How to get back on track after a year
The last story I’ve written was How to decide to startup back in 20 January 2019. That was 1 year and 4 months ago. Needless to say, a lot has changed with the startup and in my personal life since then. However thanks to my team, we stuck together and we kept working on the company whenever we could spare.
Without them, I doubt I would’ve stuck with my decision to start up. They were the reason I still worked on the company from 11pm to 1am after a long day’s mix of master’s classes, graduate research, and leaving early from salsa socials.
After a little over a year of that, I’m getting back on track with the company starting with this blog post. Below are the steps I will be taking.
Step #1: Understand what happened
Remember how I said I’d drop my master’s degree to pursue my startup? Funny story…
While I was working at my software developer job, I got an email about a graduate research project on AI-assisted systems engineering, which was exactly what Abstract Assembly does.
The timing could not have been more perfect too. See, we weren’t going to be subcontractors on our first customer’s NASA SBIR Phase II proposal until the following year, meaning I would have time to squeeze in a quick 1-year non-thesis master’s degree in systems engineering to boost my credibility and get formal instruction on my business’s area of expertise.
Obviously I accepted, but it came with a catch.
I needed to be a full-time master’s student with a 20-hour/week graduate research assistant job which funded my degree and living expenses. I struggled with juggling classes and research with the commitments I made to my startup and its customers.
And as a result, everything suffered.
Don’t be an octopus, because you’re not. Trying to do everything will make you miserable.
Step #2: Talk to people
During the course of an average week, I’d randomly call a handful of friends. I tried to get a mix of some that I’d always talk to and others I needed to catch up with.
The talks could be about anything, but they all had an odd way of helping me figure out problems with the company. For instance, talking about each other’s love life made me realize the similarities between dating and customer development.
Or sometimes, I’d talk to my best friend Adam. He works for a PR firm in DC and he’s honestly a marketing & PR genius! He’s given me tips about SEO, press releases, op-eds, etc — all of which he’s done professionally. He’s made me much more interested in the subject (and he doesn’t know it, but first chance I get, I’ll hire him in a heartbeat).
Talking to people lets you see problems in new perspectives, even if you weren’t talking about it.
Step #3: Have everyday systems in place
After you’ve understood what happened and you’ve talked to people, you’re ready to start making what I call “everyday systems”. “Everyday Systems” are things you do every single day to achieve your goals.
For example, here are mine:
- Interact with customers everyday
- Commit (to GitLab) everyday
- Exercise everyday
- Read a book everyday
Because each of these MUST be done every single day, they MUST be atomically small.
Interacting with customers can be as small as sending a followup email. Commits to GitLab could be a few lines of code. Exercise can be a short 15–30 min run or weight session. I can read a few pages of a book while I eat breakfast.
James Clear, author of Atomic Habits, writes that 1% better every day results in 37x better over the course of the year due to compounding (1.01³⁶⁵=37.78). The importance lies in the consistency of the effort, not with the impact.
Do small things every day without fail. Ever.
Getting back on track means learning what got you off track, brainstorming the problem by talking to others, and forming atomic everyday systems that ensure you’ll stay on-track.
That being said, I’ll write a new story every week with updates and thoughts from within our space startup.
As always, be sure to visit our website and follow us on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn if you’d like to learn more about Abstract Assembly, our team, and how we’re revolutionizing the engineering design process!
