Ignore the real world

Every piece of received business wisdom comes with an implicit disclaimer: "this doesn't apply to you, you're different." Fried and Heinemeier Hansson's answer is to stop apologizing for being different and start using it. The excuses that supposedly disqualify you — no funding, no experience, no free time, a day job — are usually assets in disguise, because they force discipline that well-funded competitors never have to develop.

The "real world" invoked to shoot down new ideas is really just a description of what's worked before, presented as a law of physics. But someone had to build the current real world too, once, by ignoring the previous one.

The authors' own company started as a side project built by a small web-design firm with no funding and no plan to become a software business — the constraints didn't stop it, they shaped it. Takeaway: treat "that's not how it's done" as information about the past, not a rule about your future.