Month: July 2021

Last week I wrote a post encouraging exploration. This week, we are putting that ethos into action as we will be attending the Dig South Tech Summit in Charleston. It will be our first conference as partners and our first in-person conference in two years. We both attended last year’s virtual version of the same conference in our prior business capacities, but there is something about being in the room with people that videoconferencing just cannot replace. I think we have all found this out over the last year and a half  no matter how much working from home has been great for many people.

Attending conferences like this is going to be a core tenet of our strategy over the coming months—some will be virtual but we plan to be in person for as many as we can. We have both had serendipitous encounters before and hope that some of that magic finds us again. And many of these conferences are in places I want to visit anyway, so I can constructively mix work and play. If you know of any conferences in the entrepreneurial or technological ecosystems, we are open to recommendations.

I do face challenges at meetings and conferences though. It is not natural for me to go up to people and introduce myself. Nor is it natural for me to join a group conversation when I don’t know the other participants. Necessity is the mother of invention, though, and I am trying to build a business here. That means I will make it work. It reminds me of some of the research highlighted in Quiet, a book after my own heart if ever one existed. The research finding is this: even the most introverted person can don the outward features of an extrovert in pursuit of a core personal project. Building my new legal practice is a core personal project, so I know that I have it in me to stretch myself in order to achieve it. There is also a sort of networking mantra for introverts in Quiet that I have internalized: one new honest-to-goodness relationship is worth ten fistfuls of business cards. That isn’t to say that I won’t have my new business cards ready to distribute, but leaving with a few new relationships after the conference is a much more manageable goal for me than to meet half the attendees. 

As for the venue, I wish the conference weren’t in the sweltering July heat but Charleston is a great city to visit. Charleston is not new territory for me, though it has been about seven years since I last visited and I’m eager to try one or two of the restaurants I’ve read about that have opened during the interim period. Through the conference, I will also get to experience one or two of the hotel rooftop bars that should offer great views. The whole journey will be unexplored territory for Bill, so he is excited too.

I went for a walk in one of the state parks near Raleigh on Sunday morning. It was part of my exploration whose goal is to discover the places that I hope will make me feel at home here. The walk itself offered nothing I hadn’t experienced before—a dirt path meandering through a few miles of woodlands with the furthest point on the loop trail overlooking a small manmade lake. I stopped and watched centipedes, frogs, and other small animals, but the stroll was mainly just me and the trees in the cool morning. Being in nature is refreshing, so much so that doctors in Japan sometimes prescribe forest bathing for stress-induced ailments. That wasn’t the best part of the morning, though. Not this day. This day was about seeing new territory, a new park, a new place.

Exploration and goals are essential. I’m sure that I’ve heard Jordan Peterson talk about the subject, but I have felt it directly. When I’m not pursuing something, everything starts to drift and to drift quickly. To my occasional physical detriment (and to the detriment of those who have traveled with me—just ask my family), I have walked and walked and walked and walked in order to see over one more hill or around one more corner. It is a compulsion, something that gives me life.

The events of the past year and a half curtailed much of my exploration of new places. I also let those events limit my exploration of meaningful ideas. COVID limitations continue to dissipate, and I have been jolted by my move to a new place. I want to throw myself into many new things all at once now that I can do so again, but I also know that there must be balance between exploring the unknown and staying within the familiar. In any event, I’m getting antsy.

I know that many other people have experienced similar versions of a quarantined cabin fever. They may not have felt it as acutely as me, but I have discussed the topic with plenty of others. Do something this week to face this problem head-on. Shake up your routine or try something completely new. Maybe it is a hike on a new trail as I experienced this weekend. Maybe it is a new recipe that you saw on a cooking show you watched last week. Maybe it is a new book to read or film to watch. Maybe it is an airline ticket for a trip next spring that you can start anticipating and planning in the coming months. Whatever exploration means to you, do some exploring this week. You’ll be grateful you did.

I watched the final of the European Championships between England and Italy on Sunday. The match was in London in front of a packed Wembley Stadium, the largest gathering of people in England since COVID lockdowns began. The stage was set for an English carnival, and less than two minutes into the game England took the lead. It was pandemonium in the stands. That goal was also England’s only shot on target during the entire match. England’s mentality changed after the early goal and were willing to sit back and defend. Italy grew into the game and bundled home an equalizer midway through the second half and won the trophy on penalties. England had set out a team to make speedy runs behind the Italian defense, but after the goal abandoned this approach. In relying upon what was already achieved, England set in motion its eventual defeat.
 

