It’s good to steal helpful tactics from anywhere you can find them.

So many of the interesting solutions I’ve come up with were adapted from other industries or disciplines for application in my own.

One example is the “couch to 5K” concept that gets beginning runners into action to the point at which they are able to run and walk continuously for long enough to complete a 5K race.

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A friend of mine is starting a new business.

However, he’s a little self-conscious about calling it a business. That’s because it hasn’t made any money yet. But, strictly speaking, it’s not a hobby. The intention is not to just have fun. The intention is profit, eventually.

How do we bridge that gap? How do we launch the thing if we aren’t sure whether it is going to work?

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I don’t know if Savage Steve Holland’s Better Off Dead, starring a teenage John Cusack, qualifies as a cult classic, but it’s one of my favorite ‘80s movies.

In one memorable scene (featuring the late, great Vincent Schiavelli as the geometry teacher), Lane Meyer, played by Cusack, experiences that nightmare scenario of being unwittingly unprepared for class.

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A colleague is struggling with what to call his new business.

Really, he doesn’t have a business yet. All he has is an idea.

I used to get stuck there, too. I used to fret about names and logos and office space. I worried about finding the perfect photo and headline for a website, the right software to manage the project. I didn’t want to mess up my thing by doing it wrong.

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It happens so often and with such pleasing predictability that I know it to be part of the learning process now.

I find out that I got something wrong, and I instantly see the correct solution.

Luckily, because I’m not a bombardier, my errors don’t cause loss of life. I can relish the moment when testing or checking reveals my mistake and I am suddenly able to see what I didn’t see before.

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