Light Side: About Me

Entrepreneurship is Like Tennis ... or Farming ... or Spaceflight

Fri, 06 Apr 2007 02:26:33 GMT

Today's my birthday, and I wanted to write about some of the stuff I've been thinking lately. Being one of those people Peter Drucker describes as gaining insights from talking or writing about what they're thinking, maybe this will help me better understand it. I guess it's also as good a time as any to reflect, because this past month has been just one of those times ... There seems to be just one thing after another to contend with. Some problems are just small or silly, while others start out seeming big, but perhaps turn out not to be so bad.

Since the problems in my last post, for example, our a/c has gone out, which didn't really surprise me because the compressor bearing hadn't sounded too happy. However, when I called our repairman, I got a recording saying they were on vacation. So we were going to be (mostly) without a/c for two weeks, since I didn't want to trust what may be a major repair to someone I didn't know. It hasn't turned out so bad after all, though, because of a couple of cool spells. Yesterday we had a nice front, which has made today's weather just about perfect, and it's supposed to get cooler for the next few days, so hopefully it won't get too hot before we can get our a/c repaired.

I'm one of those people who hate interruptions, and so really hate it when things break. There's a part of me which fantasizes that somehow, one day, I'll get all my ducks in a row and will be able to merrily go along, working without interruption, with everything running like clockwork. Times like this past month point out the quite obvious fact that, actually, the longer I go, the more papers keep stacking up in my office, the more things don't get done, and therefore just how essential it is that I develop a more strategic approach to dealing with this reality!

In my uber-organized fantasy mindset, I'm thinking that if I can just get all the trivial, mundane stuff - fixing the car, filing tax returns, returning phone calls, etc. - out of the way, that somehow I'll be free to do creative stuff. Michael Eisner, Disney's former CEO, actually wrote something like this in his autobiography, that you have to learn to keep your desk cleaned off in order to be able to do creative work. In practice, though, it seems that most creative persons are typically swamped with work, a tangled morass of creative projects and mundane tasks, and the real trick is to be able to somehow keep projects moving forward despite the endless mundane disruptions.

Taking this line of thought a bit further, lately I've been reflecting on how the longer I go in life, the more I realize the "big things" in life actually mirror the seemingly mundane stuff. This was probably understood a century or two ago, but nowadays when folks start out as entrepreneurs or in some other ambitious endeavor, it's natural, given the influence of TV and other media, to somehow think the experience is going to be different or transcendent from other parts of life.

Really, though, I've found that one of the basic entrepreneurial skills is to be able to break out of this mode of thinking. Rather than pushing hard for a limited time, expecting to suddenly pop out above the clouds, real-world entrepreneurial persistence is about slugging it out from day to day, scoring little victories while containing the damage from defeats.

Startup Journal, the (free) entrepreneur's section of the Wall Street Journal, had an interesting article recently about Blogger co-founder Evan Williams, who is encountering some of this his next time around. Having taken VC money, he's gotten a lot of pressure to go-go-go, when his entrepreneurial instincts are telling him he needs to hunt around for the right opportunity before pushing ahead. Apparently he's cut a deal to buy the VCs out, but considering that his new venture reportedly hasn't burned much of their cash anyway, I suspect he's right and they're wrong (why doesn't being frugal ever factor into anyone's credibility these days?!!).

Even though I'm very much an optimist at a strategic level, I've noticed that people like me have a tendency to be overly pessimistic at the day-to-day tactical level. As someone observed, you always end up accomplishing less than you expect in the short run, but more than you expect in the long run. In other words, it's important to avoid being overly swayed by the daily ups and downs and frustrating setbacks, which I suspect scuttles many entrepreneurial attempts.

One example that helped me a lot is a description I saw on TV some years back of how renowned Soviet rocket designer Sergei Korolev approached his work. One of his assistants recalled that usually, his day would start with bad news - a tank had failed a test, a part was delayed, whatever. He would get everyone involved together in a meeting, and they would hash it out, often late into the night. And then the process would start all over again the next day.

I'm sure it would have been horrendously frustrating, if he had allowed it to be. Nevertheless, as many have remarked, until his death in early 1966, the Soviets were always ahead in the space race. He accomplished an awful lot with very limited resources, by just grinding it out on a day-by-day basis.

