Last Friday marked the end of my seventeenth week of working from home. Here are my takeaways from week seventeen:

• Path forward – I had good conversations about the future. I’m far from the only person thinking about what the rest of 2020 and 2021 will look like. People are mulling over how they can achieve their goals in creative ways given the pandemic.
• New companies – Lately I’ve spoken with many entrepreneurs who are working on starting businesses. I predict a surge of new companies in the next twelve to twenty-four months. Some of them will have a big impact on society. There are so many needs not being satisfied right now. The masses are actively seeking out new things to adopt—what a rare opportunity for entrepreneurs.
• Redistribution – The pandemic’s impact on commerce is uneven. Some sectors are thriving and having their best year ever. Others are struggling and businesses may shutter. A redistribution may be ongoing.

Week seventeen was a positive week. I paid attention to trends and stopped projecting what I think should be happening. I also thought more about how to move forward if the current situation is the new normal.  

I’ll continue to learn from this unique situation, adjust as necessary, and share my experience.

I’ve always been in the habit of asking myself a question: am I doing what I need to be doing? Lately, I’ve struggled to answer it. I usually compare what I’m doing today to what’s worked for me in the past. In recent months, I’ve compared what I’m doing today to what I did before COVID-19. I lifted weights four or five days a week to release stress and stay healthy. I traveled by plane every few weeks to maintain existing relationships and build new ones. I went to the office every day to focus on work. I ate out often because I was busy.

When the past is my baseline, the answer is no, I’m not doing what I need to be doing. It’s not that I don’t want to do these activities. I do, but I’m just not comfortable doing them in this environment. That got me thinking about my approach. Should the past be my baseline?

The world has changed so much over the last few months. Many things that were commonplace aren’t viable today. I decided that using a comparison that isn’t feasible doesn’t make sense. In fact, I think it’s unhealthy.

I’ve started to ask myself a different question: am I doing what I need to be doing in the current environment? I no longer use the past as a baseline. What matters is whether I’m getting what I need in the best way possible given the current reality. For example, I need to relieve stress and stay healthy. I’m not comfortable going to the gym, so weightlifting is out. Instead, I’m running outside. Well, it rains pretty often, so I don’t consistently run four or five days a week. Two or three days is more realistic. Since I’m not as active, I now eat home-cooked meals to keep calories down (take-out is full of them!).

Is running two or three days a week what I’m used to? No. Does it give me the same results as my old workout? No. Are running and eating home-cooked meals what I need to be doing now to stay healthy and relieve stress? Yes.

I realized that benchmarking my life against the past was doing myself a disservice. I couldn’t fully embrace the present—which, after all, is all I’ve got—because a part of me was always holding on to the past.

Next time you’re grading yourself, consider thinking about what you need now, in today’s circumstances. You may realize you’ve been shortchanging yourself.

Last Friday marked the end of my sixteenth week of working from home. Here are my takeaways from week sixteen:

• Month four – Hard to believe it’s been four months. If someone had told me I’d spend four months working from home and a few weeks completely locked down, I would’ve thought they were nuts. This has been an extreme exercise in human adaptability. We don’t like change, but we can deal with it when we must—no matter how drastic it is.
• Holidays – Spending holidays with friends and family is what I miss most. Time away from work just doesn’t feel the same when you can’t enjoy it with the people who matter most.
• Reflection – We’re halfway through 2020 and it’s been a crazy year. The second half of the year will be more of the same, if not worse. There’s been so much change in a short time. I hope there’s a light at the end of this tunnel.

Week sixteen was a good week. I’m glad it ended in a holiday weekend. That gave me time to reflect on the last four months and think about the rest of 2020. I don’t believe that pre-COVID-19 “normal life” will return. Getting back to it doesn’t seem realistic anymore. I also don’t think society will tolerate another lockdown; too many are resisting the very thought. In my opinion, something between those two extremes is likely. I think our current reality is our “new normal.” The longer we live in this “new normal,” the more society will accept it and learn to operate within it.

I’ll continue to learn from this unique situation, adjust as necessary, and share my experience.

