Everything is a journey
The concept of being on a journey has always fascinated me.
Here, I’m not referring to undertaking a physical journey, but the evolution of you as an individual: broadening your mindset, learning new facts, opinions, and skills. Discomfort is what I feel when I catch myself dwelling in the past or taking the easy route just to avoid a healthy challenge. The idea that there is an ending point to our learning journey is just not acceptable. The world around us is in constant movement, and there is always something worth experimenting and adopt.
The book Principles from Ray Dalio inspired me to think carefully about my own principles. The first one that I wrote about myself (back in Aug) was:
“It’s better to get something off the ground early, test, experiment, and improve or kill based on results. Always give a chance to the ones willing to try for real.” Action over inaction.
Applied in business, I found myself going the extra mile to support an organization or startup, even with a poor track record, that was willing to try new things to move forward. In my experience mentoring startups, I see projects getting stuck for good happens a lot more often than I initially thought.
A founder, trying to get some coaching, asked me to help brand his project. After digging deeper, the real challenge was the lack of clarity around who the customers were and their exact pain point. As I encouraged him to go back to Customer Discovery, the entrepreneur was convinced that the project he had been working on for years was actually heading into the right direction, with the hope to be successful within a few months. His certainty on unvalidated elements causes him to be stuck. He wasn’t on a journey, he was wishing that luck would strike and get him to move ahead.
The common belief is that entrepreneurs are more agile or flexible. But the next example has shown me how large organizations could possibly move faster than one individual.
A corporation that I have been working with has created several large-scale programs to support its staff in the transformation of its industry. While many thought it was unrealistic to expect lasting change, I decided to jump on the opportunity. It has been a lot of work to deal with different stakeholders across all levels of hierarchy, and it still takes a lot of patience as the onboarding happens almost individually. But after the inertia, there are small wins that we can celebrate and are showing that we’re on the right track. Allowing this massive company to be on its journey is now paying off.
One of my current journeys is about writing and sharing more content. I am awful at both but have decided to give myself a chance. I started this a little over a year ago, writing 750 words notes once in a while, only to get in the practice of sitting in front of my laptop, and putting my thoughts onto the screen. For the past few weeks, with Felix, Bronze, and many more Startup Weekend HK organizers, we’ve decided to write an article a week and publish them on medium. Am I doing great? My articles are still so so — but I enjoy the journey, and will keep working at it!
