I found “100 Truths You will Learn Too Late” by Luca Dellanna a fast thought-provoking read. Here are 10 rules of thumb I found most useful.
Ten Useful Rules of Thumb from Luca Dellanna
Here are the ten rules of thumb I found most useful from “100 Truths You will Learn Too Late” by Luca Dellanna. Luca explains in his forward: “I call them rules because breaking them has consequences. In the words of bestselling author Stephen Covey, while we are free to choose our actions, we cannot choose their consequences.”
I have preserved the numbering of the rules from the book.
Rule 1: You Can Choose Which Games To Play, But Not Their Rules
You can interpret “game” as a domain, profession, industry, or discipline. I am reminded of Robert G. Ingersoll’s observation, “There are in nature neither rewards nor punishments–there are consequences.” If you decide to become an entrepreneur, there are benefits and drawbacks that you will have to live with.
Rule 2 The Very Important Never Feels Urgent “Because the very important does not have a deadline, we have the impression that we can delay it.”
I think this can be true if you don’t understand the consequences of losing something vital. For example, you focus on your startup and neglect your spouse, children, or friends. In the moment, they may give you the benefit of the doubt–and sometimes, you may need to disappoint someone if your business is genuinely at risk. You can let your margin for error erode, neglecting sleep, diet, exercise, and ultimately your health. On any given day, you may feel like you can make up for it tomorrow or next week. But at some point, you can’t; you have walked through a trap door–or fallen off a cliff–and cannot recover.
Rule 3 Problems Grow To The Size They Need For You To Acknowledge Them
How does something become painful? You ignore it. Experienced entrepreneurs have learned to spot early indicators of problems because they have the scars to remind them. You will always have problems and always need to manage risks. If you understand the risks in a situation, you still need to monitor them and set tripwires for action, but you don’t have to take action. You have to prioritize your efforts where they will have the most impact.
Rule 4 Problems Are Not Solved By Addressing Their Symptoms, But By Addressing Their Root Cause
My first move is often to address a symptom: “That didn’t work. I won’t do that again.” But the next step is to reflect a little more deeply and ask, “Why didn’t that work? How could I tinker with it and try again?” Finding the root cause requires exploring multiple hypotheses and understanding that failures—and successes—rarely have one cause.
Rule 13 Taking Responsibility Will Make You Grow
Taking responsibility enables you to recapture agency when things have gone wrong. You have to be careful not to micromanage or fail to delegate effectively out of a desire for control. There is a principle of “contributory negligence.” Even if you were only 30% responsible for a failure or made mistakes that contributed, you have things you can work on.
Rule 21 Once You Decide What You Want, Work On Paying Its Costs
This connects to rule #1, you have to understand the rules of the game you have decided to play.
Rule 24 If You Cannot Take A Big Step, Take A Smaller One
Sometimes, you have to take a step back to be able to take two steps forward. It can be frustrating to be unable to make progress as fast as you would like, but forward motion is better than standing still trying to figure out how to make a big move.
Rule 27 Choose Objectives You Can Influence
Focus on what you can control and measure yourself against what’s under your direct control are two very good rules of thumb. I focus on the actions I am going to take, I don’t have control of how prospects will react so I focus on my actions to get different results. This is also important in crafting an MVP:
- The particular type of customer: you can select who are you targeting and messaging. In many B2B markets the best message is a dog whistle: highly appealing to your target and of little interest to those who are not.
- The specific problem or need your focus on: it’s better to pick a very narrow pain point initially so that you maximize your chances of providing value.
- What you provide: the feature set and packaging of your offering.
Rule 40 Build A Reputation For Not Wasting Time
This is critical for doing business in Silicon Valley. It’s one thing that surprises many entrepreneurs visiting Silicon Valley: people want to help but don’t take it well if you waste their time. If they are a prospect or potential partner and have asked questions you cannot answer in the meeting, commit to getting back with answers within a specific time frame. And then close the loop. If you ask for help, follow up on the advice or introduction and close the loop.
Rule 75: Secure Survival Before Optimizing Performance, You must survive to be able to improve
A minimum viable product is the stepping stone to a whole product. Making your first sale is on the path to break-even operation to ramen-level profitability to a profit level that covers opportunity costs. The flip side of this is to never go all in to secure an advantage. Only make bets you can afford to lose. Assume it’s going to take several iterations to understand to execute reliably and more iterations–and reflection and analysis–to execute with distinction.
SKMurphy Take: I did not agree with many of the rules Dellanna proposed in his book, but I found it useful to examine my reasons for rejecting them. And I did find a number of them helpful.
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