Aditya Kothadiya's Blog

Mark Cuban at Blog Maverick writes a great advice based on his experience -

In sports, the only thing a player or coach can truly control is
effort. The same applies to business. The only thing any entrepreneur,
salesperson or anyone in any position can control is their effort.

I had to kick myself in the ass and recommit to getting up early,
staying up late and consuming everything I possibly could to get an
edge. I had to commit to making the effort to be as productive as I
possibly could. It meant making sure that every hour of the day that I
could contact a customer was selling time and when customers were
sleeping, I was doing things that prepared me to make more sales and to
make my company better.

And finally, I had to make sure I wasn’t lying to myself about how
hard I was working. It would have been easy to judge effort by how many
hours a day passed by while I was at work. That’s the worst way to
measure effort. Effort is measured by setting goals and getting
results. What did i need to do to close this account. What did I need
to do to win this segment of business. What did i need to do to
understand this technology or that business better than anyone. What
did I need to do to find an edge. Where does that edge come from and
how was I going to get there.

The one thing in our business lives is effort. Either you make the commitment to get results or your don’t.

This is a great advice with a great timing. With this bad economy and downturn ahead, way too many of my friends are talking a lot about layoffs, fear, politics, survival, etc. I'm not saying they are wrong. It's a natural reaction. But I personally don't like to talk about it. As a individual programmer/engineer/entrepreneur, I cannot control this. I had also tweeted back then on my Twitter account-

So let's forget the downturn talk, and focus our energies on our effort to make our goals successful. Because that's the only thing we can control. Wish you all the best!

Few days ago I posted a thought on Twitter –

Actually, the same thought also applies to Marketing and Business Development as well. Let me explain what I mean by that.

For me, as a programmer, I found every new programming language, platform or development tools difficult, until I learn it and then practice it. Once I make my hands dirty on it and learn enough skills to build something real, I get that confidence that I can do this stuff. I may not become master in it, but at least, I'm not scared anymore. I know if I spend more time on it, I can be a master as well.

So once you learn something, then there is some certainty that you can produce some expected result. Of course, you will see some hurdles while you are building it, but eventually you'll get there. Your technology development is rarely dependent on any customer, market situation or financial crisis.

On the contrary side, Sales, Marketing and Business Development are the kinds of skills, which are not certain to produce the same results every-time you apply those skills. I think even though you are a salesman by birth, or you've mastered those skills in your MBA program, it's very hard to predict that you'll close the potential deal the same way you closed the previous deal. But of course, the more you practice those skills, the probability of you closing that deal is more compared to someone less-practiced person closing that deal.

For Sales, your skills are important, but you are also primarily dependent on your customer's buying mindset. And that's a huge variable factor. Same is the case with Marketing and Business Development. They are heavily dependent upon market conditions and financial crisis. And these kind of dependencies make these jobs even more challenging. Of course, technology is a challenging field, but in my opinion, Sales and Marketing fields are more challenging because of their dependencies on other factors.

And those are the skills that we as an programmer, who also wants to become an entrepreneur, should learn and master to improve our chances. Recently, Jeff Atwood at Coding Horror also mentioned –

So in a nutshell, for a programmer, it's not enough to master only programming skills. If he also wants to go entrepreneurial route, he also needs to master how to sell himself, his code, and his idea. And these skills can not be learned by sitting in front of the computer or in the cube. We need to go out, talk to more people, try selling our idea, get them excited about what we're doing, and more. It's a work that needs to be done in the battlefield, not in the boardroom.

That's exactly what now I'm going to start doing it. I've spent enough time in the boardroom to code and build my idea. Now it's the time to go out and sell my idea and vision to more people to improve my salesman skills, and also to get more inputs from the real people. And I'm sure it will be very challenging task and I'll learn hell lot of things.

I hope you also believe in this point, and will start selling your ideas, your code to more people. Wish you very all the best!

I am still doing some interesting stuff on Twitter that I mentioned a few weeks ago – post random, but quite meaningful thoughts in less than 140 characters. Here are my latest ones -
 
My Thoughts -
 

 
 
Famous Quotes - 
 

 
 
If you enjoy reading my thoughts, then you can also follow me on Twitter here – http://twitter.com/adityakothadiya to receive real time thoughts and quotes.

Related reading:

• Some one liner thoughts
• What I'm Thinking
• More one liner thoughts

Watch these videos where Steve Jobs, the icon of Marketing world, explains following things about NeXT workstations.

These are some of the fundamental processes that we should follow while we are set to start a startup.

• Who is our target customer?
• Why are they selecting our products over our competiton’s?
• And what distribution channels are we going to use to reach these customers?

Give attention to Steve’s clarity and simplicity.

Part 1:

Part 2: