John Gruber said something in a recent article about Apple that really jumped out at me.
Making money is not easy. Apple has gotten good at making large profits every quarter by building up to that — making ever-increasing profits all along, quarter after quarter after quarter, device after device after device.
This was in reference to a quote by Jason Fried in an Inc. article about how to get good at making money.
I can’t say enough about bootstrapping. Whether you’re starting your first business or your next one, my advice is to bootstrap it. Bootstrapping forces you to think about making money on Day One. There’s a fundamental difference between a bootstrapped business and a funded business. It’s all about which side of the money you’re on. From Day One, a bootstrapped business has no choice but to make money. There’s no cushion in the bank and not much in the pockets. It’s make money or go home. To a bootstrapped business, money is air.On the other hand, from Day One, a funded business is all about spending money. There’s a pile in the bank, and it’s not there to collect interest. Your investors want you to hire, invest, and buy. There’s less — and in some cases, no — pressure to make money. While that sounds comforting, I think it ultimately hurts. It replaces the hustle, the scrap, the fight, with a false comfort of “we can worry about that later.”
As Gruber pointed out, this is painfully obvious, it almost bears not saying but it is so easy to miss. The way to get good at something is to do it. Over, and over, and over again. Keep doing it.
Whether it is painting, playing the violin, singing, learning a foreign language or programming language, hiring, firing, presenting, public speaking, cooking, writing, reading, cleaning, or farming.
Anything you want to get good at, you have to do it. Over, and over, and over, and over again. This kinda jives with what Malcolm Gladwell had proposed in his book Outliers.
We sometimes forget, so I figured I would repeat it.
Besides, I want to get better at writing so might as well be ‘meta’ while doing that eh ?