 One of my favorite TV shows for a while was The Walking Dead.
The zombie apocalypse premise makes for such good drama because it poses the question, “What would humanity look like if civilization were to crumble to nothing?” In times of crisis, some people might rise to extraordinary levels of virtue. Many others may descend to the darkest depths of depravity. The Coronavirus pandemic we are currently experiencing gives us a real taste of that dystopia. Stock markets are tumbling, paper products are disappearing from store shelves, and we seem on the brink (or in the midst) of mass panic. What can you do to remain calm in the face of crisis? Of course, this question is relevant even absent the Coronavirus. Startup entrepreneurs face existential danger seemingly weekly. People endure crises in their personal lives and careers regularly. What are the best practices when you are gripped by fear and entangled in anxiety? 1. Zoom out to the macro level Up close, everything looks crazy. My kids like to freak each other out when they stare at their scalps up close. Zoom out to a normal level, though, and it’s just hair. At the atomic level, electrons are whizzing about furiously. With our human eyes, all we see, though, are static objects. I would imagine that from the International Space Station, life on Earth must look quite placid. From a distant exoplanet, our solar system must seem downright dull. We must guard against our myopic tendencies by taking the long view on the things that matter. Warren Buffett has famously built the most successful investing career of all time on his ability to remain steadfast when others panic. The Coronavirus in the US seems scary. Right now. How must it have felt to have been trapped in Wuhan, China just 4 weeks ago? Post-crisis, the Chinese populace seems rather unfazed. So when you feel yourself spiraling into fear, take broader context. See not the latest drop in your roller coaster life. See instead the amusement park of living, full of variety — exciting parts and boring parts, risk and safety. 2. Embrace the stress Crazy, right? Who in the world wants to embrace stress? In fact, a certain amount of stress makes life fun, and without it, we would actually be miserable. I once played a round of golf betting a mere $1 per hole with my playing partner; prior to that, I had never played golf with any money on the line. The financial risk was, of course, de minimis, but the fun factor rose by 10. I remember Serena Williams admitting in an interview that she feels butterflies every time she walks onto a tennis court for a match. The day she doesn’t feel butterflies? That’s the day she quits the sport. Because she’ll know then that there is no intrigue left for her in the sport. When my Dad and I ran our family business together (and crap was routinely flying into the blades of every conceivable fan), my Dad would say to me, “I love stress!” I would look at him with incredulity, but all I would get back was his warm smile. “Stress is good for us,” he explained. “I experience stress every day. I’m used to it.” At the time, I would find his reasoning completely unpersuasive, but I realize now that that my Dad preferred to own his stress. Imagine getting over your need to avoid stress in your life and instead welcoming it in. Imagine dancing with Fear and seeing Apprehension as a good, rather than evil. Once you do so, you can quit worrying and instead roll up your sleeves and get to work. 3. Reassert control Stress is one thing, but worry is another. Worry is the unproductive by-product of stress. When I think of “worry,” I think of hand-wringing. What good does hand-wringing do? Nothing. So the main thing to do when you’re feeling stress or anxiety is to take matters into your own hands and reassert control. You only need 2 ingredients for asserting control: devising a plan and taking action. If you’re worried about your business, employment prospects, your stock portfolio or even your health, come up with a plan and spring into action. There is no sense in just sitting there and wallowing in the enormity of it all. And once you make your plan and take action (e.g., purchasing groceries, asking friends for supplies, making important calls relating to your business), then tie yourself to the mast à-la-Odysseus, and brave the storm. You don’t want to flip-flop between action plans once you’ve set one in place, especially the more severe the crisis. That said, it is fair to reevaluate your plan after a reasonable period. But know that our human tendency is generally to lose faith rather than to keep it. * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * In writing up these thoughts, I definitely don’t want to come across as preachy and as minimizing the stress that is out there. In life wisdom as in physics, for every morsel of advice, there seems to be equal and opposite advice. We are told “Stay the course!” but we are also told that “Only the paranoid survive!” So I wouldn’t fault anyone for freaking out just a bit right now with the Coronavirus crisis. But I would encourage you to wash your hands rather than wring them, embrace your family and your fears, and as you Zoom into meetings, remember to zoom out enough to see the lush forest from the prickly trees. After all, I’m quite certain we’re still pretty far from the zombie apocalypse.
