I’m reminded of something a Facebook influencer once said—and I’m paraphrasing here:
When you start something new, you have to ask yourself whether you’re willing to suck at it long enough to become pretty good at it.
Innuendos aside, I recently discovered just how true that is.
When I started building NeuroSpicy, I designed a grand organizational structure for the business. It had departments, managers, databases, procedures, specialized roles, reporting systems, and enough administrative machinery to make everything look very official.
It was ambitious. It was organized. It was impressive.
It was also an epic failure.
I had overengineered the entire operation.
Instead of helping me build the business, my system created more work. I was spending entire days buried in administrative procedures, database changes, status reports, approval processes, and organizational red tape.
Eventually, I stopped and looked at what I had created.
THE REALIZATION
I had become the United States government.
There were systems for tracking the systems, reports about the reports, and enough bureaucracy to ensure that very little actual work was getting done.
That was the moment I realized something had gone seriously wrong.
Not everything, of course.
The experience taught me what works, what doesn’t, and what we might need later. But the massive organizational structure itself had to go.
I’m returning to the basics.
That doesn’t mean the original effort was wasted. Failure gives you information. I now understand the organization better, and I know which ideas created real value and which ones simply created more administration.
I’m not starting completely from scratch.
I’m starting again with better information.
The Lesson Is Pretty Straightforward
When you’re starting something new, keep it simple.
Build what you need now. Solve the problems that actually exist. Don’t create elaborate systems for imaginary future problems just because you might need them someday.
You can always expand later.
A small system that people actually use is better than a magnificent system that brings everything to a grinding halt.
So yes, my grand organizational experiment was an epic fail.
But that’s part of building something new. You try. You learn. You laugh at yourself. Then you simplify and keep moving.
I became so bogged down in the minutiae that I forgot the cardinal rule:
Keep it spicy!