Unsupervised
One of the truly amazing things about working for yourself is choice over what you do. You no longer have that parental figure nudging you to do their bidding – or disciplining you when you’ve been naughty. But you do have to forego the treats and the attaboys.
The lack of supervision and guide-rails also means you can go off piste for quite a long way before you realise.
A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the need to get a bit more strategic, develop some vision for Familiarize, imagine what it could be. It was great timing because I am now starting to look for funding to take the MVP forward. And even if execution is what distinguishes good startups from bad, a jam-packed Trello board aint going to cut it.
The vision, though exciting, had become overwhelming – and totally undeliverable with today’s resources (obviously). Specifically the huge user numbers I was beginning to imagine knocking on my door.
A good walk sorted me out, stripping everything back to purpose and mission. I went back to the pain I faced at bp that led me to start up Familiarize - and the need to help a small number of people in urgent need of pain relief. It’s advice I give to founders all day long, and yet I’d not taken it on myself.
This week I talked to my friend Tom about the way we can become so single-mindedly focused on executing one specific task, that everything else goes out of the window. And then all of a sudden, you realise you’ve lost touch with something else – and it yanks you back to the middle ground.
You can’t really behave like this in a corporate – at least not if you want to be successful. The demands on your time and brain are coming from all sides; there’s a rhythm to the week that forces you to look up, there’s politics all around you that force you to look behind, and if you’ve got a team, you’re probably pulled into their lives quite a bit too.
Supervision from all sides.
It reduces the risk that anyone can unilaterally pursue something for too long, if there’s no support. Hence very few operate at the extremes, most are safe in the middle ground.
And quite frankly, it’s one of the main reasons I left corporate life. I was sick of safety (something you could never say in bp).
“Everything in moderation, including moderation” Oscar Wilde (of course)
It’s pretty good advice for a startup.
Play at the edges, but not for too long, not without half an eye on what else is going on, not without a quick test to see if you’ve done enough (and are now in ‘diminishing returns’ territory, like I was with the vision).
Here’s some ideas to help you become your own (better) supervisor:
Mark your to do list or Trello board with a colour for Urgent, Short-term, Long-term – try to get a balance between these activities each week. Then look back and see if you got the balance right (for you).
Get into the habit of testing the work you do – is this good enough, or good enough for now? We probably had a better sense for this as a boss, looking at someone else’s work or plan, but now we need to do it for ourselves.
Take time, a couple of times a month, to sit and think whether you’re generally getting the right balance. When we allow ourselves to listen to our thoughts we often know whether we’re doing the right things (spiritual man).
Look at whether you’re putting extra energy into something simply to avoid something else. I do this all the time – NB despite all the grand visioning I haven’t actually applied to any investors!
Step into the extremes. Some of us may be spending too much time in the middle ground, dealing with the urgent and short-term stuff. Years of training have made us legendary at this. But building something means we have to push ourselves and live on the edges a bit. Because there lies the innovation. And unlike our previous corporate versions, we might actually be able to act on these ideas and deliver!
Half the fun of this startup life is learning about ourselves; our natural biases, where we get stuck, how we avoid what we don’t like. But also how we can use all this self-awareness to get better, to stretch ourselves and deliver things we couldn’t dream of in corporate life.
The more I think about this, it’s this self-sufficiency, this self-determination, this self-awareness that distinguishes us as entrepreneurs.
There’s no-one else anyway, so we better get used to it. But I suspect it’s yet another area where we can use our corporate training to act as that internal supervisor to balance the internal innovator, to balance time in the middle ground with time on the edges, to achieve great things.