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 The zeitgeist of Silicon Valley can be sampled at any time by dipping into the phrases-du-jour and examining one like a novel specimen.
One such phrase is “forcing function.” A forcing function is simply an event that virtually guarantees another event to occur. An example would be me declaring that I will write at least one blog post per week (which I am absolutely disavowing) to all of my coachees and friends. Another example would be me rendering my pantry devoid of all potato chips so as to “force” myself into eating healthy. Forcing functions work. For that reason, I highly recommend them! If you’re finding yourself low on willpower, set up a forcing function so that the absence of will is irrelevant to you achieving your goals. Some of the most successful people in life are masters at setting up their environment, such that everything forces them into only the most optimal behaviors. Think Olympic athletes and world-class performers. Their lives are highly regimented, such that free will is sparely exercised in their day-to-day lives. Hacking your environment this way removes weakness from the equation. At a moment of high motivation, set up a forcing function. Then when the moment comes, and you are drained of discipline, you will have no choice but to follow the righteous path you wisely pre-configured. Making public declarations, sourcing accountability partners, and ridding our environment of temptation are all examples of forcing functions. Use your better self to force yourself into the right moves, and you might unlock a whole new level of functioning.  As the credits to the movie “Parasite” rolled, I wondered, “How did the writer, Bong Joon-Ho, compose such a grand masterpiece?”
I conducted some quick research and learned that the movie was at least several years in the making. In 2013, while working on a similar-themed movie titled “Snowpiercer,” Bong Joon-Ho was encouraged by a theater friend to write a play version that also centered on class conflict. Bong then proceeded to write a 15-page treatment that became the basis for Parasite. His production assistant then turned that treatment into three drafts of a screenplay. The final act of the movie (no spoilers here) revealed itself to Bong, as he stood at a crosswalk in Vancouver some time later. Parasite was a natural and gradual build-up of Bong’s interest in the theme of class inequality, beginning with a small 15-pager, further developed by a collaborator, and capped with a good ending a long time later. In other words, Parasite was not a 120-page screenplay that came to Bong Joon-Ho like a bolt of lightning. Rather, it accumulated like a tumbleweed of notes, thoughts and mini-efforts, ultimately manifesting in a project that could then be further honed. That is the evolutionary sequence of most objets d’art. A fertile context receives an organic seed that, with a few basic and logical steps, blossoms eventually into a spectacular flower that seems impossibly related to its ordinary roots. Our difficulty in comprehending the banality of accomplishment likely stems from a cognitive shortcoming. As humans, we simply cannot grasp the magnitude of exponential compounding. If you could fold a piece of standard copy paper in half, how thick would it be? If you could theoretically fold it again on itself, how much thicker (and taller) would the resulting paper be? Clearly, the paper would still be miniscule in height. But how many times would you have to fold the piece of paper until it’s thick enough to span the distance from the Earth to the moon? Hang on to you hats, here is the answer: only 42 times (hat tip to Douglas Adams). Don’t believe it? Check out this video. It is my belief that our brains simply can’t crunch that math. We are missing a bit in our processing unit that makes this math intuitive. It just doesn’t jive with us that a paper folded on itself 42 times would be as thick as the distance between Earth and the moon. Yet that is mathematically correct. Our inability to grasp exponential growth is also perhaps why we don’t intuitively grasp the idea of compound interest (something none other than Albert Einstein dubbed “the eighth wonder of the world”). This explains why we are similarly stumped by the power of compounding when evaluating skill. Imagine an amateur magician practicing sleight-of-hand card tricks. At first, the magician is clumsy, revealing their obvious techniques. But after decades of practice, the magician has mastered their craft. What was once a lame parlor trick suddenly looks like, well, magic! This is true for skills across the board. When Roger Federer effortlessly lands a tennis ball within a 4-inch window past his opponent, when Alysa Liu lands a quadruple lutz as graciously as a swan gliding on a lake, we are awestruck by the magnitude of their skill. When Bong Joon-Ho types the last period of his screenplay, we wonder how he ever imagined such a fantastical universe of characters and plot twists. But it is actually explained as a long sequence of skills that naturally compounded on themselves. We think of greatness as binary — you are either great or you are not. But greatness is gradual — you work your way from unskilled to masterful over a serious of a million strokes. At some point, your skills tip over from “meh” to “woah.” When we are in the presence of greatness, it feels like magic. Flip between nearly identical cartoon drawings, and I can piece together an idea of motion. Cycle through millions of illustrated images at 30 frames per second, and