This month I've been going through some old notes I've saved going back years on a variety of topics. I'm reorganizing them into a new way that should make them easier to read through and make use of (the method is called Zettelkasten).
The fun thing about it is that I can ask for a random note and then go from there. One I got today was:
You might spend 70-90% of your time cleaning data.
This is in reference to data analysis but it got me thinking, what else takes the majority of time to prepare for?
Adding new products takes a long time to design, produce, build up the product detail page, etc before you finally sell.
Same for starting a new business or expanding into a new business area.
Or even non-business things like starting a garden.
In all of those, if you quit anytime during the preparation process you get 0 results.
It might be necessary to quit.
You might be forced to quit.
You might have no choice but to quit.
But by quitting you lose the potential benefits.
It's better to go into the project knowing that 70-90% of the time will be just getting prepared and sticking with it. Or deciding not to start at all (which are lessons from The Dip).
Eric Davis
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