Why is it that it often takes external validation before you listen to what people have been telling you for a while? Our incredibly talented lead developer Thorsten Drobnik, has been telling me for ages to keep things simple, launch quickly and frequently, just get something out there, less software is better software, etc. etc. I kept brushing it off and not really paying attention. It is not that I didn’t agree, I just wasn’t taking it seriously or really listening. About 2 weeks ago I started reading the fantastic book, Getting Real by 37signals, which is all about these concepts. Since then I have taken these themes to heart and started to embed them into everything we do; you could say I have started to ‘Get Real’. We would have been much stronger as a company had I listened to Thorsten 6 months ago. It’s not even that Thorsten is just a random person, he has heaps of programming and development experience and is more then a decade older then me.

What else can I learn by simply listening to those around me?