Counterintuitive Advice: Pay people for help

The problem with doing everything on your own is that it doesn't work.

The problem with not paying people to help you is that money isn't your biggest opportunity cost. Time is.

When you're not moving towards solving people's problems, someone else is.

So hire freelancers, hire friends, hire experts. Hire them for short projects. Find people that are good and don't haggle with them. The time you spend searching for perfect partners is time you should be spending on figuring out what you don't know.

And if you think what you're working on is so important, challenging your assumptions is exactly what you need to do to accomplish your goals.

I hired 5 freelancers in the last few weeks and gladly paid them because I knew that hiring people good at their jobs would help me quickly spot what I'm doing wrong. I also knew I wouldn't be able to intuitively know what that thing I was doing wrong was. Hiring freelancers was simply the fastest way for me to identify my own roadblocks to moving forward. For me standing still is not an option.

Here are 4 ways hiring freelancers benefits you:

1. You learn more about the skillsets you're hiring for
2. You learn how to manage people without experiencing big hiring risks
3. You challenge your business assumptions
4. You get yourself out of your own way