Over the years, I've seen my thinking about entrepreneurship crystallize into several simple analogies that often help me to better understand what's going on. One is that an entrepreneurial venture is analogous to a farm. Another is that it's analogous to the stages of a rocket. Perhaps I will write about various analogies some other time, but this past month a new analogy has crystallized in my mind: entrepreneurship is like a grueling tennis match, hard fought over every point.

I'm not a big fan, but if you've ever watched much tennis on TV, you know what I mean. The players give their all for each point. Sometimes they win a game, sometimes they lose and have to start all over. Sometimes they lose a hard-fought set and still fight back to win the match. It's grueling. They make the most of each point, game, and set but, like a boxer, it's also key that they be constantly ready to come back for the next round. If you see a tennis player starting to fade, you can usually figure it's over for them.

The longer I go, the more I realize that as an entrepreneur, you really need to move past the mindset of trying to generate a breakthrough, and instead just execute as well as possible every day. In many ways, entrepreneurship is the art of the possible. The more innovative you're trying to be, the more you'll be operating with limited resources and heightened uncertainty. A lot of times, you won't really know quite what you can accomplish on any particular day. As the tagline says, you can be busy making all sorts of plans, but find yourself doing something quite different! I've learned that for me, anyway, I have to be receptive and alert to the opportunities for getting things done as they present themselves, rather than trying too hard to stick to the script.

This "art of the possible" applies in a big-picture sense as well. The entrepreneur strikes out in some new direction, blazing a trail to what they alone may see to be possible. At the same time, there must be discipline and honesty to recognize and work within one's limits, and to change course when needed. The paradox is that, when you get good at this, on both the small-scale and the grand-scale, you'll end up in fact generating some breakthroughs, though perhaps without realizing it, since they happen gradually.

In my mind, the biggest challenge for us, anyway, is to keep being aggressive about taking care of ourselves, to prepare ourselves for the next round, in the face of so many other worthy things all demanding more out of us. It's been a quarter century since Susan and I started college, and there really hasn't been much of a break all this time. A lot of good things have happened, a lot of breakthroughs have been accomplished that other people don't see yet, but it helps to have an easy way to visualize how I need to make sure I'm up for the next point, every day.

So Much Stuff in My Head

Sun, 11 Feb 2007 03:09:45 GMT

Today has been one of those days where it's just been hard to really get into gear, to really get going quickly through all the work that needs to be done. Last weekend I got away for a bit, took some of the kids camping, and came back with quite a bit more energy, and until today I was getting quite a bit done. Years ago, a day like today used to really frustrate me, but I think I understand better now what is going on, even if I don't know exactly what started it.

Susan and I were in a church once, by far the biggest either of us has ever joined, where every Sunday there was at least a few people, or more, who came forward to join the church. I liked the pastors and the church was OK, but it was past capacity, with several services, shuttle buses to off-campus parking, etc., as a new, bigger campus was being built. I finally remarked to someone how great it was that the church was growing so well, and their response wasn't so positive, something to the effect that almost as many were leaving out the back door, unseen, as were coming in the front.

For the last 15 years or so I've felt like my brain is kind of like that. There's still a flood of information coming in (I'm blessed both with having a zillion interests and with being a details-glutton), but there's a troubling sense that just about as much is falling out of my head as well. There just doesn't seem to be as much "room" for new info as when I was younger. It's certainly not as easy to jump in and read a complex technical book or something and learn a bunch of new stuff quickly. I suspect that's part of the reason why older folks have a harder time memorizing than kids. There's just so much re-arranging of the mental furniture that must occur to memorize a large bunch of facts.

Of course, as I described earlier, a lot of this is simply that there's so much stuff to track in normal everyday adult life. I'm amazed, for example, at how much mail and other paperwork I get from various financial accounts. Just figuring out what everything is, what can be thrown away, and filing the rest is a major hassle. It kind of reminds me of that infamous sort of high school teacher (not so nice as mine usually were), who forgot you had homework in other classes, too. E.G., there's not just one privacy policy pamphlet to file (?), but a dozen or more, plus they proudly send the new, improved version every so often.

I guess that's why David Allen and his Getting Things Done (GTD) books/system are so popular. His advice actually tries to tackle information overload head-on, whereas I think most of our society still isn't seeing it yet as a huge problem, one that is increasingly stressing us out. Our minds work best when dealing with limited subsets of information at a time, something which seems like quite an indulgent luxury these days.

