Timing is everything - Rick Carter

Rick Carter - Your Business 2.0

www.yourbusiness2.live 

Introduction:

This week Timing is everything

Today we will focus on the words of Kevin Kelly in understanding why now is always the best time ……….if you are ready

I truly believe that the next 20 to 30 years will be the most innovative and the most opportunistic that we as a species have ever experienced. There is no better time in history to start something, to make something than right now, that the opportunities that are before us are so vast and the barriers to participate are so low that if you’re in business or want to be in business this is a great time. The reality, though, is the success rate for any particular experiment is very low — and may be even getting lower in terms of the number of people trying it — so one of the things that we’re learning, and maybe one of the things that a person in business should be expecting, is this is like science, where your long-term success is going to be built on many failures. And so, science proceeds by failure one after another, where you try something, it doesn’t work, you try again, so on and so forth.

That’s the nature of what you do, and I think businesses should be expecting more of that, where most of your success will be built on a string of failures. But hopefully you’re failing forward; you’re learning something each time. So it should put to rest the idea of the inherent state of a startup is that it works. The inherent state of a startup is that it doesn’t work. The inherent state of any new product is that it’s not going to work. And so I think this regime, this place that we’re going to is very fluid, and this idea that the first version of something is definitely not going to be the final version, that you’ve versioned your way to success, iterate fast, that things that are made look more like a verb, the process is more important than the product. It’s a great opportunity, but it’s a different way that success is going to come.

Kevin Kelly is now the senior maverick at Wired, though he no longer serves as its editor. His post-Wired career has mostly included writing books, including “New Rules for the New Economy,” a tome on decentralized emergent systems, and “Out of Control,” a novel about robots and organisms, among others.

Kelly’s most recent book, “The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future,” is arguably his most fascinating for a business audience. Drawing on his technological background developed through his time with Wired, “The Inevitable” aims to provide a road map for the future, arguing that most, if not all, of the biggest inventions in the next generation haven’t been invented yet. For business leaders reading his book, this means that the next billion-dollar opportunity remains undiscovered. But unlike past generations, Kelly argues in the book that the next wave of technological innovation can come from anyone.

While our focus in this show is on a specific topic related to What it takes to be an Entrepreneur in general. In every show we talk about what specifically being an Encore Entrepreneur means to help you understand the what and the why before launching in to the how. To help with this we have 2 regular segments -

Opportunities for the Modern Elder i

A modern elder is a seasoned boomer with 10 to 25+ years of experience who participates in inter-generational knowledge transfer.

A modern elder is expected to evolve, learn and collaborate in order to make an impact in the workplace..


Future Back Thinking 

The key to Future Back Thinking is understand where trends and technologies are heading so that we can build a picture of our market 10 years in advance.

Today we will focus on 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future

Kelly both describes these deep trends—interacting, cognifying, flowing, screening, accessing, sharing, filtering, remixing, tracking, and questioning—and demonstrates how they overlap and are codependent on one another.

Show Objectives:

In taking about timing being everything …we will talk about some of Kevin Kelly’s 68 Bits of Unsolicited Advice

• Learn how to learn from those you disagree with, or even offend you. See if you can find the truth in what they believe.

• Being enthusiastic is worth 25 IQ points.

• Always demand a deadline. A deadline weeds out the extraneous and the ordinary. It prevents you from trying to make it perfect, so you have to make it different. Different is better.

• Don’t be afraid to ask a question that may sound stupid because 99% of the time everyone else is thinking of the same question and is too embarrassed to ask it.

• Being able to listen well is a superpower. While listening to someone you love to keep asking them “Is there more?”, until there is no more.

• A worthy goal for a year is to learn enough about a subject so that you can’t believe how ignorant you were a year earlier.

• Gratitude will unlock all other virtues and is something you can get better at.

• Treating a person to a meal never fails and is so easy to do. It’s powerful with old friends and a great way to make new friends.

• Don’t trust all-purpose glue.

• Reading to your children regularly will bond you together and kickstart their imaginations.

