WORKWORK12: Life’s Three Types of Business // Characteristics of a Good Startup Employee
Inner Work: The 3 types of business + what happens when we mentally live outside of our own. Outer Work: Characteristics that have made me a good startup employee.
Inner Work
I can find only three kinds of business in the universe: mine, yours, and God’s. —Byron Katie
Last WORKWORK, we talked about the first reason we suffer — when our thoughts argue with reality. Today, we explore the second reason we suffer — mentally living out of our business.
Byron Katie likes to say there are only three kinds of business: mine, yours, and God’s. Anything that is in my control is my business, and anything outside of my control is either your business or God’s business. A lot of our stress comes from when we are living out of our own business. When I mentally went into my partner’s business, for example, I thought “Nick should listen to me and go to bed earlier” immediately causing a feeling of frustration. Or another example: “My friend should be more considerate of my big life changes,” leaving me possibly feeling lonely or upset.
If you are living your life and I am mentally living your life, who is here living mine? — Byron Katie
In each example, my mind is in the world of the other person. I am trying to control their mind, their actions, and their responses to scenarios that they have a completely different relationship with. When I return to my own mind, it’s a place of discomfort, frustration, or loneliness. I’ve been putting this into practice lately and whenever I feel a negative emotion arise, I ask myself: Whose business am I in mentally? Here’s what I’ve noticed so far:
The sooner you realize you are mentally living in someone else’s business; the sooner you realize how it’s more important for you to take care of yourself! Come back to your own, beautiful self, think about what you want in those situations, and give it to yourself! Don’t rely on others.
Sometimes it’s kind of funny to shine a light on your thoughts and expectations of others. It brings a sense of awareness and moments of asking myself, “how the heck am I supposed to expect that person to see what I see?!”, or “this scenario is literally outside of my control, and their control. Time to let it go and give it up to God (or the universe or whatever you call a higher power).”
I find myself way more present and less caught up in the “what ifs”, or hypothetical scenarios of the mind.
Looking forward to talking about the third reason we suffer in the next WORKWORK. Have a beautiful day!
Outer Work
As I continue to take on new roles and work with new companies, I’m starting to be more reflective of my career. This last year I’ve noticed that I’ve basically only worked with, for, or built startups throughout my career. (Isn’t it funny how you don’t realize some of the major themes about yourself until you reflect on the thousands of decisions made over the years?!) Even when I was working at advertising agencies on Fortune500 brands, it felt startup-esque because I was choosing to work in the unchartered territory (at the time) of social media marketing.
From building athletic apparel showrooms in my living room, creating my own consulting business, bringing an ecommerce brand from pre-launch and zero sales to $500k+ monthly sales in less than 2 years to being the first female and marketing hire at an ecommerce tech startup, it’s very clear to me now that I love startups. I love the process of creating something out of nothing and reaching a point where we can see its true potential. Startups aren’t everyone’s forte, though, and that’s just a difference in preference, personal needs, or a byproduct of choices made over time.
Here are a few characteristics that I’ve found to be helpful in startup environments specifically:
Positive Mindset + Creativity
You’re helping create something from nothing. New challenges arise every day (many that are never planned for) and how you go about tackling those challenges are EVERYTHING. For me, it’s so important to be grounded in the ideas that 1) Everyone is doing the best they can (you absolutely have to make that assumption). 2) Everything always ends up working out — and in the case of failure, learning is the result, which in my book is “working out.”
Creativity is necessary to take on challenges with more edge and intelligence than you did the day before. You also have to be able to envision the bigger picture and potential of what you’re building.
Curiosity
No matter what, you’ll always be performing more than one job in a startup. This is one of my favorite aspects because it means I’m ALWAYS learning. My natural tendency is to learn many different skills and follow things that excite me (horizontal) over being an expert in one thing (vertical). I think the “swiss army knife” or “generalist” vibes help in startups tremendously.
On the marketing side of things, my superpower has been the blend of performance-driven marketing and creative or brand marketing. I view everything from both of those lenses, and it allows me to be able to communicate and ship a variety of projects with a variety of teams.
Comfort in the Chaos
I really like this piece by Ravi Gupta about desperation-induced focus. There really is a lack of process—you really are desperate at times, and you really do need to enjoy learning through doing.
Last night I went to dinner with Phillip Jackson, the co-founder of Future Commerce (one of my favorite commerce media platforms), and he introduced me to the concept of yak shaving, which was so timely and hilarious to me. It’s basically the idea that through the process of trying to accomplish one thing, you find a whole slew of random other things that are necessary to do in order to accomplish the original thing. This happens SO MUCH. It’s the reason timelines get pushed, and honestly why you end up launching something completely different than you initially intended. But, in a way, I find that kind of beautiful.
Interested Energy Helps
I was talking with my coach about podcast prep and expressing my anxiousness around making sure I sound “interesting.” And he said, “What if you are so interested in the topic that you are interesting? Aren’t things more interesting when the person is interested in the topic?” That was a huge lightbulb moment for me. I am SO interested in what I work on, sometimes to a fault. It’s another way of saying you are passionate about something. It’s a HUGE help being interested and passionate about the startup you are working with because it fuels your energy to push through the shitty times, motivates you to create momentum, and run with it.
Being Exposed and Owning It
A while back, I spoke with Kim Steifel, the co-founder of Repeat, and she brought up the idea that when you are at a startup you are much more exposed to the people you work with, which makes so much sense. In large corporations, you can hide behind layers of process and people. In a startup, your coworkers see your flaws, your vulnerabilities, your weaknesses, and your processing of when you don’t know something, etc.
From my experience, the best thing you can do is own your humanness. Keep it real — don’t be afraid to admit when you are wrong or uncertain. This is why building trust is so important because when you trust your coworkers, you can lean on them when you aren’t sure.
No Space for Drama
One of my favorite perks of working at startups is less room for drama and politics. You have to get shit done and get it done fast. If you are spending time on politics, drama, or even title and org structure, you are taking time away from shipping, testing, or building. I like to treat everything I’m doing as if it was my own business. I just focus on doing good work that I care about.