Yep, I know it sounds heretical. But it seems to work for some of the most successful people on the planet. Here’s a recent quote from Paul Graham, who owns a venture capital firm (Y Combinator) that continues to fund many wildly successful start-ups:
“It’s not just for other people that you need to start small. You need to for your own sake. Neither Bill Gates nor Mark Zuckerberg knew at first how big their companies were going to get. All they knew was that they were onto something. Maybe it’s a bad idea to have really big ambitions initially, because the bigger your ambition, the longer it’s going to take, and the further you project into the future, the more likely you’ll get it wrong.” -Paul Graham, venture capital owner of Y Combinator. More here.
Something for those who insist on having everyone think really big, to ponder.
My mother and brother own a family restaurant. They started small, with a hole in the wall place on the outskirts of town.
They made some mistakes and had a learning curve during the process. These mistakes would have been magnified had they started off with a big restaurant.
It has been a few years and they now own a large restaurant that seats over three hundred people. They also have a significant catering business.
They have had to knock out walls and expand, in order to accommodate the crowds.
All of this growth has taken place in a down economy, in one of the more dire economic areas in the country.
And yet, in the beginning, they started small.
This post brings to mind quotes like “Little drops of water make a mighty ocean” and “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a step” ; Starting small is actually the way everyone can achieve their goals.