I am watching Toy Story. For mere mortals who wish to achieve greatness, it is critical that we remind ourselves to just keep rowing in the same direction. When digging an underground tunnel out of jail, it probably matters more that you keep digging in one direction than that you even dig in the right direction! Staying the course, you will eventually break out of the perimeter that ensnares you. The necessity of perseverance in compounding skill also explains why it’s so helpful to discover and pursue your innate passions. How can we sustain our interest in building a skill unless we care almost irrationally about it? If 9 out of 10 wannabes drop out of ever wanting to become a great diver/balloon artist/ screenwriter, the key is to be that 10th person who says with a dumb grin, “This is fun, isn’t it?” The only way to sustain yourself through the boring parts of getting good at any skill is to have an unreasonable drive to continue to get good at it. When skill-building, switching costs are extremely high. The writing of this blog post is a product of the same path. My post here is a culmination of so many years of thinking about what makes greatness, and I’m still trying to figure it out. What makes people great — is it skill, luck or something else? So far as I can tell, greatness is mostly little more than the by-product of that most unremarkable of forces: compounding effort.  In all likelihood, you are a mental laborer.
Like a manual laborer — say, a mason mortaring and laying bricks — you are tasked every day with laying mental brick upon mental brick, applying adhesive, and building something of substance. Frankly, if I were a mental bricklayer, I’m not sure I’d hire myself to build a 2-foot wall. My daily “job site” probably looks like 3 or 4 bricks half-heartedly tossed about, with the mental laborer almost always out on a really long snack break. Now, ask me to build a physical wall, and I’m champing at the bit. I find that I pour myself into physical tasks — rearranging storage cabinets in my garage, fixing door hinges in my house — with total verve. Mental tasks? Can’t find the nerve. I look on with some amount of envy when I see others handling mental tasks with the stamina of a true workhorse. I first noticed these types in law school. My class was so chock-full of them, I began to wonder if I was the only “stallion” who yearned to roam the plains free, unencumbered by work demands. I saw more of this type when I worked at a law firm. That’s probably when I realized legal practice was not for me. What’s the fun in producing mounds of corporate documents, torturing English grammar to an unspeakable degree? (Apologies to those who practice corporate law for a living. Honestly, if I had any choice in the matter, I’d rather have the capacity to grind that you do). It is a frightful thing to be a mental dilettante in a world where mental labor is your bread-and-butter. The solution, it seems to me, is to find that set of variables — the why, what and how of your work — that, of course, makes it seem least like work. I’d equate one’s daily productivity to an electrical circuit with numerous potential resistors. I try to set up my day so that I deal with the least amount of resistance possible. I apparently only have so many amps I can pump through the circuit at a time. So what do I do? To get into the flow of my work, I hack my workflow. For one, I “journal-as-I-work.” This means I keep an iPad for journaling, right next to the laptop where I do my actual work. I begin my day by opening up a new journal entry on my iPad. If I don’t feel like working, I journal about that. I let the journal handle my extraneous thoughts, like a mental clearinghouse that keeps my work circuit clear of as much resistance as possible. Finding the right tooling — as for any craftsman — is key. Find the writing/journaling app that works for you. I like the apps where the entire screen can be rid of toolbars, and where one sentence is highlighted at a time as I write. I also like writing apps with password protection, so that I don’t have to be self-conscious as I write. I also focus on completing only 4 important things each day. In my journal, I will write something like, “I should really email Sam today.” I will then stop journaling and hopefully attack that one email on my laptop, then report back in my journal: “Done!” Part of what I’m doing here is delegating executive function. Entrepreneurs do not really have bosses, so you, in effect, have to create your own boss by depersonalizing your executive function. Your journal is now your boss. You are still working for yourself, but you’re not trusting your dilettante side to be on the same playing field as your mental laborer side. Whether it’s working off-site, working with music, working with accountability partners, or journaling-while-you-work (my own term of art), your first task as a mental laborer is to affirmatively design your workflow. This blog post itself is a manifestation of my workflow today. I knew I wanted to capitalize on the recency and impact of my latest blog post about Kobe Bryant, so I recused myself from home early on a Saturday morning, typed on my iPad in the comfort of my favorite coffeehouse (aka my country club), and journaled as I wrote this. Taking a step back to review my handiwork today, I think I can safely say to myself that — thanks to my workflow — my work today is less bric-a-brac and more real tangible substance.  I was sitting at my computer at work, sifting through emails, eyes somewhat glazed over, when my pulse suddenly quickened.
