The book I’m reading this week is great. It’s a biographical anthology about nine people who achieved outsized success. I won’t spoil it (check the post on Monday for the title), but one of the authors said something that’s stuck with me. After reading tons of books in his field and interviewing the nine people in the book, he realized something:

[T]here is almost always someone achieving enormous success in doing something that you think is impossible.

I agree. If most people think something is impossible, it may be more the case that it’s really hard and tons of people have failed at it. If you’re one of the diligent people who figure it out, the reward could be massive. This is a classic power-law outcome. Only a small fraction of people succeed, but the ones who do receive rewards so large they’re hard to comprehend. Think Steph Curry’s salary of $62 million for the next NBA season (per spotrac) or Jeff Bezos’s $256 billion net worth (per Bloomberg as of this writing).

Hard things are . . . well . . . hard. That doesn’t make them impossible. Many hard things seem impossible but are actually quite possible if effort is applied to solving or mastering them over a long period of time. Bezos and Curry spent decades working at and perfecting their crafts. In the early years, they weren’t sure they’d succeed, but they knew their chances of success would continue to go up as they worked at it consistently. Each has achieved what, 20 years ago, many would have said is impossible. In reality, it wasn’t impossible; it was just really hard and required a ton of energy and commitment over a long period of time to make it happen.

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This past weekend, I created a flowchart with swim lanes to dissect what went wrong in a critical situation at a friend’s company. The details are complex, but one thing stood out to me. The more parties that stand between you and what’s happening with your customer or your product, the harder it becomes to understand the issue and quickly resolve it.

I had a loose idea of what happened based on a long email chain, but it wasn’t crystal clear and I wasn’t familiar with all the nuances. Creating the diagram this weekend helped me a ton. I was able to get my head around the situation by visualizing who did what. That helped me identify the parties that likely caused the issue and where and when in this complicated process everything transpired.

I now have a good idea of what needs to happen to prevent a repeat of this problem in my friend’s company. This exercise took longer than I expected, but the output was worthwhile. It’s definitely something I’ll keep in my toolkit.

As I shared two days ago (see here), I’m helping my friend’s start-up. He created his own brand and products for it, and he’s manufacturing, warehousing, and shipping them to customers. I’ve been trying to help him resolve some logistics challenges. Here are our insights so far:

• Partners – International manufacturing and logistics partners are important, especially when things don’t go as planned, so it’s important to choose reliable, communicative ones.
• Network distance – The more network distance there is (that is, the more companies there are) between you and a shipment, the longer it takes and the harder it is to resolve problems.
• Cross border – Language and cultural differences can affect how fast problems are solved.

It’s still early and I’m sure I’ll learn more, but those are the lessons so far.

I’m helping a friend with his start-up. He’s created his own brand and products for it. He sells the product directly to consumers online. Because he’s selling his own branded products, he has to manufacture them, warehouse them, and then ship them to customers.

It’s early in his company’s journey, and his product and marketing strategy are great. However, the logistics of moving products between different countries and fulfillment centers and to customers’ doorsteps haven’t been smooth.

When people buy a product, they underestimate how much is involved in going from an idea to a physical product in their hand. Their minds would be blown if knew what was happening behind the scenes, including the number of people who touch the product and the number of times it must be moved.

Creating a branded product is hard. If you’re an entrepreneur considering that path, like it or not, logistics know-how will be a factor in what makes or breaks you (you can choose how much of it is internal vs. outsourced, though).

As I shared last month (see here), I’ve been working with Atlanta entrepreneurs and moderating an accountability group. The group meets once a month for a few hours. I’m aiming for the group to be highly engaged and open to sharing so they’ll learn from peers' experiences and can solve their own problems faster. My goal is to make each meeting a better experience for the entrepreneurs than the last.

We had our second meeting this week. The members rated the meeting highly (this is at the end of each agenda), but the meeting didn’t meet my expectations. “High engagement” means everyone is showing up, being prepared to share, and learning from their peers. During our first meeting, we had 100% attendance. I also had everyone go through their calendar month by month for the next six months. We found dates that worked for everyone and committed to those dates as a group. I sent meeting invites out for the next six months. Stuff happens, but as much as possible, I wanted to mitigate scheduling issues that would prevent a busy, type-A entrepreneur from attending.

This month, two members couldn’t make it. Another member was late. I’ve realized that I didn’t fully set expectations with the group. The expectation related to being late had been set (no admittance after the meeting starts), but I hadn’t crystallized what happens if someone misses a meeting (whether that’s planned or because of tardiness).

My thinking is that A players want to be around other A players. They get annoyed when they’re forced to work alongside less-than-A players and often remove themselves from such situations. I think everyone in this group is an A player, but this week, not everyone gave A-level effort. Three members missed. To maintain the high-engagement, high-effort culture required to make this group a success, I need everyone to give A-level effort every meeting. That means showing up on time and prepared.

Last month, everyone gave A-level effort. The challenge this month is that some members gave A-level effort and others didn’t. I’m pretty sure (though this is an assumption; no one said anything to me) that attendees who did give A-level effort noticed the difference. I need to address this and have the members who missed demonstrate to their peers that they can and will put forth A-level effort going forward.