• Never use a credit card for credit. The only kind of credit, or debt, that is acceptable is debt to acquire something whose exchange value is extremely likely to increase, like in a home. The exchange value of most things diminishes or vanishes the moment you purchase them. Don’t be in debt to losers.

• Pros are just amateurs who know how to gracefully recover from their mistakes.

• Extraordinary claims should require extraordinary evidence to be believed.

• Don’t be the smartest person in the room. Hang out with, and learn from, people smarter than yourself. Even better, find smart people who will disagree with you.

• Rule of 3 in conversation. To get to the real reason, ask a person to go deeper than what they just said. Then again, and once more. The third time’s answer is close to the truth.

• Don’t be the best. Be the only.

• Everyone is shy. Other people are waiting for you to introduce yourself to them, they are waiting for you to send them an email, they are waiting for you to ask them on a date. Go ahead.

• Don’t take it personally when someone turns you down. Assume they are like you: busy, occupied, distracted. Try again later. It’s amazing how often a second try works.

• The purpose of a habit is to remove that action from self-negotiation. You no longer expend energy deciding whether to do it. You just do it. Good habits can range from telling the truth, to flossing.

• Promptness is a sign of respect.

• When you are young spend at least six months to one year living as poor as you can, owning as little as you possibly can, eating beans and rice in a tiny room or tent, to experience what your ‘worst’ lifestyle might be. That way any time you have to risk something in the future you won’t be afraid of the worst-case scenario.

• Trust me: There is no ‘them’.

• The more you are interested in others, the more interesting they find you. To be interesting, be interested.

• Optimise your generosity. No one on their deathbed has ever regretted giving too much away.

• To make something good, just do it. To make something great, just re-do it, re-do it, re-do it. The secret to making fine things is in remaking them.

• The Golden Rule will never fail you. It is the foundation of all other virtues.

• If you are looking for something in your house, and you finally find it, when you’re done with it, don’t put it back where you found it. Put it back where you first looked for it.

• Saving money and investing money are both good habits. Small amounts of money invested regularly for many decades without deliberation is one path to wealth.

• To make mistakes is human. To own your mistakes is divine. Nothing elevates a person higher than quickly admitting and taking personal responsibility for the mistakes you make and then fixing them fairly. If you mess up, fess up. It’s astounding how powerful this ownership is.

• Never get involved in a land war in Asia.

• You can obsess about serving your customers/audience/clients, or you can obsess about beating the competition. Both work, but of the two, obsessing about your customers will take you further.

• Show up. Keep showing up. Somebody successful said: 99% of success is just showing up.

• Separate the processes of creation from improving. You can’t write and edit, or sculpt and polish, or make and analyse at the same time. If you do, the editor stops the creator. While you invent, don’t select. While you sketch, don’t inspect. While you write the first draft, don’t reflect. At the start, the creator mind must be unleashed from judgement.

• If you are not falling down occasionally, you are just coasting.

• Perhaps the most counter-intuitive truth of the universe is that the more you give to others, the more you’ll get. Understanding this is the beginning of wisdom.

• Friends are better than money. Almost anything money can do, friends can do better. In so many ways a friend with a boat is better than owning a boat.

• This is true: It’s hard to cheat an honest man.

• When an object is lost, 95% of the time it is hiding within arm’s reach of where it was last seen. Search in all possible locations in that radius and you’ll find it.

• You are what you do. Not what you say, not what you believe, not how you vote, but what you spend your time on.

• If you lose or forget to bring a cable, adapter or charger, check with your hotel. Most hotels now have a drawer full of cables, adapters and chargers others have left behind, and probably have the one you are missing. You can often claim it after borrowing it.

• Hatred is a curse that does not affect the hated. It only poisons the hater. Release a grudge as if it was a poison.

• There is no limit on better. Talent is distributed unfairly, but there is no limit on how much we can improve what we start with.

• Be prepared: When you are 90% done on any large project (a house, a film, an event, an app) the rest of the myriad details will take a second 90% to complete.