“Conflict check — Kobe Bryant.” I knew what this meant, even as a green first-year Associate at the law firm of Munger, Tolles & Olson in Los Angeles. It was access to these very deals that inspired me to join this firm over any other in the country. I immediately emailed Rob, the partner on the deal. Apparently, I had won the fastest fingers competition. “You’re in. Stop by my office and let’s discuss.” The deal, it turned out, was for the purchase by Kobe Bryant of Olimpia Milano, the Italian basketball team for which Kobe’s Dad played. Having grown up in Italy, Kobe’s purchase of this team represented his success and the closing of a circle from his youth. Working on the Kobe deal represented a notch on the belt of my career too. Having graduated from Harvard College and Harvard Law, and having worked as an investment banker and now as a corporate attorney, working for Kobe was a milestone — maybe the capstone — of my gilt-edged career. The experience did not disappoint. I remember the first time I met Kobe. I had arrived at the Brentwood offices of super-agent Arn Tellem. No sooner did the doors to the lobby of SFX Sports swing open than my eyes were immediately drawn to the unmistakable figure of Kobe Bryant. It was 1999. I had just graduated from law school and the fabled Lakers were on the heels of another impressive decade. Having grown up in LA, I was a diehard Lakers fan. And maybe it was his name, appearance, international background, or the way he carried himself, but somehow as an Asian-American, I always felt an affinity for Kobe. His universal relatability has always been part of what makes him special. Kobe was also the crown jewel on a team in ascension. In a city of stars, Kobe was clearly on the path to shining brightest. And there he was, sitting on a sofa, signing his autograph on basketballs — two at a time — with his right and left hand. A coterie of handlers was handing him balls to sign as he capably did his work, smiling and cheerily engaging in conversation all the while. I’ll never forget that image of him. He appeared legendary, even signing autographs. When the time came to meet with Kobe, he was as gracious as you’d hope an idol to be. He treated me as a person of importance, even though, in his world, I was really nothing more than a cog in a corporate wheel. As I sat in the SFX conference room, along with Rob Pelinka, Arn and others, Kobe sat engaged and attentive as we went over the admittedly boring particulars of the deal. He was only 21, and I was only 26. He was at the top of his mountain, and I was near the top of my hill. As Kobe signed the endless closing paperwork, I joked that I should add a few basketballs for him to sign additionally. He laughed heartily (and perhaps obligatorily) at my joke. I’ll always be grateful to him for that. Over the years, I knew Kobe less as a corporate signatory and more as the Mamba. After my brief encounters with him as the corporate attorney working on the Olimpia Milano transaction, his reputation was beyond cemented in my mind. When a superstar laughs at your jokes, looks you in the eye, shakes your hand and thanks you for your hard work, that bond is pretty much never going to go away. I cheered as he won 5 championships with the Lakers. I whispered my “Come on’s!” as I stayed up late to watch him on TV lead the US in beating Spain in the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Few seem to remember the choke job the United States continued to perform before Kobe took the game over in the final few minutes and exorcised all of America’s demons with his daring-do, confidence, ruthless and reckless commitment, and talent. My wife has asked me why the only athletic performance shoes I purchase are Kobe’s Nike shoes and why I never throw them away even after they’re worn thin. I keep them in my closet because I’m frankly unwilling to let go. I’m unwilling to let go of my connection to Kobe. He is a reminder of the excellence I’ve always wished for in myself. Kobe will always mean something to me. I do not see him as Kobe, the basketball player or Kobe, the client. I see him as Kobe, the legend whose aura I shared for a brief moment.  When I was in the throes of entrepreneurship, running my struggling commercial printing company and my struggling tech company simultaneously, I had a vividly clear thought in my head. I thought, “If I could pay someone a thousand dollars to just listen to me talk about my business problems, I would.” And that, fundamentally, is why I am an executive coach today. Starting off my career as an investment banker, then a corporate attorney, I felt very limited. As a banker, my life was all about standing by the fax machine (yep — I just dated myself), traveling, and managing spreadsheets. As an attorney, my life was all about reading, writing and billing. I always felt like I had more to offer the world than just my liberal arts skills. I felt like I could recruit, sell, create a vision, craft strategy, build product, manage, code