Key Takeaways
- Surprise serves as a crucial signal for entrepreneurs, indicating overlooked potential or faulty assumptions that could lead to breakthrough innovations.
- Embracing a beginner’s mindset and staying curious can help entrepreneurs spot inefficiencies and patterns that others miss, paving the way for new ventures.
- Building a ‘surprise radar’ through techniques like time audits, exploring unfamiliar fields and questioning routine practices can be instrumental in seizing unexpected opportunities.
Being an entrepreneur means experiencing a range of emotions, sometimes in quick succession: there’s frustration, inspiration, exhaustion, glee, satisfaction, anger, excitement, despair — to name a few. It’s a rollercoaster.
Success hinges on being able to manage those feelings, and not letting them unbalance the even keel needed to keep going through the highs and lows. But there is one emotion I always make a special note of, every time I feel it: surprise.
Surprise is what prompted me to start my company, Jotform. It was 2005, and I was working as a developer at a New York media company, coding custom web forms for editors who needed them quickly. One day, after building yet another nearly identical form, I did what any burned-out developer would do — I searched for a tool to make the process easier.
That search turned up nothing, and there it was: surprise. Could it possibly be that such a tool didn’t exist? It didn’t. And that’s when I knew I had a good idea on my hands.
Over time, I came to understand that surprise isn’t just a fleeting emotion. It’s a signal. Evidence that something’s been overlooked, or that an assumption that seemed widely accepted might, in fact, be wrong. And for entrepreneurs, those moments — if you know how to pay attention — can be the starting point of something big.
Related: 70 Small Business Ideas to Start in 2025
When surprise strikes
When something surprises me, I don’t brush it off — I investigate. I’ve learned that those unexpected moments often contain more insight than hours of brainstorming. If you stumble on an idea, the next step is to build a minimum viable product, or MVP, and get it into users’ hands as soon as possible.
Obviously, not every surprise will lead to a product — a lot of MVPs end up dead in the water, which is why I advise building them quickly. But the practice of noticing and reflecting on the unexpected builds a kind of mental radar, one that keeps you alert to opportunities others miss.
The same is also true for less pleasant surprises. I once had a Jotform customer — a well-known brand — ask me to send a salesperson to their office to learn more about our other products. I was completely caught off guard. Salespeople? We had no salespeople. Until that point, Jotform had been entirely self-service.
I was so stunned that I sent no one, and didn’t go myself, either. Surprise! We lost the client to a competitor, one that had a sales team. But that moment stayed with me and became the impetus to build Jotform Enterprise, which today is growing so quickly it will surpass our self-service version within a few years.
Surprises like these, pleasant or otherwise, are rarely random. They test assumptions and expose blind spots. And if you’re paying attention, they can reveal what should come next.
Systematizing surprise
You can’t plan for a surprise, obviously, but you can get better at spotting it. Over the years, I’ve learned to build what I think of as a “surprise radar:” a system that keeps me tuned in to the unexpected, even in the most ordinary moments.
The first step for me is to always stay curious, even — or perhaps especially — when doing routine tasks. It can be easy during these times to switch off your critical thinking brain. But those are often the best moments to notice inefficiencies or strange patterns. Why does this process take so long? Why do we always do it this way?
This way of thinking is what’s called a beginner’s mindset, and it can be tough to adopt if you are not a beginner in your field. Once we’ve gained enough knowledge in a given area, our brains forge shortcuts that, while timesaving, also reduce our capacity for surprise. It becomes easy to stop questioning how things are done.
Related: The Accidental Entrepreneur: 3 Tales of Entrepreneurial ‘Eureka’ Moments
One strategy to keep your brain from slipping into autopilot is to conduct a time audit, which can help you figure out where you’re sinking your precious time. There are plenty of different platforms for this, like Reclaim or Toggl, but what matters is that you can clearly understand what tasks are taking up too much of your day.
From there, search for automation or AI tools that can relieve the burden for you. If it’s been a few months since your last search, do it again — AI technology is evolving rapidly, and options that may not have existed just last week may well exist now.
If you’re still coming up short, consider this a potential opportunity. Someone will probably fill this void eventually. Why not you?
It’s also critical to get outside of your comfort zone. Read books and articles on topics seemingly unrelated to your job. Talk to people in different industries, with different expertise or whose ideas don’t align with your own.
Will this be uncomfortable? Sure. But that’s the point. Surprise exists at the edge of expectations, just outside of what you thought you knew. If you only stick to the familiar, you’ll rarely be surprised. And without surprise, innovation is unlikely. The more you train yourself to notice the unexpected, the more you’ll start seeing it not as a disruption, but as a guide.
