I love randomness. It’s an essential part of how I live and work.
Today’s example of randomness is the book event for Do More Faster that David Cohen and I are doing at the Barnes & Nobel in Boulder at 4 pm today. It’s open to anyone and we have no idea who is coming or what the actual agenda will be, but we know that even if it’s just the two of us sitting at a B&N together, we’ll have fun and learn something.
My goal with randomness is to always be learning. Sometimes I have structured randomness, like the Random Days that I used to do all the time and now occasionally do. Other times it’s just a random event (like the one this afternoon), a random visit to a company/organization (like something I’ve decided to do on Saturday afternoon), or a random new thing to play around with.
One of my favorite Neal Stephenson anti-heroes is Raven from Snow Crash. Raven has the phrase “Poor Impulse Control” tattooed on his forehead as a punishment for some crime in his past. I’ve always loved this phrase, but use it in a positive way around randomness.
There are endless examples in the 53 years of my life in the power of randomness. When I’m asked about how we ended up in Boulder, I answer “it was random – we wanted to try it out and see if we liked it so we just moved here from Boston.” We knew that if we didn’t like Boulder, we could try someplace else. Another example is my Goodreads My Books Read list, which is a little less random than the infinite pile of books that I’ve actually bought and are sitting on my Kindle to read. My email is another example – the number of interesting things that have come out of a reply to a person I don’t know who cold emailed me is remarkable to me when I reflect on it.
There is an endless structure that is imposed on my life, either by me or others. All you have to do to see it is look at my calendar. So, in addition to the Joy Of Missing Out, I encourage you to embrace some randomness in your life.
And yes, I am very aware of Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s thoughts, anecdotes, and warnings about randomness. Rather than being confused that luck is skill, I prefer to allow luck to just show up while I’m learning and exploring lots of different things.
Recently, I discovered a neat new acronym, JOMO, which stands for the “Joy Of Missing Out.”
While FOMO is an endless part of all things technology, entrepreneurship, and investing, I’ve actively tried to ignore and avoid FOMO across all dimensions of my life. On balance, I’m more successful than not on this dimension, but it’s an endless challenge.
I find it entertaining to turn FOMO upside down, backward, and inside out and actively experience JOMO instead.
When I’m depressed, I describe the feeling as “the complete absence of joy.” In general, I self-identify as a “joyful” person. I smile, a laugh, I’m entertained, I’m playful, and I’m generally happy. Even whenever I’m under incredible stress, I still feel, at my core, joyful.
When I think about missing out on things, my joy meter goes to 10. One of my favorite things in the world is reading on a couch in the same room as Amy. For hours. And hours. Or running, alone in the mountains, for hours. Or sitting in front of my computer and writing. For hours. And on Saturday and Sunday afternoons, if I can get in a 90-minute nap, that’s extra joyful.
When I’m doing these things, I’m missing out on a lot of other stuff. And that’s just fine with me since I’m getting enormous joy from the things I’m doing.
I realize that by this description I’ve made JOMO apply to me. I imagine others can apply JOMO in many different ways, depending on what they do that brings them joy. Ponder this for a while.
Not surprisingly, there’s a book on JOMO titled The Joy of Missing Out: Finding Balance in a Wired World. As is my way, I’ve bought a copy, if only to support the author, but I expect I’ll read it soonish.
As part of v53, I added the word “Healthy” into my statements of “what I want to be.” I’ve lost about 15 pounds this year, which has helped a huge amount with my running. I’m focused on losing another 10 pounds which will be me down to my goal weight of 195 that I’ll be happy maintaining for a while.
In addition to having an amazingly wonderful nutritionist named Katie Elliot who programs my meals, I’ve been experimenting with something different things. One that has been successful for me is intermittent fasting, where I only eat in an eight-hour window between 11 am and 8 pm.
This week’s experiment is ProLon, which is billed as a Fast-Mimicking Diet.
ProLon® is a 5-day dietary program that nourishes your body while promoting regenerative and rejuvenating changes, including effects on a wide range of markers that are associated with aging, such as cholesterol, inflammation, and fasting glucose.
ProLon® mitigates the burden and risks of water-only fasting, while responding to the unmet need of having a tasty, convenient, and safe dietary program.
Several people have mentioned it to me and one of the people in our office did it recently and loved how it made her feel. I’ve been pondering it but was pushed into trying it by a fascinating article about it in MIT Technology Review.
As a bonus, I have three dinners out in the next five days, so it’ll be good practice for not eating anything at dinner out, which is part of the intermittent fasting challenge (e.g. if I eat something at 11 am and have a dinner set that overlaps with 7 pm, I need to modulate what and how I eat at dinner out.)
