When you are a doer, you just keep doing. And doing, then doing some more. In fact when you are not doing, you feel like something’s off.
Sometimes you might hit a place where you’re running on empty. Even then, you just do, without even having to think much, or feeling passionate or anything really. When I hit that phase recently, and spoke to David Hrostoski about it, he said it felt like I was at a point of contraction right before a big opening.
Maybe, maybe not. But today when I look back on these past few weeks, I think it was just my mind getting out of the way for things to rearrange themselves in some order. So that I would not be driven to ‘fix’ or ‘force’ things into shape.
It made me think of a specific discussion in an entrepreneurship program I had attended many years ago. It had a really great format—entrepreneurs facilitating conversations among participants to answer questions that would bring phenomenal breakthroughs, which if allowed by the business owners would change their businesses as well. The session facilitator spoke about how sometimes solutions come when we have had some quiet following an intense time spent researching, exploring, doing, failing, experimenting, hitting walls, and so on. It’s the quiet—maybe a nice long sleep, or a walk in the park, or a relaxing bath—that brings us that little insight that is needed to allow all the pieces to fall into place. This happens more often than we realize. Call it the Eureka moment if you want. But probably it is not always that dramatic as Archimedes had us believe.
Back in December 2017, if you had asked me what 2018 looked like for me, I wouldn’t have been able to say. I would have been able to tell you some bits here and some bits there. But a cohesive picture? No. Not only did I not seem to have the grasp on the road ahead, I didn’t even want to talk about it. I was okay to listen others talk about it, and just listen. Not give inputs. I guess it was a probably frustrating time for my co-founders, but they let me be.
We had our team offsite in the first weekend of January, and the vision for the year ahead was laid out by my co-founder. Nothing new for the co-founders, as we practically live the vision everyday. But putting it together for the team to be able to see it as we did was important. I went through his vision document. And as I mulled it from the team’s point of view I was able to come up with the key themes to keep the team aligned for the year. It just took me a few minutes. Of course we would still have the task of translating the themes into each person’s day to day work, but that could be done over the coming few weeks. But at least we had a vocabulary for everyone to align to, to use in their work, to use as their North Star for the year.
The offsite went well, and we have been having some great conversations since. And we are also working on drilling down the yearly themes to daily work.
While the vision was clear and is in the process of getting clearer for all, we still didn’t have the year’s sales numbers locked down. During the course of a day earlier in the past week, my co-founder asked if we had to discuss something related to automation for sales. I said no, but I did need help figuring out the sales numbers. So we went into the conference room and sat for maybe less than an hour. And emerged with sales numbers that looked realistic, yet a stretch for us. It all just fell into place. These numbers had always been a struggle for us in the past years to arrive at, but not this year. They just came through. And it happened without any drama, any excitement, any debates, any raised eyebrows. Smooth and easy. And both of us believe in it too.
Why? What was different about this year?
I just think in the past few months we had already done all the hard work, the debates, assessing the highs and the lows, looking squarely at what was working and what wasn’t, what we wanted for the company and what we didn’t and so on.
When the quiet happened, all of it just cohered into oneness. And it all just felt right. All we now have to do is keep doing things as per the vision, the themes and the numbers. And correct course when we see things going off track.
So now I am back to doing. Just do. Because, for now, I have allowed the real ‘what needs to be done for the company’ to come through.