and more. I felt like I needed entrepreneurship to truly maximize all of my skills and really challenge myself. And boy did I ever get that challenge. Entrepreneurship was by far the hardest challenge and most rewarding experience I’ve ever had in my career. I have been an entrepreneur now for more than 15 years. Entrepreneurship can be thrilling, but also brutal. (So are other professions, of course, and I don’t mean to discount the challenge of other professions, but I am writing simply from my personal experience). I was sole owner and CEO of my commercial printing company, where 1,000 things went wrong per day, and I was sole founder and CEO of my tech startup, where 1,000 other things went wrong per day. Though I consider myself to generally be pretty level-headed and even-keeled, I was frequently on edge as an entrepreneur, and I often carried with me an enormous and unwanted baseline of stress. Being an entrepreneur (especially without partners) is a hellaciously lonely existence. Nobody cares as much as you do, there is a line between you and your employees, and the stakes are very high. It is hard to find empathy, and it therefore makes for an extremely emotionally vulnerable position to be in. Even having co-founders and partners is no panacea. In many cases, having co-founders can even compound stress if founders are at odds with each other. Entrepreneurs need a listening partner. I firmly believe they need a coach. They need someone who is paid to simply sit there and hear them brag about their successes and cry about their failures. Entrepreneurs need to talk about all of their fears, their fear of failure, their fear of embarrassment, their concerns about their business, their investors, their employees, and frankly, the whole kitchen sink. They need to be able to speak with grandiosity, pride and even pain without fear of judgment. They also need a sounding board. The echo chamber of one’s own head makes it impossible to have any perspective on what is really going well and what isn’t, what are the right moves to make and what aren’t. It is too hard to self-assess when you are the sole creator of your own business universe. It is vital for mental health and peak performance to speak to someone you trust who is focused on hearing you. I believe this with all my heart. And so, when I stepped off the entrepreneurship train after selling my company last year, I wanted to dedicate my time to helping other entrepreneurs who are on this warpath. I feel particularly equipped to help others because I have been an entrepreneur twice for over a decade, and I have the financial and legal acumen to buttress my general advice with specific time-worn knowledge. Furthermore, my personal qualities made me feel like being a coach would be a natural path. I love talking to people one-on-one, and I am most proud of my ability to understand and connect with people. I didn’t actually seek out my first coaching engagement. A former student of my business class at General Assembly reached out to see if I would be interested in coaching him. During my class, he developed a startup idea, and shortly after, raised seed funding. I am forever indebted to him for being the first to trust me as a coach, and for lighting the pathway to my current career. Taking my first few steps in the coaching world, I was afflicted with an initial and mild dose of impostor syndrome. Are coaches charlatans? Does anyone need them? Are they just a crutch and a dependency? Do I even know how to coach someone? Do I need credentials or training? I have been coaching for nearly a year now, and I am happy to say that these questions don’t bother me anymore. I absolutely love coaching, and I have been relayed heaps of positive feedback by my amazing coachees. One of my favorite pieces of feedback came from a wonderful founder who expressed in the most “millennial” way possible his appreciation. At the conclusion of our second session, he exclaimed, “Holy frick! This is soooo incredibly helpful!” Holy frick, indeed. I love coaching, and this is how I got here.  I have a bad attitude about doing self-promotion. I don’t mind, and in fact, I will even relish opportunities to talk about my accomplishments and my capabilities in a 1-on-1 or small group setting. But it’s the online self-promotion game where I really struggle. In all of last year, for example, I made but 1 solitary Facebook post. (And it wasn’t even that good). There’s something about the permanence of online communication and the 1-to-infinity distribution of content that makes me suddenly shy about sharing. But in attending an evening talk recently about personal branding, I listened as a social media guru implored the audience members to “live a life curated.” She encouraged us to get with the program and to Facebook, Instagram, Tweet and Snap our way to relevance. On the one hand, the point is well taken. In our post-Industrial economy, many individuals are no longer cogs in a very large machine, but