Was at the “Start-Up day” for the School of Entrepreneurship on Saturday. This is always a great event with about 40 speakers from around the globe and 400 participants. Speakers yesterday included the CEO of Telenor (the 7th biggest wireless carrier in the world) and one of the founders of Boo.com (Swedens biggest dot com failures who spent $135million of investors money in 18 months then went bankrupt).
A very interesting speech to wrap it all off came from David Axmark, one of the founders of MySQL who was making his last speech as an employee of MySQL (they sold it to Sun in 2008 for $1billion). He railled against the threat of software patents (in my opinion one of the major dangers to the freedom of the Web and Internet, not just writing applications). We then all went for a nice glass of wine and buffet thanks to the sponsors Microsoft and no one said anything more about it… 
The day started with a speech about celebrating incompetence which suited me down to the ground.
The thinking goes like this… If you always want to be competent in your professional life, you never take the risk of doing something new and you stay within the boundaries that you set yourself. It’s like never learning to play the piano because you might sound terrible the first few times (or years) you try. Of course, if you aren’t prepaired to be incompetent at something, even if it’s just for a while, you’ll never really test yourself.
One of my favourite sayings is “If something is worth doing, then it’s worth doing badly“. This is especially useful when you feel like you have a mountain to climb and just don’t know how to get started. Not taking yourself too seriously, just having a go and learning from the mistakes you make and then doing better the next time is the key to doing things which other people say can’t be done.
Unfortunately, most people like to feel competent and if you come along with new ways of doing things which are going to make them feel incompetent, you’re going to meet resistance. They started the whole seminar with the message that you’re going to get knocked down a lot and it’s up to you to get back up again. Here’s the subtle video that they used… (Not for people with a delicate disposition or people who don’t like Radiohead).
