The Pursuit of Curiosity 🧭

Another week just felt like another month’s worth of time.

Which is a good thing.

But feeling like a month’s worth of work is very different from actually getting a month’s worth of work done.

Which is a distinction I am always seeking to make in my life/week/day.

Welcome back to Week 22 of The Unicorn Founder; it’s been another week of slapping on more growth…

The High-Level Overview:

→ ❌ First VC meeting, which wasn’t successful.
→ ✅ Completed five JavaScript mini projects.
→ 🥳 Someone had a birthday.
→ 🤠 A community has been started.
→ 📱 An app has been started.

Take a step inside my mind to see what’s going on, where I see the above all fitting in, and how I’m thinking in terms of going forward.

Investment

Is it really even needed at this stage of the startup?

We literally do not burn through any money at all, it’s miniscule.
And the revenue generated from a client covers costs immediately, so I’m pretty chill about not getting investment right away.

But, meeting with VCs, getting their feedback, hearing their concerns; it has all had it’s benefits:

A new perspective on what issues they see looking from the outside-in and a push to think about certain aspects of the business that we haven’t yet had reason to think about yet.

So, I see it all as a plus, and never as wasted time.

Technical Education

Every day I am dedicating time to expanding my skillset, and after just completing CSS/HTML last week, this week I moved on to learning JavaScript.

You learn best by doing, so through freecodecamp.org I am able to really get fully immersed — which has been a pleasure.

You know when you’re doing something and you just get this feeling that it’s going to be important in the future — yeah, that’s how I feel about going down this route.

Following Curiosity

One of the books I’ve started reading is the biography on Leonardo da Vinci by Walter Isaacson — and the big thing that da Vinci did that led to so much depth in everything he did, was to follow his curiosities.

Da Vinci realised the incredible interconnectedness of everything in the world around him, and he did not fear exploration, but rather he craved it, found it addictive.

For myself, I have been finding that same experience in exploring the interconnectedness of engineering, design, art, knowledge, philosophy, business, innovation, and so forth.

And so while I acknowledge the importance of focus and intention, I equally believe that there is a great loss that can occur in our lives if we create self-inflicted walls around what we can and can’t do.

As a founder, I think any opportunity to create a space of vastness, openness, and exploration is one that should be pursued, because that’s where the great innovation lies.

→ In the organic exploration of seemingly disparate, disconnected things, stirred by a natural inclination to seek.

And so, that’s what i’m doing…

Community

FounderMode — a term only recently coming to popularity, which is best understood as being the antithesis of something called ManagerMode.

ManagerMode: Getting good people, putting them in a box with an instruction manual, and checking in on them every so often.

FounderMode: Rallying people and getting absolutely stuck in to every single aspect of accomplishing your vision, with a relentless focus on output, speed, and high standards being upheld.
The style of leadership here is unique to the founder, and at least for now, it is not found in MBAs or Business Management books.
It’s hands-on, in your face, and there’s no room for employees to hide.

The difference between how Steve Jobs ran Apple versus John Sculley is one of the clearest examples between FounderMode and ManagerMode, respectively.

And that’s exactly what this community is all about — bringing FounderMode founders together — originating out of San Francisco…

It’s gonna be super interesting to see where it ends up going, but this is just one of those “follow your curiosities” moments for me.

The App

I have never built an app in my entire life.

But, I do have a vision for something I myself want: a way to completely maximise the potential of my life.

And so, while I am not building that whole monstrosity yet, I am indulging my curiosities by building a very, very small component of that as an individual app first.

More updates on that in the next few weeks to come… :)))

A Big Question

How much of our time is actually spent doing things of value?

Things of value: Tasks that actually lead to a sort of growth in our lives, where we are at a point that is one step further ahead than we were at a moment ago before doing that task.

I track every hour of my day, every single hour, and then 15 mins within the hour if multiple things were done in that hour.

And honestly, it’s scary.

It’s scary to see how much more I could really be doing, and how easily we can allow “feelings of working” hard to blur the lines between productivity and actual productivity.

Sometimes I feel like I have done soooo much, just to look back and see that I actually only put 2 hours into something that felt like I had given 6 hours towards.

It grounds and humbles you.

But it also pushes you — to continually ask this question, to analyse our lives, and to examine our choices.

Is it easy to get to a point in our lives where we can honestly answer the question with 100% of our time being spent on doing things of value?

Absolutely not.

But by setting that as the standard, the goal, the vision… I think we can start to move ourselves in a direction that is extremely powerful, invigorating, and rewarding.

Nonetheless

It’s been a pleasurable week, moving into a new year of my life, and more excited than ever; as every day feels like such an incredible opportunity to make a few more meaningful steps forward.

The Startup: We’re building the complete sales pipeline automation over the coming weeks & I am nurturing relationships with some big boys in the real estate industry.

🕺 That’s it for this week.

Check out Linkedin and IG for daily updates/thoughts/ideas…

Connect with me there, or reply here.

Peace and Wholeness : )
Ethan