5 things I’ve learnt over 5 years of Disruptive Thinking
As Disruptive celebrates its 5th birthday this year, we’ve been looking back on what we’ve learnt and where we want to be. Co-founder Yiuwin Tsang shares some of the things he’s learnt over the past 5 years and offers his tips for anyone starting out.
1) Try to keep perspective
It’s so easy to get hung up on the minutiae of running a business that you lose your sense of perspective. My wife is a medic, so the reality for me is, is that if I have a bad day I might lose a deal or miss a deadline, if she has a bad day people die. I appreciate that’s a bit extreme, but the point is, as soon as your work consumes you, it controls you and that means you’ve lost control. The first step to keeping control I’ve found is to keep a good sense of perspective.
2) There’s good money and there’s bad money
You need to know when to leave which on the table. This extends to a wider point around purpose which I’ll cover a bit further down, but the sooner you can accept that the value of revenue or income into the business goes beyond pounds, shillings, and pence, the more sound your commercial acumen becomes. What I mean by that is generating income is a byproduct of doing something well enough that someone values it enough to pay you to do it. This is pretty straightforward, now apply the notion that you enjoy what you do and you enjoy the people you do it for. How good does that feel? Now apply the notion you’re doing something you hate for people you don’t like. There’s a cost to doing this kind of work and its currency is your well-being. So, there’s good money and there’s bad money and they’re certainly not equal.
3) Eat the frog, but first, accept it is a frog and just take the first bite
There are entire books written on how you should deal with the biggest / toughest task on your list early on. I think most folks accept that’s the sensible thing to do, but it’s not the easiest. Even if there was white space in my calendar, I’d find other things to do to try to feel busier and less guilty about not doing the task that needed to be done. What I’ve learned is firstly don’t feel bad about wanting to put it off, because that doesn’t help - you just feel more guilty and do more other stuff to stop feeling guilty. Secondly, just make a start, if it’s opening up a doc/slides, picking up the phone, or whatever it is, physically start doing it, breach the threshold so to speak. The saying ‘the longest job to finish is the slowest one to start’ is an old one, but it is a good one.
4) Remember to reflect
For a long time, I’d literally book ‘reflection time’ into my calendar to remind myself to take some time to think back over what happened in the day, in the order it happened. There’s a book called The Chimp Paradox by prof Steve Peters, it’s a great read. Its relevance to my point about reflection is not that we should spend our cognitive bandwidth analysing what went wrong and beat ourselves up about it, but that we learn to recognise what is happening in the moment and learn how we inherently respond to these situations, we need to know what our inner chimp is likely to do so we know what to expect and how we feel after certain things happen. On a really selfish note, when you recognise things that you feel proud of or that make you happy, in the moment, it makes it feel even better as you know it’s coming.
5) Expect different, be happy more
When we made our first hires, it confused and frustrated me that our new team members didn't have the same sustained passion for the work as my co-founder and I did. Why were they not going the extra mile? Why were they not working the late nights? Reflecting now on to back then, it was both unfair and naive for me to expect that team members would have the same amount of passion as a founder has for the business. The reality is, is that employees won't have the same passion, their connection to the business is fundamentally different to that of a founders. However, your team can and will have as much passion, commitment and zeal, perhaps even more than you - but in a different way, a way that lies much more in the emotion and fulfillment of their role than in any shareholding value. I'd argue this kind of connection to the business is even more powerful. Once the shift happens, your expectation of your team as a founder is different and invariably you are more happy and through this, more appreciative of your team than ever.
