Wade Armstrong

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Luck Favors the Prepared

Posted Thursday October 25, 2007 in Business, Entrepreneurship

Nothing ever goes right for my neighbor. His tires are flat, someone broke his cabinet (the one that he left in the driveway), and his car accidentally got impounded. The things he hopes for never pan out. For Steve Jobs, it’s the opposite story - Apple sold a boatload of Macs last quarter, more than anyone expected. It seems like, after years of hoping, Steve finally got some iPod users to make the big switch to the Mac.

Of course, it wasn’t really hope that got the switchers. Apple’s been working on this for years. They built a crossover product and promoted that product until it was the definition of hip; but they also worked hard on the Macintosh. Apple moved us from the old System 9 to OS X, from PowerPC to Intel, from ClarisWorks to iWork; they developed and bundled iLife; they built compelling hardware and laptops that work well, especially in key laptop traits like sleep. They bundled a development environment with every Mac and watched an ecosystem of great applications bloom. Whenever people began to switch, Apple was going to be ready with the experience and tools the switchers needed.

Back to my neighbor. When good things happen to him, he’s never ready. That one time someone gave him the two brand-new flat panel TVs? Never got around to selling them. The fancy tires he got in exchange for some work? Sure, he was going to make a bunch putting them on some neighborhood kids’ cars, but he never had the space to jack up a few extra rides and actually do the work. Sure, it seems mundane, but with a little planning, those finds - things that many an electrician, like my neighbor, might get in trade for work - could’ve helped support his family. Everybody gets breaks; Apple had planned and was ready.

Of course, there’s also overplanning. At a recent USC networking event, I met a man with a smart idea for a skateboard product. He’d been working for months on his project, and had planned out everything out, from the launch to how he’d handle thousands of orders. In fact, because he had everything planned so thoroughly, he was in a tizzy about the challenges of shipping hundreds of units every day - so much that he wasn’t worrying about actually selling the first unit tomorrow. Of course, if he couldn’t get the sales rolling, he’d never have to worry about hundreds in a few months. Sometimes you just have to solve the problems that are in front of your face.

PJ O’Rourke, the Rolling Stone political/international reporter and humorist of the ’90s, once wrote that there were two kinds of roadblocks in strife-torn nations: those for which you absolutely must not stop, or you’ll be shot; and those for which you absolutely must stop, or you’ll be shot. The trick was that you never knew which kind of roadblock the one ahead was until you were at it. While the stakes for entrepreneurs are smaller - only going broke, instead of dying - the dilemma is similar. Some problems need to be planned for, others ignored until they become worth worrying about, and you never know which kind of a problem it is until after you’ve decided which approach to take with it. If you know which kind mine are, please tell me.