Life is a bicycle ride
Thursday, 30 July 2026 – 10:30 am (Sydney)
Learning how to ride a bicycle is one of our early childhood’s momentous challenges. It looks fun, but also dangerous. It can hurt. It is highly likely that our first attempt will result in failure. WE FALL. WE FAIL. WE GET HURT. However, as kids, we have the gift of life optimism, perhaps even the arrogance to succeed or the ignorance of permanent failure. These lead us to pick up ourselves, pick up the bicycle and try again for the second time, the third time, the fourth time. Probably with very little contemplation of the failure of the previous attempts. Little did we know that that brief cycle of the habit of attempts and iterations can be the key to long term success.
As we grow older, we might have become jaded with failures and hurt and traded life optimism with over-buffered caution. Yes, most of the time that newly created habit of caution keeps us safe but also most of the time, it keeps us at bay away from enjoying the proverbial bicycle ride.
One of the lessons that Noah and I repeat almost daily is:
“The more you do, the better you get”
As we move through life, the amazing rewards are just waiting on the other side of attempts and learnings. Oftentimes, the attempts can be scary, costly and can hurt us but ultimately the price is lower compared to the lessons and values we gain.
Running a business (and life in general) is also like a bicycle ride. While starting slow, it feels wobbly and harder to maintain balance. Once speed and momentum is gained, it feels more stable. Sometimes we can even ride with “hands-off” because of that momentum. In business, when we are starting with only 1 or 2 products and only have 1 or 2 sales channels, it feels extremely wobbly. During the early days of re-starting Koen Cuts, we were selling only 1 product in 1 sales channel, we were only selling custom Cake Toppers only via Facebook Marketplace. We made 3 sales in 3 weeks and probably 5-6 inquiries then everything stopped. The inquiries stopped coming. The sales went dry and silent. I tried to troubleshoot the issue but could not find the root cause. It was then that I found Alex Hormozi via his book $100m Offers. In this book, he talks about Markets and the Value Equation. Note the plural form of market(s), not a singular market. To gain momentum, my paradigm shifted from mastering cake toppers (single product) via Facebook Marketplace (single market, single sales channel) to multiple products across multiple markets and sales channels.
This also reminds me of another learning, and there’s even a book of the same title: “The Obstacle is the way”. Obstacles do not block the way, they are the way. We fall from learning how to ride a bicycle. We do not avoid that fall because the fall is what teaches us balance.
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