One of the books I reread periodically and recommend to idea-stage founders is The Mom Test. It’s a short read and can add tremendous value to founders who are thinking about what solution they should build or what problem they want to solve. Every founder I’ve recommended the book to, and who read it, loved it.

The book focuses on a single topic: customer discovery. It outlines a simple, effective methodology for talking with customers. The book details how to ask the right questions (that aren’t leading questions) so conversations yield valuable insights about customer pain and its severity. The book does a good job of laying out an approach that helps founders better understand what (if anything) they should build, which can prevent founders from wasting time, energy, and money. Another reason I like this book for idea-stage founders is that it helps them avoid the common solution-in-search-of-a-problem trap.

If you’re an early-stage founder who hasn’t found product–market fit yet, consider giving the book a read.

I’ve been learning about Jack Ma recently. He’s the founder of Alibaba, the China-based e‑commerce behemoth. As of this writing, the company has a market capitalization (i.e., valuation) of roughly $188 billion. Alibaba has a variety of successful business lines, including a marketplace, cloud computing, and financial services.

Jack is an impressive founder, but one fact surprised me. Alibaba is a technology company, but Jack Ma isn’t technical at all. He doesn’t write code and doesn’t have a deep understanding of tech. Yet he was able to found and scale a wildly successful technology company that changed commerce in his country.

If ever a nontechnical founder building a technology company needed inspiration, Jack Ma was the one. For nontechnical founders, his journey is worth studying.

A friend, who’s also an investor, gave me some feedback on my blog. This doesn’t happen often, so I was excited to hear what he had to say. I view any kind of feedback as an opportunity to get better, which is important to me.

Sharing topics that I’m thinking about is helpful to him. But he gets more value from the posts where I go deeper—specifically, when I share personal examples of how I’m acting on what I’ve learned or lessons I’ve learned from past actions related to the topic.

This was timely feedback, as I’ve recently been thinking about knowledge vs. wisdom. I get more value from wisdom and have decided to focus on reading to acquire wisdom this year.

Similarly, according to the feedback from my friend, he gets more value from the posts where I share wisdom and unique insights. I appreciated hearing that. It motivated me. Going forward, I want to write more posts where I share more of what I’ve learned from my successes and failures and the actions I’m currently taking based on what I’ve learned.

This is my two-hundred-third weekly reflection. Here are my takeaways from this week:

• Financial history – I’ve been reading books on financial history lately. It’s been a great exercise in zooming out to see the big picture, understanding human behavior, and understanding some of the complexity of the financial system. I’m excited to keep learning in this area.
• Weekly learnings – I’m thinking about ways to share some of the things I learn each week. A friend suggested an idea that I like, and I’m going to solicit other people’s thoughts about it.
• Practical learning – This week was a reminder that the best way for me to learn is by doing—and that I learn the most when things don’t go as planned.

Week two hundred three was another week of learning. Looking forward to next week!

I’m continuing with my learning survey. It’s turned into more of a customer discovery exercise than a survey. This week I had a call with an entrepreneur who’s also an investor. One thing he shared stuck with me:

“My learning is curiosity led but application driven.”

In other words, he’s looking to learn something to a level of competence sufficient to apply it. I like his wording—it’s a succinct and accurate description of how I and the entrepreneurs I’ve surveyed approach learning.

This week an entrepreneur told me about a new business he’s trying. He’d met a gifted creative whose work caught his eye. The creative wants the freedom to create what inspires him and thinks that a business that sells what he makes will give him that freedom. But he hasn’t had much luck getting the business off the ground. The entrepreneur got to know the creative and realized that he’s gifted in his craft, but not in business. He doesn’t understand or know how to apply business concepts.

This entrepreneur and creative have decided to test going into business together. If the test phase works out, they’ll continue. Each is responsible for his strengths: the entrepreneur for administration, marketing, and finances; the creative for creating the pieces and networking with other creatives.

When I heard about these two starting a business together, I was excited. Last month, I shared that I think a practitioner could be a good cofounder when paired with a business-minded hustler. I think a partnership like that could be a great, complementary founding team. The entrepreneurial experiment these two are running is exactly that. If successful, it could turn into something big.

I’m excited to follow the journey of this experiment and hear about what they learn along the way.

While researching a business, I learned that it generates significant revenue from ads. Digging deeper, I found out that it’s charging 10x more than I’d envisioned for ads. The coveted (and most expensive) ad slots are sold out for the next six months. I don’t have any inside information, but it wouldn’t surprise me if this business is generating eight figures in annual revenue from ads.

I don’t know a lot about ad-based business models, and this project has me curious. I want to learn more and will dive deeper into this space.

Today I got to watch serendipitous interactions between several entrepreneurs who didn’t know each other before today. The inevitable “What are you working on?” question came up in most of these conversations. After sharing, these entrepreneurs were able to add value to what the others were working on in some way.

My takeaway from today was that entrepreneurs have more to gain than lose from sharing their ideas and what they’re working on. The more you share, the more opportunities you provide for others to help you and the more feedback (positive and negative) you get. Both will improve your idea or project.

Yesterday I shared my thoughts on wisdom vs. knowledge. I have a daily habit of acquiring knowledge, which I enjoy. I’ve noticed a pattern as I’ve been reading more long-form content, mainly books. Some books add considerably more value than others. I’ve been thinking about why this is the case for the last few months.

The most helpful books I read last year have a common trait. They were about how people took action toward a stated goal. The books explained their thought processes as they learned by trial and error, detailing their learnings and how what they learned changed their behavior during their journey. These books were about how people acquired and applied knowledge. They were books that contained the wisdom others had accumulated (often over decades).  

This year I want to refine my reading a bit. I enjoy learning about new concepts and ideas, but I want to focus more of my time on reading books that contain wisdom, not just knowledge.

As an early-stage founder, I was part of an entrepreneurial group that taught new founders about key business functions. Each quarter we went deep into a specific business function: marketing, finances, HR, marketing, etc. At the end of each of those sessions, I better understood functions that didn’t come naturally to me (e.g., marketing). I felt educated. But I still had a problem: What do I do with this new knowledge? How do I use it in my business? I’d learned what I needed to do, but I still had no idea how to do it.

This experience highlighted the difference between knowledge and wisdom.

Knowledge is acquired by learning new information or being made aware of something. Learning about marketing is an example of acquiring knowledge. Knowledge acquisition doesn’t always equate to adding value. There’s another step.

Wisdom is the ability to apply knowledge in a manner that aligns with the outcome you desire. Wisdom means changed behavior and improved decision-making—knowing what to do and when to do it. Wisdom is acquired from experience (yours or someone else’s). Growing your company through marketing execution is the result of wisdom.

Through trial and error and talking with other successful entrepreneurs (who shared their experiences), I learned how to apply the concepts I learned in those sessions to grow my business. My problem was solved.

This experience showed me that knowledge is important. You can’t apply something if you aren’t aware of it, which is why continuous learning is so important. But wisdom is what I value most because applying knowledge well is how I achieve the outcomes I desire.