Sunday, November 22, 2015

You're more patient than they are

Sam Altman at YC put together this Startup Playbook and as you might expect, it is packed with nugget after nugget of great advice.  If you are running a startup, or thinking about it, I thoroughly recommend it.  I scribbled down a lot of little notes while reading through it, but I'll include one particular one from the initial section (perhaps it resonated with me the most as I'm so early stage myself) -

Let it gooo!  Playing around with giant balloons the other week.
."..almost everyone is going to tell you that your idea sucks [...] whatever the reason is, it will happen a lot, it will hurt, and even if you think you’re not going to be affected by it, you still will be. The faster you can develop self-belief and not get dragged down too much by haters, the better off you’ll be. No matter how successful you are, the haters will never go away."

There are two things about this that made me feel like I was getting a good hard hug when I read it: 1) The 'self-belief' that I've felt swelling up inside of me over the last couple of months does not mean that I am arrogant, or self-inflated. The remainder of the playbook reinforces this, but persistently believing in your own success is essential. And 2) The haters come in different forms - sometimes they are just people who are dismissive of you because of what you do, and *sometimes* they are even voices in the back of your very own head.

My little biz is hardly center stage with any major 'haters' coming my way, but this was clearly on my mind - this is a quote from Seth Godin was one of the first things I wrote at the front of my work notepad:

No idea what the '6:30ish' note means haha! Clearly I was making dinner plans at some point.
I will share a secret with you: this song came onto Pandora (I was on the Taylor Swift channel, ok?) when I was having a rough day, a month into this gig. It made me cry with resonance and now it's my lets-do-this song whenever I need a little pick me up:

I know, so cheesy right?!  I don't care :)

PS - The playbook and Seth Godin quote are both via the ever excellent swissmiss

Monday, November 9, 2015

You already enjoy many things

Image may seem vaguely unrelated, but I took this photo yesterday thinking about the guy who left his tea on this wooden stool, right in the middle of the street. You have to give him credit for coming and going as he pleases, trusting his tea canister and seat to all of the folks passing this busy corner by.
A friend who always sends me the very best things to think about emailed me this article by Mark Manson a couple of weeks ago: 'Screw Finding Your Passion'. Reading it was 7 minutes well spent and a refreshing antidote to the swarm of seminars, pinterest quotes and self-published non-writers out there, all urging us to run into the woods and determine what our true passion is.

To borrow the subject line of my friend's email - go read it. Then this is pretty much verbatim what I wrote back -

Since I left Goog I feel like a lot of people try and find some kind of narrative about what I'm doing; that I'm following my passion, that I'm a frustrated designer who finally liberated myself from the corporate world - but that's not the case. I just talked so long about how much I didn't want to play football anymore, I decided to start collecting bugs because it was different and intriguing to me; I don't know how long I'll be doing this for or how long, or whether it will turn into something else.  When people say 'you're so lucky that you know what you want to do' I think 'yes I am lucky... but you probably already know too; you're just too tied up with financial / job / [insert something] security. There isn't anything else stopping you.'

"You already enjoy many things. You're just choosing to ignore them."