Anyway, I've noticed that I tend to generate a lot of energy at times, such as travelling, where I'm away from most of my work and so automatically can exclude considering working on it. A few years ago, I helped some folks from our present church paint someone's house. I began thinking, "How come I can't get going faster fixing up our own house?" After a while I finally realized, that as soon as I got home, there'd be a hundred other things all vying for my time. Concentration really is valuable, when you can manage to achieve it.

I guess whenever you encounter scarcity in a given resource, you suddenly start to notice every bit of it so much more. Over the last few years Susan and I have finally grasped what is going on at times like today when suddenly one of us tends to slow down, for no obvious reason. Generally it's because a big chunk of our brainpower is busy working on some question/problem. Sometimes it's because something has upset us, and other times because we suddenly realized something - quite often subconsciously - that jump-started our brains trying to solve or make sense of it.

Today, alas, is one of those days where I have no idea what started it, but I've learned to just hang in there for a day or two, puttering along trying to get something done, until the little line starts blinking on the monitor again, so to speak. While I used to think times like this were wasted and unproductive, after two decades of doing research, I know they may actually be some of the most productive times, just as when people sleep on a problem and come up with the answer in the morning.

At least it's usually just a couple of days. Folks who've been through major traumas can be this way for years, as their brain tries to process all the information and, quite possibly, block some of it out. I think that's why it's often good advice in such cases not to try to do too much too quickly, but give yourself/someone else in that situation time to get up to speed. As I've noted before, that can often be a couple of years or more. Just bear in mind that mentally there may be more going on, subconsciously behind the scenes, than you think or - should I say - as you think.

the light side of serious

Thu, 28 Jul 2005 21:59:18 GMT

This is my personal blog, so I figure it should reflect my personality. Nevertheless, I suppose some folks might wonder about my tagline. It seems in American culture nowadays that men, at least, are supposed to be easygoing, mellow, even passive. In some places I guess it's acceptable for women to be aggressive, serious, and deliberate (goal-oriented), but these qualities in men seem to be viewed as implying a lack of concern for others (selfishness), hard-headed ignorance, and so on (is it any wonder American society is having trouble competing with the rest of the world?).

While it may be the politically correct thing today to be mellow or even flippant, that's just not me. I'm a very serious person and always have been, and I don't make any apologies about it. Nevertheless, it disturbs me when just being serious is enough to put people off, even intimidate them. Being "serious" means you have a purpose that drives what you're doing. What's wrong with that?

This dilemma really shows up in a school environment. Business Week did a cover story a couple of years back about how boys are starting to really fall behind girls in public school and on into college. I think this bias against being serious has a lot to do with it. In my view, the purpose driving a school should be scholarship (same root word), yet most schools don't cultivate a culture that encourages scholarship. In listing interests, someone wrote on their blog "studying (believe it or not)". Well, I think they meant it, and it's encouraging to see someone admit it, but why else be in college (unless it's to go to a "party school" or get an Mrs.; thankfully no one's going (at least yet) to stay out of Iraq!).

Realistically, I think there are a lot of folks who want to learn and achieve, but we hurt ourselves as a society by not encouraging folks to take life more seriously. Being serious isn't the opposite of being fun. In my view, we should all try to live life to the fullest, and we can't do that unless we get serious about life, at least much of the time.

As another example, after 9/11, I was really impressed with our society as folks started, instinctively, to get more serious, become more frugal and prepare for a war against terrorism. Unfortunately, it wasn't very long before Washington was telling everyone to stop that and start being irresponsible again (I don't mean to step on anyone's toes - remember, I live in Texas, truck capital of the world - but I just don't see how it makes sense for the U.S. government to be encouraging people to buy gas-guzzling vehicles when we're fighting a war in the Mideast).

It's as if our whole society is living life with one hand tied behind our backs. If we're going to fight a war, we should be taking it seriously, which doesn't mean nuking everything in some kind of bone-headed aggressiveness, but rather not being satisfied with a half-hearted effort. Maybe, for starters, we ought to take the 600-pound steel scrape plates off the bottom of Hummer H2s and send them to Iraq, where they might actually get some use, and start using our resources to actually get something done.

In my own case, I am serious about space, and have been since I was a small child. I don't expect everyone to be interested in what drives me, but I do hope that each of you will be fortunate enough to discover what is the calling that God has put inside of you, the special thing that you can really contribute.