Last week saw the first few days and nights of cooler weather here in Raleigh. Daytime temperatures returned to the upper 80s early this week, but there was a glimpse of the onset of my second favorite season (my birthday is in April after all). It is still too early for the kitschy fall activities—picking apples or pumpkins is still a while off and the leaves are still green—but it isn’t too early to get out in the cool morning air that is now with us.

I capitalized on the lower temperatures by listening to extended podcasts while taking long walks around some of the small manmade lakes that double as public parks here. There are paved trails around the bodies of water and nice facilities that anyone can use. I was not the only person on the trails, but I rise early enough that crowds aren’t a problem.

This may not be the best way to walk, sure, but I haven’t found a conversation partner yet so for now these walks provide me time to take in new ideas and then unplug my earphones and reflect. Many of the greatest minds in history thought as they walked for hours at a time. I don’t have the hubris to equate myself with such men, but I can at least emulate them. I really enjoy long walks in crisp air. I’ve had regular walking routes in Cambridge, in DC, and in Charlotte. I haven’t yet nailed down my route here, but I’m sure I will soon. My family sometimes reminds me that they have had to tolerate wind noise picked up through my headphone speaker when I have called them on these walks down the years.

Again, no crazy connections between spurious things I’ve read or watched this week. Just take the opportunity for an early morning or sunset walk this week if the weather is finally turning cooler where you are. Bring a good friend if you can and leave your phones in the car or at home. You won’t regret it.

Traveling to new places is one of my favorite things to do. I have done so alone, with friends and family, and with groups of strangers. This is true even when many of those around me don’t understand why I would ever want to visit certain places. And I see little that will cause my passion for this sort of exploration to abate. Unfortunately, though, events of the past few months have fundamentally changed the situation for the worse in one of the places that I have periodically dreamed of visiting. I understand that few of you ever thought about visiting Afghanistan as a tourist, but I have. I now doubt that that will ever be possible.

I have not followed much of the news coverage—what little I have watched or read seemed more focused on a domestic political blame game than anything else and I see little utility in that. That isn’t what this post is about either. Instead, I will use these events as a case study demonstrating the power of a story in a world inundated with information.

Statistics and numbers don’t register for most people. Our brains just aren’t programmed to comprehend large numbers. But we do latch onto individual stories. The story of a single person is thus more powerful than all the facts and figures in the world. This is why most PowerPoint presentations fail and why the most effective politicians are those who compose the most compelling narratives.

A travel vlogger I watch has visited Afghanistan on multiple occasions and has recorded a series of videos showing a way of life very different than what has been portrayed on our television screens (and sadly, different than what is to come for those same people). He fell in love with the people and the landscapes of the place and his love for Afghanistan shines through in the way he presents his video essays. On each of his trips, he had the same guide, a man with a wife and two young children who spent the last decade as a guide for Westerners visiting Afghanistan. When cities began falling to the Taliban, he went into hiding along with his family. Through the power of those very YouTube videos, he was able to obtain Australian visas and made it out of the country just before flights were halted entirely. From a hotel room in Melbourne, the vlogger and the guide have an interview/conversation about their exodus. It is a different sort of heartbreaking than some of the still images that have circulated, and this is yet another testament to the power of storytelling.

Very few of the people reading this newsletter will experience anything like what has transpired in Afghanistan. That doesn’t mean we can’t extract some learning that we can apply to our own lives. I won’t touch on any of the geopolitical considerations or potential lessons, but instead on the power of storytelling. Whether you are hiring employees, seeking investors, or selling your company, you need to know that you are selling a story. The same is true if you are interviewing for a job and you need to explain why everything that has come before makes you the perfect candidate for this position right now. It is also true within a family or even within your mind as the narrative you craft for yourself can create so much momentum in your forward trajectory, whether positive or negative.  

P.S. If you want to watch the video interview discussing their exit from Afghanistan, it is HERE. If you want to watch a few videos of the same vlogger’s time in Afghanistan before recent events transpired, click HERE, HERE, HERE, or HERE.

Last weekend, I was able to do something I enjoy that I haven’t done in a year and a half. For those of you who have navigated to the attorneys page on our website and read our bios, you may have noticed that I list three sports that I play. This post is about one of them—curling.

Curling has always been my favorite sport to watch in the Winter Olympics. The combination of strategy and precise execution drew me in even as a child. The finer points of why they swept the ice or yelled so much eluded me, but these provide atmospherics if nothing else. I probably could have tried the sport while I lived in Boston, but the thought didn’t even cross my mind and that town is more into its hockey anyway. In DC, I didn’t have a car and so couldn’t easily get to the curling club out in the Virginia suburbs. When I moved to Charlotte, I finally had the opportunity to play. I attended a learn-to-curl event and became a club member that evening.

I eased into the sport only playing a single league during the fall but signed up for two leagues in the spring. In the fall I was the lead on a four-person team, so I got a lot of practice throwing the same shot over and over again (since I threw the first two of the eight rocks my team threw each end) and then even more practice sweeping my teammates’ rocks. It felt like an apprenticeship. In the spring I was the lead on a three-person team so I threw three rocks instead of two and I also played doubles, a different form of the game that requires different and more challenging shots to be successful and that I enjoy more. We may not have been the best doubles team in the league, but we weren’t the worst either. We also had more fun than anyone else, always trying the high-risk-high-reward shots and with an age difference of at least thirty years. The spring season was cut short by lockdowns, just as I was finding my rhythm and improving.

