Oh, Open Gate it! I like that.

1. Environment.

Kind of need to flex the concept of Environment for business. I'd put staff and money in this category.

For a long time I was afraid to raise the price of habit coaching because if gross revenue went down, we'd be out of business. So I can take more tiny risks because I have margin from the Medium deal.

And then right now we are doing a SAAS tool for Medium authors specifically because our friend Connor is available. He's on new dad duty but has time for a side project. But if there was a vaccine they'd probably bring a nanny back and he'd go take a full time job somewhere.

We're calling that SAAS tool Moneyball and if we launched it and he left, we might not revise it simply because we wouldn't really have the team anymore.

2. Habit.

Maybe. I do generally have a Set Priorities habit. But I don't do a great job of really evaluating what is required to make a business work and then making sure that gets done.

3. Capacity.

I don't have a good research skillset. So it's sort of launch and then what? I certainly never interviewed the early users.

We're doing this Moneyball project right now and we have tiny milestones that all have interviewing the users attached to it. They're not formal interviews, because that's still not my skillset. But there's much more rapid reaction.

I also think building products to be run by myself but not the people around me is a capacity issue. Like, a lot of times I don't return to something because I don't have time to. Or it launches and I realize it needs something that I don't personally have the skillset for.

I'm a lot better now about thinking about staff. It's not just that they need to be able to run it. It's also that I've given up on thinking "What is the optimal product to build" and made that more specifc to the staff, "Let's see where this goes when I let the team play to their strengths." That was really a process of letting go of my vision of what the product would look like at the end.

I suppose having too strong of a vision is why I don't like interviewing users. They are too likely to contradict me and ask me to build something I don't want to build.

4. Belief.

Well, yeah, the belief that a product has to be a certain revenue to be worthwhile. I definitely had that during the peak VC period.

5. Identity.

Not as sure where I trip up here. There's something about wanting to be original and innovative.

But a lot of times it means I'm years ahead of the mainstream. Like habits. I read Switch and did BJ Fogg in 2011 and thought the topic was done. Meanwhile, the best selling habit book of all time just came out recently. So I was 9 years early.

By not understanding how early I am, I launch things and then assume that they won't get any bigger when really people just aren't ready for them.

6. Mission.

Money is at some level part of my mission. And what helped there was that I have a spreadsheet that tells me exactly what I want and I'm pretty clear that having more than that would just turn me into a money manager (which I don't want).

This spreadsheet is something I didn't have until 18 months ago.

And so that helped me see the value of singles. Essentially singles almost guarantees I get all the money I want, whereas home runs makes it less likely to get there, but if I do, I'll have the burden of way too much money. Not the worst burden in the world--you can just give it away. But still not al that useful for my purposes.

Now do you!