Going Back: I Want to Start a Business but I'm Afraid of What People Will Say
About this ebook
In Spanish it even has a name, el qué dirán. People. Everyone. The whole town, the whole family, the whole group chat. A fear that size can't be argued with, because there is nobody in particular to argue with.
This book makes it smaller with one idea. You are not afraid of what people will say. You are afraid of what two or three particular people might say, and so far you have only heard it from the version of them that lives in your head. Three names, not everyone.
One exercise per chapter, each finished at one sitting. None asks you to imagine anything; each collects something real: a person's actual words, a count, a first reply. All of it goes on one page.
Inside:
The page with three names, and why, in about a hundred studies of more than a hundred thousand people, the opinion of those who matter weighed less than your own attitudeThe spotlight effect: students in an embarrassing T-shirt expected half the room to notice; only twenty-three percent could name the face on itThe beautiful mess effect: why your own moment of weakness looks worse to you than to anyone watchingDon't announce it, ask: students whose written intention someone had read worked about forty-one and a half minutes, against forty-five and a half when nobody lookedThe liking gap: after a conversation, people underestimate how much the other person liked them, whether it lasted two minutes or forty-fiveAgainst you, or just not with you: in a study of 1,087 people who had lost their jobs, undermining from the person closest to them was a different and stronger force than missing supportEl qué dirán itself: what gossip is for, tight and loose cultures in 33 countries, and why a German fear of failure that stopped 42 percent from starting was mostly about moneyWhat if it works: the tall poppy, the law of Jante, and two kinds of envy that point in opposite directionsThe secret has a price too: in more than 13,000 secrets, what weighed was how often the mind went back to them, more than how often they had to be hiddenGoing back: 1,223 job applications, what recruiters really worry about when a former founder applies, and the CV lineThe stranger who hasn't heard of you: why commuters in Chicago and London misjudged how interested a stranger would be, and the one offer the book builds towardsEvery finding names its researchers and who they studied. Where the research is thin, the book says so.
Diego Segura is an industrial engineer who has spent his career working out how systems fail and how to fix them. He holds an MBA and a master's in Digital Technology from Boston University, and has worked with Stanford, Harvard, MIT and Boston University. He has spent most of his working life building businesses, and the series this book belongs to is published in nineteen languages. He also grew up in Zapopan, where el qué dirán is part of daily life, and he has been the student whose hand stayed down because of two classmates, and the son whose parents argued he was gambling away years of work. Those stories are in here.
The book has one goal: within ninety days of finishing it, one stranger has paid you for something. Not your mother, not your best friend. Someone you've never met, who judged your offer worth paying for.
It will not make the fear disappear, and it does not promise to. It makes your version of it specific: specific people, specific words, specific consequences, each of which can be checked.
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About the author
Diego Segura is an industrial engineer who has spent his career working out how systems fail and how to fix them. He holds an MBA and a master's in Digital Technology from Boston University, and has worked with Stanford, Harvard, MIT and Boston University. He writes by reading everything published on a subject, then reporting what it actually says, including the parts nobody wants to hear.
