DEATH BY A THOUSAND CUTS

("Or How A Chinese Embezzlement & Subsequent Bankruptcy Taught Me About Proper Decision-Making")

/// A Thread ///

You've heard the phrase that "90% of startups end up failing in the first 3-5 years". Or, at least, some variation of this sentence.

I cringe every time I hear it because let's face it, there is some truth to it.

Not everybody that tries to build a business manages to do so successfully.

Building a business from scratch is hard.

It implies creating something out of nothing. It implies *correcting* how the world works.

Before your company existed, the world didn't work as well as you thought it would, but *after your company* exists, it works better.

In some sort of miraculous way, an entrepreneur not only is a problem-solver but a world-changer.

Entrepreneurship implies assembling different pieces together, with an increasing degree of complexity.

First, you uncover a need in the market and create a product or service that addresses it.

Then, once you have market-fit (or before), you start marketing and selling the product/service.

Then, when money starts coming in and you can scale up, operational and financial management start becoming more important. Etc.

Each step builds on top of the previous one to create a complex machine that solves a painful problem and delivers *real* value to your clients, at scale. But this adds complexity.

Servicing your neighbor is simpler than servicing a client located in New Zealand.

The problem with the ever-increasing level of complexity is that it becomes easy to be swayed away from your core business... and start devoting time to stuff that doesn’t matter.

You may start fixating on shallow marketing practices, like being on 5 social networks at a time.

You may start creating adjacent products that address the non-core needs of your clients, which eat up resources but add little to the bottom line.

These new "needs" force you to hire more people than needed. Etc

When you manage a business, it is easy to lose sight of your core program and stretch yourself too thin, giving way to an increasing degree of complexity.

Each small decision carries its own footprint, no matter how small it may be. And complexity, thus, increases.

This is the reason why most startups fail: they increase their complexity way above their management threshold.

The mismanagement of an ever-increasing degree of complexity ends up becoming fatal.

Let me give you a personal, real-life example:

I learned this lesson the hard way when I was doing business development in Shanghai, back in 2010-2012.

If you have ever tried to do business with China, you know how complex it is.

Not only we had to adapt to local business customs but do so while learning how to speak English (we were all Spanish nationals). Another layer of complexity.

Additionally, my company was an architecture bureau that dealt with urban planning regulations, which are complex in all places of the world.

Etc.

Mismanaged complexity, all around, at all times. A recipe for disaster.

We managed to secure a YUGE contract at a municipal level (an urban refurbishing contract of half an entire city in inner China - 2 hours from Shanghai).

Once the upfront payment of the contract hit our Chinese bank account, our Chinese partner embezzled the money.

It took us a few days to discover this when it was already too late.

Since China is a country where the Rule of Law doesn’t apply (only the iron fist of the Communist Party), we never recovered the money.

Nor did we surmount the blow. We were forced to close shop.

This story proves my point of the inherent complexity of business-building. It also leads to the inevitable conclusion: when you are in control of a small number of things that you know well, you may become excellent at it.

When you stretch yourself too thin, you end up paying a high price for it.

This is what I call "Death by a Thousand Cuts": you don’t fail because you make big mistakes, but because you don't do well enough the things that matter.

The corollary to this is obvious: only those obsessed with doing less of what doesn't matter can be excellent at what matters.

Those that understand this concept of "Death by a Thousand Cuts" and become proficient at one thing before scaling up, have a much bigger chance of success than 10%.

My experience is 70% (if they persist long enough).

This lesson also applies to self-management: in fact, most of my time coaching entrepreneurs is devoted to eliminating complexity from their lives.

Instead of adding new things (new training, new protocols, new connections, etc), I help them to increase their performance by doing less of everything (but more of what matters).

This concept of "leveling up by doing less" is the core concept that is key to the Selfmastered Roadmap.

Lesson 1. "Taming the Universe"

I first help you understand how the loop “entropy-effectiveness-energy” works, then we discuss how it relates to feedback loops and finally help you help yourself identify what matters to you.

And then, track it.

Because only what gets measured gets mastered.

By self-measuring you become selfmastered.

If you are serious about MASTERING your performance by doing less and become a radically-upgraded version of yourself by next week, join the program. There's nothing quite like it.

Enrollment closes in 24 hours: http://www.selfmastered.net/roadmap