FOMO Hurts You in Entrepreneurship – Close Some Doors to Succeed!

As I run workshops for entrepreneurs, a key part of our training is that they have to focus. Entrepreneurs have to select a beachhead market and then actively deselect other markets. It is very common that students have resistance to this step from mild to actively and emotionally rejecting this concept as wrong.  The selecting a market is not so hard but it is the deselecting that causes the problems. As we do in our example, an entrepreneur can’t claim to be disciplined when they are a Lamborghini dealership while they are also taking in the Volvo to service it, as we do in one of the first exercises of the workshop.

But in the eyes of resistors even after they are told they have to deselect, you can still see, they really DON’T want to deselect. They want to do it all. If this is you, don’t feel abnormal. It is perfectly normal for humans to NOT want to close doors. A renowned behavioral economist, Daniel Ariely, has shown how deeply ingrained in our psyche this is in his experiments. “Decision-makers overvalue their options and are willing to overinvest to keep these options from disappearing,” because they have a fear of missing out (FOMO).

You can read Daniel’s books, which I recommend the first one in the recommended books section of this web site under the tab “Resources” or you can just read a summary of this specific behavior in this article from the New York Times to get the essence of this point: https://tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/02/25/dear-irrational-reader-close-the-door/

From my vantage point, the takeaway is twofold. First, focus is extremely important even if it does not feel right in your gut. It will significantly improve your odds of success. Closing off options so you can give full focus to the one you do choose will increase your odds and speed of success or failure. Both of these are good. You can more easily recover from failure if it happens quickly.

The second point is that entrepreneurship is not just intuitive despite what conventional wisdom might lead you to believe. This but one example where if you know the research, you know important first principles based in research that will give you a more systematic knowledge of the decision you are making and hence increase your odds of success. It is another proof point that entrepreneurship is a learned craft that practitioners who studied what they are doing will get better over time. If you are willing to take entrepreneurship seriously as a body of field of study and a body of knowledge, then the more you intelligently practice it, the better you will get.