ReWork

They’ll say you’re wasting your time.
    Don’t believe them. That world may be real for them, but it doesn’t mean you have to live in it.
    We know because our company fails the real-world test in all kinds of ways. In the real world, you can’t have more than a dozen employees spread out in eight different cities on two continents. In the real world, you can’t attract millions of customers without any salespeople or advertising. In the real world, you can’t reveal your formula for success to the rest of the world. But we’ve done all those things and prospered.
    The real world isn’t a place, it’s an excuse. It’s a justification for not trying. It has nothing to do with you.

Learning from mistakes is overrated
    In the business world, failure has become an expected rite of passage. You hear all the time how nine out of ten new businesses fail. You hear that your business’s chances are slim to none. You hear that failure builds character. People advise, “Fail early and fail often.”
    With so much failure in the air, you can’t help but breathe it in. Don’t inhale. Don’t get fooled by the stats. Other people’s failures are just that:
other
people’s failures.
    If other people can’t market their product, it has nothing to do with you. If other people can’t build a team, it has nothing to do with you. If other people can’t price their services properly, it has nothing to do with you. If other people can’t earn more than they spend … well, you get it.
    Another common misconception: You need to learn from your mistakes. What do you really learn from mistakes? You might learn what
not
to do again, but how valuable is that? You still don’t know what you
should
do next.
    Contrast that with learning from your successes. Success gives you real ammunition. When something succeeds, you know what worked—and you can do it again. And the next time, you’ll probably do it even better.
    Failure is not a prerequisite for success. A Harvard Business School study found already-successful entrepreneurs are far more likely to succeed again (the success rate for their future companies is 34 percent). But entrepreneurs whose companies failed the first time had almost the same follow-on success rate as people starting a company for the first time: just 23 percent. People who failed before have the same amount of success as people who have never tried at all. * Success is the experience that actually counts.
    That shouldn’t be a surprise: It’s exactly how nature works. Evolution doesn’t linger on past failures, it’s always building upon what worked. So should you.

Planning is guessing
    Unless you’re a fortune-teller, long-term business planning is a fantasy. There are just too many factors that are out of your hands: market conditions, competitors, customers, the economy, etc. Writing a plan makes you feel in control of things you can’t actually control.
    Why don’t we just call plans what they really are: guesses. Start referring to your business plans as business guesses, your financial plans as financial guesses, and your strategic plans as strategic guesses. Now you can stop worrying about them as much. They just aren’t worth the stress.
    When you turn guesses into plans, you enter a danger zone. Plans let the past drive the future. They put blinders on you. “This is where we’re going because, well, that’s where we said we were going.” And that’s the problem: Plans are inconsistent with improvisation.
    And you have to be able to improvise. You have to be able to pick up opportunities that come along. Sometimes you need to say, “We’re going in a new direction because that’s what makes sense
today
.”
    The timing of long-range plans is screwed up too. You have the most information when you’re doing something, not
before
you’ve done it. Yet when do you write a plan? Usually it’s before you’ve even begun. That’s the worst time to make a big decision.
    Now this isn’t to say you shouldn’t think about the future or contemplate how you might attack upcoming obstacles. That’s a worthwhile exercise. Just don’t feel you need to write it down or obsess about it. If you write a big plan, you’ll most likely never look at it anyway. Plans more than a few pages long just wind up as fossils in your file cabinet.
    Give up on the guesswork. Decide what you’re going to do this week, not this year. Figure out the next most important thing and do that. Make