A bi-weekly roundup of feelings more common than you thought April 27 - May 10 Is This Why You Open Your Laptop with a Sigh?This week alone, four different people described the same feeling and each one thought they were the only ones who felt that way. FOUR! Each one led their business in some way and had responsibilities and long-term goals. I was able to identify the signs of what they were feeling because I too have the same feelings: It's the feeling that upon opening the laptop, I'm calling it Entrepreneurial Dread, because it's different from non-business-related dread. Here's a list of the kinds of dread normals have:
Entrepreneurial Dread differs because there's a few elements that are unique to being in charge of a business. Here's three examples sourced from my conversations this past week. "The Market Will Destroy You" DreadA business could fail because the market changed. For the smaller businesses I tend to work with, they don't have innovation centers or multiple product lines- their sole service line tends to be their one big bet. If the market shifts, that bet may lose. If they spread their bet into multiple directions, there's not enough resources to make any one of them win and they will definitely lose. "You’ve Been Wrong The Whole Time" DreadEntrepreneurship is a risk. Whether through inaction or action, a business owner has to make decisions and any one of them might be wrong:
The worst part of this dread is that the impact is delayed (could be years to find out you’ve been wrong) and hard to ascribe impact to one single choice…or if you failed simply through bad luck. "This Can’t Be Fixed" DreadEspecially on small teams, interpersonal relationships have conflict. Whether it’s acknowledged or not, people will disagree and problems will happen. As a business leader, it’s a rare time when EVERYONE is happy and getting along: it’s much more common to be aware of an interpersonal issue that has yet to be resolved…and that's where the dread comes in. Conflict might not be solved. It might always be there. And for many smaller organizations, the team still has to perform, even if Matt and Marco might kill each other. For me, this is the toughest one. Coming from an HR and employee engagement background where good vibes are a KPI, it’s hard to accept that solving interpersonal problems doesn’t always trump producing work results. Sometimes getting the proposal out matters more than re-establishing psychological safety on a team. Making the big-boy call to stop accommodating and start demanding results has so much dread attached to it that I tend to drag my feet about it. Now that you can see the signs of Entrepreneurial Dread, what can you do to step out from underneath that piano?
I'm an enabler. Whatever Dread you are currently experiencing (Entrepreneurial or otherwise), take action right now and follow #1 on that list and Talk about it. Add your dread to the LinkedIn thread below 👇
A TL;DR from the CROI dread the Golden Hour because I know that means there's only one more walk left in the day. -Roman Noodles, Chief Ruff Officer A TL;DR From The Archive: Four Takeaways from FinishIf you want to combat dread, finish important things. There's four takeaways from this book that we've neatly summarized for you to help you finish whatever's hanging over you. Read the four takeaways! ROCK TUMBLING UPDATE While people delight in springtime weather because they can get into their garden, I get excited to hook up my outdoor hose because it makes rock-washing so much easier. After running rocks through the tumbler for a few weeks, I gotta rinse off all the sludge and put new grit in. It's a cardinal sin to wash your rocks in your sink- the slurry will turn to concrete in your pipes. During the winter, I have been known to throw sludgy rock water off my 2nd floor deck. But when spring comes, I can use my outdoor hose to luxuriously rinse off my little babies. I took a slo-mo short video of the best part: when the grey sludge gets rinsed off and you discover what a 2-week tumbled rock will look like. In the world of magic, this is the Prestige. My future as an ASMR Rock Tumbling Influencer starts right here. Wash off your sludge and see what's underneath, Dan from Learn to Scale Opt-out from the newsletter | Unsubscribe from all emails | Update your Preferences | www.learntoscale.us, Boston, MA 02119 |
Entrepreneur, Professional Learner, & Proud Failure. Writes about sales, marketing, and entrepreneurship from the eyes of a learning and development nerd. Lead teams, manage people, scale a business, and learn better through the biweekly irreverent newsletter, the TL;DR.
A bi-weekly roundup of insights from six years of failure September 20 - October 3 Stitching A New Birthday Suit Next week, Learn to Scale turns six years old. I've been a professional failure for almost six years. I don't know about you, but birthdays make me reflective. It's a special event that connects you to previous versions of yourself: the person who used to believe one thing is the same person that you are today, but you've changed what you believe. And every year, the Dan from...
A bi-weekly roundup of how 1.9 billion AI queries are mostly about dating advice September 6 - September 13 Hey ChatGPT- how does my hair look? New research that came out this week from OpenAI and Anthropic shows some mind-bending facts about how the world is utilizing this new hotness they're calling "AI." I published a deep dive on this new research in a new blog post, Are You Using AI for $10 Tasks or $10,000 Decisions? The fact from this research that's still living rent-free in my head:...
A bi-weekly roundup of ways culture eats strategy for breakfast August 23 - September 5 Breathing a Big Sigh Of Strategy You know the scene that's in countless superhero movies where the good guys look each other in the eyes as they finalize their grand plan to beat the big baddie? This turning point also tends to be the catharsis of their interpersonal conflict, with an incremental "Put our differences to the side and save the world" head nod. So dramatic! The stakes in those stories (and...