TLDR: Moving your 2023 goals forward by taking tiny actions that compound, a quick review of Stutz, and more about the book I wrote for founders.
I appreciate all the support on last week’s post about What’s in store for 2023. A lot of you reached out directly, so I figured a follow-up would be welcomed.
The reactions came with a few themes, but two that stood out: 1) how to move things forward, and 2) comments on specific goals (notably the book and re-watching Stutz), so let’s dive into all three.
Moving Things Forward
I blocked 30-minutes to calendarize all of the “first actions”
First actions are the smallest first step you can take to setting something in motion. As James Clear says, “You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.”
This week, I have 8 total hours of first actions—mainly blocked as 1-2 hours after work
For example, last week I blocked an hour to work on an Excel model for the rental property I was interested in. The numbers weren’t as attractive as I hoped, so I sent the models to friends in real estate for feedback. At least it’s in motion
For the book, I reached out to ten authors in my network for feedback, sent them digital copies, and booked time for coaching with those who were open to it
For tracking, I pulled up a simple Excel To Do List template that looks like this:
And that’s it. Get it on paper, create some social pressure for yourself, set it in motion, and track it. Pretty simple.
Comments on Specific Goals
The two goals that got the most reactions—the book I wrote in 2022 and the Netflix show I want to re-watch.
First, Stutz, the Netflix show.
Stutz is a Netflix documentary from Jonah Hill about his psychotherapist Phil Stutz and the tools that he teaches. I would go out on a limb and say it was the best thing I watched on Netflix last year (and yes, I rated it on whatcha.io).
As Jonah Hill explains, we spend money on professional therapists to have them listen to us but never give us real advice, and then we talk to our friends and pay them nothing, yet they give us (terrible) advice. It should be the other way around. You want your friends to listen, and you want the professionals to give you advice and actionable tools.
As someone who thinks in frameworks, Stutz’s tools gave me a deeper clarification over abstract concepts and provided a new lens to evaluate aspects of life. Here are a few things that stuck with me:
Three Aspects of Reality. Everyone must deal with three things: Pain, Uncertainty, and Constant Work
Life Force. It is imperative to understand what makes you feel more alive, and to arrive at that you must first understand the three levels of your life force: Your Relationship with your Physical Body, Your Relationship with Other People, and Your Relationship with Yourself.
Part X. We all have that voice. The one that tells you that you can’t do something, or holds you back from going after what you want. It’s the darker side of your psyche, “an invisible force that keeps you from changing.” Stutz & Hill also talk about The Shadow—the part of you that you wish didn’t exist, and knowing how to deal with and talk to The Shadow as well as how to deal with Part X is crucial
Tools. The show goes on to cover concepts like Active Love, Radical Acceptance, The Maze, The Realm of Illusion, String of Pearls, and The Grateful Flow which highlight ways we can work more effectively with our minds
The goal of re-watching it was to more deeply process the concepts, determine what might be most valuable, and decide how I might apply them to my life. Ironically, simply posting about it in last week’s MMM created a response which then caused me to review the material and write about it here.
If it wasn’t obvious by now, I recommend giving it a watch.
And now, the book—Inevitable: The Founder Handbook for Day Zero.
What started as a project in Notion to give founders access to the most important learnings on starting a company (code named “The Antler Way”) quickly evolved into cliff notes on some of venture capital’s most important works, like Do Things That Don’t Scale by Paul Graham, or more tactical works like, How Superhuman Built an Engine to Find Product Market Fit by Rahul Vohra in First Round Review.
That Notion page became a series of MMM-length commentaries that referenced these works and layered in my lessons from investing in more than 100 pre-seed companies over the past two years, starting a company of my own, and having a front row seat to some of the best leaders in the valley by way of my time at LinkedIn the decade prior.
If you’ve read Jim Collins’ monograph Turning the Flywheel, you know that a 100-page book can deliver incredible value quickly, and what became obvious to me is that there was nothing quite like that for starting a company. Sure, you could go to something like Founder Library, but then you have to search through and read every article to figure out what’s truly valuable and then synthesize it yourself.
Founders don’t have time for that. So instead, we wrote it ourselves.
With the help of my friend and entrepreneur David Hunt, in just 100 pages, we cover what we believe are the most important topics at day zero and linked each chapter to a digital repository holding those important works so founders can go deeper or hear it directly from the source if they so choose, and so that we can continue to add resources as new works are published.
The book isn’t available yet, but if you are a founder, investor, or just someone who aspires to bring the founder mindset to your work, and you’re interested in reading a draft copy (pictured above), shoot me an email and I will add you to the waiting list for author copies.
We’re only two weeks in, but 2023 goals are in motion!
See you Monday.