Month: August 2021

I have been in my new apartment for six or seven weeks now. It took a few weeks to retrieve everything from storage and to have a new couch delivered, but now I have almost all of the furniture and decorations I will have here. I have also finally put up most of those decorations. Some of the elements are in very similar places to where they were in my last apartment; others have found new homes. The only new decorations are handwritten birthday cards from my younger cousins whom I wrote about a few weeks ago. Having new things isn’t necessary. What is necessary is to make the space mine and make me feel at home in it.

The exercise has reminded me of an admonition from Jordan Peterson to make one room in your house as beautiful as possible. The impetus is to bring more of the ideal into your world, to immerse yourself in the ideal as much as possible so that you strive to build that ideal in the rest of your life too. The way my apartment is laid out, the kitchen, dining room, and living room are all combined into one great room. This means I have to do quite a bit, but the effort has placed reminders of people, places, and things I enjoy all around me when I am cooking, eating, reading, or watching television. It would all be better if I kept the dishes clean and put away, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

In a small way, decorating my great room has elevated me. I certainly feel better in there, surrounded by images to conjure memories and paintings I enjoy, than I do as I sit here in my office staring at two computer monitors with a blank beige wall behind them. That probably means I need to decorate my office too, but I haven’t got around to that yet.

So this week I ask that you consider going through the exercise yourself. You don’t need to be as ambitious as to attempt to redecorate your great room. Even beautifying a small reading nook will have a positive effect. And if you have been living in your current residence for some time and have already decorated as you see fit, consider moving a few things around so that you have a different perspective on them when you view them. You may find that the way the afternoon sun hits a piece gives a much more pleasing effect than artificial light can muster.

This week’s reflection is about a rough formula for startup success that I encountered via a podcast. While venture-backed startups now form a large portion of my practice, the formula illustrates a broader principle that impacts other businesses and life more generally.

The formula is this: Idea x Product x Team x Execution x Luck. Your idea includes things like the size of the target market, the growth strategy, and how well you will be able to stave off competition. Your product is your physical product or service, but it is also the entire customer experience. Your team are the few people who are in the trenches with you every day trying to build the business. Execution is probably the most important element, as great execution can overcome a lot of problems. Just don’t work to perfectly execute something that no one wants to buy—do some market research first and talk to your customers regularly. Each of these items warrants its own exposition, but this post is about the final variable in the formula.

Luck is the one thing that is out of your control. The lecturer opined that luck could be any number between 0 and 10,000 and this is entirely at random. One may quibble with the numbers, but that would miss the point. Events completely outside your control can wipe you out (or allow you to find undeserved success). It is a reminder that the stoics were onto something all those years ago—you can only control what you can control and you have to accept the rest.

I have had my own lessons in stoicism in business offered by some rotten luck. In my prior law firm, I miscalculated the size of the potential market and how difficult it would be to gain traction. Those things are undeniable and self-inflicted errors. It is also true that I was starting to find my feet in January and February of 2020 and that maybe I was going to stumble my way into something that worked. Then the world shut down. And that was that. I am in a better place now with a fresh start in a growing business in a new city, but that wasn’t the easiest time. I learned a lot, both about how business really works and about myself. Taking lessons from that time was all I could do; nothing was going to change the fact that the business model I had been striving towards could not work amidst shutdowns.

I know I am not the only one who has experienced something like this. Your experience may not have been COVID-related, but that difference is immaterial. The important thing is the perspective you have while living events and then reflecting upon them. There is nothing to be done about external events. Take the time to reflect on how you managed the things you could control, evaluate how you might change your decision-making process, and move forward to the next thing. Hard though it may be, that is the only option. So best of luck to you my readers, and keep your heads high when the dice don’t roll your way.

Some time ago, I stopped to visit my cousin and her two adorable daughters. As happens on most of my visits, the girls were excited to see me. This was especially so on this occasion as the older one had just celebrated her fifth birthday. After lunch and show-and-tell with all the new toys received as birthday gifts, the girls wanted to go outside and look at their garden. The corn was already taller than them, so they enjoyed walking back and forth in the few rows pretending that their mother and I couldn’t see them. Following that expedition, the older one announced that she wanted to go play on the monkey bars.

