Hey friends, welcome back. I hope you enjoyed the previous reflections. In case you haven’t read them, check them out: last week’s reflections.

Now, onto my reflections for the past week:

A Quote I Liked

Growth Mindset

One of the most impactful books I’ve read in the past 2 years has got to be The Dip by Seth Godin (who is a marketing genius too). The book centers around the concept of smart quitting, which is one of the driving factors that helped me decide to drop out of my finance qualification and pivot my career away from it entirely.

The premise is that quitting is the wisest thing to do (sometimes) because, in a lot of situations, you have 2 options: be exceptional in the arena you’re playing in or quit. In the context of my decision, I had the option of being a cookie-cutter auditor with no passion for what I do or just quitting to pursue something I could carve a space for myself.

Ironically, many people in the same situation as me (1) learned about the concept of sunk costs in finance, and (2) are faced with the same fork in the road, but can’t seem to piece the two together! By continuing on a path of obvious mediocrity, you would be significantly overinvesting your time and resources just to not stand out.

If you are facing the same fork in the road and are thinking about quitting a path that doesn’t serve your ideal future, ask yourself:

1. Am I panicking?
   Be aware of whether you’re in the right headspace to be making this decision, or if you’re just being impulsive and going on a whim. If you aren’t, give it a rest until you can think rationally.
   

2. Have I hit the Dip yet?
   The Dip is what separates the smart quitters, serial quitters, and the successful. You’ll often find yourself facing minor setbacks along the journey of doing anything but none of those are the Dip. “The Dip is the long slog between starting and mastery.”. Quitting before the Dip helps you focus resources on the right things, quitting during is a total waste of resources (and potentially pushes you to become a serial quitter; always starting but never finishing), and persevering through a Dip is actually a good shortcut because it gets you where you want to go faster than any other path (since most people don’t get past it).

3. What sort of measurable progress am I making?
   Self-evaluate and find out if you are either moving forward, standing still, or falling behind. The key to good quitting is making it clear in advance when you should quit by setting goals, deadlines, and milestones. These will keep you accountable and help you decide whether to quit or keep pushing through.

This concept doesn’t just apply to your career but also works for your business, relationships, etc.

Entrepreneurship

A follow-up question from one of the biggest supporters of this newsletter (my partner): Because of the saturated market I always doubt if I am the right person to solve the problem regardless of checking out the 3 points mentioned. When can I tell when to move on to the next idea or persevere?

Founder-Market Fit

There’s product-market fit, founder-market fit, and founder-product fit.

The first two are the most important because product-market fit tells you that you’re building something people want, while founder-market fit is a founder’s persistence to solve a particular problem.

What’s crucial is not the fixation on a single idea or solution but the drive to solve the underlying problem, and constantly iterating until the best one is found. This will also reflect in your commitment to understanding why a problem exists and what about it is most pressing to solve (this commitment can evolve into a pivotal advantage in navigating the problem space and innovating effectively). Not having previous experience in the space but the right mindset also means you can bring an outsider’s perspective that may have become blurry to others in the space.

On the point of the market being saturated, I see it more as the pie growing when more minds are committed to solving problems in the same space. So with the right approach, a saturated market can become a positive-sum game for you to play (e.g. your competitors testing new ideas, approaches, growth tactics, etc. that you can learn from).

When to pivot

Similar to smart quitting, you’d want to have a reliable system to help you objectively decide whether to shelve your idea or keep hacking at it.

Stewart Butterfield, co-founder of Slack, gives some pretty good advice for this. He says to stack rank your best idea, dig in, and when all else fails, know when to pivot.

When your product hits a rut, come up with 15 of the best ideas you can possibly come up with, and stack rank them (consider using the ICE Scoring Method). If all of them fail to move the needle (in this case, get more sales/paid users), then the 16th idea is unlikely to work.

It’s also important to note the difference between quitting and pivoting. “Quit” in this context refers to not wanting to solve a specific problem anymore. A “pivot” refers to your approach or solution to a problem change, and that’s fine.

As for when to quit entirely, that’s trickier to answer because that comes down to your dedication to the problem that needs solving.

Freedom

The freedom to be creative. As soon as we detach ourselves from the conventional notions of what creativity means, we’ll see it everywhere.

We struggle to make a living from what gets us excited because we’re trying so hard to do the default. Many believe you have to get a job in the space before you can successfully do the work. I learned that this is far from true because for years I told myself I needed to work in startups to know best how to start one myself. Instead, I learned the most when I started my own business and created products for actual people.

Because creativity can be anything (knowing the latest TikTok trends, having a taste in fashion, learning Apple’s new tech releases, etc.), the same concept can be applied to other areas too.

You don’t need to find a mentor to succeed at YouTube. You don’t need to work in the fashion industry to start your own fashion line. You don’t need to graduate from teaching school to become a teacher. There’s always more than one way to achieve what you want.

The internet makes it so that we don’t need permission to create and act on our ideas, just like how I’m sharing my thoughts in this newsletter freely.

If your dreams are important enough to you, then the norm and the default path are just distractions.

Homework

Reflect on the path you’re on right now. Are you moving forward, standing still, or falling behind? When should you (smart) quit?

By setting concrete goals and deadlines you can work towards (or avoid hitting), you can be more certain of whether to quit or not while avoiding becoming someone who never intends to see anything through.

Till we meet again next week.

Cheers to the future,
Ernest
indiepreneur, digital nomad, transhumanist

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