I am not skilled enough for my venture
Comfort zone is the biggest threat to any big step up in life. We often follow the stable paths in life and get satisfied with whatever we have.
Sometimes its lack of confidence, opportunity or the skill. But the best thing to do something remarkable is get courageous and come out of that comfort zone.
Because
“A Ship in a harbor is safe but that’s not why ships were built”.
Let me share an interesting story where the lack of skills were not at all the roadblock in the success story.
Instagram CEO, Kevin Systrom, created something which is one of the greatest Silicon Valley success-stories of our generation. Unlike facebook founder, who acquired the popular photo sharing app for $1 billion, Kevin received no formal engineering degree.
Systrom, is a largely self-taught programmer. While working in the marketing department at Nextstop in 2010, he would spend his evenings learning to program.
He started doing more and more engineering at night on simple ideas that helped him learn how to program. One of these ideas was combining elements of foursquare (check-ins) with elements of Mafia Wars (hence the name Burbn). He could build a prototype of the idea in HTML5 and get it to some friends.
Those friends ended up using the prototype without any branding elements or design at all.
At a party for the Hunch folks there were two people from Baseline Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz. He showed the prototype, and they decided to meet up for coffee to talk about it. After the first meeting, he decided to take the dive and lefy his job to go solo and see if Burbn could be a company.
Within two weeks of leaving, Burbn (later Instagram) raised $500k from both Baseline and Andreessen Horowitz, and started work on finding a team.
Today Instagram is one of the most promising companies, Within 2 years of its launch Instagram was acquired by facebook for whooping 1 billion dollars.
So the learning is that the skills are not the only ingredient to make a dish of your venture.
You should have the determination, rest can be managed well. If you have conviction, you will definitely come up with flying colors.
Action Points:
- Identify the skills you need to progress in your task.
- Make a plan to learn it. I prefer learning by yourself, May be some resource on internet or any book.
- Implement whatever you learn the same day and also start using the skill in your venture.
- Do it fast and adopt the lean methodology to come up with the product as soon as possible.
Congrats in advance for the new skill that you are going to learn in near future. I believe in you and confident, that you will achieve whatever you want in life.
Tip : By the way Kevin learned programming from code academy. You can use the same if your new skill is related to the programming and computers.
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