I’ve decided not to run for the next five days. I’ve been running a lot lately and could use a mental reset so I figured timing it with ProLon made sense.
The experiment begins – now.
David Cohen and I are doing a public event in Boulder this Friday 10/11 and one in Denver next Thursday 10/17 around our new book Do More Faster: Techstars Lessons to Accelerate Your Startup, 2nd Edition.
These are happening at the Barnes & Noble stores listed below.
10/11: Friday @ 4pm: B&N Boulder: Crossroads Commons
2999 Pearl Street
Boulder, CO 80301
10/17: Thursday @ 6pm: B&N Denver: Colorado Blvd II
960 S Colorado Blvd
Glendale, CO 80246
While David and I used to do a lot of public things together in Boulder and Denver, our “out in public together” time has decreased a lot the past few years because of a variety of things, including the rapid expansion of Techstars globally.
So, when we came out with the new version of Do More Faster, we decided to do a few events together in Colorado. We had a fun event at B&N in Fort Collins a few weeks ago, so we are ready to follow it up in Boulder and Denver.
As a special bonus, our good friend Jerry Colonna from Reboot will be joining us in Boulder on Friday 10/11 to interview us and be part of the discussion.
Come out and join us for a couple of hours of fun and a stimulating discussion about entrepreneurship.
In Neal Stephenson’s newest book, Fall; or, Dodge in Hell: A Novel, the protagonist Richard “Dodge” Forthrast uses the phrase “The Miasma” to refer to the collection of technology that we commonly call “The Internet.”
When I first came across the phrase, I said out loud, “Brilliant.”
I was poking around on the Miasma this morning looking for a reference to this and found this Slashdot post about an interview with Stephenson from PC Magazine.
Q: How would you describe the current state of the internet? Just in a general sense of its role in our daily lives, and where that concept of the Miasma came from for you.
Neal Stephenson: I ended up having a pretty dark view of it, as you can kind of tell from the book. I saw someone recently describe social media in its current state as a doomsday machine, and I think that’s not far off. We’ve turned over our perception of what’s real to algorithmically driven systems that are designed not to have humans in the loop, because if humans are in the loop they’re not scalable and if they’re not scalable they can’t make tons and tons of money.
The result is the situation we see today where no one agrees on what factual reality is and everyone is driven in the direction of content that is “more engaging,” which almost always means that it’s more emotional, it’s less factually based, it’s less rational, and kind of destructive from a basic civics standpoint… I sort of was patting myself on the back for really being on top of things and predicting the future. And then I discovered that the future was way ahead of me. I’ve heard remarks in a similar vein from other science-fiction novelists: do we even have a role anymore?
Still brilliant.
I’ve spent the past year struggling with the Miasma. I’ve deliberately disengaged from some of it through deleting my Facebook account, limiting my Twitter usage to broadcast only, and trying to use LinkedIn in a productive way even though the UX seems to be set up to purposely inhibit you from using it in a way that doesn’t suck you into the LI vortex. I’ve stopped going to websites online proactively, have unsubscribed to everything except for a limited number of technology-oriented newsletters, and only read the articles that I click through to. I get summaries of what is going on daily through Techmeme’s newsletter, have a set of specific search filters set up in Google Alerts, and scan blogs I’ve subscribed to via Feedly. I try to never, ever, go to news.website.com (whenever I am bored and feel like doing this, I do ten situps instead.)
But the Miasma is still – well – the miasma. The relevant definition, if you don’t know it, is:
an influence or atmosphere that tends to deplete or corrupt
or
a dangerous, foreboding, or deathlike influence or atmosphere
While I was reading Edward Snowden’s book Permanent Record, he reflected on the joy of interacting with the Internet of his youth, which was the Internet from the mid-1990s. He remembers it as an idealized thing that has now become completely and totally corrupted.
When I described this to Amy, she responded with a magnificent rant that was something like “this is a romanticized utopian ideal about a thing that was inhabited by socially inhibited, white male nerds who consider themselves too smart to be misogynistic but, well, often are.”
Yup.
The Miasma is a mess. It’s always been a mess. And it will always be a mess. Figuring out how to find beauty, usefulness, and joy in the mess is the opportunity. I’ve been thinking about that more lately and have a few ideas I’m going to play around with.
In 2011, my now-partner Chris Moody (and then-CEO of Gnip, which I was on the board of) kicked my butt about my endless statements about hating marketing. His thoughts on recasting “marketing” as “thought leadership” appeared on this blog in a post I Don’t Hate Marketing.
