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Tuesday, July 22, 2025

The multitasking entrepreneur

by

20140709

Q: Is it sen­si­ble or prac­ti­cal to work on sev­er­al dif­fer­ent ideas at once, or is it bet­ter to per­fect one at a time?

- Qurat, Is­lam­abad, Pak­istan

You've asked an in­ter­est­ing ques­tion, Qurat, since there are plus­es and mi­nus­es to each ap­proach. When you launch your first en­ter­prise, you have to learn so much on the job, and so quick­ly, that con­cen­trat­ing on one project with a clear­ly de­fined pur­pose is al­most in­vari­ably the best ap­proach. But once you and your team have been through the process, you can ap­ply what you've learned to oth­er launch­es, and per­haps at some point tack­le some projects si­mul­ta­ne­ous­ly.

To choose well, you need to learn when to go for­ward and when to say no, which can be dif­fi­cult - es­pe­cial­ly if you pre­fer to say yes, like I do! Dur­ing the Vir­gin Group's ear­ly days, one such mis­take near­ly de­railed our com­pa­ny.

From time to time I still re­ceive tweets from peo­ple sur­prised to have dis­cov­ered that we used to make films. Our ven­ture was called Vir­gin Films (of course!), and in 1984 we set about turn­ing George Or­well's clas­sic nov­el "1984" in­to a film star­ring John Hurt and Richard Bur­ton. It was the same year that we launched Vir­gin At­lantic and, in hind­sight, our team took on too much.


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