Do stuff.
As a student, I studied engineering and decided not to learn computer science. I just figured I’d hire someone if I ever needed a website (and it didn't help that the CS classes were taught in refrigerated rooms...). Then I decided to build a tech company and spent a full year learning to code and shipping a SaaS product. And I admit that my mediocre coding skills were one reason we didn't succeed, but still, I actually really enjoyed coding.
Now, in the past 6 years at The Family, I haven’t touched a line of code. I’ve spent most of my time supporting other founders: answering hundreds of Slack messages & emails per day, meeting 25 to 50 people per week. I’ve learned tons and developed new skills, like the ability to get a feeling for someone's entrepreneurial skills in record time–but I also lost the ability to DO STUFF.
At first I didn't notice. Then I realized that writing emails that needed more than 10 lines or setting up a new tool had become difficult. I’ve stayed good at learning because I'm constantly surrounded by entrepreneurs that teach me things, and I kept a foot in technical questions thanks to subjects like crypto. But I could really feel how people get to a point where they feel old and unable to move and adjust.
In addition to maintaining your ability to learn, being able to do stuff requires:
intense concentration over long period of times
attention to detail
creativity (to make really great stuff)
Intense concentration and attention to detail do not naturally fit into everyone’s schedule. So you need to figure out ways to keep up those skills:
some ways are incremental: removing notifications or dedicating set periods of time with no interruptions, for example;
other ways are transformational: crafting your own sales presentations, doing your own Excel models, playing music, imagining worlds in Minecraft, building furniture, writing.
I was always intrigued by tweets from CEOs like Patrick Collison of Stripe and Tobi Lutke of Shopify saying they were still coding. How could they:
find the time to code while running an $100B business
have an impact coding while employing thousands of world-class engineers
And then it struck me—they do it because it keeps their brains in shape.
Recently, I’ve spoken with multiple friends of mine that have taken up chess quite seriously. They all described it as a forcing mechanism that pushed them into concentration mode for long periods of time. And I think that if you want to stay good at doing things, you need to find your own chess.
To push myself to get back to doing, I started with small endeavors—like writing this newsletter. I’ve been able to get back into geeking out on things, and I feel like building more. These habits have inertia: it takes time as you fall out of doing stuff, and it takes equally long to regain the ability. Start small, give yourself deadlines, and build up from there. It’ll start to reinforce itself—building is incredibly rewarding.
At The Family, we definitely want to hear about what you’re doing–apply for our next online batch, starting in September 🦁