Just Do It
I mean, what a great tagline right? But what is it? Well, basically, if you’re doing it right… just about anything.
Strategy will slow you down and in many cases, it will kill you. Now this is not to suggest that we should just act all willy nilly and just act without thinking. Instead, what we mean is that thinking without acting is not a good plan of action most notably because of the lack of action.
Mike Tyson (who I’m aware is problematic, but for the sake of this discussion has the best quote on the subject) once said about someone having a plan for how to fight him;
Everyone’s got a plan til they get punched in the mouth
The fight he was talking about? He won that.
The point is that we can plan and plan and plan but eventually those plans come into contact with the actual world and then all hell breaks loose. MOST of our bets don’t pay off. Many of our hunches are just plain wrong. And on a short time scale, that’s ok. It’s ok to be wrong for an hour if you made a reasonable, bite-sized bet. It’s ok for your hunch for this quarter to be wrong, if you didn’t place all of your eggs inside the basket found at the bottom of that hunch. It’s not about the idea that there IS risk, it’s about the size and timeline of the risk.
Strategy (as most companies and individuals think about it) is a long, painful process and at the end of that road is a hope and a wish. And you are PROBABLY wrong. So what can you do?
Think. Test. Learn. Think. Over and over again.
Your goal should be to fail fast (or succeed fast) and then make much bigger bets based on the data you got back from these first experiments. Remember as kids when we did science experiments in school? Those were pretty low risk, right? Well, keep doing those kinds of experiments and learning, THEN when you have ACTUAL evidence that exists OUTSIDE of a pitch deck or a spreadsheet with made up future data THEN you can make bigger decisions.
We all want to make a big splash. That’s cool. Unfortunately we tend to do it in shark infested waters, with an open wound, within 30 minutes of eating. Not the move.
So back to Just Do It. Within reason, yes. Do something. Do something small that tests a hypothesis you have. Maybe it’s carving off a little bit of ad spend on a new campaign. Maybe it’s posting only in the mornings. Or only on the weekends. Maybe it’s cold calling a few people even though you usually email. Do it. Do it fast. Then figure it out. NOT the other way around.