What Is Your Unicorness?
Uniwhat?
Ian Hogarth of Songkick spoke at Y Combinator’s Startup School in Europe last week and he brought up the idea of unicorness in relation to startups. The way he defines it (with a shout out to Sean Ellis) is this:
Your gratification engine to the power of your growth engine to the power of your economic engine.
He goes on to say that you will become a full unicorn when you get all three of these right and that for every one of these engines that fail, you will lose your unicorness by orders of magnitude. You can watch the talk here.
But the more I thought about this idea, the more I began to see how it translates to our individual career paths as well.
Gratification
If we are gratified by the work we are doing, if we are magnifying our strengths and expressing an authentic version of who we really are, then we will begin to grow and flourish.
Growth
This is when the growth engine kicks in. After an initial period of mastering the core concepts and skills of our chosen endevour, we begin to learn faster and deeper and soon without even realizing it we are witnessing an exponential growth in our capabilities.
And if we are still gratified by the work, if we are still learning at an exponential rate, then we begin to see a return on this investment in the form of more opportunities and higher earnings.
Economic
Here is where things really begin to explode and we see the cycle accelerate. We now have the resources and the know-how and the enthusiasm to become a full unicorn.
This is where we are able to share our gifts with the world in the best and most realized way, because at this high level all of the engines propel each other in a constant re-imagining of what is possible.
Is it easy to get this trifecta right? Not at all. (I am still working on it daily)
Is it worth striving for? Only you can answer that for yourself, but for me the answer is, absolutely.
Kirk Wheeler is the host of Discover The Road where he writes about how to question everything, make progress, and embrace the journey. For ideas about what it means to live an authentic life, join his free newsletter.
