Dreary thoughts, I know, but they’re reality checks everyone needs to go through. According to Seth Godin’s book, The Dip: A Little Book That Teaches You When to Quit (and When to Stick), people who succeed don’t do so because they never quit, they succeed because they know when to quit, which battles to avoid, and when to persevere through tough times.

At the recommendation of our advisor, John and I listened to the self-narrated audiobook version from iTunes which took a few hours to finish and sparked a few more hours of discussion. As with most of Seth’s books, the concepts are simple, but he does a good job of explaining and illustrating with stories.

One of the examples was about snowboarding and how it’s easy to learn, but there’s clearly a “dip” before you can truly master it. He made the argument that unless you have the dedication and resources (time and money) to persevere, you might as well not even start snowboarding. It seems like an extreme proclamation, but it gets his point across. It also hit pretty close to home since I did exactly that. A lifelong skier, I gave snowboarding a shot, learned it pretty well for a few seasons, but hit the wall (well actually fell off a jump onto my face and slid down the mountain) and gave up. Had this been a business, I would have wasted plenty of money and time.

The key takeaway we got from the book was that if you’re not going to be the best in the “world” at what you’re doing, don’t even start. Being the “best in the word” means you’ll have to power through the inevitable “dip” along the way to success. The keys to success here are to:

• define your “world” appropriately, and
• be aware of your capabilities, resources and commitment

Remember, this is the world of the Long Tail. You don’t have to be the best blog in the world, you can define your world to be “best blog about cute animals” and have tremendous success.

The other thing we learned from Seth is that you don’t get credit for starting something then just giving up when the “dip” gets tough. It’s one thing to quit because you recognize a cul-de-sac/dead end, but if you just quit because the dip is hard, then you’ve neither succeeded or learned anything. What’s to say you’re going to succeed at the next venture that inevitably has a dip? If the dip is too hard, change your world and your goal to something attainable given your resources and capabilities.

Take a few minutes to think about it.

Are there things that are taking valuable resources away from your primary goal that maybe you should quit? Are you going to be the best in your “world”? Should we stop blogging?

I’ve love to hear any thoughts or stories.

- Justin

The first was due to pure luck – Digital Bootcamp’s demo was right next to ours at Tech Cocktail, so on a whim I entered their raffle, where you guess the number of Digital Bootcamp dogtags in a big mason jar. Who knew that jar could hold over 600 dogtags? I ended up with the closest guess, so over the weekend we visited Mike (while sporting my Menuism tee) to pick up my prize – a nifty iPod nano. Sweet!

If that was all there was to say about Digital Bootcamp, this would’ve been just a “yay-I-won-something” post, but it’s definitely not. Besides being a successful entrepreneur (DB’s going strong after 15 years), Mike hosts a monthly “Circle of Progress” Entrepreneur’s Meetup group, where entrepreneurs of all backgrounds meet to keep each other accountable. Justin and I attended last night and found it helpful. There usually aren’t many people around to keep an entrepreneur on track, so having a support group of some kind, structured or not, is critical to keeping things rolling. The “Circle of Progress” records member’s monthly commitments, so it’s easy to track what’s been accomplished or not, but the most valuable aspect is simply declaring publicly what you intend to do in the coming month and what you did and didn’t accomplish last month – peer pressure and public humiliation works wonders.

Justin and I have tried on and off to do something like this with our networks in Seattle and Chicago, and hopefully seeing what Mike’s done with this group will be the kick in the butt necessary to get something really going. Mike’s doing some neat stuff here in Chicago – if you get a chance drop by the DB offices and have him show you his neat auction purchases.

More on accountability to come!

-John

After we launched the open beta of menuism about 4 weeks ago, we’ve been slowly changing gears and putting more thought and time into other aspects of the business. When we started this venture, one of our goals was to make this a “for experience” venture at the very least. As long as we learn, there’s no such thing as failure – we’ll just chalk it up to the MBA of hard knocks. The fun part of learning while you’re doing is that everything is much more interesting than in school when it’s hard to see applicability.

The past few weeks we’ve been increasing our book budget and making more trips to our friendly neighborhood public libraries and here are the books we’ve been reading:

• The Long Tail – Chris Anderson. This is a great book about the growth of niche markets and how they’re changing business of all kinds. It’s kind of like how there’s a small group of you reading this blog instead of going to larger publication about business.
• The Art of Profitability – Adrian Slywotzky. Who doesn’t like profit? The book is written in a friendly, story-telling manner that makes the concepts easy to understand. He walks through 23 different basic profit models.
• Small Is the New Big – Seth Godin. Collection of stories and articles about the beauty of being small. It’s an easy and entertaining read. You’ll get plenty of stories that you can tell your friends and sound smart.
• All Marketers Are Liars – Seth Godin. Learn how to tell genuine stories and connect with your audience and customers. Hint: The title of the book is just a marketing tactic, they aren’t all liars
• Guerilla Marketing for Free – Jay Conrad Levinson. When you’re small and on a budget, you need all the free ideas you can get. The next time I give you 3 business cards or you see my business card stuffed in a library book, you’ll know why.
• Crossing the Chasm – Geoffrey Moore. How do you take your product from early adopter to mass market? Read this book for hints on tackling the chasm, the gap that stands in the way of any small company’s mainstream success.
• The Art of Project Management – Scott Berkun. A great guide to getting things done in software projects, the right way. A pleasure to read all the way through, and a great reference to come back to.

Got any suggestions for our next book?

- Justin

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1. Give your analysis not your opinion. Well reasoned analysis and constructive criticism helps people out a lot more than “I think that stinks”.
2. Be aware of the context and give the appropriate feedback at the appropriate time. Put yourself in the shoes of the person asking of feedback to understand the kind of feedback they are looking for. If it’s early on in the cycle, then nit-picky comments on fit and finish aren’t as useful as feedback on the concept or direction.
3. If you have something nice (really, anything) to say, then say it and say it first! (this one is my favorite ) This puts the feedback recipient in a open state of mind to receive the ensuing constructive criticism. Plus, everyone likes to hear a kind word or two or three.

Pretty simple and easy to follow. I just have one more simple one I’d like to add.

• Do it and do it often. Chances are that most feedback isn’t ever responded to, but you can bet that the feedback recipient is reading it. It doesn’t hurt to hear more sides of the coin and if you don’t speak up the recipient might never know. It’s easy to get overwhelmed with other details, especially as a very small business, so the more feedback the merrier.

That’s all for now. Any feedback?

- JC

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