Louis Bidou

12 years ago, Guy Kawasaki was already teaching in U.S. top universities the importance of making meaning in your company. To him, this is the core essence of entrepreneurship. He believes a company set up to make money will not make meaning, and will probably not make any money as well. Here are his three ways to make meaning as a company.

Increase the quality of life — That's precisely what he and the Macintosh division at Apple did when they were designing this product.

Right a wrong — Find something in the world that is going wrong and fix it.

Prevent the end of something good — Engage in sustaining wonderful things around you.

Making meaning is a great motivation to help you going through. I'll build on that later on in an essay about making meaning both in your company, and your personal life.

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Robert Waldinger helped run the longest and deepest study on happiness. He and his colleagues studied for 75 years what keep people happy and healthy. 724 men, Harvard alumni, but also boys from Boston poorest neighborhoods have been tracked, and the research is now extended to their 2,000+ children.

The clearest message that they get out of this study is this: good relationships keep us happier and healthier.

They have learnt 3 big lessons about relationships: social connections are really good, they keep us happier, healthier and make us live longer, and loneliness kills ; it's all about the quality of our close relationships, people who were the most satisfied in their relationships at age 50 were the healthiest at age 80 ; good relationships, and feeling we can count on others in times of need, protect not only our body but also our brain.

Those good relationships don't have to be smooth all the time as long as you feel you can count on others. It's a life long commitment. The happiest people in the study were those who worked hard on replacing workmates with new playmates.

Possibilities to foster relationships are endless. As Mark Twain said, “There is only time for loving”. The good life is build with good relationships.

Source: https://www.ted.com/talks/robert_waldinger_what_makes_a_good_life_lessons_from_the_longest_study_on_happiness

What makes a Google team effective? Who is on a team matters less than how its members interact, structure their work, and view their contributions.

Here are the five keys behind a successful Google team.

PSYCHOLOGICAL SAFETY Do team members feel safe to take risks and be vulnerable in front of each other? It is the most important dynamic, and the four others derive from this one. Are we safe to ask dumb questions on anything, including the goal of our work? The safer we are, the more likely we are to admit mistakes, to partner, and to take on new roles.

DEPENDABILITY Can we count on each other to do high quality work on time?

STRUCTURE AND CLARITY Are the roles, plans and goals of our team clear?

MEANING OF WORK Are we working on something that is personally important for each of us?

IMPACT OF WORK Do we fundamentally believe that the work we’re doing matters and creates change?

Google implemented a 10-minute exercise on the five dynamics. It appeared that the teams who decided, for instance, to kick off their meetings by sharing a risk taken in the previous week, were more effective. So, managers, take some time to evaluate and build psychological safety on your team. Three tips: frame the work as a learning problem, and not an executive problem ; acknowledge your own vulnerability ; and model curiosity, asking a lot of questions.

Sources: https://rework.withgoogle.com/blog/five-keys-to-a-successful-google-team/

Emilie Wapnick had never been able to answer the question “What do you want to be when you grow up”, because she was interested in so many things. She get to be pretty good at whatever it was, be bored, and let it go. Again and again. And she was scared of being forced, at the end of the day, to stick with something.

But where did you learn to assign the meaning of “wrong” to doing too many things? From the culture, when people ask you “What do you want to be when you grow up”, anytime in your life. This question doesn't lead you to think about all what you could be. The idea of destiny, or one true calling, is important in our society. But what if there are many different subjects you are interested in, and many things you want to do?

There is nothing wrong with you: you're a multipotentialite. Don't take it as a limitation, because here are three superpowers you have: idea synthesis (creating something new at the intersections of several things), rapid learning (well, you've went hard on so many things in the past, be sure you're ready to go out of your comfort zone and learn new things), and adaptability (morphing into whatever you need to be in any given situation).

Do not lose those qualities being pressured to narrow your interests. The world needs people able to handle multidimensional problems. If you're a specialist at heart, specialize. But if you're a multipotentialite, embrace your many passions, follow your curiosity and explore your intersections.

Source: https://www.ted.com/talks/emilie_wapnick_why_some_of_us_don_t_have_one_true_calling

This article shows that building a company the team members truly love is 99% inspiration and 1% perspiration, and that inspiring them proves to be directly linked to how productive they are.

