Start-Up mindset

"Apple is the biggest start-up on the planet", said Steve jobs.

Start-ups are great way to fuel entrepreneurship in a society, to overcome challenges and seize opportunities. Organizations and people who's in the start-up mind set act fast, think agile.

No matter how large apple became, the organization breathed like a start-up. And that's how apple has achieved unparalleled creativity & innovation by rupturing many industries through tech.

This drives the point that learning about startups will help individuals and organizations at any given point in their life cycles.

Good news is, we don't need to be big like apple to be a startup, and grow.

image: Getty images preview

The lizard brain

The term "lizard brain" is coined by Seth Godin, in his new book ' The icarus deception'.
I read an article on the book, and "lizard brain" is:

Whether you know it or not, we all have what Godin refers to as a lizard brain. He says, "The lizard is a physical part of your brain, the pre-historic lump called the amygdala near the brain stem that is responsible for fear and rage and reproductive drive."

Godin has written a lot about this in previous books including Linchpin and Poke the Box and cites author Steven Pressfield for further explanation -- “As Pressfield describes it, the lizard brain is the resistance. The resistance is the voice in the back of our head telling us to back off, be careful, go slow, compromise. The resistance is writer's block and putting jitters and every project that ever shipped late because people couldn't stay on the same page long enough to get something out the door. The resistance grows in strength as we get closer to shipping, as we get closer to an insight, as we get closer to the truth of what we really want. That's because the lizard hates change and achievement and risk," Godin says in The Icarus Deception.

Quieting the lizard brain is a constant struggle for entrepreneurs. It is a skill that needs to be developed. But as we tune into the frequency of what we feel is the right decision and tune out the lizard brain we will be able to truly test our business plans and hypothesis.

The full article: Here

Having the best

Having the best is not a guarantee for success. Having it all neither.

Example: Purchasing Excel does not guarantee that I'll build an effective budget.
Getting the next best smart phone does not guarantee that I'll be punctual for the next meeting, despite having many calendar, time management apps.

Similarly, we can make excuses, 'we don't have this and that to get things done'.
Aspiring is a good thing, but it should not be an excuse.