Everything you thought you knew about business is wrong
In business — as in life — everybody likes to tell you what you can’t do. You can’t start a business in your spare time. You can’t succeed without a million-dollar advertising budget. You cannot — under any circumstances — let anyone see you sweat a mistake. If only the bullying stopped there but, alas, no such luck. Everybody has an MBA-approved laundry list of what you have to do, too: 10-year business plans, meetings, meetings and more meetings.
But what if everybody is flat-out wrong?
According to Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson, authors of Rework, there’s no need to follow all of those cumbersome rules. You can start a business on a shoestring, invest one hour a night and still make a splash— so long as you don’t let the naysayers hold you back. These guys ought to know. They launched their first software, Basecamp, with just a handful of employees, no advertising and a deep irreverence for plans (which, by the way, they call “guesses”).
You should only listen to Rework if you’re ready for two rule-breaking rebels to blow your excuses out of the water. You say you have no time? Turn off the television and get to it. Did you think up the next Facebook or Twitter and get beat to the punch by some fresh-faced kid surfing the web in his jammies? Not possible, Rework says, because if you never acted on the idea, you never entered the race to begin with. Think you have to write long-term plans or have a perfect product before you can launch? On the contrary, sometimes “good enough” really is “good enough.” Just quit hemming and hawing and do something. Narrator Mike Chamberlain possesses the perfect voice, with plucky enthusiasm that makes all the simple, empowering advice sound, well, simple.
