Your college matters little when you’re Starting up. Here’s what does – skills no one tells you about.

Have you been in a situation where you spent hours, maybe days, trying to solve a really tough problem, and later realized that you shouldn’t have worked on the problem at all? I recently had an aha moment when I realised that this is the #1 skill I need as an entrepreneur – the skill of contextual problem prioritisation. In other words – identifying the most important problem for you to solve, at a point in time, and with the resources you have.

This is not an easy skill to pick up because our mind has a bias…it wants to solve an interesting problem whether or not it is the most important problem for you right now. If you have this skill of contextual problem prioritisation – you have it made. Human beings are incredibly talented and creative. What holds us back is our inability to pick the right problem to solve, at a particular point in time. So this is skill #1.

Skill #2 is overcoming the curse of knowledge.

Imagine you just had a piece of really, really rich chocolate cake. And then you’re told to forget the taste. Impossible, right? This is the curse of knowledge. And this impacts the software we build. We know what we’re building, we know how it should be used, we know how much love and effort has gone into creating it. We just cannot fathom how a random enduser will perceive our product. It is just not possible. This is the curse of knowledge.

It’s close to impossible to overcome the curse of knowledge. Skill #2 is having the ability to circumvent it and figure out a way to be effective inspite of the curse.

Skill #3 is related to #2 and is the skill of empathy.

To be able to take off your own shoes and to step into the shoes of another. When you’re building a product for a user, it’s amazing how one can be oblivious to the real world situation of that user, and instead focus on what to build. This is another cognitive bias where our mind would much rather solve a problem that’s immediate & real to us than live in the context and real world journey of our endusers and solve problems within that context. We find it incredibly difficult to be in someone else’s shoes. Even if…even if we were in those shoes just 2 days ago!!! Once our mind gets into the mode of problem solving, the end user and our empathy for that user reduces dramatically.

So that’s it. All 3 are mind biases but I’ve realised these are the top 3 things I need to overcome to build out GeekTrust. These 3 skills require incredible self awareness. And which college teaches you that?