5 Lessons to Minimize Frustration and Focus on Innovation

I have been doing the whole entrepreneur thing now for a while and as you likely know I love sharing tips and advice with people based on my experiences. I recently wrote an article that was selected to be published on WeWork’s Creator Magazine. If you aren’t familiar with WeWork, they run several co-working offices all over the U.S. which are very popular with startups and other small/medium businesses. I’ve worked in one of their offices and really enjoyed my time there (I may even be back soon)!

Anyway, I’m really proud and happy with the way this article I wrote came out, here is a portion of it below:

When I think about innovation, there is always one Steve Jobs quote that sticks out in my mind: “Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you.”

People who view the world this way are more likely to become entrepreneurs. But the thing you have to realize about this quote is that while the people who make the world may not necessarily be any smarter than you, if you want to innovate, you still need at least three additional things: passion, willpower (a lot of it), and the ability to execute.

It’s a brilliant quote because it’s so inspiring, and yet, it leaves a lot unsaid. So when you add in those three additional things, you weed out a lot of people and distinguish the dreamers from the innovators.

The people who are left standing: those are the people you want to watch. Why? It will be a matter of time before something frustrates them, and they can’t find an existing solution, so they build one themselves.

I built KYA out of my frustration with existing analytics platforms—they didn’t offer the tools and functionality that I needed as a publisher. In my experience, the best products are often the ones that solve real problems, and the best entrepreneurs are the ones who live and breathe the industry in which they are targeting.

Over the past several years, I’ve learned a lot about what it takes to bring a product to market. These 5 lessons stand out in particular…

You can read the rest of the article here (including 5 of the biggest lessons I learned).