I went back to school today. For the first time in 10+ years, I sat in class, behind a desk. With a bunch of other little idiots next to me, I listened to a smiling teacher as he pointed to his chest and said, “Me llamo Rubén. ¿Cómo te llamas?”
This went on for the better part of four hours, from 9am until 1pm.
For four precious hours, we went through the elementary particles of the Spanish language, presented at a snail’s pace. For four hours, I practiced saying the same damn things a million times to various Italians, Germans, and Greeks who were in the class with me.
You might have your doubts that this is an effective way to learn a language.
I have reasons to believe it will be useful.
And in any case, I’ll only do it for this week. This time investment (and during my most productive hours!) is not sustainable for longer than that. But I figure it’s worth doing at the start to kick things off.
And this brings me to one of the most valuable ideas that has shaped how I have run my career.
For example, I got going as a freelance copywriter by charging $5 for a 7-part email sequence.
Do you think that’s a shockingly low rate? Do you think I allowed myself to be exploited?
Who cares. I did it for a week and then I increased my rates a bit. And then a week later, I increased my rates a bit more. And then a bit more still.
Point being, it’s easy to fix and improve things once you get them going. But in most cases, the getting going is the hard part.
This isn’t my idea or observation, by the way. This is something I was fortunate enough to read a long time ago in an essay by somebody very rich, very successful, and very smart. Here’s what he said:
A lot of would-be founders believe that startups either take off or don’t. You build something, make it available, and if you’ve made a better mousetrap, people beat a path to your door as promised. Or they don’t, in which case the market must not exist.
Actually startups take off because the founders make them take off. There may be a handful that just grew by themselves, but usually it takes some sort of push to get them going. A good metaphor would be the cranks that car engines had before they got electric starters. Once the engine was going, it would keep going, but there was a separate and laborious process to get it going.
The guy who wrote that is Paul Graham, a multimillionaire computer programmer who started the early-stage investing firm Y Combinator (Airbnb, Coinbase, Stripe).
Graham said that one of the most common pieces of advice they give Y Combinator is to Do Things That Don’t Scale.
Now at this point, I had a valuable caution to give my newsletter readers about Graham’s bit of advice. But I’m not including that on this public archived post. I often reserve the most valuable and important ideas for my newsletter readers. I have to reward them somehow. If you’d like to join them, and start getting my daily emails, you can sign up here.