It remains a great example of one of the reasons I blog, which is to think out loud, get feedback, learn, and iterate. From that point forward, I changed my entire perspective on “marketing” and now focus almost all of my ideas around “marketing” on thought leadership.
Recently, we’ve seen leaders of several high profile startups implode, along with the current and possibly future expectations around their business. The one everyone was talking about last week is WeWork. Mike Isaac’s book, Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber, which I read a few weeks ago when it came out, is another contribution to this mix. And, there are a number of others, including many who are trying to keep out of the limelight all of a sudden.
A few days ago, I was pondering the idea of a “cult of personality” around a company or an institution and trying to come up with a way to describe when a cult of personality was dominating what was going on within and around a business. In many cases, a cult of personality can propel a company to extremely high profile or valuations, but it can also very quickly cause things to go completely off the rails.
If you ready my writing, you know that I like to use the word “obsessed” instead of “passionate”, and I much prefer working with people who are obsessed with what they are doing, rather than just passionate about it. I think passion is easy to fake, especially around entrepreneurship, and biases strongly toward extroverts. Obsession is almost impossible to fake, and while it can be unhealthy in the extreme, it is a powerful filter for me when talking to entrepreneurs.
While I was meditating yesterday, my mind was particularly noisy. I don’t know why, nor do I judge myself around it, but as I was watching (and labeling) the thoughts bouncing around, simulating a pinball machine in my mind, one popped out and lingered.
Entrepreneurs who create a cult of personality are obsessed about me, me, me.
I remembered the thought again this morning which prompted this post. I now have a simple way to separate between cult of personality and thought leadership.
- CP: Obsessed about me, me, me
- TL: Obsessed about the product, mission, idea
When the entrepreneur or CEO becomes the center of the narrative – or more specifically makes themself the center of the narrative – that’s a big red flag from my perspective.
Ryan Holiday’s new book Stillness Is The Key is out. I have a copy on the top of my infinite pile of books at home along with a copy on my Kindle. I’ll be reading it this weekend.
For a moment of inspiration today, take a look at his launch video.
I’ve read every one of Ryan’s books. I’ve loved them all, learned from them, and gotten ideas and inspiration about how to adapt and adjust my behavior.
I look forward to some time this weekend with Stillness is the Key.
Harry Stebbings just released a new episode with me on the 20 Minute VC. I love how Harry uses all caps to title the episodes.
I adore Harry. I did an interview with him early on (#65) so it’s particularly fun to do an interview number that is great than this year.
We cover the following topics, among others. Plus, there is a special book giveaway and a few other gems buried in the episode.
1.) How Brad made his way into the world of venture following 40 angel checks and how that led to his co-founding Foundry Group? Why did Brad find the transition from angel to VC in the early days such a challenge? What 2 core things did he focus on when writing angel checks? How has that changed now as a VC?
2.) How did seeing the boom and bust of the dot com impact Brad’s investing mindset today? How does Brad think about investing through market cycles and the right way to think about investment cadence? Why does Brad believe that to be successful as a VC you have to be fundamentally optimistic?
3.) Where does Brad believe we are today in the cycle? Does he agree with Bill Gurley on the biggest challenge being the “oversupply of capital”? What must entrepreneurs understand with regards to market cycle dynamics and how they can and need to future-proof their business?
4.) From analysing his best investments, why has Brad come to the conclusion that TAM in the early days is really not helpful? What are the commonalities in how Brad’s most successful companies approach experimentation?
5.) What does Brad mean when he says, “don’t have fake CEO or fake VC days”? What does he mean when he often says, “run your fucking business”? What in Brad’s mind would constitute a “fake day” vs moving the needle for your business? What does Brad think is the best way for VCs to truly get to know one another? Why is, “hey let’s do a deal together one of the most hollow and fake statements in venture?”
6.) Brad has sat on some of the most meaningful boards of the last 2 decades, what have been Brad’s biggest learnings on what it takes to be a great board member? How does that change with the progression of your career? What advice would Brad give to me, having just gained my first board seat? If the VC does not support the CEO, what is the right process? Why does Brad believe the VC should work for the CEO?
7.) What is Brad’s biggest advice when it comes to learning how to say no? What advice does Brad hear most often that he commonly disagrees with? Why does Brad feel we are in a moment of peak noise in the ecosystem today? To be a great leader, what 2 skills does Brad believe you need to have?
Just foreshadowing.
We are going to the edge of the United States to see them.
Experiencing this puts a lot of things in perspective for me.
And, happy birthday mom.