1. People who can't work without being told what to do.
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From the time you're born until the time you retire (if you're slow-lane or sidewalk) your life is fairly free of autonomy and options. You wake up when your job dictates you do, vacation when it dictates you can, see your kids when it lets you, and so on. You get trained when you learn to use the toilet, trained to write and read, trained to study for tests, trained in subjects in college, trained at your job, trained by parenting classes, etc. It's very rare that you will come to a juncture in your slow-lane life where the obstacle in front of you will appear in this form:
"I have absolutely no idea what to do or how to do it, and I know absolutely nobody who does either."
Yet as an entrepreneur, that kind of a thing is a daily, sometimes hourly occurrence. That feeling is the barrier to entry that forms the C in Cents. If you've managed to grow up and become an adult and don't know how to do this thing, and don't know anyone else who does, it's possible that nobody knows how to do the thing you're trying to do. And if it's something lots of other people want to do, then your inability to google a quick solution is very, very good.
In these situations, you usually end up finding a bunch of solutions to similar problems that get you part of the way there. What's left is the undiscovered country of control, but if you can't find your way without a map, you're lost as an entrepreneur. If you can only make your way forward if someone tells you the exact steps and doesn't leave anything out, you won't make it at all. I wouldn't bet on this guy.
4. Guys who can't make small but significant daily progress on a huge, daunting problem.
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You can't cram the fastlane. You can't build up the kind of consistent, lasting reputation for customer service and quality products you need to disentangle your time from your income if you can't make inroads in manageable bits and keep the big picture in mind. There are lots of tools to help with this, heck, both MJ and a product that ran a $300,000+ kickstarter on this form make aides to help you break down your big future into manageable daily portions.
An alternative variation to this is guys who know basically what steps they need, but who front-load all the easy stuff and put off the hard stuff until the last possible minute. Logo design and filing LLC paperwork come first, filing the design patents and setting up overseas manufacturing are puttoff as long as possible. Shopping for office furniture is done on Monday, the call that will decide the fate of the company's first big contract is put off until Friday at 3:30.
If you can't take consistent daily action, you can't make amazing things happen. You can't become that 2, 3, 4, 5, or 6 year "overnight" success. If you're the kind of person who only works on things sporadically, you're a bad bet.
5. Guys who spend more time visualizing the rewards of the fastlane than visualizing how they're going to help people solve problems
At this point, if anyone cared, half the army of people he's told about it over the last half decade could have dropped $10,000 to hire a crack team of programmers and beat him to market.
I'm guilty of one and four, wish I knew that guys audience with people able to drop 10,000 I bet they could fund a solution if it was a worthwhile solution to their problem.
Engineers do this a lot... they like building stuff.
I find I am unable to get customers or potential customers to talk to me. If most people need to see the engineer's social media profile first I can see why there might be friction.
I'd love to talk to their customers for them, analyse the data and distill it back to the developers to help them,hard to get anyone to see the value in that though.
YYou need realists around you. They're the ones who will keep you from losing your life savings on a bad idea. They're the ones who will save you from wasting 80 hours a week for 4 years on an idea that will fail.
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I agree. Realists back up their data, optimists lose it.
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