Post 11: Naivety

Today I'd like to talk about naivety since I think it is the perfect complement to inventiveness.

Many of the people (including me) start a project without really understanding its complexity. it isn't because we didn't want to dig down into all the details a new project envolved, instead because once we start it, we realize there were plenty of things that weren't considered beforehand.

Once we understand we were somewhat naive because there're aspect the market is demanding that haven't considered beforehand, we have to act very fast with inventiveness to delivery what the market is demanding. However, If you are a certainty driven person you might agree that the right way to start something is to measure everything before jump into execution; however, I invite you to think about the cost of certainty and if is better to achieve perfection instead of shipping a product and letting the market validate it.

Let me demonstrate my point with a personal example:

I was accepted for an internship in Tokyo, Japan. It was scary at the time since I didn't know how I'd cover my expenses, my english was less than ok, and on top of that, I couldn't even speak a word of Japanese. All I had was a deep passion for the Japanese culture, which turns out was all I needed to persevere. I was absolutely acting naive and unaware of the complexity of working in Japan without Japanese. However, with inventiveness and resourcefulness day by day I was doing my best to finding solutions to the problems that I had and spotting opportunities that let me grow as a person.

Today looking back I think that acting naively has opened up opportunities for me. However, I have had to combine it with inventiveness to overcome difficulties that had not been considered in the first place. Time will pass anyway and what we don't want to regret is never having started what we have always been looking for.

Just remember that these small decisions don’t matter all that much. However, as days turn to weeks and weeks to months and months to years those tiny repeatable choices compound.