I just heard an amazing interview with John Fried over on Dan Benjamin’s The Pipeline podcast, and he dropped this gem which is simply put the best piece of business advice I’ve ever heard and has totally inspired me the way no other business podcast or book or class has done.

My feeling is that if you have something, you should begin charging for it at soon as you possible can. I would prefer Day One. If you’re on Day 300 and you haven’t started then Day 301 should be the day you start charging. You’ve got to get in the habit of collecting money for your product. The longer you wait, the harder it’s going to be. The more incentive, ultimately you’ll have to do it because you’ll be going out of business soon enough if you don’t charge for anything.

I feel like making money and charging for things is a habit and you want to get into the habit of charging for things because you’ll get better at it and you’ll do it more and it’ll just become something you know how to do, and the longer you wait, the less practice you’ll have making and charging for things. I always like to use the example of if you want to be a good piano player you start early and practice a lot and you’ll be pretty good, and to me making money is the same thing as playing the piano. When you first start out a lot of people aren’t very good at it. But you keep doing it and you keep learning about it and you learn about the market and about people and you learn psychology and you learn all these things and eventually you’re pretty good. Like today I’m really good at making money. I’m just really good at it. I can’t play the piano, but I know how to make money because I’ve been doing it for a long time.

This absolutely makes sense to me. When I started photography I was terrible. Now that I’ve been practicing at it for years I don’t suck so bad at it. When I first started lighting I was awful. AWFUL. Now I don’t suck quite so bad at it. My first website design? Oh, man. I think I would die if anyone ever saw it. *shudder*

So why do I allow myself to say “I’m just not a natural at business” and let that just be? I guess I never really thought of it as a skill that you needed to just get out there and practice. As Merlin Mann says “just start shipping”, and I guess all along when it comes to business I’ve been saying “well that’s fine for Merlin [or insert successful businessperson here]“.

(By the way, if you’re not listening to especially the Back To Work podcast… well… you should be. I think it’s currently my favorite podcast.)

It’s time to stop making excuses and start shipping.