How will you measure success in 2021?
As 2020 comes to a close, I’m taking the opportunity to reflect on the year and update my portfolio and resume. While digging through the attic to pull down the Christmas decorations shown above, I found my old hard drive with all of the files of Gentoo, a company I co-founded with my friend Ben Nadeau. In addition to wanting to find some old prototyping photos I obviously fell down the rabbit hole of just digging through files and reflecting on the experience.
My file naming convention and storage structure is chaotic at best. Every folder is full of surprises. Among the chaos though, I found an old pitch deck from a competition we were in. We won the regional pitch which meant we would go to New York to pitch at the national round. This took up a huge amount of time and energy, that in hindsight, probably should have been channeled into some other area of the business.
If you want to survive in a startup, there’s no room for doubt. Going into a pitch with any doubt in yourself comes across as doubt in your idea. If you don’t believe in it then why should the judges? I loved to pitch and I was confident in our product and our mission as a company so I’m generally pumped and jazzed when I get up there.
Against an amazing collection of much more deserving companies, we won. In the picture of the awards presentation with the top three teams and the judges, I’m actually staring off into space and not at the camera because I’m just like “wtf??”
New York was a different experience. We were way out of our league with most of the companies already generating revenue or making market impact. At that point I think we’d given out product to 60 patients at most. But I believed in our product and our mission as a company, so I went and pitched my heart out.
We did not win nationals.
I tell that story to say that when I reflect on the time Ben and I spent building our company, that competition is a tiny footnote in a very unique and rewarding opportunity. But at the time it was huge focus and when the whirlwind of the multi-week experience ended, I was mentally and emotionally exhausted.
Humans have a unique ability of assigning value to the imaginary. An award is not the value of your company, a diploma is not the value of your education and a test score is not the measure of your worth. Instead of measuring ourselves by ephemeral artifacts, we need to learn to measure success in the meaningful ways we want to make an impact.
Wherever you are in your career or your hunt for your next career, take this opportunity to reflect on what you’re measuring your value against. Are you measuring it against cultural myths like competitions, titles and awards? Or are you measuring it by how fulfilling the journey is? In a future conversation will you talk about what you won, or your impact on the world?
Have a safe and happy holiday season, don’t forget to pick a BHAG and I’ll see you in 2021!
