Here are two related posts on entrepreneurship.
The second discusses why startups fail. The biggest cause is one that plagues companies everwhere: too much scale too fast. Too much investment before you’re ready.
The first article discusses the reason why this happens:
We’re all plagued by this defect of human nature — thinking we know more than we do — which then causes us to miss opportunities to actually learn something.
And causes us to take opportunities to fail. Learning is boring and hard and embarrassing. You feel stupid, you procrastinate. You probably feel guilty about procrastinating. The smallest things are impossible to figure out.
Then you give up learning and building stuff and just lash out in activity. Bang, you’re dead.
Warning, personal rant directly ahead:
I’m still working on the weekend project and it seems that every time I turn around there’s some other super basic, super simple new thing I don’t understand that takes me forever to figure out.
For example, I’ve been completely hung up for two weeks trying to get a web server going. I have to learn how to configure Apache with Windows. Then php with Windows and Apache. None of it friggen works properly.
TWO WEEKS! And basically nothing to show for it. Meanwhile, tweaks and improvements on the basic engine of my project languish incomplete.
But the rest works, if barely. This is the bottleneck. This where I need to spend my time.
It is an indescribably frustrating process to not even be able to SET UP my tools, much less learn to use them. I’m looking forward to learning another programming language, actually. It should go much faster this time because I’ve got the basics down fairly well.
But working in the old comfort zone isn’t going to help me, is it.
Not Unreasonable 