I’ve often worked on two projects at once — sometimes more — thinking that if one didn’t pan out, the others would be there as a backup.
As I mentioned in my previous post on commitment, for the universe to help you, you must to commit to the project or venture you’re going to pursue. It’s only when you truly commit that you decide you’ll do whatever it takes to make that project a success.
That’s not the same as wanting it to work out, or even working for it to work out. It’s a different mental gear altogether. The thing is, I have two projects on the table and I still don’t know which one I should commit to — project A or project Z — and each comes with its own pros and cons.
Working on 2 projects and the same time keep me away from fully committing to any of them. Committing to a specific project means becoming a true specialist in the subject, doing zero work on the others once the choice is made, and doing whatever it takes to finish it and make it succeed. So even though I don’t yet know which project I’ll commit to, I now know what I have to do that will help me figure it out.
Where I'm coming from
As many of you know, over the last 30 years I’ve attempted at least 20 different projects in pursuit of financial independence — from patented inventions to mobile apps, craft shops, photography projects, websites, an online radio station, and more. And here’s the strange part: I built every one of them, and every one of them worked. What none of them ever did was become a business that made money.
Along the way, I also tried to learn about entrepreneurship: joining accelerators, earning certifications, reading and listening to books, attending webinars, and so on. I mention all of this because it’s useful context for understanding how I plan to decide which project to pursue — the one with the best odds of success.
The plan: pick the project most likely to succeed
What I need to do is execute the project that, given my reality and my own strengths and weaknesses, has the highest probability of success.
So my plan is to put together a structured analysis based on what the experts say you’re supposed to do. The more I study, the more I notice the key points keep repeating — sometimes phrased differently, sometimes presented in isolation, sometimes framed from a different angle depending on the author — but in the end they’re all talking about the same concepts. So I’ll treat those repeated concepts as the right steps to follow, and this time I’ll actually follow them. As the saying goes, I can’t expect a different result if I keep doing the same thing.
Stress-Testing the Idea Before Building Anything
The first thing I’ll do is stress-test each idea before building anything — before spending a dollar, before talking to a single customer, before writing a line of code or designing a single screen.
The goal is to figure out whether the basic logic of each project actually holds together as a structure worth building toward.
I have a name for this step: Venture Idea Stress-Test. It’s related to the concept of a Business Model, but not the same thing. A Business Model describes something that already works — a system of value creation, delivery, and revenue that has been tested in the real world. I’m not there yet.
What I need to do first is figure out whether each idea has a logic worth building toward at all, by answering 5 specific questions about each venture idea. That’s what the stress-test is for.
I’m going to run an initial structured evaluation of both ideas — discovering the logic of how each of my 2 projects creates value, delivers it, and gets paid for it — an initial steps I had never done with any of my past projects.
From what I’ve studied, the proper way to do this is using the Lean method: this means that rather than assuming my original idea is correct from the start, I treat it as a hypothesis.
Why this framework exists
Looking back at my 20+ failed projects, I kept building products and skipping this initial step entirely. My projects worked as products — they just never worked as businesses.
If I had run this stress-test first, some of those projects I simply would never have started — a few honest answers to the right questions would have shown me what each project would actually demand from me, before I spent a dollar.
Others I probably would have pursued anyway, but I would have gone in with my eyes open: having a better idea in advance about what it would cost me in money, time, and energy, instead of finding out the hard way.
The stress-test is the step between “I have an idea” and “I have something worth building.” It’s the step I never took.
I’ll work through this analysis and share the specific framework I’m using.
I will keep you posted on my progress — so we can find out which project I’ll start working on and commit to.
