Instead of Reacting, We Should Always Be Telling Our Stories.

At the beginning of every idea is the purest state of the entrepreneur. Regardless of whether the idea is a great one, the story you have to tell is an unadulterated version of yourself. It’s a spark that no one else handed down, uncluttered by others’ opinions, untainted by all the adulthood that happens when you turn idea into execution. The excitement of this story is what allows you to recruit talented developers when you can’t compete with market rates, what compels your first angel investors to take the plunge, what gets your early adopters. No matter what anyone tells you about valuations, metrics, and growth, none of them ever replace your story’s importance.

Then you put idea into action, and before you know it, you see what looks like a huge mistake:

To ensure crippling anxiety, enable all your Slack notifications.

Unread emails start piling up 50 at a time with meetings and support tickets. Your team slack notification badge never stops flashing for long. No matter how you goad yourself to do otherwise, you react to everything because you’re a responsible entrepreneur that takes total ownership, afraid of something important slipping through the cracks. You take Pomodoro-style breaks and meditate, but these only serve as distractions. You’re firmly back to reacting once you’re back.

This tends to work well in the short term. Your team loves that you’re on the ball and always reachable. Your customers love that the founder gets back to them. You land some deals because you hustle faster and harder than the monoliths.

Before you know it, you start suffering some of these symptoms: You’re waking up with anxiety about the flood of bold text in your gmail. You’re adding new features to appease stakeholders. When you try to recall your company’s story, it’s become a mutation of the original version, with new oddities and a focus on buzzwords and titles. You rationalize it as “maturity”.

Kill Your Darlings

Being reactive eroded my story many times. I started getting pulled in different directions by all the other stakeholders. My story was longer mine. It was a pitch, catered to the audience and circumstance. As Scott Belsky said, you should always kill your darlings, the plot points and characters that detract from a novel. But…how to do?

Solving Comes Last, Not First

Tony Robbins has a daily process for problem solving that ends, not starts, with strategy. He transitions from State to Story and only then, finally to Strategy. Let me butcher it real quick:

1) Get into a positive mental and emotional state before you do anything;
2) Tell the story of what you will accomplish;
3) Strategize how to solve the problems.

#1 is old hat, but I’d never heard #2 talked about as a daily tool before. Instead the furthest I’d gotten was getting into a good state, then jumping right back into my shark-infested inbox.

After reading about his process, I knew it was time for this JT to try bringing story back. I decided I would start every morning with a positive state, tell a clear story, before finally using that story to prioritize my day. During state and story, I would not respond to anyone or anything online.

Here’s an example of a story that manifested during this exercise:

“We’re going to make our clients’ jaws drop and give them friggin butterflies when we deliver their designs. This is how Topflight will reach it’s highest potential.”

Notice that my story focused on design even though we’re a development firm. So why did I choose this as our story, and how did this story impact #3 how I strategize?

10x

I realized there were a ton of ways that we can grow by 10% but not so many where we can potentially grow by 10x (without getting into a hiring bloodbath). When I evaluated our clients’ visceral reactions to our designs, I remembered the very unfortunate but true cliche: 99% of our clients don’t care how you get it done, just that it looks good and it gets done right. Because of this, development will always be more of a bloodbath than design.

The Story Became My Daily Filter

As for how this impacted the rest of my day: after storytime, I re-open my Hydra of To-Dos, and I try to prioritize the top 3 things to do based on the story. I promise to spend at least 2 hours on the top 1 thing today.

Of course, there was swift collateral damage. Our small but scrappy design team could only handle a handful of design projects at a time, posing a bottleneck for development. We also de-prioritized clients that didn’t assign premium value to great design.

But check the flipside:

1. We overdelivered on 3 app designs within a month that we believe our clients can raise money with. These jaw-dropping design prototypes could get Topflight in doors we couldn’t squeeze toes into before, and could definitely be the seed to 10x-ing.
2. I now know that if I don’t get back to a potential client right away, that’s ok. I now know that even though we may not get to do everything we think may add value for our clients, the bigger reward is getting to find out in what single way we can help our clients the most.
3. After being forced to delegate more, I now know that my team is fully capable of doing just about everything I thought I had to do myself. Now I can focus more on what ways I can further add value to the company. Exhibit A: I’m blogging again.
4. Most Important: this has extended my runway significantly. With this story serving as a filter for what I pay my attention to, I’m so much happier and have so much more energy to pour into the work, even though the clock says I’m still spending just as many manhours as I did before. My biggest fear with hyperfocusing was that I would get less done. This was completely unfounded, as I was now getting more things done over the course of the week.

My Humble 2 Cents:

My advice to all our clients and any entrepreneur that’s feeling pulled in too many directions or on the verge of burnout: let your story guide your day, and not your day guide your story. This approach is not an avoidance of reality. The events of the day should not be ignored or rationalized. After all, you may stumble upon a situation, a client, a customer that rightfully changes everything. But that’s for tomorrow to judge, when you’re going back through the events and recalibrating them. 9 times out of 10, they’re not as important as they seemed.

For today: let you and your story be the master.