Action and Execution: The Defining Factors Of Success
Originality is reserved for the genius. The pioneers and the super intelligent. For most people on this pale blue dot, originality does not exist. Not true originality but a form of it. Originality of inspiration we could call it. The only original thing us commoners can conceive is execution. What we do does not matter, in most cases, lots of people have done it already, but the way we do it is crucial. Execution is the defining factor between rich and poor.
Henry Ford wisely said; “Vision without execution is hallucination”. And the reason I quote Henry Ford is that he is a man that is most famously known for making cars, but he did not invent them, he simply made them better than anyone else.
Execution is innovation. The tablet had been around for years but it wasn’t until Apple did it right that it took off. Apple made it different which made it desirable.
Richard Branson is an extraordinary example of someone who does this time and time again. He finds an industry that has become boring to the general public and revives the shit out of it. He sees whats boring and finds ways to make it more interesting. Different = Desirable.
I recently read Jeff Bezos’s 2017 letter to Amazon shareholders. I read in an article by a blogger I follow that it can be quite beneficial to read these letters, and he was dead right. Jeff Bezos is achieving worldwide domination. Fuck Facebook, Amazon is the real deal. Now I have some distaste towards Bezos, as he has a 600 million $ deal with the CIA, and he sits on a board of the Pentagon. But I won’t go deep into that or critique him for it just yet as I’m not sure what that deal entails. But I will say that this guy is a powerhouse. I don’t understand why people don’t refer to him as one of the best businessmen in the world, he is. Amazon’s growth is insane, and not just in terms of profit, but in terms of their expansion. They have JWO grocery stores (Just Walk Out) which means there is no staff in the shop, no cashiers. Not only that but Amazon prime has grown phenomenally. 1/3 of the US population has prime, which offers same day or next day delivery. In the photo below you can see Jeff Bezos walking his robot dog…
Alexa has also seen insane growth. Amazon is working on implementing Augmented Reality to some of their Alexa devices so that consumers can try on clothes before even buying them. Talk about a high standard of living. The biggest problem with online shopping has always been that you can’t try the stuff on, well, now we can, or at least we will be able to soon enough. It was a big shock to me that they were working on this. I knew Facebook has been working on something similar with messenger, which is quickly becoming a big commerce platform, but the reputation Amazon has, and the people behind it, I think Amazon will take over, especially with the Facebook scandal that's been in the news recently. Although it’s not so much a scandal as it is their business model. I mean do people not think about how Facebook is a free service yet a multi-billion $ company? Of course their selling data. That’s the transaction, you get to use the platform in exchange for your data.
Life is an experiment, you try something and if it works, great, if it doesn’t, rinse and repeat. People get caught up with thinking that just because they have an idea, they will be successful. But ideas are worthless. Execution holds all the value. The idea of Google glass was great. It has been in sci-fi movies for decades, but it was a huge failure. They experimented and the market told them that it wasn’t good, and it wasn’t. That being said, I reckon it will have a major come back in the next few decades. It just needs better execution.
If you have ideas, that’s great. If you haven’t acted on any of them, then that’s not so great. Les Brown is famous for saying that the wealthiest place in the world is the graveyard because there lie all the ideas that people never acted on. All the desires and dreams that were never fulfilled. We can never know the true potential of any of those ideas, nor can we even imagine what those ideas were. The world could have been a very different place, for better or worse, if those ideas were acted upon.
If you have ideas, then pick one and act on it. Eat, sleep and shit that idea day in day out, for as long as it takes. If it works, then scale, if it doesn’t, rinse and repeat. If that doesn’t work, rinse and repeat. Keep trying and experimenting until it does work, and once it does, it’ll pay off.
I also think there is another part to this. People get caught up with the idea that they haven’t found their passion. And I always wonder how people think they will find there passion. By sitting around doing the same shit they always do? Doesn’t seem likely. From my experience, with business and writing, I have found that action inspires creativity. When it comes to business, just do something, anything, and you’ll figure the rest out along the way and you’ll get more and more ideas along the way. With writing, if you experience writer's block, as I have many times, then just write about anything, no matter how trivial or boring it is. Write about what you just did before sitting down to write, and while you do you’ll find that your imagination starts to kick in and before the hats hits the ground you’ll have thought of something worthwhile to write about.
Cormac