Author: James David (Page 24 of 25)

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.

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.

This week I want to introduce a YouTube channel that I found recently and have thoroughly enjoyed. The channel is Great Art Explained (LINK), and the premise of the channel is to explain a piece of artwork in a fifteen minute video. While the concept may be highbrow, the channel has over a quarter of a million subscribers so I’m not exactly on the cutting edge in discovering it. 

I have watched videos about Mona Lisa, Guernica, The Great Wave, and The Raft of the Medusa. There are others on the channel. The videos analyze the paintings themselves (elements of composition, materials, lighting, and color are discussed), but more interesting to me is that the paintings are contextualized. I knew that Guernica was Picasso’s attempt to display war’s senseless violence and that I walked into the Reina Sofia with the sole purpose of seeing the room-sized canvas (I had my parents do the same thing when they visited Madrid—the De Goya paintings in the Prado are more to my liking), but I had no idea that the image had become such an enduring symbol across many conflicts in the century since Picasso painted it. I now also have a better understanding of how seismic a shift in painting Mona Lisa was, but this alone didn’t satisfy me concerning just how long I had to maneuver through the crowd in order to see the painting up close for myself at the Louvre. 

I doubt that high-school me would have enjoyed these videos, but college me might have benefited from watching them before seeing some of the works which are their topics. Now maybe in the coming months there will be a video on Jackson Pollock—some context there might help me justify some of the minutes I have stood befuddled before his finished canvases.