Connecting the dots looking forward by building a personal vision

This article is part of the Yolo’s diary, a new series of articles that are not particularly meant to anybody but could be useful to anybody. Just look at them as if you were reading some pages of my personal diary. Sorry for the messiness but that’s how my diary would be if I had one.

Life is sometimes beautiful, sometimes horrible, sometimes messy, and most of the time unpredictable.

Most people feel overwhelmed at one point or another about navigating this messy, unstoppable stream of events called Life.

I wrote this article to try to see how I could navigate my life (and mostly my professional one but not only).

First of all, let’s look at some concepts that made me think about this article:

Concept 1: Entropy

The first one is applying the concept of Entropy to people’s lives.

Entropy?

Ok let’s define it quickly by looking at a quick excerpt from James Clear blog post titles Entropy: Why Life Always Seems to Get More Complicated

[Entropy] is the natural tendency of things to lose order. Left to its own devices, life will always become less structured. Sand castles get washed away. Weeds overtake gardens. Ancient ruins crumble. Cars begin to rust. People gradually age. With enough time, even mountains erode and their precise edges become rounded. The inevitable trend is that things become less organized.

This is known as the Second Law of Thermodynamics. It is one of the foundational concepts of chemistry and it is one of the fundamental laws of our universe. The Second Law of Thermodynamics states that the entropy of a closed system will never decrease.

Applied to our lives it goes something like that: as time goes by, the messier our lives become, the more connections we have, the more complicated our relationships become, and the more good or bad impact and influence we have on the outside world:

The passing of time is making our inside-world (the complexity of our mind and spirit) and the outside-world (our connections with others and things) more and more complicated with a growing number of decisions to make.

How do we navigate in this mess?

How can we try to turn things around and use this lack of order in our favor?

Good questions, let’s move on to the next concept. Master-planning 👇

Concept 2: Master-planning

The second concept came to me during a comet’s offsite and a workshop we did about our dream job.

The Idea was to think about our perfect job and where we wanted to be in a few years. I thought about this and it made me think about building my career (and live) path as a Master plan similar to one I admire because of its simplicity: Tesla’s master plan. It was written by Elon Musk more than a decade ago to guide its company’s strategy.

More on this later. Before, let’s move to the last concept which will make this article even more fucked up to you dear reader: product market fit 🤯

Concept 3: product market fit

I know, I know, it all starts to sound like bullshit. Why am I talking about product market fit. OK bear with me for a second.

What does this concept mean? Here’s the definition of Marc Andreessen:

Product market fit means being in a good market with a product that can satisfy that market

A young company will therefore look for a product market fit during its early days in order for it to scale when this fit has been found.

I always like to compare Human Beings as tiny companies.

You are the CEO but you might have also a board of directors that will evolve over time (your parents, your teachers, your kids, your spouse, etc.).

You create wealth.

You pass contracts with other companies (individuals, entities, institutions, etc.).

Well you get it. It does not mean I don’t think we have any Human parts left but on the contrary that because of that, most companies should be more Human. Anyway, I’m digressing sorry 🙃

Back to the tiny company.

Just like a young company, you start your journey by looking for a product market fit, you know more or less where you wanna go but you have no idea about what your product market fit is. You’re looking for it as you grow up.

You can translate Product Market Fit into Self Life Fit.

Self life fit means living in a good life with a self that can satisfy that life and a life that can satisfy that self. Ouch 🤯

So how does all the above concept fit together?

Entropy is making our lives harder and harder to navigate as we grow up because everything becomes more and more complicated. New careers opportunities, girlfriend(s), marriage(s), divorce(s), kid(s), grand children, family disputes, diseases, buying a house, selling a house, etc.

A huge mess.

Therefore, in order to cruise peacefully in this labyrinth, you need tools that can guide you.

Today, I’ll focus mostly on the one that’s starting to guide my professional career but I don’t really like to think about my life as something different than my professional life.

The concept of work-life balance is stupid as it sounds like you have work on one side and life on the other. For me the two are extremely intricate and should be seen as a harmonious whole.

First I needed to find my self/life fit (what do I really like to do as a Human Being?), then I started to build a vision, a mission (my north star, what will guide my main decisions ⭐️), and finally, some kind of master plan to achieve that vision.

This is what became a grand plan that’ll guide me through my life.

Hopefully (just added a reminder 10 years from now).

