Let Go and Haul: dispatch from DC
Week 12, 2018 – Washington DC, San Francisco, Los Angeles
Journey: where we’re at
I skipped last week because Gen and I were knee deep in prep/rehearsal for an important Monday morning presentation at the NSF in DC on Sunday night. We think it went well!? We got good feedback from our NSF mentor after we finished, so that’s a good sign.
This presentation was a major requirement for competing for the part II funding. 🤞Timing-wise, it was a bit of a crunch because of our current product priorities and due to the government being shutdown at the beginning of the year, we didn’t get the info on what we had to do until way late! We had to share insights and learnings from cust dev (which is something we’ve been doing all along anyway), but this program forced us to go re-test our assumptions again in the last couple weeks. While normally I wouldn’t do this leading up to uh, a launch, it was useful to have done it! We slayed 30 customer interviews and observations, synthesized, and are even figuring out how to roll some of that feedback into our release. Whew! It’s been a wild few weeks but if agility is one of the greatest assets of being small, we are learning how to jump higher right now!
After 3 days of DC learning about all the requirements we need to hit with our business plan, I flew to LA to go meet our new investors at Next10 (amongst other meetings) and made a pit stop in SF on the way to do a day of meetings there.
All while trying my best to keep the team unblocked and on track with all our product deadlines. It’s been an intense couple weeks to say the least! Gen joined me in LA for meetings as she had a serendipitously timed personal trip, which was really fun! I’m used to doing them alone to keep travel costs down and work moving forward, but it was really rad to have a buddy :)
Journal: what I learned
I want to share a diagram that my good friend Jamie told me about years ago. It’s come up in conversation a few times with friends recently, and I realized what a simple lens it is for us all to look at our work ethic through so I thought you’d all enjoy it this nugget of wisdom: Good, Fast, Nice.
To be successful in a creative / knowledge work setting, *especially* as a gun for hire, you need to be three things:
Good: obviously, you need to be good at what you do. If you’re not good, you should be developing your craft through continual curiosity to get good at it. If you’re not curious enough about what you’re doing, you should look inside yourself and ask why, maybe you’re not doing what you’re meant to be doing?
Fast: you need to deliver on time. If you don’t, people are not going to have you on their A list, because nobody likes to work with someone who is always shifting deadlines. I stress the delivery part of this statement which also includes follow through. Nobody likes to have to check up on projects, ask for progress or push to get follow-through.
Nice: be pleasant. By nice, I don’t mean “ruinous empathy” where you’re so nice you don’t give critique or tough feedback where it’s warranted, bend over backwards for the people you’re working with and have no boundaries. By nice I mean pleasant. You are simply enjoyable to be around, consistently. You make your colleagues look good. You know that if they shine, you shine.
We’ve all worked with people who are two of these combos:
The jerk who is good and fast: We call them when we’re in a pinch and brace ourselves.
The slowpoke who is good and nice: We call them when can afford to have a long lead time on a project
The B-lister who is nice and delivers on time: We call them when the budget is tight, we can’t get an A-lister, or it’s a project that is appropriate for someone who is still learning to tackle.
What Jamie pointed out to me is that the easiest of these three is to be nice.
Learning to be good takes years. Learning to deliver on time and have follow-through takes a lot of trial and error. These things don’t happen over night.
If you’ve ever talked to a celebrity, or talked to someone who has, one of the first things they point out is how nice that person is. Especially because fame and ego can quickly corrupt grace, people quickly point how how kind and generous that celeb is – with their team, with the interviewer or or person they’re meeting with. If they’re not, we notice and take not right away. I don’t think it’s a huge surprise that some of the biggest stars infamously have insane work ethics and are also known for being gracious and attentive. One of the primary examples is Beyonce.
There’s a poster that looks much nicer than my crappy diagram by British designer Anthony Burrill. This hung in an office I worked in in London. (Normally I hate anything that looks vaguely like a motivational poster that could be shouting at me from a WeWork conference room, but this art was before that era and also it is a very different context in Britain where the language is much more realistic – if not at times even pessimistic – about what one can accomplish within their means and place in society)
Unrelated, I’ve totally turned into that person who dresses all in black and white. Once upon a time I used to be all colors and patterns, and today my suitcase looks like this: super modular, no time for decision making.
If I was doing this all over again, I might have tried to acquire some of these staple pieces before I started doing this job ha. I asked one of our investors Sydney if I should include this image and she was like yea go for it you’re always putting in surprising things ha! I mean, this is real life.
Jams: what I’m into
ICYMI Lizzo and Missy Elliott did a collab. Omggggggg
Also this video by Lily Singh on how to make a Migos song is hilarious if you haven’t seen it yet.