Don’t boil the ocean, don’t chase butterflies

Entrepreneurs, changemakers, corporate climbers: we’re a special breed of people and sometimes our outspoken ambition can drown out the quiet voice of common sense.

In our attempts to conquer the world, or grow exponentially, or make good on all of our phenomenal ideas, there are two clear traps that can trip us up and cause us to fail before we even get started:

1. We try to boil the ocean.

2. We get obsessed with chasing butterflies. All the pretty butterflies.

Obviously, I don’t mean this literally (although the first one makes for a pretty compelling mental picture), but they are really useful analogies to understand why these two pitfalls should be avoided by goal-oriented go-getters at all costs.

Let’s break them down, shall we?

Boiling the ocean

Let’s say you have a killer idea for an app (and who doesn’t?). You’re going to create the Uber of stationery. It’s a protected industry, it’s fat, it’s lazy, and you’re going to be the one to disrupt it. Good for you!

But stationery — that’s a broad category. You’ve got pencils, you’ve got pens, you’ve got paper, glue, staplers, erasers, binders, post-it notes, sharpeners, rulers, paper clips… and the list goes on. Even beyond those categories, you’ve got sub-categories: it’s not just pens, it’s blue pens, black pens, red pens, gel pens, permanent pens, washable pens, fountain pens, I don’t know, quills…

And don’t get me started on the different user groups: schools buy pens, so do offices, so do individuals, but then you’ve got retailers, wholesalers, promotional pens with “Pat’s Plumbing” printed on the side… Before you can even make a definitive list, you’ll probably run screaming towards the exit door and wonder why you ever had the misfortune to dream up this “Uber of stationery” concept in the first place!

I’m not saying that, one day, you couldn’t become the Bill Gates of stationery. In fact, once your business gets a foothold, you might scale so quickly that you’ll achieve that trajectory in record time. But I’m saying: get a foothold first, in a profitable or credible niche, and use that as leverage to replicate your success over, and over, and over.

This breaks the goal into manageable chunks, and also helps you to make little mistakes along the way, which prevents you from making unnecessarily big mistakes once you’re stationery’s answer to Mark Zuckerberg.

Don’t lose sight of that big goal. Keep it on your wall as a reminder of your macro objective. But make it your micro mission to become the Uber of, I don’t know, blue pens for high schools in Stockholm, Sweden. That’s an achievable task, and if you get it right, it will put you in pole position to one day grab the whole damn stationery game by the proverbials.

Chasing butterflies

Let’s say you took my advice and decided to start small, with your Uber for blue pens in Stockholm high schools.

You’re out there, talking to prospective customers, getting to know the market, talking to some pen suppliers, working with app developers, getting your logo designed… and eventually you start to see a little momentum.

But then you get a random email from a school principal in Prague who’s in the market for red pens. And then you exchange business cards at a conference with someone who can link you with a major stationery supplier for the corporate market in Lithuania. And then you hear on the grapevine that there’s a great wholesale deal available on green pens and you tell yourself you really should snap some up. And then you get a call from an old colleague who’s heard about your new venture and thinks you should collaborate with him on his new venture which is, conveniently, the Uber of post-it notes.

Opportunities! Opportunities everywhere!

The problem is, you’re still not the “king of the hill” in the Stockholm-high-school-blue-pen-disruption category.

There will always be opportunities. Some you won’t be ready for, some will wait for you, and some aren’t even opportunities yet. But if you haven’t yet conquered your beachhead market, you should probably forget about chasing non-core opportunities until you get the basics right. Because they’ll distract you from your core purpose, and it will take you that much longer to gain any sort of traction.

In the early days of business, you have to FOCUS. Leftfield opportunities can be energy vampires if you’re not discerning and disciplined.

Mapping ambition to reality

To the uninitiated, boiling the ocean and chasing butterflies might seem like the same thing. But there is a subtle distinction:

1. Boiling the ocean is thinking you can chase and capture all the butterflies, right now.

2. Chasing butterflies is thinking you can boil the ocean by capturing ocean water in a billion different pots and boiling each of them on a billion different hotplates.

Neither of those scenarios is realistic.

Dream big, work hard, but as the saying goes, don’t bite off more than you can chew. Keep your eyes on ONE prize, and make sure that prize is achievable. Then get your head down and stay patient. It’ll give you a great base to go out and grab all of the prizes — eventually.