Good Decisions Require Mental Space
Raise your hand if your first action upon waking up each morning is to reach for your phone.
Earlier this week I had the pleasure of giving an address to graduates of the Faculty of Health Sciences at The University of Sydney. As I said to them, healthcare will experience enormous change in the coming decades and this change will create significant opportunities. At H2 Ventures we see great opportunities to invest in the health tech startups that will drive this change by leveraging the power of data and artificial intelligence.
I’ll spare you the full speech, but here’s a little excerpt from it on mental space:
In venture capital investing, timing is consistently rated as one of the most important factors determining the success of a startup. This applies equally to most areas of life, which is unfortunate because timing is largely out of your control.
However, you can increase the odds of having timing on your side by allowing yourself the mental space to read widely, to think, and to enable the major trends going on around you to inform your decision making. For example, don’t take a job at a company that is facing industry disruption, instead, work for one of the disrupters, for it is far easier to be successful when you have the wind at your back.
One of the little hacks I have started using to create mental space is to avoid looking at my phone each morning until I get to my office. It’s amazing how clearly and widely you think before you allow yourself to get caught up in the minute details of the day ahead. I encourage you to give it a try next week and if you do, please let me know (in the comments) how you find it.
