This article is about seeking the truth of what your business is, or will be, not what you hope and pray it might be.
The truth: it’s tough, and it hurts, and not everyone can handle it – just ask Jack Nicholson.
Knowing the reality of the situation saves everyone an awful lot of time, money and effort. The truth lets you work out whether it’s a good idea right now. And as painful as it might be, it’s 0.0001% as painful as messing around in the real world and finding out it was broken from the start.
We need to talk about a fundamental truth – from an evolutionary point of view, humans are still animals.
We share 98.8% of our DNA with chimps, and 99.7% of our DNA with Neanderthals. Our brains are effectively the same as when we lived in caves. So everything we are, everything we think and achieve, is down to us using the same equipment as those seemingly ‘primitive’ species.
Humans rarely want to know the answer, they want reassurance, and it’s important to know the difference. Reassurance makes you feel good, and honestly, the truth rarely makes you feel good.
A chimp does not know what’s happening in New York City. Hell, the chimp doesn’t know what’s happening a kilometre away if they’re not standing on high ground.
Humans do. I can check the weather in Japan, or what some guy in Louisiana thinks about turkeys. And the problem is, humans are inquisitive, just like chimps.
And whereas chimps aren’t aware of what is outside their bubble, what information they do and don’t know, humans most definitely are, and it’s addictive.
We want to know the world. The problem is that our brains aren’t designed to hold such a wide view, and it thoroughly overwhelms us. Without the proper support, our response pulls us in one of two directions:
- Shut away from the information: hide from the truth. We harden what we know and then stop listening to everyone else. This is where tribalism comes from, and also a lot of the world’s hate,
- Shut away from the decision: We get overwhelmed and refuse to decide. This has been unhelpfully called Millennial Indecision.
Let’s go back to the chimpanzees. They can’t shut away information, and they don’t need to, because they have so little, and all of it is important. They also can’t decide on whether they’d like to do something 99% of the time, because they need to focus on living, or they’ll get to dying. As humans, we have too much information, and it’s rarely fatal.
Refusing the truth and refusing the decision helps in the short term. Innocence is bliss, and all that. And for a short time it’s lovely to not decide, but it can have devastating long-term effects both physically and mentally. It’s also little help when deciding whether you should start, or continue running, a business.
Not knowing or not deciding are both fatal for businesses. It makes you sloppy, slow, misguided, and arrogant.
Finding out the answer to the question “is my business worth starting, or continuing?” might be a short-term pain for your mental health, but it’s a long-term gain for everything else, I promise.
It’s better to know. So be curious, seek the negatives and embrace them. Because we can try to solve problems if we know them, and they don’t cease to exist if we ignore them.
If you’d like to find out if your idea is a good one – why not book in a free consultation with us – it’s pretty easy.