As I said in my last column, I have been doing a lot of thinking lately about what the last few years of actively working with founders of small space companies has taught me. This is because it has become clear to me that even after 35 years working in many roles in this business, I still have a lot to learn.
As part of that reflection, I realized that much of that learning has come from the founders themselves and from their experiences. They really have taught me a great deal both as a group and as individuals.
Perhaps the most important thing I have learned, or maybe it’s more appropriate to say that I have remembered it, is what it takes to run your own business, especially in a sector as demanding as space.
I spent a whole column on this a while ago, so I won’t belabour the point. The short answer is that the one essential quality that founders can have in this business is grit, or resilience. The ability to work through adversity.
It’s an easy trait to describe and a hard one to develop, but I have seen the Founders I know learning to shoulder this burden.
They all do it in different ways. Some are quick to see the silver lining in pretty much any cloud, others are more thoughtful and introspective. Regardless of how they do it, or how long it takes, though, when reality knocks them down, they all find ways of picking themselves up, dusting themselves off, and getting back to moving forward.
In the end, I think that they all start to realize that surviving a major crisis is just as much cause for celebration as achieving a major goal. Perhaps Nietzsche was right.
The second thing I have learned from “my” founders – and which I have tried to apply to my own work – is that they key to genuine success is, as my own executive coach used to say, to find, and respect, your Genius.
By “Genius” I mean the thing that you are really good at, but also the thing where that competence gives you genuine pleasure. In other words this Genius is the thing that provides not just value to others – but also to yourself. It’s not always easy to figure it out. And even less easy to figure out how to make it the thing on which you focus your days.
But when you do, it’s a very powerful thing.
I have watched founders as they struggle with trying to figure out how to spend more time on the tasks where they genuinely add value – and less time on those where they do not. It is not easy. It requires a lot of introspection. It often requires unlearning some bad habits and unhelpful ways of thinking about what you “should” do. It also requires patience, since the world does not always cooperate.
As a founder, especially in the beginning, your world is full of things that MUST get done. And, by and large, you are the ONLY one who can do those things. So, whether or not you enjoy them, you get them done. And, whether or not you enjoy the process, you often get good at tasks you really never expected, or had any desire to get good at. That is life as the founder owner and operator of a small business – especially in the early days of the business.
The trick is to realize that it does not have to be that way in perpetuity. Let’s face it, if you have gone to the trouble, and taken the risks that are necessary to start your own business, you did not do it so that you could have a job you didn’t enjoy. There are plenty of ways to do THAT with other people’s money.
No, if you started a business, it was because you wanted to have a job that you liked. It is easy for founders to forget this fact pretty quickly after they start their business. Getting and keeping the business running becomes their overriding concern – it has to be. There are so many things that need to get done RIGHT NOW and so many people that have to be satisfied – investors, customers, employees… that it is easy to forget that the long-term objective of the whole exercise is to create a job that pays the bills and that you also want to do every day.
And that is where finding your Genius comes in. The way to end up doing what you really enjoy is to figure out how that overlaps with what is of greatest value to others. When you figure that out, you have “found your Genius”. And, then the magic happens.
Because when what you really enjoy is also the thing that is of great value to others, to your customers, and your co-workers – it becomes the thing that everyone else actually WANTS you to do. And so, you find that increasingly all of those things that used to distract you from your passion, become less and less, well, distracting. This is either because you figure out that they were not all that critical to your value proposition after all, or because you find others who are not only able, but willing, to step in and step up to handle those parts of the job that you don’t enjoy.
This is not surprising. If you are doing this right allowing others to help you is just enabling them to find their own personal value. A lot of founders struggle to understand that functions and tasks that they find onerous are genuinely enjoyable to other people. Invariably founders will have co-workers whose palms literally itch to take the jobs the founder dislikes away from them – so that they can be done properly. Time and again, I ask founders to look around them and ask someone else if they are willing to take the load they hate to carry. Often, they find someone who has been waiting to be asked – and wonders why it took so long.
Now, I should add that this is a transition that is not possible until the right prerequisites are in place. First and foremost, the business has to have grown to the point where the founder has others with whom to share the load. Also, the founder and the business need to have matured to the point where it is possible for the founder to really understand what they, personally, bring to the table that their customers really appreciate – and which those customers cannot find anywhere else.
The final piece of the puzzle is to be ruthless about understanding the overlap between your value to others and your own satisfaction and sanity. For some this moment arrives in a rush of great clarity. For some it is a feeling that grows over time until it becomes a certainty. Either way, once you have found your Genius, once you have convinced yourself to focus on where you add value to yourself and others, once you let go of everything else – the world really is a different place.
Maybe this sounds a little bit too soft and fuzzy for hardnosed business folk, especially the engineers among you. But I think the founders that have reached this point will back me up when I say that it is a transformation from which they never look back. They can’t. Once you have solved the puzzle of how to be of use to others while also being true to what drives you personally, there really are no other attractive or even palatable options.
I know that it is true for me. Finding my own personal Genius has taken me a long while. I think I have known for a long time where my personal strengths lay. I have always had a fairly unique (I think) ability to see patterns and links and connections COMBINED with an ability to explain those insights to others for whom they are not obvious. It is what drew me to physics in my early life AND it is also why I have always enjoyed lecturing and teaching.
But I think it is fair to say that I spent a career doing what needed to be done – and being competent at it – often quite competent at it. But while applying my “core competencies” to a series of jobs, I never really did learn to shape things such that what needed to be done and what I wanted to do were the same. Unlocking that particular realization has been a revelation.
Increasingly it’s why I do what I do.
And why I don’t do many other things that I used to do.
And it is working with founders that helped get me here. It was not only watching them but also hearing the advice I was giving them – but was not taking myself.
I guess that was because taking my own advice would also mean having to face the first truth I mentioned in this article. By which I mean that finding your Genius and making it your job is something that does not come immediately or easily. It requires a resolution of a little of the Stockdale paradox every day. To really find, and respect, your genius you have to know that it is the right thing to do and not be dissuaded or disappointed by the obstacles and doubts that get in your way.
The founders that I know who have, or who are, solving this combined conundrum have my utmost respect. They are making a difference. But they are making the difference they want to make.
I have discovered that my Genius is helping them. So, that’s what I try to do. Every Day.
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