Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense. - Gertrude Stein

The ethos of not fooling yourself is one of the best you could possibly have. It's powerful because it's so rare - Charlie Munger

Entrepreneur ship is not the best way to get rich- Eric Ries

The best business is a Ponzie scheme.  Eric Ries

The mental habit of thinking backward forces objectivity.   Charlie Munger

Our mentor, Brooks told us when we were working on the Starbucks project, “work backwards” and that was an epiphany for me in how to complete the project.   We were given a financial goal so it was just a matter of seeing if we could get there.  Just as Costco determined that having more than 360 Advil tablets in a bottle led to more than 10% not buying limiting their revenue, we determined how much food Starbucks could serve and still reach their goal using their current system by working backward.  One must also work backward in starting a business.

Michael Gerber in  E Myth talks about the same working in reverse process when starting a business.  You first need to determine your own life goals.  What do you want to be as opposed to do?  Noam Wasserman in The Founders Dilemma asks what we want in life: being king or having riches.   He evaluated motivations by decade of life and by gender ranking from top to bottom and found:
Men’s motivators
20’s – 1. power and influence, 2. autonomy, 3. managing people, 4. financial gain
30’s – 1. autonomy, 2. power and influence, 3. financial gain, 4. managing people
40’s – 1. autonomy 2. altruism,  3. variety , 4. power and influence
Female motivators
20’s – 1. autonomy, 2. power and influence, 3. managing people, 4. altruism, … 9. financial gain
30’s – 1. autonomy, 2. altruism, 3. power and influence, 4. variety
40’s – 1. autonomy, 2. altruism, 3. variety, 4. intellectual challenge
He ended with the “Key Questions for the Founder”:  1.Why am I doing this?  What motivates me? 2. What early choices will cause problems?


 

Starting a business is complicated and is probably best done in a group.  One of the best instructional videos I have seen is:

http://video.nytimes.com/video/2012/04/17/dining/100000001493798/potato-pizza.html because it inspired me to make the pizza.       I don’t know if watching the Lean Startup will have the same result.