A lot of us make the mistake of waiting for the “right” idea until we decide to pursue something. Huge mistake.<p>Joe Gebbia put it nicely by making an analogy to the “gym of entrepreneurship.” Building a startup is one of those things that you need to work to get better at over time. Not many founders have many regrets but when they do express regrets it’s usually them wishing they had started earlier. Here’s Joes quote from his interview with Tim Ferris.<p>“People think we woke up and Airbnb was just created out of thin air. That couldn’t be further from the truth. I hope if there’s any takeaway from the stories that we’ve talked about today, it’s that there’s a long lineage of trying things, bumping into walls, getting rejected, failing, reframing that failure into learning, and trying to continue forward.<p>And so, by the time Airbnb came around, it was like I’d been in the gym of entrepreneurship for many years. So, it’s like you don’t wake up and just run a marathon all of a sudden. Nobody does that. You train for it. So, by the time it’s ready for race day, your body is conditioned for it. Your muscles and your system – everything is ready for you to go run 26+ miles.<p>I think entrepreneurship is the exact same way. I think it’s a misconception when people look at the magazine covers and they read the stories of a successful company and they think, “Wow, the people who started that, they built it and everybody came.” That couldn’t be further from the truth. I think “Field of Dreams” is probably the worst movie to ever happen to entrepreneurship. It created this idea, like, “Oh, wow, if you build it, they will come.” I can tell you, if you build it, they don’t come.<p>It takes this incredible perseverance and sometimes irrational belief in yourself to bring something to life in the face of lot of adversity and a lot of people saying it can’t happen. So, I hope if there’s any takeaway from the stories that I shared today, it’s that the simple act of spotting an opportunity, coming up with original solution and then taking that third, hardest step of putting something into the world, of trying something, putting your idea into practice – it doesn’t have to be the big idea.<p>It’s just about being in the gym and doing a rep, the gym of entrepreneurship, doing curls or something. It’s just getting in the habit of those three things. You spot an opportunity, you come up with an original solution, and you put your idea into the world. And the more you can do that, the better you are at spotting the next opportunity. Airbnb just happened to be a part of the lineage of all the things I’ve told you that happened before it.”