Dharmesh Shah argues that entrepreneurship skills like public speaking and coding are learnable, not innate talent. He breaks complex abilities into smaller parts through functional decomposition, then practices each one. Shah went from severe stage anxiety to confident speaker by deliberately training storytelling, slide design, and humor separately.
Chapters
I think people conflate sometimes skill versus talent, and they believe they don't have the talent for entrepreneurship or for design, for programming, whatever it is. In my mind, so skill is something that's learnable. That's an easy definition. Talent is the rate at which you could acquire a particular skill. So if you have a talent for music, that means you will acquire musical skills faster than someone that doesn't have a talent for music. It doesn't mean that someone that doesn't have a talent for music can't learn it. So they may have a ceiling as far as how far they can go. Fine, I get that. But it doesn't mean they can't do it. And so one of the big lessons kind of in my life, in my professional career, is that most things are actually skills, not talent. I would have been voted least likely to ever start a company in my entire, like, generations of family, right? That's not a talent I ever had, like, until I went off and did it. It's like public speaking was not something— it's like, oh, that's a skill. And then in software engineering, there's this thing called functional decomposition, which is take a problem be able to articulate well. So a function that has a set of inputs and an output and what it's supposed to do. And really all software problems are being able to— the highest order function is, let's say you want to grade a possible investment based only on the website. It's like, oh, I'm going to give you the domain and you're going to give me a score from 0 to 100 as to how good this is. Okay, well, that function is easy to define. It's like domain goes in, score from 0 to 100 comes out. What other functions does that function need in order to pull that off? It's like, okay, I want a function that looks at the domain and looks at the level of SEO they have. That's one layer down. The person that's writing the SEO function goes down levels. Like, I'm gonna look at the on-page SEO and see how good they're doing at meta tags and H1 titles, and I'm gonna look at the off-page SEO and their link acquisition, that kind of stuff. That's— it's like— so if you roll it all down and you go down far enough, individual functions at the atomic level are so simple as to be trivial. What matters is the fact that you were able to abstract it down to that simple thing, right? And so most things can be broken down that way. So— So if you look at, oh, I want to become someone that can give a talk in front of 25,000 people on a stage, that seems like an insurmountable task for someone like me that's never done that, and that's not my thing. It's like, oh, well, what does that involve? Number one, you have to have kind of overcome— I didn't have like stage fright, I had severe stage anxiety. Then there's the, oh, you learn about storytelling, you learn about writing, you learn about slide design, you learn about humor. And I did all those things, right? Read books, took classes on all those components of public speaking. And in aggregate, I'm okay now, right? Like, I can do that. And you then again, then it's practice and you do it over time. So anyway, my point here is startups, figure out what set of skills you need to acquire. Some you'll be good at acquiring because you have the talent. The other one, you're just going to have to grind it out more than others may. But it's doable. It's a doable thing. If I can do it, anyone can do it. That's my point.
