Has been a guiding business maxim certainly since the industrial revolution. But I’ve now found a replacement terminology I can really feel.
Then: Profit Maximisation
Now: Purpose Maximisation
This comes from a book worth reading called Drive by Dan Pink.
Sure, startups need cash to stay alive, but our purpose is what people really care about.
Was thinking about this laying in bed last night. The things we should never think twice about spending investing money on.
Mainly because they make us and life better and they build on our entrepreneurial foundations. Here’s my top 10 list.
What’s on your list?
It’s a matter of will. Everyone can, but not everyone will – Jim Rohn.
Will you?
While technology and lifestyles has shifted radically in the past few hundred years, the human DNA hasn’t evolved very much at all in the past few thousand. It’s one of the reasons why we are becoming obese. Our bodies are just not designed to have some much access to food, and so much automation and leisure time. Another interesting quirk of our DNA is the fear instinct. An instinct which is totally vital for survival, until a a few hundred years ago. In a pre-civilised world, failure could mean being killed while gathering food.
The problem with the fear instinct is that it gets in the way of us doing our best work in a modern world. It can stop us from proposing amazing ideas, and disrupting old outdated methods. The fear we have is not of death, but these days usually only of embarrassment or financial loss, neither of which will kill us.
This fear robs us of our best chance to make a difference, and generate the momentum we need. The best way to overcome this fear to remind ourselves that the fear we are facing is emotional and not physical. And almost every circumstance, what we are afraid of will not stop us from having a second chance.
I implore every entrepreneur to watch the first 45 seconds of this interview. Ben Lee is an average musician, but an incredible artist. Here he encapsulates the thing that matters the most when starting anything: Permission is not required.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=olRBElXjLG8]
Here’s a list of companies who should’ve done something, yet instead, let someone else do it for them. And in being asleep at the wheel, they will never be as powerful (read relevant) again.
| Yellow Pages | should have become… | |
| Encyclopaedia Britannica | should have become… | Wikipedia |
| RCA / Sony / BMG / EMI / Warner | should have become… | iTunes |
| Newspaper classifieds | should have become… | Craigs List |
| Trading Post | should have become… | eBay |
| Barns & Noble | should have become… | Amazon |
| Industry X | could well become… | Your startup |
—
The key point is this. The future doesn’t care about your legacy, or how things were done in the past, it only cares about what people actually want. And people don’t care about your existing infrastructure, they only care about themselves.
There’s a million more of these examples out there, and many more to come. The question is which industry will you disrupt because they are too in love with their existing infrastructure?
Startup blog friend and movie maker Ryan Spanger has some kind of a secret project happening called creative.biz – I’m not sure what it’s all about but here’s a video which is on the home page. I reckon this is one entrepreneurs should keep an eye on given the solid advice in this short video.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dK-48E9tW20]