You and Me Are Not The Same

On ignoring advice, writing your own playbook, and embracing your unique wisdom.

There is a palpable feeling about meeting someone that is ‘unapologetically themselves’. The effortlessness of their actions, interactions and ultimately the momentum they can create around themselves is contagious. It’s certainly understandable why we often spend time trying to ‘be like’ other people. We copy their behaviours, we emulate their processes and ways of doing things - we even adopt their goals and versions of success as our own.

But somewhere along the way, we can lose touch with the bits of ourselves that are ‘unapologetically us’. Maybe we’ve spent a lifetime leaning away from these parts, in case they were deemed to be unacceptable by the collective. Maybe we couldn’t see them connecting to the more material goals we aspire to, so we’ve taken to wearing a mask instead to keep us on the right path. It’s at this point that our ecosystem, and honestly society at large, misses out.

The reality is the startup ecosystem has largely perpetuated this problem by creating a culture of standardised advice, programmatic instruction on how to ‘optimise yourself’ and generally reinforcing the idea that there is a ‘singular’ way to do things to be successful. We have pattern-matched what worked in the first iterations of technology and venture capital, and created a norm for people to fit. In doing so, we ultimately missing the point that it was people’s uniqueness that established those norms in the first place, and that we should have been optimising for difference instead of homogeneity.

Essentially we have distilled down what it means to be a 'high performer’ into a caricatured persona -  one that is on turbo thanks to LinkedIn thinkfluencers - that we tend to subconsciously measure ourselves against. 

You know the one:

• Highly productive, output-oriented at all times

• ‘data-driven’ decision maker (no room for intuition or instinct unless it can be forced through a numeric justification process)

• always optimised for external metrics/reach/impact

• always on/consistently shipping rain, hail or shine

• If you didn’t post about it, did it even happen?

If you are not doing the above and more, you are not valued as a ‘weapon’, a superpower contributor, an amazing operator etc. You know the tropes.

To be clear, the above capabilities are admirable. For some people. And we could all benefit from leveraging them. Some of the time.

But if you’ve ever sat back and wondered why you don’t seem to fit the mould, why you could never live your life like that, or why it feels like your inherent value goes unnoticed - it’s probably because that advice is not good for you. And because the system we exist within has struggled to recognise more complex or subtle value-drivers, purely because they are harder to quantify.

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I want to pause here to appreciate the incredible growth of our ecosystem over the last 5+ years largely due to the above qualities being front-and-centre. This is not a post against those qualities and ideals, it is a recognition that for a minority they will not be an aligned way to live. It’s also an awareness of the constraints of our continuing ‘industrial complex’ approach to work life, even at the bleeding edge of startups. And a hope that our ecosystem will benefit all the more when we recognise, appreciate and celebrate other ways of being, doing and working to create even more outsized impact.

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• What if your value is to incubate, join dots and initiate the next big idea, but you get penalised because you can’t drive a project all the way to its natural conclusion or implementation? Or you can’t take the downtime you need to create something new because if you’re not doing 15 hour days, are you even working?

• What if you are great at implementing something the first few times, but aren’t the right person to establish the systems and processes that would keep it moving, growing, evolving?

• What if your superpower is being able to absorb the energy of the collective (team, company, community), tap into its needs and evolve its direction without seeming to lift a finger? Would people back-channel about how you never seem to ‘do’ anything, and yet, they know they’re better off with you around?

• What if you were simply a mirror to hold something up against, without which we continue to move forward unchecked, full of hubris and without any conscious reflection around the direction we are going?

Ultimately, it’s my view that the world of startups has become more prone to rewarding one way of working to the exclusion of all others. At the very least, my broader question is whether we are setting up all kinds of people to be successful in this industry? Or are we optimising for only one kind of contributor, and therefore missing out on so much more value, richness of experience and quite simply individual strengths and skills that are often overlooked.

For me personally, I’ve spent almost two decades learning where I can and do fit the mould (and for how long I can exist in these states), while also recognising where doing so absolutely depletes me, and leaves a whole lot of my value on the table, unseen and under-leveraged. Luckily, I am at the age and stage where resolving this feels within my control. But over the course of my career, I have borne witness to many others being disregarded for their true gifts, or being forced to supplement them with activity that probably felt plain unnatural to them. At best, they felt disgruntled or disengaged. At worst, they burnt out completely.

What feels more dangerous is that we’ve reached a point of idolisation of this one way of being, a ‘guruisation’ of its proponents and their way of thinking and acting, and the ‘processification’ of even the most human and intangible acts - like building meaningful relationships. Are we thinking and reflecting, or just acting and executing?

At a micro level, it can just be plain annoying to see this mindset being reinforced ad nauseum, adopted without question, and how few people spend the time to explore their own unique ways of working. At a macro level, I worry we continue to make the startup ecosystem inhospitable for people who think and act differently, whose value is harder to quantify. And that has dire consequences indeed.

So what? Well for me, I have begun 2024 with a renewed and even more insatiable appetite to understand myself better than ever. My motto has always been ‘perpetual self-betterment’, but not the ‘productive’ kind. (In fact, the less productive I am, the more aligned to and aware of my true value I become.) I value my intuition, my emotional knowing, my capability to see ahead and pull pieces of the puzzle together to make it real. This is where I’ll be spending time optimising myself this year.

But more to the point, I want to encourage and support others to spend time deeply enquiring about their own unique value - not the one our industry or society has said is worthy, but the one that, when unembodied, leaves you feeling sad or detached. If the prescriptive advice of the masses doesn’t seem to fit, I invite you to create your own playbook and lean into the things that light you up, the superpowers you know to be real even if you can’t put a KPI against them. We need your courage and your individuality to shape the world for the better.

If this resonates with you, either because you’re building a team and want to do the above better for your people, or you are an individual on a journey to better inhabiting your full potential - I’d love to hear from you.

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TECH

• In reference to the above, I want to shout out someone who is absolutely leaning into their superpower. Annie Liao, founder of Build Club, is leveraging community to support the new generation of tech builders specialising in Generative AI. It’s a joy to watch her at work.

ECONOMY

• My journey into startups and tech was via the pathway of social entrepreneurship and social innovation. Deep down, I have always struggled with the ‘growth at all costs’ orientation the industry has. I’m loving the content of the ‘Post Growth Entrepreneurship’ course at the University of Amsterdam, as a way to consider alternate pathways.

HUMAN CONDITION

• There is no better way to commence your journey of greater personal understanding than to deep-dive into your values. One of my favourite new startups is leveraging AI to support this process. Check out thecompass.ai to kick off your own process of discovery, with their special early-bird subscriber rate.