I met with an entrepreneur who is building a platform to help artists master and engineer their tracks. Automation will reduce their production time and costs so they can release more music. The platform leverages data science to make the automation possible.

I was intrigued as he explained the problem facing artists and how his platform will address it. I enjoy music as a consumer but have zero experience in the creative or business side of the industry. I have a high-level understanding of data science but zero experience applying it. I would have never thought to put the two together to solve a problem.

This entrepreneur has experience in both areas, which is rare. He’s been a musician since childhood. He’s passionate about it and has over a decade of learning under his belt. He’s worked in data science roles at start-ups alongside PhDs in data science. That experience taught him the power and capabilities of data science. His passion and experience allowed him to recognize how seemingly unrelated disciplines could be combined to create something wonderful.

This entrepreneur is in a great position. His experience puts him ahead of anyone else who has a similar idea; he’ll be able to move much faster. His passion will motivate him and push the platform to the finish line. The two together give him an unfair advantage that greatly increases his chances of success.

If you’re thinking about entrepreneurship, consider: What are you passionate about? What do you have experience doing? Can you put the two together? Identifying your unfair advantage could put you on a path to great success!

I’ve been asked a few times to name one game-changing thing I did to help myself. Easy question: I sought out people MUCH smarter than I who were directionally aligned with me. This changed my trajectory, and it’s something most people can do.

Directional alignment was key, and it required me to think about where I want to be in 10, 15, and 20 years. I didn’t get granular and say I want to be at X place by Y date; I kept it high-level. When I was thinking of leaving corporate America, I decided I wanted to build a company and be an entrepreneur. I didn’t want to be shady or exploitative. I wanted to be successful while treating others the way I wanted to be treated. Super high-level; clear direction.

Once I knew where I was headed, I looked for groups of people smarter than I was. Some, like EO, were formal. Others were informal. I’ll admit this was tough to do. I was very uncomfortable when I first interacted with these groups. I was used to being at the top of my game. I’d done well in school and ranked high among my peers in the corporate world. I soon learned how big my knowledge gap was!

I was inexperienced and embarrassed when I couldn’t answer questions about topics that were basic in these circles. I often had no idea what they were talking about and experienced imposter syndrome. I powered through it, though. I noted things I was unfamiliar with and Googled them later. I had one-off conversations with people to dive deeper into specific topics. I eventually realized that when I was uncomfortable, it meant I was learning. Over time I became comfortable being uncomfortable.

Smart people introduced me to many new things and better ways of doing old things. Over time, I formed great relationships with many of them. Looking back, I see how critical my decision was. These groups helped fill my knowledge and relationship gaps, which gave me more opportunities to be successful.

I once listened to a founding executive of a publicly traded Atlanta company speak. Bob helped scale the company from a five-man team to an IPO with thousands of employees. He was sharp and reminded me of a startup founder. He always believed the impossible was possible. When asked what the secret to his company’s success was, Bob said his team didn’t blindly trust anybody or anything. Their motto: “prove it.”

As it scaled to an enterprise-size organization, his company was pitched tons of products and services. Often, when he asked why ABC product or XYZ service was the best, the answer was, “All the big companies are using it.” This never made any sense to him. His team learned to give that rationale zero weight. They tested everything to find out for themselves if it was the best. Often, they found that big companies were not using the best—far from it. They’d find competitors with superior offerings. And knowing the shortcomings of other companies gave them insights on how to differentiate themselves to customers.

This approach ultimately produced their competitive edge. Bob and his team did the tedious grunt work of vetting everything that underpinned their technology. Their competitors had chosen the lazy way, piggybacking on big companies’ decisions. Over time, using the best of the best made Bob’s company’s platform lightning fast. Once customers discovered how fast it was, the company developed a cult following.

My big takeaway from his story was to trust but verify. You can’t lean on someone else all the time. You have to dig in and put in the time yourself.

I spent over a decade building CCAW. The journey was pretty crazy—filled with extreme highs and lows. I didn’t realize the value in taking time away. I worked five years straight before taking a one-week vacation and around eight or nine years before taking a two-week one. It took people close to me encouraging me to take time off and feeling mentally and physically exhausted.