Companies, and especially startups have all been doing this for decades, and even centuries for the oldest ones. Why not me 🤷‍♂️.

The last two and a half years of my life made me realize that at one point, when you’re mature enough, leaving this erratic path and start to look at a guiding North Star is a better way to embrace opportunities, luck, and decisions you have to make.

The Formative Years or Looking for Self Life Fit

At school and mostly up until mid-2016, I always felt like my path and the decision I took were opportunistic and followed a quite erratic path, which is, in my opinion, quite a healthy path to walk on.

You go to school and the best thing you can do is to explore what you like, put yourself in a discovery, opportunistic mode.

That’s mainly what I did and when you listen to most people, their learning path, is like a very twisted road.

First I wanted to be a fighter pilot, then I realized I was not good enough at sports and the way the Army works would not be my cup of tea (+ thinking about potentially killing people did not feel quite right. I just liked fighter jets…).

Fighter pilot ❌

Being fascinated by fire, I explored the possibility of becoming a pyrotechnic engineer which could lead to jobs ranging from the Firework industry to the Aerospace field. Unfortunately, mathematics was not something I was good at and it made me rethink this option at the end of high school.

Pyrotechnic engineer ❌

So I was 16 or 17 and the daunting vision of having to choose my destiny within 1 year was a bit stressful. I considered medicine.

For some reason, and I can’t really remember why I fell into Economics instead.

It was a Scientific field, something I appreciated, and also focused on Human behavior. That was a good balance of the rational and irrational world. Two extremes I’ve always been attracted to.

These are the years when I started to be interested in high-impact decisions since I was studying Insurance, Monopolies, and other Winner-takes-all theories.

That’s when I learned that you could have power over millions of lives through business, marketing, and Economics with a capital E, meaning the study of resources allocations and how people behave regarding scarcity and these allocations of resources.

That was a true turning point for me. That’s when I understood that money could buy happiness. Not because you could buy anything but because:

1. It buys you time so you can do the things you love
2. It allows you to impact millions of lives with your vision

That’s when I fell into the business world.

But not any business world…passionate about new technologies, I naturally got attracted to the Startup landscape and built some kind of fascination for this universe, which seemed to be fairer, more transparent, and with better values than “regular”, more old school businesses (not sure it’s really true though after being an insider for a few years now…).

That’s when I slowly found my Self/Life fit.

Once again opportunistically, I fell into marketing which seemed to be the perfect alliance of business and Human behavior analysis that helped me to be passionate about what I was doing.

In conclusion, the best thing to find Self/Life fit as an individual is:

Apply the research/hypotheses-build-test-learn framework.

1. Try to make some research about the potential things you’d like to do, and meet people in this industry/position (research)
2. learn the new skills you need to reach that position (build)
3. do this job, find a junior position, become a freelancer or an entrepreneur (test)
4. then start to be critical about it, what does it bring you? Do you feel happy? Do you feel like you could do this for years? (Learn)

Rinse and repeat as needed.

As far as I’m concerned, I found my Self/Life fit pretty early, and here’s how it went:

First, I was interested in medicine, new tech, and helping people be better versions of themselves. That was some hypothesis.

Then, I did some research about a company called Withings, did all my research and assignment during my master’s degree about that company, got interested in product management, met a PM working at Withings, a tech company, and realized I liked that job.

This led to me doing my internship at Withings to test my assumptions.

Finally, after my internship as a PM, I, opportunistically, ended up doing marketing which was something I did not know I liked but still loved it because I was more interested in the mission of the company: helping people be better versions of themselves, therefore working for a company having a true and measurable impact on people.

At that time I realized that having found this Self/Life fit was not enough and naturally, without even thinking about it, right after quitting Withings and thinking about what could come next, I realized that a vision was needed in order to guide me towards the things I wanted to do. This vision was needed to make decisions, to grab opportunities, to say no to some, and yes to others. I needed this as my North Star

Building a vision

Building a vision is probably the hardest thing to do.

But don’t worry, you won’t even realize you’re doing it.

You have to come up with something that reflects who you are and who you want to become, what you want to add to this world and how you want to influence it, it has to be something quite big and somehow unattainable so that you can do the extra mile.

The question I asked myself was pretty easy: how do I want people to remember me after my death?

I’m not saying that you should live a certain way just for the sake of people remembering you a certain way but just because doing this mental exercise helped me to build that vision.

