Do More Faster India, 2nd Edition

Chapter 47Have a Bias Toward Action

Ben Casnocha

Ben is an entrepreneur and author of the books My Startup Life: What a (Very) Young CEO Learned on His Journey Through Silicon Valley, The Alliance: Managing Talent in the Networked Age, and The Start-Up of You: Adapt to the Future, Invest in Yourself, and Transform Your Career. He cofounded and is a partner at Village Global, a $100 million venture capital fund. He has been a Techstars mentor since 2007.

Learning experts agree that learning by doing is the best way to learn something. When you do something—when you pick up the phone and talk to a potential customer, launch a prototype, or send out the first brochure—you learn infinitely more than if you think about doing it in the abstract. The best way to test the validity of a business idea is to start the business and quickly gauge market feedback.

The best entrepreneurs have internalized learn-by-doing. As my friend Josh Newman says, there are only two steps to entrepreneurship: start, and keep going—and you lose most people at the first step. That’s because talk is easy. Writing business plans is easy. Chatting about your business idea with friends at a party is easy. Taking an action—starting, doing—is hard.

It’s hard because when you take action, it may turn out to have been the wrong action. Fine. When you have a bias toward action, it means you are constantly making decisions, and some of those decisions will surely have bad outcomes. But good decisions can have bad ...