Brute force, axes, and dams

My favorite superhero is Batman, because he's the superhero with no superpower. Me neither. Much of what I'm able to accomplish comes down to three patterns that everyone could follow, but few people do.

1. Brute force

For example, you buy a ticket to a business conference to meet potential customers (or investor or partners or hires or whatever). Do you go through the attendee list, look them up one by one on LinkedIn, try and connect using a personalized message, try and organize short face-to-face meetings the week before the conference starts, and only feel successful if all day, each day is full of meetings? My record is 25 meeting and 54 business cards in two days.

Or way back in 2011 I was trying to figure out what to do next, so I organized 3-5 face-to-face meetings per day, five days per week. 15-20 meetings per week, each week for many months, to guage what was happening in Seattle, what was missing in Seattle, and where I coudl make a difference. The end result of that was the Fledge accelerator (fledge.co) plus a side job teaching at a business school.

Or one of my favorite tasks is reviewing 1,000+ applications to a business accelerator, or 2,000+ business summaries to recruit into a business accelerator. I’ve found no better way to understand what has been tried, what works, and what doesn’t in startups than to review startups in these forms year after year.

lunarmobiscuit.com/brute-force/

2. Chopping down a tree

Not too dissimilar is the approach I take when working on projects that take weeks or months to complete. I live in what 150 years ago was an old growth forest. The trees were 100+ meters tall with trunks a few meters across. Imagine your job is logging those trees, with nothing but an ax.

How do you fell a tree of that size? Many many many many many many strokes of the ax. Either multiple loggers on the same tree at the same time to fell it in one day, or perhaps each logger on his own tree, each taking a few days to fell one tree. Either way, it’s one stroke of the ax at a time.

The same is true for any project that takes more than an hour. If you want it done, you have to make the first swing of the ax. Then the second. Then the hundredth. Then eventuall, it gets done.

lunarmobiscuit.com/chopping-down-a-tree/

3. Blowing up a dam

The best of these metaphors is blowing up a dam. Despite how much I like brute force, sometimes it isn’t needed. Sometimes you can accomplish the same big effort with just a little push in the right direction, letting the momentum of the world do most of the work.

This doesn’t seem to be a well known phenomenon. Most people don’t seem to be looking for the invisible dams that are preventing progress in the world, and the nudges or ax blows or small explosions they can use to knock down the dams.

If all goes well, this public listing process kicked off by Africa Eats and Tuesday Markets is going to cause some cracks to form in the dam that stops the flow of capital into African businesses. That is why I swung my ax for 14 months to make it happen. Why I spent weeks brute force selling in hour-long face-to-face meetings in multiple cities around the world.

lunarmobiscuit.com/blowing-up-a-dam-reprise/

Your force, axes, and dams?

Do you use these brute force tactics when there is no other solution? Do you pick up an ax and start chopping, when that is the only way? Do you have your own dam busting story to share?