Moving your Mountain
In a life drenched with data multiplying at the speed of light, reading Phil Knight’s Shoe Dog feels somewhat incongruous. Imagine waiting for a letter from Japan for several weeks where most of us now would be unable to sit through the torture of not receiving a reply to a very important email or message for a few hours.
All beginnings are small
Incongruity aside the book is a great read and besides the ways in which we globally communicate, the world has completely changed between the year in which Blue Ribbon started and the behemoth Nike is now. The ‘World Wide Web’ has existed for 30 years, created in the same year as the fall of the Berlin wall (9 November 1989), which in itself was approximately 25 years after Nike was founded. Change over decades is sometimes difficult to disconnect from that what is now. Facebook did not exist 16 years ago and ‘Zuck’ didn’t become a gigantic billionaire building robots that communicate with each other overnight. All real change starts with small, sometimes seemingly insignificant steps, or as Phil Knight puts it:
‘The [wo]man who moves a mountain begins by carrying away small stones’
Phil Knight in Shoe Dog
The magnificent mountains on the cover image of this article took a very long time to become in what they are now, this process can’t be compared to the speed at which we see digital innovation accelerate yet let’s not forget that the first website was, well, quite basic:
So was the first version of Facebook, Google, Amazon, Netflix and any other successful proposition or business that are talked about in the occasionally star struck stories about its founders. These stories being ubiquitous because almost all of us either directly or indirectly use their services and/or products on a daily basis, while the struggles, major pivots and fuck-ups are left out. Knowing the full story, all its data, is crucial.
Focusing on the now
Knowing the full story on something that you have to track longer term or have yet to conceptualise is hard. There is a lot of data, information and visual stimuli out there, a lot of, a lot, basically. Which is both amazing and might also be quite daunting.
It is amazing because you no longer have to be based in Boston, Oxford or Cambridge to get access to education from what are deemed the most prestigious universities, you can just go onto EdX. You no longer need to go into the bank branch to open a current account nor be a high net worth individual to invest in the stock markets or private equity. Heck you can streamline the whole of your financial life and automate it at the same time by a few taps.
It is daunting because our sensory memory has to filter out more and more and with endless opportunities arises decision/choice paralysis, now that is something a robot doesn’t face. The wealth of tools and information at our direct disposal means we start skimming through text, skipping past the basics and almost become information lazy. The effects of, for example, skim reading on our society have yet to be fully measured yet just like the actual impact of ‘click-bait media’ on our brains, it’s longer term impact will likely be profound.
The importance of taking the time to go through what we have in front of us in the now is crucial. Being a generalist I have had to and continue to learn the hard way that focus is always required, even if you want to consume a lot of information about a lot of different topics.
Your path
Whether you’re considering starting a business based on an idea you are passionate about, co-founding a venture someone else got you hooked on or if you are passionate about pursuing a particular career path, focus can come in different forms for all of is. Finding your focus, your true purpose, isn’t something that happens at an instant. Eureka moments are usually only a result of the aforementioned seemingly insignificant steps that you make, yet you must be making them. Drastically changing your life overnight usually doesn’t work yet slowly and patiently working towards ‘growing’ yourself will certainly lead to eureka moments along the way.
Consider your Cognitive Load
Finding your focus is related to how much new information you hold and process, the first step is allowing for an infinite learning curve and second is finding your own way to navigate through Gigantic Data (big data is so 2010's).
In Sweller’s cognitive load theory we see that just as a computer’s SSD our brains have a ‘working memory’, your sensory memory. It is the germane part of our brain that allows us to consider new input. If we try to take on too much new information at once we simply do not process it (i.e. we become information lazy).
So in order for you to find your focus you will need to tap into your working memory, your germane load. The fuller it is and the more novel challenges you’ll have to solve on a daily basis the less likely it is you’ll get to develop yourself on your path. Think of the effect of poverty on our brain, having to find life’s basic needs day in day out really doesn’t allow for much ‘headspace’ (one of the main arguments as to why Universal Basic Income could actually help improve the world and all of our lives, a topic I touch on in this post dated Feb 2019)
In short, to find your focus and allow for extra-curricular development of your new passion, free up some of your germane load (if possible). Be wary of the ‘s/he got up at 4am and worked on her/his company before working 12 hours in a busy job’ type of stories, success is steadily ticking off to do list items not neuroburning yourself. Freeing up headspace to work on your passion doesn’t mean you do ‘more’, I believe that real focus over time allows for time to free up gradually. Embarking will see you go over the neuro-peak of taking on new information while you work out the very path you want to pursue. Which also means that you get to adopt a ‘growth mindset’, allowing you to build the emotional resilience that the future requires of all of us.
Don’t fear running like a turtle!
Be it a venture (check out Yena, a global and virtual acceleration community for entrepreneurs) or a career jump, there is a right time to scale and if 2019 has thought us anything it is that ‘blitzscaling’ or hyper-growth isn’t sustainable. Of course, any sort of professional sprints are great yet it requires skill, determination and endurance, which can only be build over time, to complete an ultra-marathon. Treat your path to passion as a long term goal and never feel stuck to that one path, letting go and starting all over doesn’t mean you have wasted time. In the end, I truly believe, all of life’s dots are connected. I hope you encouraged you to re-ignite your passion and work on small steps to get there all while you enjoy the ride.
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If you are a generalist like me and find everything interesting I definitely recommend reading this article:
Or following this course on Coursera:
