| When I coach startup founders, I walk them through a very simple 4 step process when we meet: 1. What have you learnt since we last met and how has that altered your priors? 2. What do you now believe is the most important problem you should be solving? 3. What's currently blocking you from solving that problem? 4. How do we overcome those blocks? Crucial to this process is that Q1 is not what have you done, it's what have you learnt. I do not give a shit about anything you've done if it's not in the service of learning. I also run a retro every 3 months with founders where we ask the following questions: 1. What would you want to tell yourself 3/6/12 months ago (essentially, all the lessons learnt in italics) to save the maximum amount of pain? 2. When did you learn each specific thing? 3. When was the earliest you could have learnt that thing? 4. What changes can we make going forward to minimize that delta? Extremely simple things but extraordinarily powerful when applied consistently over a long enough span of time. |