TJ's Kaleidoscope

Trouble Keeping Your Resolutions?

February is here, the month in which most new year resolutions fall by the wayside. I haven’t made my resolutions public because I want to see how many of them make it past this month. You can see this phenomenon in the gym. January is usually the busiest time for any gym with people all worked-up to workout but by February the traffic dies down to its usual levels. There are many theories and studies as to why this happens, but I think it’s just a question of setting expectations. Yes, the new year is a chance to start things anew, but you are still the same you. So if we don’t change what it is that required the resolution in the first place, that resolution itself isn’t going to have much of a chance.

While it is good to have big goals, what we should be focused on breaking bad habits and creating new ones. As you might suspect, this is easier said than done, for by the time we become self-aware of a habit, it is already well, a habit. Yet it is repeated action that begets habit which in turn creates excellence. The correlations between habit and  excellence has been a lot in the news lately mostly due to Malcolm Gladwell’s latest installment, but also because of recent press coverage on change. One study however, on swimmers and their stratification I believe brings forth all that needs to be said about habits. The study, conducted by Daniel Chambliss in 1989, makes many conclusions, the most prominent being that excellence is mundane. In fact, Chambliss argues that,

Excellence is accomplished through the doing of actions, ordinary in themselves, performed consistently and carefully, habitualized, compounded together, added up over time.

Chambliss argues that competitive swimmers are excellent by repetition. He observed
that the Olympic class swimmer practiced for about the same time as a county
or a league level swimmer, however the Olympic swimmer did things
qualitatively different, focusing on the details and converting them into habit. It was a qualitative improvement, but within the framework of repetition and habitualization.

Now, there are other theories about habits and excellence, and about what drives certain individuals to make excellence itself an habit. Yet, one fact still rings true, all habits start with what we do now in this moment.

Quote of the Day

Carpe diem. Seize the day, boys. Make your lives extraordinary.

                                                    --Robin Williams in Dead Poet’s Society

Startup Lessons: Ignorance

My blog is in danger of going stale due to my schedule-induced blogger’s block. Since life’s been getting in the way, I figured I’ll just blog about life itself. This new series I’m starting is a laundry lists lessons I’ve learnt in the past year and a half at CallFire. It’s not without hesitation that I share these lessons. Not only are they a reflection on my many personal shortcomings but also reflections on a journey that is very much in progress. So take it with a grain of salt, and of course, feel free to disagree.

My first lesson was revealed to me a couple of weeks ago when I was part of a panel discussion at the Bren School’s HiTEC competition kick-off. The panel consisted of Karim El Defrawy and myself and was moderated by Jeff Greenberg. It was a very open and honest discussion about our experiences, mine in running a successful startup, and Karim’s in winning last year’s competition and his subsequent efforts to launch his company.

The hITEC competition tries to foster innovation and entrepreneurship among Bren school students by providing a level of formalism to the creative process. I felt I dropped a minor bombshell when I mentioned that when we started out we didn’t have a clear product spec or a business plan. The focus was on delivering features that our customers would want in a market space that was (and still is) very nascent. All action came from that single focus. It was very short-term, very quick paced, and with little time for long-term vision and mission statements. I guess what surprised the audience the most was the consistency of the short-term focus, i.e., since I didn’t know what was going to happen tomorrow, let me focus on getting things done today.

Learning to accept the feeling of “not knowing” is a tough pill to swallow. All your adult you’re programmed to seek to be the expert. You get your first job, build your career by showcasing what you know not what you don’t know, yet entrepreneurship is the perennial discovery of your own ignorance. In fact, I would argue that a significant portion of the infamously long work weeks is spent discovering of all the ways that don’t work rather than finding ways that do. It is demanding, and can be very demoralizing. What keeps you going is a focus on problem solving, and of course passion for your product. So while we may not have had a business plan, we never lacked business focus. While we may have not known, we never lost our tenacity and at no point did we lose sight of the customer’s need. Instead of focusing on defining the problem, we defined the solution, and then work our ways back from there.

This was, and still is, a tough skill for me to practice. Conventional logic asks you to state the problem before you solve it, however more often than not, you have to state the solution (or desired result) and see how close you can get to it. You have to turn the problem on it’s head and use unconventional approaches to get to the solution. Sometimes those approaches will not be pretty, but as the rodeo credo goes, you have to “f**k the form and grab the horn”. So, to all those starting new ventures, I’d suggest that it’s OK to have a big goal and yet not have an effin’ clue of how to get there. Just take one step at a time, keep learning, keep trying and just maybe you’ll get close.

 

Quote of the Day

The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.

                                                     --Socrates

PS: The HiTEC site mistakenly lists me as a co-founder. I am a partner in the firm and employee number five, however the title of cofounders rests with others.