• When you die you take absolutely nothing with you except your reputation.

• Before you are old, attend as many funerals as you can bear, and listen. Nobody talks about the departed’s achievements. The only thing people will remember is what kind of person you were while you were achieving.

• For every dollar you spend purchasing something substantial, expect to pay a dollar in repairs, maintenance, or disposal by the end of its life.

• Anything real begins with the fiction of what could be. Imagination is therefore the most potent force in the universe, and a skill you can get better at. It’s the one skill in life that benefits from ignoring what everyone else knows.

• When crisis and disaster strike, don’t waste them. No problems, no progress.

• On vacation go to the most remote place on your itinerary first, bypassing the cities. You’ll maximise the shock of otherness in the remote, and then later you’ll welcome the familiar comforts of a city on the way back.

• When you get an invitation to do something in the future, ask yourself: would you accept this if it was scheduled for tomorrow? Not too many promises will pass that immediacy filter.

• Don’t say anything about someone in email you would not be comfortable saying to them directly, because eventually they will read it.

• If you desperately need a job, you are just another problem for a boss; if you can solve many of the problems the boss has right now, you are hired. To be hired, think like your boss.

• Art is in what you leave out.

• Acquiring things will rarely bring you deep satisfaction. But acquiring experiences will.

• Rule of 7 in research. You can find out anything if you are willing to go seven levels. If the first source you ask doesn’t know, ask them who you should ask next, and so on down the line. If you are willing to go to the 7th source, you’ll almost always get your answer.

• How to apologise: Quickly, specifically, sincerely.

• Don’t ever respond to a solicitation or a proposal on the phone. The urgency is a disguise.

• When someone is nasty, rude, hateful, or mean with you, pretend they have a disease. That makes it easier to have empathy toward them which can soften the conflict.

• Eliminating clutter makes room for your true treasures.

• You really don’t want to be famous. Read the biography of any famous person.

• Experience is overrated. When hiring, hire for aptitude, train for skills. Most really amazing or great things are done by people doing them for the first time.

• A vacation + a disaster = an adventure.

• Buying tools: Start by buying the absolute cheapest tools you can find. Upgrade the ones you use a lot. If you wind up using some tool for a job, buy the very best you can afford.

• Learn how to take a 20-minute power nap without embarrassment.

• Following your bliss is a recipe for paralysis if you don’t know what you are passionate about. A better motto for most youth is “master something, anything”. Through mastery of one thing, you can drift towards extensions of that mastery that bring you more joy, and eventually discover where your bliss is.

• I’m positive that in 100 years much of what I take to be true today will be proved to be wrong, maybe even embarrassingly wrong, and I try really hard to identify what it is that I am wrong about today.

• Over the long term, the future is decided by optimists. To be an optimist you don’t have to ignore all the many problems we create; you just have to imagine improving our capacity to solve problems.

• The universe is conspiring behind your back to make you a success. This will be much easier to do if you embrace this paranoia.
 

Kevin Kelly [@kevin2kelly] is Senior Maverick at Wired and the author of bestseller book, The Inevitable.

TIMING IS EVERYTHING 

Ask these Questions. 
Are your potential users comfortable using the technology? 

Look at early adopter areas like California, and then equally at those just behind like Western Europe. If they aren’t, then it may be too early. 

Does your industry have a lot of competitors? 

Be honest. Do the research. If so, then what are you going to do that will make you stand out?

Are your potential customers currently underserved? 

Ask them, look online at user feedback. What’s the opportunity that could serve them better? 

What trend is happening, that will cause a product to be developed which could not of been created before?

It doesn’t have to be technological either, it can be social, political, etc. For example, high unemployment was a catalyst for a new generation of on-demand workers.


What You Need to Do

Read or listen to Kevin Kelly’s Book 

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/27209431-the-inevitable

Keep developing your  1 minute Pitch by analysing what Problems you plan to solve and why based on what you learned today 
 

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Written by Rick Carter
Connect with me at
www.YourBusiness2.live 

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