On vacation, I didn’t look at work unless it was an absolute emergency. I made sure to communicate this to the team to set expectations.

I hadn’t realized how wound up I was. Time away brought this into focus. I worked out regularly, so I had a physical release, but this was mental. It took me longer than it should have to relax and enjoy my downtime. Working on something intensely for so long had slowly changed my mental state and I hadn’t realized it. Time away let me reset mentally and relax.

It’s common knowledge in my entrepreneurial circles that sleep is a challenge. A fair number of us don’t sleep soundly because our minds are racing. Waking in the middle of the night becomes the norm. We learn to function on suboptimal sleep. I slept much better on vacation, recharging mentally and physically.

I come up with many of my best ideas and solutions to nagging problems when I’m away from the business (like some people say they do in the shower!). I’ll be thinking about something else and an idea will pop into my head. I jot it down so I won’t keep thinking about it. Over the years I’ve noticed that when I get things out of my head, my subconscious mind uses the bandwidth in creative ways.

My experiences with time away are probably extreme, but I share them so others can learn from them. You may think there’s no good time to be away from your business, but sometimes that’s exactly what you and the business need.

I hope everyone enjoyed their downtime this holiday weekend!

Happy July 4th!

I hope everyone had a safe and healthy holiday!

When I’m passionate about an idea, my mind races. I think of ways to maximize the potential I see. I visualize the idea as a success. I’m mentally at the finish line before I’ve even started running the race. I see how it can add value to customers’ lives, how it will run, how many people are needed, what those people will do, and on and on. Then I have to tell myself, whoa. It takes time to get to the finish line. The idea will get there, but not on day one. When it does, it might not look exactly like my vision.

When an idea has great potential, I want it to be realized immediately. Unfortunately, things don’t work that way. After a decade-plus as an entrepreneur, I still have to remind myself of that. It takes time to learn what your customers want, develop what they’ll actually pay for, build a team, and work through the unexpected kinks.

Most worthwhile businesses didn’t start off anywhere close to where they ended up. Netflix began by shipping DVDs. Now it has a huge digital content library and creates original movies and shows—all delivered digitally over the internet. Amazon started off selling and shipping books. Now it creates movies and TV shows, owns a grocery store, and sells computing power to companies of all sizes. Oh . . . and it’ll sell you anything you can think of and deliver it in two days. Facebook got its start connecting college students over the internet. No one had any idea how or when it would make money. Now it generates $70 billion in annual advertising revenue, runs a social network that connects the world, helps people share images via Instagram, and offers free cross-border mobile communication via WhatsApp. These are extreme examples, but you get my point.

Greatness doesn’t materialize on day one. It develops over time and the journey is a valuable part of the process. Things that weren’t obvious at the outset are discovered along the way and help inform where you end up.

The next time you’re excited about a great idea with lots of potential, savor the feeling and look forward to the ride!

Today I had a conversation about change. Sarah is experiencing significant change, like everyone, as a result of COVID-19. She’s feeling a lot of angst. She wanted to know how I’m dealing with virus-related changes and what I’ve learned from navigating change over a decade as an entrepreneur.

The first thing I noticed is that Sarah rejects change. She fights it if she didn’t initiate it. She will change eventually, but only after the pain of not doing so is unbearable. But change can be caused by something out of our control (like a pandemic). Fighting against something you can’t control wastes time and energy. The world doesn’t care what we think. We can either accept change and get on with things or struggle against it and endure anxiety, or worse. Regardless, the change keeps happening.

I also noticed that Sarah sees most change as an obstacle. That’s her perspective, for whatever reason, and it affects how she copes. It would help her to realize that while change is inconvenient, it opens up new possibilities. Thinking about them instead of dwelling on present discomfort can illuminate opportunity.

I view change as inevitable. The world is constantly evolving. That has always been true and it may be the only thing that will never change. With that perspective, I try to embrace most change. Doing so has allowed me to take advantage of some great opportunities and spared me avoidable stress.

The next time you experience change (now, maybe?), consider accepting it and focusing on the opportunities it presents.