Monday breakfast buffet

Here are a few interesting articles to start your week…

The Kauffman Foundation (the leading foundation supporting entrepreneurship) in the US, recently published a new study, The Making of a Successful Entrepreneur which I read about in the Small Business Trends blog. The most important success factors reportedly are “previous work experience, learning from their successes and failures, a strong management team and good fortune”. I am not sure to respond “well, duh!” or to recognize that sometimes statement of the obvious is not so obvious. To the budding entrepreneurs reading this, the most important component is what is not included in the list. As I have written before, big ideas (and even good technology) do not pave the path to success. This report reinforces that truth. (Disclaimer: I have not yet read the full study, which I do plan to do, found here).

Since I am a compulsive maker of to-do lists (the only element of the GTD methodology I have adopted wholeheartedly is: if you add it to your to-do list, you don’t worry about it), I was struck by a blog posting on zenhabits. The posting opens with a quote from Taligent’s Guide to Designing Programs which is absolutely brilliant (techies will all agree): Remember that there is no code faster than no code.

Zenhabits blogger Leo Babauta opens with:

What’s the fastest way to get a task off your to-do list?
Just delete it …
or don’t put it there in the first place.

My facetious response is to ask what is the sound of one task forgotten? Answer: screams of agony. But this posting is worth a read and is challenging for me; so I shall immediately write a to-do task to meditate on this.

Finally today, a compilation of the Web’s Best Advice for Entrepreneurs from Tom Eisenmann at HBS. Of course, I think my collection is the best collection… but Eisenmann’s is a pretty good one too!