I’ve just given the green light to my developers to go ahead and start building our product.
It was a bank holiday weekend the last three days and each night I’ve been tossing and turning. So many thoughts go through your head when you’re about to sink most of your savings into a project.
But at the end of the day there’s no way of knowing if something you’re creating will work or be liked.
I love Seth Godin – he’s a massive inspiration and I really believe he “gets it”. He gets what being an entrepreneur in the 21st Century means.
He often speaks about “The Marshmallow Test”. It was a test done on primary school children where they were shown some marshmallows. The children were left in a room by themselves with a marshmallow in clear view. They were told that if they did not eat the marshmallow when the examiner left the room, that they would then receive two marshmallows when the examiner returned.
The children were then followed up later in life. It turned out that the children who did not eat the marshmallow and could delay their gratification until later were better off in all aspects of their life – they were happier, healthier, were academically better, earn more etc.
The moral is that the children who could hold two ideas in their mind – that they might get an extra marshmallow vs they might not – were more successful in adulthood.
So what does this mean for us?
It means that those of us that can hold two ideas in our mind – it might work vs it might not work – are able to really go forward in life and be successful.
I’m completely open to failing right now. I think that realistically I have about a 10% chance of success in what I’m trying to do. But I don’t care. I’m trying to solve a problem that I really believe in. It might work, it might not work.
Or as Richard Branson would say; screw it, let’s do it.
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