Calling all entrepreneurs and want-repreneurs - What if you have everything you need?

I recently came across a fascinating principle called Effectuation, developed by Dr. Sara Sarasvathy. She interviewed a collection of expert entrepreneurs, and discovered that 89% of them used what she calls effectuation more often than causation. With effectuation, entrepreneurs determine goals according to the resources in their possession. She calls it the “bird in the hand” principle - Figure out what you know, who you know and what you can do, and go from there. This is different from causation, where entrepreneurs determine goals to achieve and then look for the resources to do so.

I find this a fascinating principle if only because it turns on it’s head the notion that you need to take another course, to read another book, to visit Quora again, when you might just have everything you need to proceed. The hiding is negated, because you can’t delve into research, or analysis that leads to paralysis. You have to proceed, and ship and no it wont be perfect, but it will be out the door. It will have moved and that perhaps the most important thing.

This “thinking inside the box” mentality advocates things like action and developing strong partnerships. As Seth Godin and others tell us, we don’t need more information. We have all the information in the world now available at our fingertips. We just need to be willing to move ourselves to do something with it, to make a choice, to act and lead.

We can learn a lot from writers. I think that all writers practice this concept instinctually. Writing is a creative pursuit that pretty much everyone on the planet can partake of. Whether it’s good or bad, daily or weekly, we all have the opportunity to put words on paper, to cut some cloth from the infinite tapestry of words and stitch together something warming. The main reason I hear that people don’t write is that they don’t know what to write about. Each of us has a deep, deep well of opinions, hopes, fears, wisdom and advice rattling around in our heads, (which we mostly can’t turn off, no matter how hard we try) and yet when it comes to writing a few lines we back off and wont even take a cup of water from it. What is the bird in your hand today? Maybe it’s the lack of motivation to write? Even thats worth writing about.

“I don’t know how to write” is also a common refrain, even if we have been doing it since we were 5 years old. Most 5 years olds I see just want to write. They will write anything, from stories about magic frogs to what their daddy does at work. Somewhere along the line most of us went from not being able to stop writing to being utterly afraid of it. And that fear was likely fed by the idea that we aren’t good enough to write, that we need to learn more, to understand more, to see the end before we begin and be assured of a masterpiece.

Next time you hear your self-talk saying “I need to get better at X” or “I’m not yet good enough at Y” just consider instead the thought - “Maybe I have everything I need?” followed swiftly by the actionable self-talk of “What can I do right now?”. Watch your life change.