When You’re a Hammer Everything Looks Like a Nail

by Mark Suster on June 14, 2010

Over the years I collected (or thought up) a series of short-hand phrases to remind me of life’s lessons that are applicable to business.  One of my favorite ones is “what you’re a hammer everything looks like a nail.”  The definition is kind of obvious.  We’re all biased by our backgrounds and tend to put forward solutions that our backgrounds suggest to us.  It’s so common to go into meetings where somebody acts a certain way or has a certain point-of-view that leaves me thinking, “Hammer.  Nail.”

This post by Mark Suster covers a pretty well known topic, but has his typical unique view point expressed.

For me, there is another way of looking at this, for many teams, they are only walking around with hammers, but they are trying to accomplish something that needs a screwdriver. For many software startups, it is difficult to really get into particular problems if you don’t have the depth of knowledge in a field. In these cases, listening to the customer would be quite key.

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