are instead freelancers left to fend for their own careers. One’s personal brand and network becomes the only asset they can count on. Promote yourself or risk oblivion. Get a YouTube channel, start uploading, and don’t stop. The Narcissism Economy (as I like to call it) is in full gear, and impresarios rule the roost (Kim Kardashian being an inarguable example). On the other hand, you can only be you. If social media isn’t your thing, it’s painful and mostly fruitless to fake it. Authenticity is still the gold standard, whether you choose to be digitally extroverted or introverted. But like anything, I suggest making the best of what you’ve got. Personal branding and digital promotion are trending upwards, not downwards. For better or worse, we need to get on the train or risk being left behind. From the vast buffet of social media choices, however, we are still free to pick and choose what we want to partake in. I can’t seem to motivate myself to do anything on Instagram, but I have discovered that I enjoy blogging on Medium. I feel very self-conscious recording videos of myself offering quick coaching tips, but I know it has helped some people, and I do get a kick out of learning the ins and outs of the technical A/V gadgetry. Oftentimes, when we experience resistance, it is a sign that an opportunity for personal growth is right in front of us. We can tell ourselves our same old stories that rationalize why “the future is wrong” and “my view is right,” but there is an alternative. That alternative is to say, “I will embrace something uncomfortable. This is outside of my wheelhouse, but I’ll give it a shot and accept that I might look like a dork.” It’s brave, it’s scary, and it may lead to some embarrassment, but it’s a step in the right direction. So yeah, I really do hate self-promotion. Hang on while I click… “Publish.”  What percentage of your work day do you spend consuming things? How much time do you spend each day consuming Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, Hacker News, Techmeme, Google Finance, ESPN, Wikipedia, or whatever else suits your fancy? 30 minutes per work day? 1 hour per day? 6 hours per day?
I was speaking with an attorney friend recently, and I asked him how much time he wastes during the day, consuming sites like ESPN. I suggested possible answers. “30 minutes per day?” He replied, “Yeah, definitely. Or maybe more like 2 hours. Yeah, 2 hours, easily, on ESPN alone.” This is symptomatic of the digital world we live in today. Everyone — blogs, marketers, journalists, friends, media outlets — is becoming a master at grabbing attention. The firehose of information flying in our direction is at an all-time high. And it will only increase. In the old days, if you wanted to learn what camera you might want to buy, you could go to a store, ask a few questions and purchase it. Or you could ask a friend. But now, 9 trillion terabytes of YouTube reviews, web reviews and other purchasing options await your precious attention. It can almost create a sense of digital nausea. How many words a day does the typical desk worker consume nowadays? How many photos and videos? I think it’s staggering, and I’m not sure our brains were evolved to handle this much verbal data consumption. We all fall into this trap. Personally, I don’t consume the FITS (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat) much, but I definitely research everything to death and I love to follow my curiosity down so many intellectual rabbit holes, usually starting with a Hacker News post or a Wikipedia search. In contrast to consumption, what percentage of your day do you spend creating things? Writing a blog post, shooting a video, penning a document, writing a book, using your hands to craft something? I would surmise that the typical desk worker consumes at least 90% of the day, and creates only 10% of the day, if not worse. Imagine what would happen if you consumed no digital data at all during the day? What if you wandered into an actual forest armed only with a notebook and a pen. What would you create? Seth Godin has said that some writers find efficacy in boring themselves to death so that they can write. Would Jack London or Ernest Hemingway have created their works of art if they were plugged into the 24-hour attention-splitting wonder-chine that is the internet? No chance. There is a reason why Henry David Thoreau wrote Walden by a pond, not a modem. (Only took 40 seconds and 10 billion neurons to verify that on Wikipedia). This is not meant to be an indictment or a judgment, just an observation. We are bombarded. Seriously bombarded. We are bombarded by information overload to the sickest degree. The only solution, I think, is to take some time to shut off the firehose. Allow yourself to be bored, to be dumb. Not everything has to be looked up on the internet the second the question is posed in your head. Empty your mind. And create.  If you are a startup founder, my firm belief is that you need a coach. Stat.
