Seeing problems as opportunities

I've once had someone ask me how it is that I manage to give my time and money to things that provide no immediate rewards.

Bear in mind, this was about a business venture, and I guess it felt weird to him that I could go years, throwing money at something that was losing money every single year without ever really wanting to stop.

To be completely honest, I did not have an immediate answer to that question because personally, I never really thought of the negative ROI the business realized, I was mostly focused on the things I could directly control.

A couple months passed and we revisited the topic and I gave a big speech about a coping mechanism, how the business served as a distraction from a whole lot of external things to me, but deep down I knew that it was more than that.

It was a case of two truths. One being that for a fact, the business was a coping mechanism and two, that I really did see possibilities for growth, for success at what I was building.

As time passed, I reflected on passion and delusion and how they play a key role in keeping certain individuals committed to specific works in life. At this point, it had become clear that I wasn't only passionate about this little business venture, I was also delusional to a significant extent that I couldn't imagine not throwing more money and time at it.

Problems and opportunities

I had a lot of time to think about various challenges I encountered while building and everything pointed to how I often came out seeing opportunities to make something out of.

Before writing this, I saw an image of a broken pencil online and it was written “see problems as opportunities” given that a broken pencil can be made into two pencils.

This took me down memory lane to a certain time when I ran into an infrastructure problem that threatened the continual operation of my business. I had weeks to worry and get stressed out about it but it was on a fine morning, at 3am precisely, that I decided that it was time to migrate to a new system, something I have frankly always wanted to do but never really had the courage to push for it.

What presented itself as a problem had now become a way to cut a very specific infrastructure cost of by 77% and effectively optimize my business to be more flexible for continued operations.

To most people, it may just seem like I'm throwing numbers around, but anyone who's had the privilege to run any business of any scale will tell you just how significant cost-cutting is for scaling up to profitability.

Everyday, we see successful businessmen such as Elon Musk speak a lot on this. From cutting costs at X to cutting wasteful spending within the government. The path to building anything sustainable involves responsible capital management.

I've had many instances of reckless spending that didn't yield the intended results and I can tell you, from experience, that going slow and optimizing for lower capital injection while maintaining valuable output is the way to go. But above all, problems will often arise but the best strategy for staying committed is to always see them as opportunities to get something new or old, integrated or done.

In my case, I had to get an old task done and now we are running on lower operational costs.

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