Pursuing your conviction – Entrepreneurship lessons from Guy Kawasaki

Naysayers are important people – who push you to do more and do better. When they reject an idea, you have an opportunity to do more and prove a point to them. When I decided to take up a career in IT/Software almost a decade back – many people tried putting me off saying that there is no future in IT (they said so based on their limited perception of IT and also based on the IT scenario in India prevalent then). As years went by, their perception changed and they started looking at IT as a successful career.

There will be people who would cast their doubts on all professional /entrepreneurial initiatives that someone undertakes.  Some do that occasionally and some do it habitually. Treat them well – for they are the ones who can become your biggest source of inspiration.

The bottom line is that if you convinced and have strong belief in something that you have undertaken – it is almost a best idea to ignore naysayers – so what if they are so-called experts? Sometimes, the cost of lost opportunity is much higher than the cost of failure!

In this context, I cannot disagree with what Guy Kawasaki has written in his last post on Sun Microsystem’s blog titled “Five most important lessons I’ve learned as an entrepreneur.” While you can check out the blog post yourself, here is an excerpt of what he writes about naysayers or “Schmexperts” as Guy calls them. Very insightful!

4. Ignore schmexperts. Schmexperts are the totally bad combination of schmucks who are experts–or experts who are schmucks. When you first launch a product or service, they’ll tell you it isn’t necessary, can’t really work, or faces too much competition. If you succeed, then they’ll say they knew you would succeed. In other words, they don’t know jack shiitake. If you believe, try it. If you don’t believe, listen to the schmexperts and stay on the porch.

Ultimately it all boils down to your own understanding and conviction of initiatives you are pursuing. If it does not work at first shot, some immediate course corrections can happen, fine tuning can happen – but not giving it a try just because someone else says it won’t work – is a bad idea!