1. Passion: If you have been truly passionate about a problem, you have probably thought about that problem since early days. Some life changing events can bring new passions/causes in life as well. Whatever it is, the point is to choose an idea that you can nurture for the rest of your life
2. Competency: Being passionate may mean you know a lot about that domain. Is that knowledge enough to create variations on existing solutions on your own? Arethe variations that you are able to create important enough to decide the new performance of the solution?
3. Balancing act: To have depth in a domain also means that you know the pros and cons of each variation you make in your new solution. If you are making a decision in which you only see an upside or a downside, you are probably missing some aspect of that decision. Entreprenuership is all about treading the thin line between two extremes of various kinds and if you can present your stance as the middle ground between two extremes, you can show depth.
4. Business as a social science: Each business idea is a essentially a social experiement and an economic experiment. Figure out how to carry out mini-experiments to test your hypotheses and tread the path directed by the learnings from those experiments. However, bear in mind that unlike that in science, social science presents cause and effect very rarely. Most of the times, one can only observe correlation between two phenomena. In social science, no two experiements are the same and hence drawing conclusions from past and current observations must be done very carefully. Ultimately, the aim is to find causal relationships in the market and human behavior.
5. Take your time: Your idea has a merit because of you. So dont be afraid of others stealing and running away with your idea because they cannot possibly implement the idea the way you would. Take your time and do it right. Thats most important. The preferred way is to have small insignificant failures that lead to success rather than small successes that delude you into the wrong direction and eventually lead you to mediocre or spectacular loss.
6. Fail early and often but without much consequences: Make sure that your experiments are designed in such a way that if they fail, they dont cause you huge losses. Learn from them and move on.
7. Do the important work yourself, hire/outsource for the rest: This is like a corollary of #2. However, the focus here is on capturing a larger portion of the pie created and that can be ensured only if you know the critical parts yourself and its hard for anyone else to replace you.
8. Acknowledge your limitations