Why? Well, let me count the reasons… Being an entrepreneur is stressful, intensely so. When the going gets tough, as it inevitably does, to whom are you going to turn to express all your fears, hopes and frustrations? Your significant other? They can’t hear anymore. You will do nothing but inject fear and pessimism into the heart of the person whose support you most desire. Speaking to an employee as a business confidante is another bad idea. Well-intentioned though you may both be, the CEO-level of transparency must stay beyond earshot of any employees, for reasons of conflict of interest and morale. You wouldn’t want the pilot of your plane to tell you that they’re secretly afraid you’re going to crash, would you? Speaking to investors is admirable, but let’s be real, you’re human. It’s hard to be 100% honest with the person who’s entrusting you with their money and whose opinion you care deeply about. It’s just a completely normal human reaction to want to spin things for your investors, for the benefit of everyone’s morale. Speaking to your friends becomes overbearing when all you talk about is your startup and your startup’s troubles. Either you are perceived to be blabbering on and on about first world problems or your friends’ recommendations aren’t what you’re looking for (you probably just want to vent and have no desire to hear any suggested solutions) or your friends really just don’t care to hear about all your crap, as they have enough to deal with themselves. That’s why you need a coach — someone you pay to hear you talk about all your business crap. And there’s a lot of it. To steal a line from Thomas Hobbes, the life of a startup is nasty, brutish and short. You need to be able to say the unsayable, you need to spit out articulations of your worst fears, you need to be able to express that you don’t know what the heck you’re doing, and you’re frustrated and scared. You need to be able to say your employees are incompetent and don’t care as much as you do. You need to be able to say all of that and then throw it away. And then to recover and rebuild and get back to the business of kicking butt. And only someone you pay, who is outside of your company and outside of your social life, will listen to that and give you exactly what you need. This may seem like the most self-serving post of all-time (I am a startup coach, after all), but I say it from the bottom of my heart with the deepest sincerity and a genuine concern for all entrepreneurs. Talk to a coach. Stat.  This is not easy for me. In the blogging age that we now live in, sharing our thoughts and our lives on-line comes second nature for so many. Not so for me.
It has taken me months just to get from my first post on Medium (a one sentence post, mind you) to this, my second post! And both posts are strictly meta, talking about what I’m talking about! But I guess these posts are good because they share with you my voice. And so, to encourage regular posts, I will try my best to post as soon as I write, bypassing second drafts or any real polish. That’s the only way I’ll gather any motivation to put finger to keyboard. And I must remind myself not to age myself by refusing to dive into those popular activities of the young‘uns. I will out myself right here right now as someone who has never stayed in an AirBnb (no thanks!), never ridden an Uber or Lyft (gasp!) and who thinks Snapchat is for the birds. And no, I am not 120 years old. But I digress (just aged myself again!). All I mean to say is that to not stretch oneself is to ossify, and I am definitely anti-ossification at this point. And the other reality I must come to grips with is the fact that we live in an era of personal brand marketing, and I think it’s here to stay. With the internet, everyone has a microphone. And to not pick it up and use it is to be left behind to wither. I refuse to do that. On this blog, I will articulate my musings on technology and Silicon Valley. I will also pontificate on topics I deem relevant to my coaching clients or anyone else seeking an executive coach. I hope you like what you find here. Please follow me/subscribe/like or whatever the heck they call it (can’t believe I’m doing this). Wish me luck, and see you around! |
AuthorThese are my musings on executive coaching and life! Archives
March 2020
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