Whenever I realize I’ve made a mistake, I get a rush of excitement and anxiety. Excitement because I’ve had this aha opportunity to learn something. Anxiety because usually the learning has come with a cost I cannot afford.

There are three types of decisions that you will ever make - good decisions, bad decisions and a third category of the worst kind, no-decisions. In this last category are those ideas that you deliberate on for eons but never take any action on. In it lie those reasons you look for not starting up, such as the right business model or funding. But, make a decision and you will see that the startup ball magically moves forward.

You wish to become an entrepreneur to free yourself from the constraints of your job. However, after getting started you discover that the freedom you desire is elusive. Constraints from your job are now replaced by those from cashflows, investors, employees, clients, vendors and several other sources.

There’s this phenomena of flipping that’s increasingly popular in startup culture. It means to buy or sell something to quickly make a profit. Much like fast food, it tastes good for the short term and draws investors and entrepreneurs alike to an imagined gold rush. 

When brainstorming a business or product idea with people, I find them quickly jumping to execution concerns - “how will we get the money” or “I don’t know how to build that” or “no one else does that” or “that won’t work” and so on. What we don’t realize is that our minds tend to imagine the future with a present-day context. But the present always seems to change faster than it did in the past.

We are all inherently creative. The only time when we are not is when we allow our natural abilities to be clouded. An easy indicator to know if our creativity is clouded is to ask the question, how much are we following the herd?