Discussing Startical with Cynthia

A few months ago, while walking my dog, someone stopped me and asked if I would be open to a spontaneous interview in which I'd answer a question selected by the previous interviewee. Today, I sat down for coffee with that person, Cynthia, to ask her a few questions about how to capture and share discussions and interactions as part of Startical.

One of the ideas that came up was to ask fellow entrepreneurs a simple yet revealing question, such as:

If you had one extra hour per day, just for you, how would you spend that time?

I tested that on the team over lunch and the responses were:

Read (as a way to have time by oneself)
Read (for much the same reason as above)
Get outside and explore/visit

Cynthia's own answer was "sleep". I like the idea of asking such a question and noting the response and will definitely test it out further in the context of Startical!

TechNoel

Answers to the question from Vaughn and Noor. Art with Eva...

Evolutionary Purpose

Will and I discussed finding the balance of progress and purpose in organisations (startups and otherwise) which reminded me of the book Reinventing Organizations by Frédéric Laloux which was recommended to me by one of my mentors. We found the clip above on YouTube (if you're not familiar with Laloux, it's a nice short summary of his work) and one element stood out for me: what he called Evolutionary Purpose . How I understand this concept is that the purpose (or soul) of an organisation evolves over time, rather than an individual or leadership team directing towards a specific outcome. It's very much in line with the sailboat analogy and the lunch discussion I had with the team. It is very reassuring to me that the people closest to me today all affirmed my feelings on leadership, and interesting that it often took very different paths/context for us to be able to truly connect on the subject.

Sniffles

Of course I pushed too hard and paid the price of feeling that scratchiness in my nose by mid-morning. At best I was gonna carry a mild cold through the holidays. At worst I'd be a write-off for an entire week (which happened to me right after Christmas in 2015). It's not difficult to realise that I pushed too hard. Despite being on Startical with its explicit guidelines , there was just way too much to get done before the holidays. Even my Startical posts for nearly the past week have been placeholders to fill in later. And now that's caught up to me and I'm starting sniffles. The challenge now is striking the optimal balance between preventative care and completing my commitments before Christmas: sending out personalised Owl-iday e-mails including the Owl-iday Special I had worked so hard to create. I think I'll err on the side of preventative care as I really don't want to wrap up Startical feeling sick and useless...

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