The "Aversion blind zone" of Paul Graham Anthology

Under our noses, some great entrepreneurial ideas have not been developed. There are several reasons for this, and one of them is called the "blind Zone of Disgust" (schlep blindness). The word schlep originated in the Yiddish language ("Yiddish", the language used by the Jews in Central and Eastern Europe and their descendants in various countries), and was incorporated into the American daily vocabulary through several generations of circulation. It represents a tedious, unpopular errand (hereinafter referred to as "drudgery" and "drudgery").

Nobody likes such things, and hacker especially hates them. The vast majority of entrepreneurial hacker expect to write some clever code, and then put the code on a server, can be a source of revenue. They have no intention of communicating with users, negotiating with other businesses, or cooking up the problematic code that others have written. Maybe their expectations may be fulfilled, but I haven't seen them yet.

One of the things we teach hacker at YC is the inevitability of "drudgery". Yes, writing code alone is not enough to start a business. I remember how I realized that. It was sometime in 1995, I'm still trying to convince myself that I can start a business by writing code, but I'm quick to realize that "drudgery" is not only inevitable, but also a major ingredient of business--a definition of an enterprise is explained by the "drudgery" it will engage in. You should think of it as a cold swimming pool: jump. This is not to say that you should specialize in "drudgery", but to say that on the road to great achievement, you should not capsize.

One of the biggest dangers in people's aversion to "drudgery" is that it is unconscious-you don't even think about the painful work that "drudgery" entails-it's called "The Blind Zone of disgust".

The most typical case of this blindness is stripe, saying it is the idea behind it. For more than 10 years, any hacker who has used online payments has personally experienced how bad the service is. At least thousands of people are aware of this problem, but when they choose the direction of their business, they run to do recipes and local activities to aggregate such things. What's going on? Why do you spend your time in places where few people care? Besides, the market won't buy it. They could have been able to solve the problems that affect the basic functioning of the world, but they have fallen into the "blind of disgust", even without considering the past repairs online.

Nobody who applies for YC hatching should be in this position: ask yourself, "Are we supposed to pay for repairs or do we build a recipe site?" "The latter was chosen as a result. For others, although the idea of repair payments is obvious, it just ignores it-because subconsciously, they are faced with the complexities involved, and are already hanging around: you have to deal with the banks, and so on. How do you do these things? Besides, making online payments is a diversion of money, it's about dealing with scams, and dealing with people trying to hack into servers. Well, don't forget, there's a myriad of regulations to follow. Creating a business like this is a lot more challenging than doing a recipe site.

It is the fear of such affairs that makes ambitious ideas doubly valuable. In addition to their intrinsic value, they are like undervalued stocks-entrepreneurs are less demanding on such ideas. If you choose an ambitious idea, you will face less competition because others will be intimidated by the challenges they face. (in general, entrepreneurship is also the truth.) ）

How to overcome the "blind zone"? Frankly, the best dose of medicine is not to take the drudgery. The most successful entrepreneurs are likely to say: "If you knew you were going to have so many difficulties at the start of your business, you probably wouldn't have started-maybe that's why the most successful startups are always young (and fearless) founders."

The founders encountered various difficulties in their practice, but grew up. In other words, no one seems to have foreseen the difficulties, even for older, more senior entrepreneurs. So young founders have this advantage, just because they make two mistakes, these two wrongs negate each other: they don't know how much they can grow, but they don't know how much they need to grow--as for older founders, they usually make the first mistake.

But, the wrong thing is not a panacea. To achieve some of the ideas, it is clear that the need to complete those amazing "drudgery." What do you think of this idea? The trick I suggest is detached-don't ask, "What kind of problems should I solve?" And ask, "What kind of problems do I want people to solve for me?" "If anyone who needs to deal with a payment before Stripe tries to ask himself such a question, then a stripe will probably be his answer," he said.

It's too late to be stripe, but there are so many imperfections in the world, if you know how not to turn a blind eye to them.