Do It eBay
There's two ways of looking at the eBay story in its formative years.
The first way: its founder, Pierre Omidyar, was a brilliant person who had big ideas. When he first conceived of the idea for a peer-to-peer online auction site, he knew it was going to be a home run, and based on this guarantee of success, he worked tirelessly, pouring his heart and soul into building a massive website that he knew would make him a millionaire and put him atop an Internet empire that would later enable Meg Whitman to run for governor of California.
-or-
The second way: Pierre Omidyar had a tiny spark of an idea. He thought it might work. Because he was the kind of person to start something at whittle away at it patient, and because he knew how to program on the web, he coded up a small prototype of his site. As it grew from humble beginnings to one of the most highly-trafficked sites in the Internet, he made mistakes, stumbled, but ultimately came out on top.
Most people think of the story the first way. I don't know about you, but that makes the very thought of starting anything really scary.
My guess is that the truth lies somewhere in between these two extremes, but it's probably a whole lot closer to the second story. And that's good news, because the second story is much more accessible. The notion that Pierre was just a person who had small ideas, and that he was in the habit of making those ideas happen, is one worth dwelling upon at length. Because if you start to see it that way, then you begin to see the potential in tiny ideas without guarantees of big payoffs, and you starting seeing the value of doing small tasks in incremental bursts.
I'd be willing to bet that Pierre is a very curious person by nature, and it was probably his curiosity that drove him to do things. Here's the mindset: this sounds like a silly idea...but I'm going to do it anyway. As a person, Pierre was just a guy who did things, and one just happened to pay off.
Most of us don't have the capacity to be brilliant all the time, have huge ideas all the time, and work really hard all the time. But each and every one of us has the ability to take small ideas, start them, and chip away at them. We can all be whittlers.
The first way: its founder, Pierre Omidyar, was a brilliant person who had big ideas. When he first conceived of the idea for a peer-to-peer online auction site, he knew it was going to be a home run, and based on this guarantee of success, he worked tirelessly, pouring his heart and soul into building a massive website that he knew would make him a millionaire and put him atop an Internet empire that would later enable Meg Whitman to run for governor of California.
-or-
The second way: Pierre Omidyar had a tiny spark of an idea. He thought it might work. Because he was the kind of person to start something at whittle away at it patient, and because he knew how to program on the web, he coded up a small prototype of his site. As it grew from humble beginnings to one of the most highly-trafficked sites in the Internet, he made mistakes, stumbled, but ultimately came out on top.
Most people think of the story the first way. I don't know about you, but that makes the very thought of starting anything really scary.
My guess is that the truth lies somewhere in between these two extremes, but it's probably a whole lot closer to the second story. And that's good news, because the second story is much more accessible. The notion that Pierre was just a person who had small ideas, and that he was in the habit of making those ideas happen, is one worth dwelling upon at length. Because if you start to see it that way, then you begin to see the potential in tiny ideas without guarantees of big payoffs, and you starting seeing the value of doing small tasks in incremental bursts.
I'd be willing to bet that Pierre is a very curious person by nature, and it was probably his curiosity that drove him to do things. Here's the mindset: this sounds like a silly idea...but I'm going to do it anyway. As a person, Pierre was just a guy who did things, and one just happened to pay off.
Most of us don't have the capacity to be brilliant all the time, have huge ideas all the time, and work really hard all the time. But each and every one of us has the ability to take small ideas, start them, and chip away at them. We can all be whittlers.