要点总结
- 惊喜对于创业者来说是一个至关重要的信号，它表明存在被忽视的潜力或错误的假设，而这些潜力或假设可能会导致突破性创新。
- 保持初学者心态和好奇心可以帮助创业者发现其他人忽略的低效之处和模式，从而为新事业铺平道路。
- 通过时间审计、探索不熟悉的领域和质疑常规做法等技巧来建立“惊喜雷达”，对于抓住意想不到的机会至关重要。
成为一名企业家意味着要经历各种各样的情绪，有时甚至会接踵而至：沮丧、灵感、疲惫、喜悦、满足、愤怒、兴奋、绝望——等等。这就像坐过山车一样。
成功的关键在于能够驾驭这些情绪，不让它们扰乱内心的平衡，从而在人生的起伏中保持前进的动力。但有一种情绪，我每次感受到它都会特别留意：那就是惊讶。
正是这份意外促使我创办了 Jotform 公司。那是 2005 年，我在纽约一家媒体公司担任开发人员，负责为需要快速生成表单的编辑编写定制的网页表单。有一天，在又一次创建了几乎相同的表单之后，我做了任何一个疲惫不堪的开发人员都会做的事——寻找一款能够简化流程的工具。
那次搜索一无所获，结果却出乎我的意料。难道真的没有这样的工具吗？确实没有。就在那时，我知道我找到了一个好主意。
随着时间的推移，我逐渐明白，惊讶并非只是转瞬即逝的情绪，而是一种信号。它表明某些事情被忽略了，或者某个看似被广泛接受的假设实际上可能是错误的。对于创业者而言，如果你懂得如何关注这些时刻，它们可能就是成就一番伟业的起点。
相关阅读：2025年可以开始的70个小型企业创意
突如其来的变故
当遇到让我感到意外的事情时，我不会置之不理，而是会深入调查。我发现，这些意想不到的时刻往往比几个小时的头脑风暴更有启发意义——-关注生活，这会给我们app的功能。如果你偶然想到一个点子，下一步就是打造一个最小可行产品（MVP），并尽快将其交付给用户。
显然，并非每次意外都能转化为产品——很多最小可行产品（MVP）最终都以失败告终，所以我建议尽快开发它们。但是，留意并反思意外情况的习惯可以培养一种“思维雷达”，让你时刻关注他人错失的机会。
不太愉快的意外也一样。我曾经遇到过一位Jotform的客户——一个知名品牌——他们要求我派一名销售人员去他们公司，了解我们其他的产品。我当时完全懵了。销售人员？我们根本没有销售人员。在那之前，Jotform一直都是完全自助式的。
我当时震惊得不知所措，既没派人去，自己也没去。结果不出所料！我们把客户拱手让给了竞争对手，而且他们还有自己的销售团队。但这件事一直让我铭记于心，也成为了我创建 Jotform Enterprise 的契机。如今，Jotform Enterprise 发展迅猛，几年之内就会超越我们的自助服务版本。
诸如此类的意外，无论令人欣喜还是令人沮丧，都很少是偶然发生的。它们会检验既有假设，暴露盲点。如果你足够留心，它们还能揭示下一步该怎么做。
系统化意外
显然，你无法预料惊喜的发生，但你可以提高识别惊喜的能力。多年来，我逐渐建立了一套我称之为“惊喜雷达”的系统：即使在最平凡的时刻，它也能让我时刻关注意想不到的事情。
对我来说，第一步是始终保持好奇心，即使——或者说尤其——是在做日常工作的时候。在这些时候，我们很容易关闭批判性思维。但这往往是发现效率低下或奇怪模式的最佳时机。为什么这个过程这么耗时？为什么我们总是这样做？
这种思维方式被称为“初学者心态”，如果你并非该领域的初学者，就很难适应。一旦我们在某个领域积累了足够的知识，我们的大脑就会形成一些捷径，这些捷径虽然节省时间，但也降低了我们接受新事物的能力。我们很容易不再质疑事情的运作方式。
防止大脑进入自动驾驶模式的一个策略是进行时间审计，这可以帮助你找出宝贵的时间都浪费在哪里了。有很多平台可以帮你做到这一点，比如 Reclaim 或 Toggl，但关键在于你能清楚地了解哪些任务占用了你一天中太多的时间。
接下来，寻找能够减轻你负担的自动化或人工智能工具——我都是自己做自动化工具。如果距离上次搜索已经过去几个月了，那就再搜索一次——人工智能技术发展迅速，上周可能还不存在的工具现在很可能已经出现了。
如果你仍然觉得力不从心，不妨把这看作是一个潜在的机会。总有一天会有人填补这个空缺。为什么不能是你呢？
走出舒适区也至关重要。阅读一些看似与工作无关的书籍和文章——不知道我现在算不算？可能是我工作量太大，我没有时间去读工作无关的事情，就算现在这个也和我工作有关—–创业。与不同行业、拥有不同专业知识或想法与你不同的人交流。
这会让你感到不舒服吗？当然。但这正是关键所在。惊喜往往存在于预期之外，就在你自以为了解的领域之外。如果你只固守熟悉的事物，就很少会感到惊喜。而没有惊喜，创新也就无从谈起。你越是训练自己去留意那些意料之外的事情，就越会开始把它视为指引，而不是干扰。