Are You Guilty of One-Size-Life-Fits-All Thinking?

I was talking to my older brother the other day, about startups, siblings, raising children, and he shocked me, right in the middle of an otherwise smooth conversation, with this:

Now you’re guilty of one-size-life-thinking. You do that way too much. You want everybody to do things the way you did.

make your own pathThat took me aback.  It sounded insulting. But (damn) it’s also true.

What’s more important is how much writing on startups and entrepreneurship and business stories flows from that same basic premise:

You should do what I did. It worked for me. It should work for you too.

There are so many problems with that. They are too obvious to list, all about different times, different worlds, resources, goals, and so forth.

Conclusion: beware of best practices, recipes, checklists, and anything a successful entrepreneur is too sure of. Trust uncertainty. Make your own way.

photo credit: jenny downing via photopin cc

Comments

  • John Smart says:

    Its easy to do – we also call it experience. If you do *this* and it works, when faced with th same problem, you will do *this* again, when advising someone else, you will advise them to do *this* – its also comfort zone.
    But when you start on something different, or when you hit a roadblock, you have to do *that* instead. That is scary. That is new. That is different, and worrying, and usually stressful. But that can be quite exciting, informative and fun too!! Without that, we would be writing this in chalk on slate 🙂

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