I’m not 100% sure how I’ll do this, but I’m thinking about having each member who missed explain, in two minutes, why they want to continue being part of the group and what they’ll do to avoid missing future meetings. The members can then vote on whether that person can continue as a member (i.e., do we think this person will give A-level effort going forward?).

Regardless, the second meeting is in the books, and the members got value from it. I’m looking forward to tweaking this format to make the rest of the meetings better than the first two.

I recently caught up with a founder who’s had a rough few months. Money has been tight, and fundraising hasn’t been going so well. The company was down to less than a month’s worth of cash, and it has been operating like this for several months. The founder was forced to keep the company afloat using his personal savings. He was stressed. But he managed to stay alive and keep pitching investors.

This month, he received the largest single check the company has received from any investor since it was founded a few years ago. The $500,000 check was from an angel investor, an entrepreneur who sold his company and believes in this founder’s vision.

Just like that, the fortunes of the company have changed and the founder’s funding worries are over, at least for now.

This story is a reminder of two things: luck plays a bigger role in success than many people realize, and there’s something to staying alive long enough to get your lucky break.

I read an interview Jezz Bezos gave in which he shared how he thinks about the future. Here’s the section that stuck with me:

I very frequently get the question “What’s going to change in the next 10 years?” And that is a very interesting question; it’s a very common one. I almost never get the question “What’s not going to change in the next 10 years?” And I submit to you that that second question is actually the more important of the two. Because you can build a business strategy around the things that are stable in time. As you pointed out, in our retail business, we know that customers want low prices, and I know that’s going to be true 10 years from now. They want fast delivery; they want vast selection. It’s impossible to imagine a future 10 years from now where a customer comes up and says, “Jeff, I love Amazon; I just wish the prices were a little higher,” or “I love Amazon; I just wish you’d deliver a little more slowly.” Impossible. And so the effort we put into those things, spinning those things up, we know the energy we put into it today will still be paying off dividends for our customers 10 years from now. When you have something that you know is true, even over the long term, you can afford to put a lot of energy into it.

The world is changing faster than ever, given AI, and predicting what it will look like in the future is becoming increasingly difficult. But I like Bezos’s point: focus on what won’t change. I interpret that as aspects of human behavior and psychology that will remain true regardless of how the world around us changes. Anchor your strategy on these human traits and you’re likely to build something that customers value for many years to come.

If you want to see a short part of this section of Bezos’s interview, you can watch it here.

This week, I met several aspiring entrepreneurs who’ve built software to solve niche problems they encounter daily. None of them knows how to write software code. All used AI to build their web apps in a matter of days. They all have normal day jobs and aren’t in the tech industry. My takeaways:

• The people who understand a problem deeply and have a vision for how the solution should work will build superior products.
• Distribution will be key for these individuals. Making potential customers aware that the product exists needs to be thought through.
• There will likely be a lot more competition. If anyone can build anything with AI, we’ll see more ideas, and good ideas get copied quickly.
• These people building solutions with AI don’t all want to be full-time entrepreneurs. They enjoy building things that solve problems they care about, but they don’t want the stress of being a full-time entrepreneur. These types of projects could be a good source of income to supplement their salary.
• Some of them will need a small amount of capital to grow these businesses; I’m thinking $50k–$100k. A gap in the market for providing capital to the best of these types of projects, as well as an opportunity for a new investment product, probably exist. But the returns will likely come from cash flows, not from selling the business.

AI is moving fast and democratizing the ability to create a product and a business in a way that will benefit people with an entrepreneurial spirit.

I was listening to a podcast today. An entrepreneur shared a quote that got me thinking:

Pessimists sound smart, but optimists get rich.

I’m not sure who said this originally, but I think it’s a great quote for entrepreneurs and investors to keep in mind. A disposition that considers the worst things that could happen or the potentially negative outcomes is valuable because it keeps the What could go wrong? and What risk am I taking on? questions top of mind. Managing downside risk is critical to surviving long enough to get lucky as an entrepreneur or investor, and you can’t survive if you’ve taken on more risk than you realize.

But being mostly pessimistic severely limits you, because you constantly think that things won’t turn out well. Surprise, surprise, when you think like that, things don’t turn out well. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The most successful entrepreneurs and investors I know are neither wholly optimistic nor wholly pessimistic: they’re about 80/20. They’re optimists 80% of the time, but 20% of the time they’re thinking about the downside to make sure they’re not going to do something that takes them out of the game permanently.

I thought about my post from yesterday a bit more. As an entrepreneur’s company grows, the demands on the entrepreneur grow. The brute-force style of work that was helpful when they were doing lots of execution doesn’t work as well as the business grows in complexity, the team grows, and, most importantly, the entrepreneur’s role evolves. The brute-force approach to work becomes insufficient, and the entrepreneur’s productivity declines as the scope and volume of their responsibilities grow.

I think entrepreneurs feel this more than others, given the nature of their work, but it happens to people working for a company they don’t own or lead too. The trigger isn’t the title, it’s the accelerated growth in a role’s complexity, number of reports, and scope and depth of responsibilities. Said differently, the more things and people you’re responsible for and the faster both increase, the faster you’re likely to fall short of expectations of your role if you’re using a brute-force work style. The faster a company grows and/or the faster you climb the ladder, the faster a brute-force work style will fail you.