Pitfall 1: Fuzzy definitions
Pitfall 2: Misunderstanding the economics of digital
Pitfall 3: Overlooking ecosystems
Pitfall 4: Overindexing on the ‘usual suspects’
Pitfall 5: Missing the duality of digital

"I watch Jordan more than anybody; for sure, MJ wasn't perfect. MJ had bad games. He had turnovers. He had games where he felt like he should have been better. But I think the greatest thing about MJ was that he never was afraid to fail. And I think that's why he succeeded so much, because he was never afraid of what anybody ever said about him. Never afraid to miss a game-winning shot, never afraid to turn the ball over. Never afraid. That's one of my biggest obstacles. I'm afraid of failure. I want to succeed so bad that I become afraid of failing."
-- LeBron James
Oct. 19, 2013 (Source: ESPN)

via Fast Company https://www.fastcompany.com

For years, my only metric of success was building a billion dollar company. Now, I realize that was a terrible goal. It’s completely arbitrary, and doesn’t accurately reflect impact.

I’m not making an excuse or pretending that I didn’t fail. I’m not pretending that it feels good. Even though everyone knows that the failure rate in startups, especially venture-funded ones, is super high, it still sucks when you do.

I failed, but I also succeeded at many other things. We turned $10 million of investor capital into $178 million and counting for creators. And without a fundraising goal coming up, we are just focused on building the best product we can for them. On top of all that, I’m happy creating value beyond our revenue-generating product, like these words you’re reading!

I consider myself “successful” now. Not exactly in the way I intended, though I think it counts. Where did my binary focus on building a billion-dollar company come from in the first place?

I think I inherited it from a society that worships wealth. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Bill Gates was my all-time hero and was also the world’s richest person.

Since I can remember, I equated “successful” solely with net worth. If I heard someone say “that person’s really successful,” I didn’t assume they were improving the well-being of the people around them, but that they had found a way to make a lot of money.

> I was teaching writing all day but not writing myself, and on twitter so many people I knew were starting tinyletters, sending small paragraphs of heart-rending, un-pitch-able prose, family stories and recipes and album recommendations and lowkey erotica in little forward-marching scrolls of text that I’d read curled around my phone late at night while I couldn’t sleep. I was jealous of my students and I was jealous of everyone starting tinyletters and of everyone publishing essays, and of the world going on one bright achievement after another all around me. I wrote some paragraphs quickly, without looking, like muttering under my breath, told myself I didn’t have to edit it because no one would read it anyway, and hit send.

> The whole college application is a murderously hopeful document, and hope is the most mercenary emotion, the struck-match trick of salespeople and con artists and politicians, leaving the door unlocked at night, risking everything in a game to which no one told us the rules.

The road taken by Gumroad.
Good lessons here.

It doesn’t matter how amazing your product is, or how fast you ship features. The market you’re in will determine most of your growth.