Shaping opportunities
A world of opportunities
🧠 Top 3:
- There are plenty of opportunities out there, eager to support and help learn.
- How to find them? By filtering, modifying, curating feeds, newsletters, community memberships to feature content in line with interests.
- The act of engaging in the process can teach a lot about the goal. The fun on the way can keep the drive alive.
Little Hands
As I signed up for Mailchimp to send out my first newsletter I started getting their newsletter too. I was surprised to see they have some sort of movie thing going on, and so I viewed a few trailers. These words came up in one of them:
“Be fully committed to doing something, then a thousand little hands appear out of nowhere and help you” Check it out here at minute 3.39.
Resonates!
I’ve been on this 2020enterpreneur path and as I keep going along I feel so many others with me, obviously or not, wading through the swamps and cutting through the jungle.
I want to share 2 big “little-hands” of the past few months:
- Digital Shapers: a 12-week digital business challenge: 5 teams of 6 people each made up of developers, designers, data scientists and business visionaries to work on a task given by one of the partner companies of the challenge under the mentorship of McKinsey. I met my team one February weekend when the 6 of us were assigned to team Bertelsmann. Our challenge: coming up with a more playful way to improve their Video on Demand recommendation system. We went off to different parts of Europe and continued working online. Corona turned those 12 weeks into 16+, and one final presentation into two. We became a team-team and had a challenge, and it was an amazing place to pour our after work, lockdown hours and create a product from scratch. During that first weekend, I asked my team if I could take the role of project managing, and so I got a chance to try things out, practice and polish — team dynamics, people engagement, stakeholder communication and alignment, week in week out, one step at a time. I am proud of where we got and what we built in this time.
- Female Founder School: workshops and sessions to support and empower a community of female founders through the process of growing an idea into a company. I found Female Founder School on Elpha, which is another pretty amazing tech community for women. I saw they were offering a free one week workshop for Aspiring founders (which is an awesome name to not scare anyone away). I was intrigued and not scared away, even though I still have some steps to take before I could call myself a founder. For a week I met with a group of women for an hour in the evening, we listened to a bit of theory, did a couple of exercises, both in terms of business as well as mentality. Most importantly there I was, poking into my shy ideas and silent hopes, sharing them loudly and feeling supported and encouraged. It was so insightful and motivating, especially seeing other women work through this at different stages of the process, talking and sharing. Here I am, excited to get even more involved, and feels like a great way to pad this pursuit that 2020enterpreneur has been.
A little spark to start
So how did I find these two opportunities? I hardly remember how, I must have stumbled upon them while browsing the internet. A little something got my interest, led me to fill a form, apply, reach out. Just one of the many. And a form turned into an engagement, and so a spark that grabbed my attention on some random feed became a bank of knowledge poured into my mind.
There is a joke about some dude who prays day after day, about wanting to win the lottery. And he keeps going to church diligently praying, asking to please please just win.
Prayer after prayer he resiliently keeps asking for that big time lottery win.
One day he comes into church and starts his usual: “Please please, oh if I were to win…”
Suddenly Lightning and Thunder, and a deep voice resonates through space: “Man, cmon, at least buy a ticket”
So, here I am buying tickets, by pursuing that spark of interest (with a much better win rate too).
Well, I didn’t expect to make it for the Digital Shapers: just a form, one of the many, I am one of their many, they are one of my many. The goal was not the aim then, but to have fun while signing up, to learn something new while answering the questions necessary, to think something through while completing the assignments.
Point of the story, thus, is the process of finding these hands. To seek out those hands playfully. The act of engaging with the process is part of the commitment to the goal. It shows the commitment from the quote up top. And then
🙌 🙌 🙌 🙌 🙌 🙌 🙌 🙌 🙌 🙌 🙌 🙌 🙌 🙌 🙌 🙌 🙌 🙌 🙌 🙌 🙌 🙌 🙌 🙌 🙌 🙌 🙌
eagerly, share
and I learn.
A few links:
- 🌍 2020enterpreneur website,
- 💰 gimme Patreon.com or Paypal,
- 🎁 submit an entrepreneur project idea here,
- 🙌 can I be your little hands? Let me know how!