Watching the game and thinking about it through the evening brought to mind similar ideas that have been percolating through my mind through COVID. One is about the process of writing, an area where I am working not only on this newsletter but also on two other projects that will see the light of day in the coming weeks. It is a short passage from Stephen King’s On Writing. Well, when I looked at the passage again it is really just a parenthetical, but oh well—“kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings.” Editing is hard. It is difficult to look at a sentence or paragraph that you wrote, knowing full well that you wrote it, and cross it out or delete it. Yet editing is also when the muse can make its appearance to sprinkle some magic on the words you write.
 

The second idea that the match brought to my mind is from Seth Godin. He specifically mentioned a law degree when he said it, but the idea doesn’t just apply to me. The idea is this: Sunk costs are gifts from our past selves; our present selves get to choose whether or not to accept those gifts. Easier said than done, but it is a thought-provoking paradigm nonetheless.
 

In my professional life, walking away from litigation, the field where I focused my energies and spent the first years of my legal career, to pursue this corporate practice was the implementation of these ideas. It was me evaluating what I had written into my autobiography, saying thank you, and moving onward to the next phase of my life. The process was not easy: It was so difficult that it took the economy shutting down for months for me to initiate and even then I could only do it in stages, yet it has already been vindicated by our early success.

Turning towards my readers, your business may require a similar process. Perhaps you had an idea of what your product-market fit will be and you expended time, energy, and resources to chase that market. If it turns out that you gain traction in an unexpected niche, then consider turning towards that new opportunity. Maybe you launched a new product that was supposed to take your business to the next level, but something just isn’t clicking with customers. Wherever your business is in its journey, remember to always be iterating, always improving, never resting on success already achieved. If you are unsure whether your business needs to change course, seek the perspective of someone you trust who is not involved in the day-to-day grind. If that is one of us, great. Send us an email and we’ll schedule a meeting. If that is someone else, then reach out to that person (or people). They are likely to be eager to help you in whatever way they can. 

In preparation for an internal strategy meeting this week, I reread a short essay that I recommend to anyone who has any control over his or her own work schedule or over the work schedules of others. It is an essay I have returned to several times and have gained new insights on each occasion. 
 

Quick summary—the standard business schedule is that of the manager. Every hour, there is a new activity or meeting and planning a new activity is as simple as finding the next available open hour in the calendar. Then there are people who make things, people who can spend entire days working on a single project and who need those extended periods of focus to attain true productivity. There are tremendous costs when these makers are shoehorned into a manager’s schedule.
 

When I worked at a large law firm, I was at the mercy of my bosses. If something needed to be done, then I did it on the partner’s schedule. This ruined several weekends, but it also took a toll during the workweek. Since billable hours are the key metric, though, all was well as my number of billables increased as a result of these interruptions. Then there were the weekly status meetings. Few things wreck a morning quite like those. I do my best work in the morning and now block off entire mornings where I don’t even check my email before lunch to progress on major projects. Not checking email was unfathomable in those days, but it was impossible to start a real project before the meetings since I knew I would have to stop, and the meetings were always midmorning. My hours of peak energy were thus spent giving a five minute verbal update that could have been conveyed in an email.
 

Now, there are two of us working together. I left BigLaw sooner than Bill, so I have had more time to detox from that mindset. Our scheduling practices, both individually and as a firm, are something we are still iterating. Some of our differences are personality-based and some stem from the type of projects we are completing. Scheduling in terms of weeks instead of days when possible helps as that mentality allows me to block off one or two mornings a week without impeding our busier meeting schedule or the increasing amount of production work we are doing. I don’t think we have found the proper balance yet, and the balance will shift over time. The benefit of this essay at this juncture is that its language helps us frame our scheduling discussions.
 

To read the essay for yourself, click HERE. If you do, my hope is that at a minimum you gain a better understanding of why certain people have very different work patterns than yourself. You may even want to experiment with your own schedule (to the extent you have the luxury of setting it) to determine whether blocking off half a day or a whole day for a single project helps you reach your larger strategic goals.