Rickerism

The old joke goes:

There’s was a man stuck on the roof of a house with flood waters swirling all about. A boat pulls up and the boat driver shouts, “Get in the boat!”

The man on the roof says, “Go on. Help the others. God will save me.”

Now the water is half-way up the roof. and another boat comes. The men in the boat shoat, “Get in the boat!”

The man on the roof says, “No thanks. God will save me.”

Now the water is swirling so high that the man is on top of his chimney. A helicopter hovers over and the men shout, “Grab the rope!”

The man on the roof waves them off shouting, “God will save me!”

The next thing you know, the man from the roof is standing in Judgment Day. He is bewildered. He says to God, “I trusted you to save me and you left me to drown!”

God says, “What are you talking about? I sent you two boats and a helicopter.”

When things get rough in a startup, it is natural for us to wonder when help will arrive. We trust in God to provide for us. At the very least, entrepreneurs are optimists and expect things to turn out okay in the end.

In the process, we can be rather stubborn in focusing only on what we expect. We create a plan of how we are going to win the market, and when the plan does not work, we keep pushing harder and harder. We create in our mind what we expect to happen, and we only look for opportunities that match our expectations.

We look only for what we expect to find. This phenomenon is not unique to start ups. Thomas Kuhn describes this phenomenon in detail in his famous book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

As the company hits the rocky water, you should ask yourself, “Am I ignoring any helicopters that are being sent my way?”