A Non-Obvious Similarity Between Businesses and Religion
So you decided to stop working for someone and start your own business. You have an idea. It started off as an initial spark in your mind, a lightbulb flashes on over your head and you think you're on to something. You then ponder on that idea and try to make sense of it and bring it down to technical terms, and start realizing business potential and creating or exploiting a consumer need for your idea. You spend days going back and forth through papers where you wrote your idea down, refining it and talking to others about it, getting their perspectives, until the idea becomes part of you and what you believe in.
You just experienced a G-dly concept defined in Kabbala's Ten Sefirot as Chabad [Chochmah (insight), Bina (analysis), Daat (concept)].
I had an interesting discussion this morning about the evolution of the person in Jewish religion. If someone keeps drifting through their beliefs and can't decide how religious they want to be, or are slowly moving up and down an equilibrium point, it's hard to take them seriously. Unfortunately, it usually takes hitting rock bottom to be ready to ask for help. If your views are changing day to day and you are incorporating parts of religion in your life based on your circumstances or surroundings, and then quickly switching back temporarily in a volatile way, you are never defining yourself.
If you read Paul Graham's article on What Happened to Yahoo, then you probably know where I'm going with this. What did happen to Yahoo? I remember using it from my early childhood, but I don't think I've returned to it in a very long time, except to check my spam yahoo mail account that I use for email confirmation on websites I never want to hear from again. Yahoo had problems defining itself. It was caught between wanting to be a Media Company and a Technology Company. When it comes to defining your brand, you have to decide what you are, otherwise it's a very hard sell to the customer looking for something specific. Had Yahoo set their company objectives and market categorization, they could have continued innovating and expanding that one vertical they were very good at, and left competitors in the dust. They may sound stupid reading that article, but that's exactly what most startups end up doing. Most companies starting up will try to find a want in the market by selling anything they can under their brand. They try to build everything for their customers to keep them happy and show that they're innovative, even if these "things" are completely outside of the scope of their business plan. One of two things will happen at that point, they won't be able to keep up with demand by over promising and under delivering, or they will look back sooner than later and not remember what their company actually does. If you're not able to answer immediately what your company does, in a few words or less, then how do you expect others to?
Similarly, not choosing a comfortable place in your life religiously and living in that place day to day kills both your own perception of yourself and other's perceptions of you.
So how are you branding yourself?
