سرعت

Speed

I love a good contradiction, but this isn’t one. Patience is for the long term; speed is for the short term. The pressure that builds between the two produces the diamond.

Speed is one of my two or three obsessions in business. I will always gravitate toward the thing that allows me to live my life more efficiently and do my work faster. It’s one of the reasons I’m so excited about voice-controlled assistants like Google Home and Amazon Echo (see more in Chapter 15). Entrepreneurs—heck, humans!—care about time and convenience, and it’s just faster to spit the toothpaste out and say, “OK, Google, remind me to buy more toothpaste,” than it is to grab your phone and type “toothpaste” into your shopping list. If you’re just starting out, you’re going to be slogging it alone for a long time before you can hire an assistant to help you manage your time. In the meantime, put whatever tools you can find to good use to keep you moving through the day and using your time wisely and efficiently.

You need to constantly be in do mode. I see you out there overthinking your content and agonizing over your decisions, taking forever to make up your mind. Your confidence is low, and you’re worried people will call you a loser if you make the wrong call. Get over that quick. I love losing because I learn so much from it. The reason I don’t talk about my failures much is not because I’m hiding anything, but because once I’ve seen I’ve made a mistake, in my mind, it’s over. I’ll admit it: I was wrong in 2010; location-based chat app Yobongo was not the next great startup. But what good does it do me to dwell on what didn’t work out? I’d rather look ahead to the next thing that I’m sure will. My track record speaks for itself. Being unafraid of making mistakes makes everything easy for me. Not worrying about what people think frees you to do things, and doing things allows you to win or learn from your loss—which means you win either way. Hear me now: you are better off being wrong ten times and being right three than you are if you try only three times and always get it right.