While I was reading Seth Godin’s e-book What Matters Now (which you could get by clicking the link it’s a PDF) I came across the page written by Gina Trapani titled Productivity where she explains the difference between getting things done and making things happen. To often we are doing things in our To-Do lists and sending sales e-mails (like I did for my startup) and aim for good enough. That’s just getting things done.
I usually share my experience in this blog and in this post is not going to be different. Just so you have a little background I’m starting an education startup that was born as a university project and that we decided to carry on as a business, the problem came when all the authors of the project showed different passion for the project and while some started to try and make things happen (which I’ll explain later) others wanted to get things done. Finally it ended by us all being dragged to getting things done as we couldn’t see the results of our work. The first mistake was to aim for a immediate payoff and to think that a business is built by just a set of ordinary actions. As young entrpreneurs we thought that starting a company was like the internships we had before where we were asked to do not so much and where just completing the tasks guaranteed a successful internship. Of course there a new challenging internships around, sadly we didn’t get those before starting our company. Getting things done is about putting up just the right amount of effort to say you did it, but not enough to be great at it or to say you nailed it.
Gina proposes that we can MAKE THINGS HAPPEN and by that she means do more than just aim to the middle. The first thing to make things happen is to set ambitious goals which are the ones that people will tell you you’re crazy for pursuing. If you set goals that aren’t easy to attain it’s most likely that you’ll work hard to get them, because you know you have to put in a lot of effort to get them from the beginning. Besides putting a little bit of extra effort we need to start focusing on the big picture and start building our brand, collaborate with our communities and set up one if we believe it’s appropriate. I believe that the worse mistake we made while in the first months of our project was to listen to much to an advisor that didn’t share our vision. To overcome this mistake Gina proposes a couple of actions: take a risk (in our case risk passing the subject and put all our savings in it) and change perceptions (our product changes the conception of traditional education and we needed to start changing the perception of our advisor and possible investors). Only by doing all this things will start to happen. We need to start making things happen.
To summarize we could get a new education startup done or make people learn in a different way. The former is getting things done and the latter is making things happen. If we want to make a difference we need to make things happen.
I’ll quote Gina to end this post
“Don’t worry to much about getting things done. Make things happen”
