STARTUP ADVICE THAT DEFINITELY MAKES NO SENSE

Aim for the stars…and ignore whatever red flags your rocket ship might be showing you as you are trying to reach them. Startup advice that is all but helpful can be found everywhere and can be heard at the start, middle, and end of someone’s career. So, what is so bad about it? Let’s start with the start.

Advice in general can take on many forms - it could be written, verbal, and even physical, especially if you’re in the same room as the person who is telling you your decision will crash and burn the entire business with the swoosh of their hand. 

And while it could be that many founders, entrepreneurs, and social media gurus love giving advice, it’s not all good. Most of the time, advice itself can be either practical (e.g. helps you fix a problem and can be applied in your situation), or motivational (it can build you up and make you feel like the situation you are currently in isn’t as overwhelming as you thought). 

The truth of the matter is that the latter - motivational advice, is something you hear more often than you should. You see, even when applied in real-life situations, motivational advice is most commonly applied in occurrences where nothing else can be done - the action or event has already taken place, and there is nothing left but that feeling that needs to be disposed of. And that’s the keyword here - feeling.

There is much startup advice that revolves around a motivational quote someone uttered, or even an idea, a routine, a mantra or whatever have you. There are people who can genuinely turn their lives around with the help of this one quote, but more often than not this isn’t the case. 

Imagine that you as a startup founder google how to file your monthly taxes and what pops up is something like “ it doesn’t matter how far you go, it only matters how much you make”. Not much situational advice that can be applied, no? That is exactly it. 

Most advice out there is inspirational - it aims to motivate you, rather than educate you, and this is where the difference comes from. 

With that being said, here are a few motivational advice that definitely make no sense:

1. Go big or go home: You can’t go big or go home. If you did, you wouldn’t have the natural plateaus there naturally are in the history of a business and its development. Those are needed to make a decision on what to do next. Stillness usually means introvertedness. 
2. If the competition is doing that, you better blow them out of their seat: As a startup, you can’t afford to compete with others yet. You can snoop and discover who it is you are on the same stage and sharing a market with, but you most certainly can’t start measuring out whose presence is bigger.
3. You need funding to start a company: You definitely don’t need funding to start. It depends on the type of product you want to launch, but most business models can operate off an “on-demand production” ideology. If you need machines to physically produce the product, save your own money and invest. You need a proof of concept before you start mass production. 

Do you have any nonsensical advice you have heard that you want to share? Comment below!