This does not have to be something grandiose or completely unrealistic, it could be extremely personal like “I want people to remember me as the most xxxxx and xxxx person they have ever met” or dedicated to a more precise thing like “I want people to remember me for being the best xxxx in town” or “I want people to remember me for being the most xxxxx person”. It’s always better to use superlatives as it’ll help you go the extra mile and take the right decisions.

I’m not advocating the cult of the extra performance or of surpassing oneself. I’m sure you can live a very simple life and be happier than someone who always wants to be the best. But, this is not incompatible with that vision-building.

Your vision could just be something like, I want people to remember me for being the best mother, or I want people to remember me for being the nicest person.

I have strictly no idea or process to find one's vision, it’s something that you’ll build over the years and at one point you’ll have some kind of eureka moment that will make it clear what you want to do and achieve in your life.

For me, this happened right after quitting my first job. Quitting a job and the following months are usually dedicated to some kind of discovery/introspective period.

Not knowing exactly what you want to do and reflecting upon this, is probably the best way to find your vision.

For 6 months I thought about either launching my own company in the insurance landscape or joining an early stage venture.

In order to choose I deeply thought about what I wanted to achieve by picking one choice or the other.

After a while, the answer became clearer and clearer: I wanted people to remember me for reinventing (or at least trying to reinvent) the most important experiences of their lives such as Work, Finance, Education, Housing, Transportation, etc.

This did not come from anywhere but from a reflection I had one day while walking around in Paris with a beer in my hand.

(Yes beer walks, as I call them, are usually pretty intense introspection moments for me)

I asked myself a simple question:

Why, when we grow up, do we lose our childhood spirit, naiveté, and I-can-do-anything way of thinking? Why do we lose this crazy creativity?

The answer is pretty complex and I clearly don’t know it but intuitively I can comfortably say that education, pressure from society, financial constraints, the need to adapt to a complex world, and various fears surrounding our adult lives are responsible for losing this creative mind.

And god knows how this creativity will be important for us in the future. Please read this article by Dustin Timbrook: Want Your Children to Survive The Future? Send Them to Art School.

The question I came upon was: how can we try not to kill this creativity while growing up?

The answer to this question would become my vision.

My vision is to reinvent experiences or create new ones in order for people to live a simpler life allowing them to focus on and/or enhance and sustain their creativity as they grow up. Creativity is a jewel that we need to maintain as we age.

Build Your Master plan

When you have your vision, it’s pretty easy to start thinking about your master plan.

But what is a master plan you’re starting to wonder?

I guess if you do, you did not click on the link about 67 paragraphs above 👆

I discovered this concept thanks to a pretty well-known entrepreneur

Elon Musk

Yeah that guy 👇

More than 10 years ago he wrote this crystal clear master plan for Tesla → Tesla’s Master Plan Part One

This is a super simple, macro plan to reach tesla’s vision which is as Musk said:

[…]the overarching purpose of Tesla Motors (and the reason I am funding the company) is to help expedite the move from a mine-and-burn hydrocarbon economy towards a solar electric economy, which I believe to be the primary, but not exclusive, sustainable solution.

And here’s the plan:

1. Build sports car
2. Use that money to build an affordable car
3. Use that money to build an even more affordable car
4. While doing above, also provide zero emission electric power generation options

As you can see it’s pretty easy and straightforward.

So this brought me to designing my very own master plan that should guide my entire personal life (and especially my professional one).

Yoann’s master plan

1. Only work for companies aligned with my vision (Withings & comet so far) ✅
2. Gain entrepreneurial experience (done thanks to comet) ✅
3. Make money (investment, exit, side projects, etc.) in order to become self-sufficient ✅
4. [UPDATED 2022] Build an investment company that’ll help people build a better financial future for themselves. Money is a fuel that needs to be more widely available. Try to generate as much revenue as possible in order to reinvest it in the business.
5. Leverage these revenues to build a conglomerate around that company in order to buy, build, invest in companies re-inventing experiences or creating new ones in order for people to live a simpler life allowing them to focus on and/or enhance and sustain their creativity as they grow up (education, finance, work, housing…).

Hopefully, when you solve these kinds of issues, you also create positive externalities for the environment and society at large.

And yes, I left on the side everything related to family, love, etc. that’s another article’s topic but when you look at it, all the above will also help me to take personal decisions. For instance, I could not marry someone who’s against that vision.

It’s that easy.