No Original Ideas

“How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live..”
―Henry David Thoreau

There are no original ideas. Only reframes of various inputs and experiences you've had. This is why it's important to keep reading, consuming, doing, talking, exploring. New thoughts are only spurred by new experiences. Inputs drive outputs.

Stay curious. Stay inspired.

Stages of Learning

Typically a person has two stages of learning: lectures and experiencing. One phase is passive, depending on listening and remembering. The other phase depends on exploring, trying and failing.

Lecture-based Learning

Lecture-based learning most often occurs in grade-school and college consists. In class there is a professor speaking at you, listing of dates and events, summarizing theories and intrepretations. Later you have papers and excersizes that effectily measure you note-taking and research abilities. This is typically low-pressure (except perhaps when finals time rolls around), giving you moderate time to study, get tutoring or do additional research.

Experience-based Learning

Next you graduate and enter your field—welcome to the experience phase. Most of your life is this phase—you learn by watching others on your team and other teams or by blindly making it up as you go.

Learning in front of others might be one of the scariest things you do in life. Learning is something most prefer to do from observance or in solitude, afterall not-knowing can be frustrating or embarrasing.

Though often, when you’re thrown into the middle of something scary and you must pioneer your own path, you often learn more and retain it longer. Then hopefully you end up being quite proud of the experience and what you’ve created.

Improvising

Improvising is often activly learning in context. No one knows what they’re doing all the time.

Confidence

A key to experience-based learning is confidence. That doesn’t mean you pretend to you know everything, stop listening, do everything wrong and cause chaos. No, the confidence I speak of is acknowledging that you’re learning and going to make mistakes. Be confident in the fact you have areas to improve in, and cherrish people that want to help you along the way.

Mistakes

Mistakes are often the hardest part of learning; no one likes to fail. But at each failure is an opportunity to understand what went wrong and what you should do next time.

Keep Learning

The most important thing is to keep learning. It keeps you young. Keeps you energetic. Most importantly, it keeps you relevant.

Startups Must Have Passion

“You can’t have a startup culture if you are ok with Meh” ~ Melissa Perri (@lissijean), Lean Agile Scotland 2016

Startups are all about passion. Passionate about making something better, passionate about the medium you’re working in, passionate about results. Without passion, everything you touch will fail… or worse yet, be mediocre.

The startup culture mindset is in full swing. Even Fortune 10's are big proponents of startup culture, Lean Startup, FastWorks, etc. But none of these philosophies matter without passion in what you’re doing.

In fact, passion is the number one criteria I look for when hiring a new team member. Above the hard skills they actually need to do the job. You can't teach passion.

So, how do you get passion?

1. Hire passionate people. These are people that get carried away when talking about their portfolio or past work; or the ones that have 5 different pairs of headphones depending on their use; or the ones that measure their coffee down to the ounce. These people fall in love with their craft and gaining knowledge, and demand results above all. Cherish these people.
2. Take breaks. No one is passionate 24-7. Passion is the first thing to dim when approaching burn-out. Be sure to take the time to unwind; explore hobbies, peek into other industries or cultures, and most importantly, rest. Inspiration is everywhere.
3. Seek it out. Everyone is passionate about something. If you have team members that aren’t passionate about the mission at hand, try to find a way to align it to their passions and interest, at least tangentially.
4. Remove dead weight. Some people are just not interested for a number of reasons. If that's the case, re-assign or release them—this will save you time and headache in the long run. Disinterest can spread like a bad cold.

Passion can pop up organically, but you have to work at keeping it alive. Without regular maintenance, passion will dwindle and results will follow.