Reflections on Moving the Needle and *Actually* Getting Stuff Done in Life
Use your energy wisely, you only have so much available.
I used to have severe FOMO.
Before FOMO was even an expression I’d heard of.
I was a 23 year old with on a mission, with no idea of what I was doing most of the time. Back then, I was neck-deep in the startup grind. Throwing myself at every opportunity to pitch and talk to investors who could help me make The FoodRoom a reality.
I heard about this big FoodTech event in San Francisco with an investment prize of 100K$. I was good at pitching and I wanted the money very much! The conference was happening the same week as a bunch of other things I had going on, that also required me to travel, and I was dumb enough to think I could make it all work.
And I did…kind of. Barely. But I was crazy, and I never want to do it again.
In the span of eight days, I travelled to three cities, one on the West Coast, drove something like a Thousand KM, wrote and delivered two tremendously important pitches, lost my voice and two suits to ‘’maple syrup in suitcase incident’’, and slept for about 4 seconds.
And somehow, after that week, it felt like I just wasted a week of my life. Nothing came out of it.
When people told me to focus, I didn’t understand how throwing myself at every opportunity was detrimental.
The thing is that you only have a certain amount of energy available every day. You can choose to put all that energy into something or put some of that energy into different things and, hopefully, move multiple projects forward at once.
That’s what I was doing. The sun-looking one — the bad one.
If you spend 100% of your energy on a single project, it’s likely to move in the direction you want it to go. Maybe I should have been speaking with local-ish investors instead of travelling everywhere, spending money I did not have for pitch contests.
For me, this hell week was a learning opportunity; a giant waste of time, energy, and money. I moved my business forward by 0%.
When you are in it, it’s easy to lose sight of what you are trying to do, we often end up wearing blinders. It feels impossible to know what opportunity to pursue, which one will get you there.
I should’ve asked myself: What is the goal, and how does X help me move the needle in the right direction?
Instead of thinking about my end game, I was somehow in Quebec city visiting a space for a 2nd location while the first one was still not built.
Yeah…I know. 🤦♀️
Something that helped me a lot is the journaling habit I picked up since then. A question I started asking more frequently was ‘’what drained me of energy today?’’
Those things usually end up going on my no-no list. That list of things the little voice inside thinks you should not do but do them anyway?
Saying no to opportunities is hard.
But it gets easier once you understand what you want but especially what it is you don’t want.
During hell week? Lots of things I did should have been on that list. But I didn’t listen my the little voice; I didn’t pause to think and reflect on what my priorities are. What is the single most important thing I can do today that will get me closer to where I want to be?
So I did everything, and that was dumb.
I got nothing out of it (except for a mildly okay story).
Don’t do that.
How about you? How do you cut through the noise? What are your methods to decide which opportunities are worth pursuing and which aren’t?
