Codex Audentia

I recently had a business failure.

Long story short, here’s the bullet list of lessons learned. If you’re not me, and you’re reading this, just know that I wrote this for myself. It may or may not apply to you.

1. Focus
   If I had to distill everything into one word, it would be focus. Focus, focus, focus. FOCUS! Ignore the free ice cream van.
   
2. Keep focusing
   This is not a joke. Stop strategizing or changing things. Just STOP! Once you make a decision, don’t switch directions until you’ve burned the fucking tires and they’re melting on the tarmac. Finish all your thinking before the decision, not after. Set 1-2 metrics/lead measures and chase them into the horizon like a mindless dog.
   
3. Velocity
   Blaze through your day. If you have time for idle bullshit, or if you’re slowing down, close shop. Your venture is dying anyway. Sure, smell the flowers – but do it quickly. Get used to doing the work of three people.
   
4. Only hire people who are better than you.
   Your team’s talent density/concentration should keep going UP over time. Each new hire should improve the average quality of your existing team members. It’s the only criterion that matters in the end. If you can’t hire someone truly remarkable, don’t hire. If a candidate likely keeps the average quality of your team constant, don’t hire. You don’t have the luxury of time spent coaching and training people to make them “better.” You’re an entrepreneur, not a manager. Stop fucking managing.
   
5. The best time to fire someone is the first time it crosses your mind
   Harsh but true. The first time it crosses your mind, talk to the person to figure out what’s going on. If you don’t walk away with huge confidence that you should keep them, fire them immediately. But do it right by them – it was your mistake to hire them, so they deserve to be treated fairly.
   
6. It’s okay to be tough
   Don’t strangle your inner toughness. Don’t make an “effort” to be nice. Nobody cares about “nice” people. Let people self-select themselves out of your life.
   
7. (Bonus) Expect Success.
   You cannot be in doubt when fighting a monster. You have to have the conviction: when I drive my sword into its heart, the monster will die, and I will emerge victorious.
   
   You don’t need to be sure of how you will get your sword to reach the monster’s chest. You just need to have the conviction that it will happen, and all you have to do is get over the obstacles in the way.
   
   Without this conviction, you will prepare for failure instead of success – and your failure becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. You will simply keep dodging the monster’s attacks, trying to stay alive, until you’re tired and dead.
   
   Expect to emerge victorious in the end. Expect to hold success in your hands. Visualize victory.

I never understood the concept of hiring people based on an arbitrary number of how many years they’ve existed in an industry.

Experience is wonderful, but it’s only helpful in very specific types of jobs:

1/ When you need someone who has PRACTICED (to achieve a certain level of skill): some things just have to be polished by deep intentional training and repetition. There’s no way around it.

2/ You need them to have a huge pre-existing NETWORK (which takes time to build): whether you build those connections one by one, or at scale through a large audience or community.

Both of these compound over time, and there are no shortcuts to building them. But the focus should still be on the QUALITY of experience, not the “number of years.” I believe the quality of experience (what they did during that time) can only be seen in examples of their work, so my hiring process was always more focused on online exercises and take-home assignments.

All other reasons for hiring for “experience” are frivolous.

In my controversial opinion, someone looking for a job that they have already done a thousand times is often (though not always) a sign that they’re stagnant and not learning anything new.

The best pros want to challenge, reinvent, and stretch themselves into uncomfortable territory. If it’s not a little scary, it’s boring.

But then, I might be biased.

Nobody can be the expert on everything. As an entrepreneur, I always have to find people who know more than me, and trust them to do their job.

But hiring is tough (and that’s probably an understatement). People lie in interviews all the time (from both sides) trying to make the best impression. And often, jobs go to the best salesperson, not the most suitable person (at least for non-technical/managerial roles).

When I’m hiring someone – whether it’s a freelancer on Upwork or Fiverr, or a consultant – I use one key criterion to filter them out, and it works so well that often I’m left with only one candidate at the end.

It’s their ability and willingness to TEACH — to EDUCATE me a little, so I walk away having learned a new thing or two right from my first interaction from them. Good teachers have an excellent grasp on their subject to begin with, they are excellent communicators, and they also have a GIVER’s attitude which makes them decent human beings (in general).

To put this into practice, when I message a freelancer or start an interview, I usually start with a question that goes like, “hey I’m not an expert on this thing, so could you maybe educate me a little about how it works, and what I should be looking for?”

The non-teacher will give me a curt or very concise answer that can be summarized as, “this is what I need from you, and this is what you’ll get from me.” Or at most, they’ll ask me a couple questions and then give me that same answer. Either way, it’s not what I want.

And what will great teachers do instead? We know it when they do it. It’s not hard to see.

A special thank you to Dave Ramsey who first introduced me to this concept in a youtube video.