The girls’ technique the first several rounds of traversing the monkey bars was to reach out with one hand, grab the next bar, bring the other hand and the rest of the body with it so that both hands were holding that next bar, then repeat the process. It is an intuitive method, but it creates a problem—at each new bar, they came to a stop and had to regain their forward momentum. This requires a lot of strength, strength they don’t yet possess.

I gave some lessons on a new technique using only one hand per bar, continuing to swing forward, and maintaining forward momentum (all with the assurance of me holding them so they wouldn’t fall). The older child was more eager to try this new method, but her sister tried it too once she watched and saw that nothing terrible befell her older sister. The girls understood after a few go-rounds that I had shown them a superior approach, but it will take more practice for this new method to take hold.

Reflecting on that part of the afternoon, it offered a physical reminder of something I have heard in a few contexts—inertia is the most powerful force in the universe. This is not true in a literal sense as demonstrated by something as trivial as our ability to stand up from a seated position, but there is a deeper truth in the saying. After all, inertia was Newton’s first law of motion. Lockdown restrictions forced many things in life to stop, and now that a new normal is emerging, I have found that it takes a great deal of energy to start doing things again, whether that be reading, exercising, writing, or whatever else I want to be doing other than sitting in my recliner watching television. The hardest thing is to begin a new project, venture, habit, etc. Once you begin, you have a positive momentum that will help keep you going. It may not be enough to overcome every obstacle, but at least you will have a chance. This week, I encourage you to make a start at something you have wanted to do during the last few weeks or months. You may find that the act of starting alone takes you much further down the road toward success than you thought you would ever achieve.

As discussed in last week’s post, we attended a conference from Wednesday to Friday. We made some new connections, watched some intriguing startup pitches, had some excellent seafood (or at least I did—it was obvious who was the Southerner and who wasn’t from what Bill and I ordered at restaurants), and I even lost my voice temporarily as a result of trying to have a conversation amidst the din of a live jazz band. The band was great, but a networking happy hour was not the right setting. If anyone reading this is ever a conference organizer, please keep that in mind.

I attended most of the sessions, and they were a mixed bag. A couple were classic death by PowerPoint. Way too much information was packed onto each slide and the text was so small that even the speaker had difficulty reading the text. I don’t understand why people continue to think that even though their own eyes glaze over when they see a slide with a wall of text that they should do just that in their own presentations, but alas.

Sitting through one of the vapid presentations, I mindlessly scrolled through my phone looking for a distraction. Having removed social media and news media from my phone, none were forthcoming. This gave me a few minutes for reflection, so I focused my attention on why I had so little interest in this talk. The idea that I turned over in my mind was this: it is more important to transmit emotion during a live presentation than to convey information or sell an idea. This was an idea that I came across via a podcast and one that runs counter to my own inclinations, which is probably why it stuck with me. The keynote speaker fully embodied this idea. I don’t know if he even had a core message, but I was ready to run through a brick wall after hearing him speak. And while the preceding sentence is hyperbole and the message was about embracing obstacles in order to overcome them, the speaker’s brilliance was the emotion he conveyed through pregnant pauses.

Even in startup pitches, emotion carries tremendous weight. Most pitch decks have the same three or four graphs and you learn to ignore J-curves. Especially at the seed stage, companies don’t often know what their product or their market really is and investors expect this. Investors are looking for people and teams to invest in at early stages. Numbers become more important later, but even then the hard data is reviewed in advance and not during the investor meetings themselves.

I know that many of us don’t give presentations on a regular basis and that almost no one has given a live presentation in at least several months. I also know that I plan to give live presentations in the near future as that becomes increasingly possible. Maybe this post was just a reminder to myself, but I’d like to think that a few readers will benefit as well. Don’t neglect the emotion of an in-person presentation. That emotion can be the most important part.