Now I am in a new city with a new curling club, a different schedule, different people, and a slightly longer commute. I have signed up for two leagues this fall and am eager for the season to start. It felt great to be competing again on Saturday, even if it was just a pickup game where everyone was trying to shake off the rust and the real competition was against the expectations I set for myself. Winning wasn’t bad either. Being on the ice again felt like another big step on the road back to a new normal, even if there have been some setbacks in recent weeks. So no exhortation from me this week, no connection drawn between something I saw and something I read. Nope, just some positive news that I was able to do something again that I enjoy and had missed. And if you ever get the chance, give curling a try. Almost anyone can play and it is a lot of fun once you learn the basics.

I listened to Sturgill Simpson’s new album (The Ballad of Dood & Juanita) this week. It lasts about 25 minutes and is really more a single extended song than an album. This is a bluegrass album and follows on the heels of two other bluegrass releases. It is the sort of thing I might listen to once or twice more, but not the sort of project I will come back to over and over like some of his earlier music. This shift to bluegrass music is at least the second turn in Sturgill Simpson’s genre-bending career, and his artistic choices and refusal to chase money through those choices offer a case study applicable beyond the music world.

Listening to the music brought to mind an essay I have read several times, 1,000 True Fans by Kevin Kelly (LINK). Its basic premise is that an artist or creator does not require millions of fans to make a good living, only a small number of thousands who will stick with you no matter what you produce and will keep buying from you. It is a different mindset to chase a small number of superfans rather than to try to please the masses. In many ways it is easier as your most passionate fans will let you know how they feel, and it is easier to respond to even a negative reaction than to ambivalence.

I cannot say I’m a superfan of any musician. I listen on Spotify and attend a few concerts a year but don’t buy vinyl records or band t-shirts. Sturgill Simpson was the last concert I attended, and even at that show I witnessed a version of some fans who had hopped off the bandwagon. As his most recent album at that time was a rock & roll record more than a country record (one that was turned into an anime film on Netflix—how’s that for genre-bending?), one of the couples sitting beside me left after Tyler Childers’s opening set of more traditional country music. Sturgill Simpson’s country records had introduced them to Tyler Childers, but they weren’t willing to join Sturgill on a journey outside of country music to a netherworld between country and rock. Their loss, and it gave me extra room to stretch out too.

The principle of 1,000 true fans applies even outside artistic pursuits. For startups, a small number of true fans becomes a beachhead and those true fans will do more for your company than any advertising campaign could ever hope to achieve. Even Amazon started out as just a bookstore before it upended global retail.

If you are a creator or building a startup, think about how cultivating a small audience is an alternative to trying to be all things to all people. The internet has made distribution easier than it has ever been and there are no longer any gatekeepers preventing you from sharing your work and ideas. If you are a startup, get your MVP ready and take it to your target customers. Then make contact with these first users regularly to solve their problems and develop a core of rabid proselytizers for your product or service. And if you are a fan, support the artists and creators who bring a little joy into your life. Your support allows them to devote themselves to the work and to produce more and better versions of what you enjoy from them.

I have been a member of a gym here in Raleigh for about 5 or 6 weeks now. The format is semi-private training and my workouts are with anywhere from 2 to 5 other people. It is a consistent crowd and we now have conversations while we go through the workouts together. It is the first time in several years that I have performed many of these lifts, but the technique instruction has meant no close calls on injuries thus far. Last week was the first max week under this training protocol. My numbers weren’t great but should improve with better technique and increased flexibility. Even this week, though, there have been benefits from last week’s workouts. Now I have numbers on the board (and there is a massive whiteboard to track each member’s numbers) and benchmarks, things I can look to with an aim towards improvement. Already this week the workouts have been better and more challenging with actual numbers to measure against as opposed to guessing what 60 or 70% of my max would be for the main lifts.

Reflecting on this, I have thought about how I try to extend and can further improve extending this principle to other areas of my life—the success of various methods to attract clients, my Spanish vocabulary, etc. Knowing where you are makes it much easier to try to get where you want to go. You still need to decide where you want to go, but the best map in the world is useless without knowing your present location. This is why those giant maps at malls and theme parks always have a dot that says “You Are Here.”

I encourage you to consider your own little experiment with this principle of measure, aim, improve yourself this week. There are a few steps in the process should you choose to take me up on this. The first is that you have to choose what you want to track. Many people and businesses focus on the wrong things and are counterproductive as a result, so getting this right is critical. If this is your first foray into this sort of thing, I encourage you to start with something really small and easy to measure so you can build the habit. Once you decide what you want to track, you need to actually track that thing. Since this step requires adding something to your routine, it also poses a compliance challenge. Lots of apps and hardware can aid you here, but I’ve found that pen and paper work best for me. The final step in the process is to evaluate the data you have collected. You collected the data so you’d be able to use it, so schedule a time to evaluate the data in advance and block off that time in your calendar. Look for trends, try to see what is working and what isn’t, and see where progress is or isn’t being made. Then make changes to your process or actions as a result of your evaluation. Once you have made some changes, repeat the cycle so that you continue to improve with each iteration.

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.