Bain & Company translated the Maslow's pyramid of needs to the context of the workplace:

The higher people are in the pyramid, the more productive they will be. Engaged employees will be 1.44x more than satisfied ones, and inspired employees up to 2.25x more. In other words, it would take 2.25 satisfied team member to generate the same output as one inspired colleague.

Many seek fulfillment in their jobs. Not trying to inspire them is simply leaving real money on the table.

Source: https://hbr.org/2015/12/engaging-your-employees-is-good-but-dont-stop-there

It's fair to believe that the more varied experiences a belief survived, the less likely it would be false. But still, how could we protect ourselves from obsolete beliefs?

First, Paul Graham advice to have an explicit belief in change. Don't even try to predict the future. Stay aggressively open-minded and super sensitive to the winds of change. Admit you have no idea what the right direction is. He thinks this mindset works for evaluating new ideas, but also for having them. If you are expert enough in a field (a year of focused work plus caring a lot is most of the time sufficient), plus if you are reasonably open-minded, any weird idea or apparently irrelevant question will seems worth exploring.

Need an incentive to correct obsolete beliefs? Turn your comments into bets. For example, if you have to share your thoughts on a topic through a blog post, you'll worry much more about getting things right than most people would in a casual conversation.

Second, focus on people rather than ideas. It seems easier to predict what sort of people will make future discoveries, than to predict future discoveries themselves. To Paul Graham, good new ideas come from earnest, energetic, and independent-minded people. Simply surround yourself with these people, the ones who will precisely make your beliefs obsolete, and you will be safe from concluding the world is static. I feel it's no coincidence if highly successful people are very attentive to youngsters.

Source: http://paulgraham.com/ecw.html

Michael Lipson, psychologist, analyses the phases of attention and distraction, and shares a simple and effective way to improve your focus.

The best way to learn to focus is first to be OK with distraction. In other words: to understand what is its structure, how your attention deviates. Then, noticing it, you can more easily bring your mind back.

Michael defines four phases of distraction:

• You choose a focus (conscious choice)
• Your attention wander
• You wake up to the fact your mind is wandering
• You may choose to return to the initial focus, or give up (conscious choice)

Work on noticing those steps over and over in real time, and you'll see that the pattern changes. Your mind will tend to stay focus longer on the original theme. If your attention deviates, it will wander less far and for a shorter length of time. For sure, meditation gurus will agree with this process.

Source: https://hbr.org/2015/11/to-improve-your-focus-notice-how-you-lose-it

You want to be read? Write in spoken language.

If you want people to read and understand what you write, written language is not appropriate. Even worse, using complex sentences and fancy words give you, the writer, the false impression that you're saying more than you actually are. From Paul Graham's experience, the harder the subject, the more informal experts speak.

So here are two tips:

1. Before publishing or sending, read it loud and fix everything that doesn't sound like conversation.
2. And even more drastic, try explaining to a friend what you just wrote. And then replace your draft with what you said.

Never let a sentence through, unless it's the way you'd say it to a friend.

Source: http://paulgraham.com/talk.html

Alban Denoyel, Co-founder & CEO of Sketchfab, share some tips on how he closed a $7m series A.

LEVERAGE YOUR MOMENTUM Do not raise money when you are running out of it. As Eric Paley, Managing Partner at Founder Collective, says, running out of money is not a milestone. Instead, leverage your momentum: growth, key partnerships, hire, product update...

FOCUS ON ONE KEY METRICS It's often tough to have all your metrics performing well at the same time. So focus on one which is both growing really well and is a good definition of what your business is.

BUILD RELATIONSHIPS EARLY Time is the best due diligence. Fundraising is an ongoing process. So identify VCs you like and who like you, and ask for help and intros. It's a great way to get them involved early. Then, keep them updated and continue asking for help.

Source: https://medium.com/@albn

To Paul Graham, if you are a startup founder, you can be as nice as you want with your customers, as long as you work hard on your growth to compensate.

Here is the math behind.

Suppose your company is making $1000 a month now, and you've made something so great that it's growing at 5% a week. Two years from now, you'll be making $160k a month. Suppose now that you only extract half as much from users as you could, meaning $500 a month now, but that you're able to grow 6% a week instead of 5%. Two years from now, you'll be making $214k a month versus $160k.

Startups usually win by making something so great that people recommend it to their friends. So focus on growth.

Source: http://paulgraham.com/safe.html