Sometimes It’s Better Not To Know

When you have a long journey ahead, sometimes it’s best not to think too much about it. You’re much better off just getting started.

For some weeks now I’ve been working on a large upgrade to our popular freelancing site FreelanceSwitch. The upgrade includes a complete overhaul of the design, some large changes to the functionality of the site and coordinating a few different sub-projects. It’s been taking a lot of time and energy and as I write this, we’re only half way there.

This morning I was reflecting that if I’d known quite how much work was involved in the upgrade, I think I might have been a little less ambitious. And in many ways that makes me glad that I didn’t know.

A bit young, a bit naive

Three years ago when starting Envato I wrote out a business plan for our fledgling enterprise. It wasn’t a particularly solid plan, at least it didn’t have any hard numbers, or organisational charts, or many of the other things I’ve since learnt are meant to be in business plans. But it did contain our strategy for how the business would grow, and to put it mildly, it was an ambitious plan.

Being very excited, my cofounders and I showed it to my father who has a little more experience under his belt. He read the plan, thought for a while and told us it was a good plan, but warned that it would take us five to ten years to accomplish. He also said something which was a little odd, he said:

“Right now your greatest strength is that you are young and a bit naive. To you, anything is possible.”

I can still remember mentally dismissing this and thinking “Bah, of course we know it’s going to be difficult to execute, but we can do it, for sure!”

Well suffice to say I don’t think I really understood. So far my father’s estimate of five to ten years is looking about right, we’ve still got a long way to go with our plans. And so far he’s also been right about how fraught with problems growing a business is.

It’s the details

When starting out I had a simplistic idea in my head that went something like this “We build some sites, they are awesome, people visit them, money comes in, we expand and build more.” In a way that is what happens. What has been illuminating though is all the myriads of details and byproducts of growth.

As a small startup we initially didn’t have much to do in the company besides focus on making a product and then operating it. But as we’ve grown there are all sorts of logistic and systemic issues that crop up. How do you hire? How do you fire? How do you get legal advice for countries you’re not in? How do you setup accounting systems that accurately model the business when most accountants have a hard time understanding it? How do you grow teams? How do you manage them? How do you ensure that you have scalability in the business? … The list goes on and on.

One foot in front of the other

So there’s a lot of complications that come up, happily they are (mostly) as a cause of things going well. If I think about all of them at once it gets a bit much however. The problems seem too overwhelming and it’s hard to process it all.

What does work is thinking about the next step, maybe the next five steps, and only occasionally glancing at the horizon. You concentrate on putting one foot in front of the other for a while, and oddly enough very soon yesterday’s problems start fading in the distance.

I still try to think about future problems, and to make sure we plan for turns and twists the business might take – to do otherwise would be foolish. But for peace of mind and to make sure we stay optimistic and surrounded by possibility, I try not to worry about exactly how much there still is to do. Sometimes I find it’s just better not to know.