In your business, are you pretending gravity doesn’t exit? What I mean is are you building a business or feeding a hobby? Many web businesses are postponing the inevitable; no profit. The book, Rework, brings this point home by saying that many of these young companies create “a place where the laws of business physics don’t apply.” The book goes on to say that that this, we will deal with the profit problem later approach is like, building a rocket ship but starting off by saying, ‘Let’s pretend gravity doesn’t exist.’” One could also say it would be like bungee jumping and pretending gravity doesn’t exist:
This is me (Matt Andresen) Supermaning from the highest jump in North America and no I am not Superman, a cord was attached.
Profit should be a discussion on day one, otherwise the amount you spend might as well be like playing poker without expecting to make anything (you are just paying for entertainment). Services like ours assume you are in this to make a profit and use your time in the most productive way possible. The only thing worse than spending time on a hobby when you think you are running a business, is to spend a lot of time doing this. Don’t be a workaholic! Probably my favorite point in all of Rework is this:
“Workaholics miss the point, too. They try to fix problems by throwing sheer hours at them. They try to make up for intellectual laziness with brute force. This results in inelegant solutions. They even create crisis. They don’t look for ways to be more efficient because they actually like working overtime. They enjoy feeling like heroes. They create problems (often unwittingly) just so they can get off on working more.”
This does not mean you are not going to be working a lot of hours, it just means most people expect results just from working long hours and pretending gravity doesn’t exist.
