Business advice from the guy who named "black holes"....

There's a physicist I have a great admiration for.... His name is John Wheeler. He's made great contributions to physics, in areas such as nuclear physics and he also coined the term "black hole". John Wheeler is still alive today (I think he's around 90). But I want to share with you some of his advice to other scientists, which ALSO applies to business.

John Wheeler said that the definition of "genius" is "to make all possible mistakes in the shortest possible time." The idea is that once you've made all the mistakes, the right answer will come. That was how John Wheeler approached his research work.... Here's how it applies to business.

I've come to the view that, unless you already have a business background, you WILL make mistakes. And you'll probably make lots of them.

The goal is not to try to avoid making mistakes completely, because they are inevitable. The thing is, every mistake is a learning experience.

If you try to avoid making mistakes, what will probably happen is you'll freeze up and end up doing nothing. If you do nothing, you'll get nowhere.

Instead, you should try to make all the new mistakes you can, as quickly as possible and also as CHEAPLY as possible.

Since business is about profits, it's important that your mistakes aren't too expensive.

This is why many great business-people, when they start a new project, they only allocate it a little bit of money. It has to be able to "stand on its two feet".... If the project fails, they've only lost the small amount of money they've put into it (not millions or billions).

I believe John Wheeler's advice - if it's modified - is great advice for entrepreneurship. Don't be afraid of making new mistakes, but make them as quickly and as cheaply as possible! The more new mistakes you make, the quicker you'll learn what DOES work. :)

This is what I've found out from my experience in business so far. This also ties in to the dot-com boom-and-bust discussion below....

The problem there, I think, was not that many dot-commers made mistakes.

The problem was they made VERY EXPENSIVE mistakes. They could have made many of these mistakes on a small scale, lost a little bit of money, and still survived. Instead, many of them made their mistakes on a COLOSSAL scale, and imploded.

Mistakes in doing anything new are inevitable, but if you make those mistakes quickly and cheaply, you'll probably end up succeeding. :)

- Dien Rice


Here's a review of John Wheeler's autobiography, if you want to know more about him....