Advice

I just read my last post and realized that I hadn't announced the other big news that I was hinting at...well here it is, I have relocated to Ottawa. Ostensibly it was to take a job, which is true and has been great, but in my heart I have believed for at least a year that I needed to come to Ottawa to make the connections I needed to move the civiside ball further down the field. So how has it been? In short, great! I have made some excellent connections in the startup community and even been accepted into an intensive business development program called Lead to Win (which I should be currently resting for since it starts tomorrow, but I am not resting for since my mind is heavy).

The reason my mind is so heavy is that I met with, and received advice from, an entrepreneur tonight who sold his company for nearly a billion dollars. He is now an Angel Investor so I was hoping to gain some ideas on how to create a compelling investment proposal so that I can raise some money to bring on additional expertise. However, what really happened was that I received advice on how to sell civiside to employers, how the business model should operate, and even how civiside the website should operate. What I realized is that alot of the advice I was receiving from him was directly contradicting earlier advice I had received from other successful entrepreneurs. Now I could evaluate the advice on a hierarchy and establish the billion dollar entrepreneur's advice as more valuable and reset my thinking...but somehow I don't think that it works that way. I have come across this contradictory advice conundrum before and tried to defer to the most recent advice and found it to be less than successful. I think that the problem with people giving advice is that it usually comes from personal experience and success...and half of success is luck. What people attribute their experience, and therefore advice, could come from skill, but probably comes from at least 50% luck...a non-reproducible variable.

This is not to say that the billion dollar entrepreneur didn't say some things with a great deal of value, his ideas on increasing the credibility of our candidates and sales techniques to employers have definitely impacted my thinking, but I would say in more of an incremental manner. More like a strategy for rushing than a well defined and executed play. Nevertheless, I am grateful for what I have learned.

So why is my mind heavy? I guess it's heavy because I am realizing that I can't rely on advice to move the ball down field. It's going to take some strategy, some skill and a lot of brute force. I have to increase my luck component by doing more and reducing my reliance on the advice of others. This is again contradictory to what I have learned in the military, "learn from the experience of others", or maybe it's not? Maybe learning from the experience of others is not following what they say led to their success, maybe it's observing what they did with as much objectivity as possible to ascertain potential patterns. Of course, to identify patterns you usually have to observe more than one situation, and often more than one person, so maybe I am on the right track after all. Maybe I just need to refocus my observation not to what is said but to what was done...drawing more objective conclusions that can be applied to unique but similar circumstances.

So what I'm saying is that I am not going to follow advice as I have been apt to do since launching civiside, but I am not going to ignore it either. I am going to look more deeply into what the person attributes their advice and try to understand where the advice comes from more objectively. Hopefully I will be able to gain additional strategies so that I can come up with ingenious new plays that will move the ball down field. So once again, "why the heavy head?", I have to wake up in 4 hours and churn my way through three-days of well intentioned advice until I find the underlying principles that will guide my strategy going forward. Good luck to me.