Evan Carmichael explains how Amazon started as a bookstore and Facebook as a college network, then grew through daily incremental improvements. The kaizen principle of never-ending small changes beats waiting for perfect ideas. Release imperfect work, iterate quickly, and practice every day.
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Good morning, Believe Nation!
Today's message is: Keep innovating one step at a time. Over to you, Vinod Khosla.
Most of the time when you start something, you want to do something meaningful and get started and maybe smaller, but you want to keep innovating, building on it one step at a time, and hopefully it becomes much larger. Amazon started with just books. Now it's everything. If you look at Twitter or Facebook, when they started, they were relatively small things. Mark Zuckerberg was trying to connect everybody on the Harvard campus, not 7 billion people on the planet. But he kept expanding his vision. So very often when you start with an innovative idea, you don't know how big it is. In fact, most of the really innovative ideas have been very hard to predict what's a large opportunity or a small opportunity.
So what do you think?
I think that oftentimes when you're facing any kind of large challenge or innovation, the challenge looks too big. And so being able to make sure that you're continually adopting but also getting to work, like getting to work on things. If you have software, release the software even if it's not fully done. Innovate every step along the way. Don't think about making things perfect before pushing stuff out, before starting the job, before doing anything. Innovation every single step, little bite-sized steps will certainly break big challenges down but it'll also make sure that you have a culture of innovation, that you're constantly innovating, that you're not being left behind. And I think innovation is key in any business.
I was having an interesting discussion this morning with somebody who's starting a YouTube channel, and he's comparing his channel to mine, and he's saying, "Well, look at all this stuff that you're doing," and he's not sure how he can copy my success and do all the things that I'm doing. And I reminded him that when I started, I sucked. Like, the first videos, I was brutal at it. Like, I couldn't speak properly and was trying to memorize things, and you helped me make some of the first ones. You know, that was 6 years ago, something like that, maybe longer. And you may look back and look at my channel then and look at my channel now and look at the videos and the quality and the effects and the intros and the branding and all of that and how much it's grown, and you see a big gap from where we've gone. And that was all step by step. Those were all little steps that if you look at it accumulates to be a big step. And so I think a lot of people, to add on to Mark's point, see this big gap between where you are and where you want to be, and that might be some big unsurmountable step, you don't know how to take it, but really it's going to be doing little steps every day, constantly tweaking, constantly trying to get better, and just pushing yourself to be better than you were yesterday. Even now, my videos, as great as you guys may like them, I still think there's a lot of room for them to get better, and I'm not sure how they're going to get better, but they're going to get better. We're going to constantly tweak them to improve them every day, every day, every day. It's a concept of kaizen, just constant never-ending improvement.
You know, it reminds me of a story I heard. Someone as an adult said that they wanted to learn guitar, and someone else said, "I can give you the secret to learn guitar." And he wrote down the secret, and essentially it was practice every day. And the guy looked at it and went, "Yeah, I'm not gonna do that." But that's all it was. If you want to learn guitar, learn guitar every day. Innovate every day. Get better every day. Practice. It's not rocket science.
I like it. It's a good message. Marc Jäger, everyone.
So the question of the day today is: What's the one excuse that you have for why you're not innovating? And it better be an excuse, and you better realize that it's a lie.
I like that. Leave in the comments below. We're going to join in the discussion. Thank you so much for watching. Have an amazing day. Continue to believe, and we'll see you again tomorrow morning for another shot of espresso. See you again tomorrow morning for another shot of espresso.
That time I said it.
Espresso, not even espresso.
Espresso, yeah. Espresso. But I would like to say that the arm motion, I think that was the furthest reach you've gotten so far. That's what threw me off. I was feeling the energy in the punch.
I put all of my energy and thought into the punch.
