The reasonable man adapts himself to the world. The unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to him. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man. — George Bernard Shaw

There are many hard-working entrepreneurs who work tirelessly, night and day. Most of these –so called– “hard-working” entrepreneurs fail in pain.

Don’t get me wrong: working hard is not a bad thing, and working tirelessly is a necessary evil for any startup.

Though, working hard is not a magic wand that creates great products and successful inventions. Most of the time, we work hard to on the wrong things, forgetting that working on the right set of problems is far more precious.

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While developing LiveGO, we’ve worked so hard as a team. I still am, thinking about LiveGO, optimizing LiveGO, researching and identifying potential issues, proposing solutions, managing the exceptionally talented LiveGO team, and hands-on coding LiveGO… all waking hours.

Though when I retrospect, I find that part of this “working hard” time was actually nothing more than “going nuts”, in the following sense:

• I can confess that we hardly ever thought about a roadmap,
• From time to time, we got paralyzed by over-analyzing our competitors,
• As a group of truly bright founders & managers we switched between several ideas, prototypes, and implementations, causing us lose months of developer time.
• As a team of truly bright developers, we re-invented the wheel “a lot” ,
• Corollary to that, at times, we worked on things just to be working on things,
• Moreover, we, at times, panicked, and feared failure — knowing that fear has never been an effective time-management strategy,

Never the less, LiveGO is currently an excellent all in one communication mid-point, addressing the needs of a certain niche. (Yeah, I know it has “issues” to be sorted out — we are in beta man! why not give us a feedback?)

Despite our strategic mistakes, which might be fatal in any other alternative condition, we succeeded. We are still growing, and getting hundreds of thousands of visits per day!

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Confused? Reap the Benefits of Being Confused

You can’t learn anything unless you are confused.

When people work “hard” either they usually know exactly what they are doing –or– they haven’t the foggiest idea what to do, but they are blowing their minds off. For that reason, they haven’t learned to reap the benefits of being “confused”.

LiveGO is an ongoing success:

• We are successful not because of our failures,
• We are successful, not because we’ve worked hard,
• We are successful, not because of our lack of organization,
• We are successful, not because we are perfectionists,

We are successful, because we literally “know” the right thing to work on:

• We’ve paid attention to what was going around us,
• We’ve seen “patterns” that had not been visible at the first sight,
• We’ve listened to our audience, and we’ve learned what they want and need,
• We’ve analyzed our target market’s behaviors, and habits,
• We self-controlled our egos, and saw things as is, rather than how we wanted them to be,
• We put ourselves in the right place where there’s a free flow of information, and we took a meaning out of it.

Knowing when to shift towards implementing, knowing you’ve found the right thing to work on and disengaging from the information fire hose… That’s the hard part. And, by the same token, that’s the most valuable part .

Sometimes the harder you work; the more difficult it can be to maintain the strategic detachment necessary to find the right problem. As for how to choose the right problem Richard Hamming’s “You and Your Research” is an excellent talk.

What I’ve learned in the past one year of LiveGO, is that you can save yourself a lot of time by working on the right thing.

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Inventions are born from insight. Creativity is born from play. Focus is far more important than hard work. And panic is the enemy of it all. So,

In order to succeed, working hard is necessary, but not sufficient:
You have to work hard on the right thing as well

Finding “the” problem to work on, is far more important than exhausting labor and effort.
And finding the right problem depends on how well you can interpret the context you live in.

Working hard doesn’t mean you will achieve success at the end.

It’s all about the dolce trio:

• working hard,
• being persistent and confident,
• And having great ideas

And not to mention, wheel-spinning is hard; but hard work on something you love is one of life’s greatest pleasures.

Life’s short, pick things that make a difference, share with others, be excited what you’re doing whatever it is, and enjoy your journey along the way

Do what you love, and love what you do.

Now go forth, and do great work!

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