Make Your Mark

by Jocelyn K. Glei

Whether you’re about to launch a new company or are considering how to retool an existing business, my hope is that this collection will offer you fresh thinking, practical advice, and the moxie to get out there and make something that matters.

Thought, if not written down and shared with others, changes nothing. Does it matter?

Your ideas, if not captured and executed, affect nobody. Are they relevant? Creation must be made accessible for consumption.

The potential of creativity—and your ability to sustain yourself and serve others through creativity—is more about business than it is about ideas.

Success is making an impact in what matters most to you.

If you don’t manage your ideas like an entrepreneur, they will die with you. Jump in and take the reins.

the first step in living your purpose is to distill it. This very act sets an accurate compass heading. It shapes your choices, tells you what is important, and helps you separate the merely interesting from the truly crucial.

How will the world be better off thanks to you having been on this earth? What are your unique gifts and superpowers? Who have you been when you’ve been at your best? Who must you fearlessly become? At the intersection of these four questions lies your personal purpose.

The same process holds true whether you’re a leader doing the hard work of articulating a purpose for your organization or you’re an individual ready to live a more directed life.

The work of introspection is put into action only once you’ve succinctly put your purpose into words.

He defines purpose as being in the right place with the people who matter to you, doing your life’s work. So the endeavor becomes, in Richard’s words, to “pack” and “repack” one’s life—discarding ideas, thoughts, duties, old baggage about relationships, in favor of packing the things you truly need to be at your best in life.

She spends her time focused solely on the projects and causes that allow her to grow and contribute. She says “no” to the rest. Restraint and discipline come to those who are clear about their purpose in life.

And here is the most interesting bit: The impact you have in the world also affirms your purpose. Impact justifies purpose. It fuels purpose. It empowers you to live your purpose more boldly every day.

We listen to that purpose. We achieve things because of our purpose. And that in turn makes each of us hungry to live by our purpose even more. In our own humble way, this is how people become great.

In the early days of a new business, you make choices—conscious and unconscious—that will influence your culture far into the future. If you’re not careful, those choices can become patterns that limit your ability to thrive.

They have an intense bias to action and a high tolerance for risk, expressed through frequent experimentation and relentless product iteration.

Think of your OS as the sum total of all the values, processes, and methods inside your organization. If the business plan is the “what” of the org, the OS is the “why” and “how.” Put another way, it’s your organizational DNA.

Demand a culture of transparent communication. Use new tools to ensure that this is possible, even when team members are working remotely. When in doubt, choose to be open—with your plans, your product, and your data.

Innovation starts with enthusiasts. The reason why it starts with enthusiasts is that they are focused on the right priority, which is the change they want to make in the world, versus say, a business idea that will get funded.

Being able to see the world in a fresh way is the essence of being an entrepreneur. You have an idea about the way the world ought to be. You have a theory about why and how you are going to connect the dots.

I believe in the power of storytelling. We live in a world of stories that are really our maps to how to think about the world. People who succeed in that kind of storytelling are telling what I would call “emotionally intelligent stories.”

What I do is look and say, “Is there something people are not realizing that if they understood it, it would help them think differently and more effectively about the future?” I am trying to draw a map of the future based on observations about reality.

We act as if a new idea is good just because it’s new. But what if we were forced to stop and ask ourselves: “Why do we need that?”

Most entrepreneurs have cast off comfortable jobs to embark on years of late nights, doubt, debt, and the constant threat of failure. It takes an almost insane amount of drive to get through those years, to keep going against all odds and at the sacrifice of friends, family, and fitness.

The “why test” always ends with fear of death. That’s the only acceptable indication that you’ve reached the end of the “why” chain, because you could argue that “fear of death” is the ultimate motivator for all human behavior. Only then do you have permission to go back and identify which insight is actually most relevant and appropriate for what you’re trying to create.

Questioning is perhaps most important when you’re at that critical stage of forming a company and developing a clear sense of mission and purpose. The questions you ask will guide the choices you make, the directions you move in, the opportunities you pursue (or fail to pursue), and the culture you create.

The business you started out in last month may not even exist next year, but if you’ve identified the real value you offer to the world, you can adapt and survive even as the market around you changes.

View your business itself as a product that you are constantly iterating on, tinkering with, and evolving. There are no answers without questions.

consumers don’t care what you want. Your job is to care about what they want, not what you want them to want. The difference between the two is the distance between a customer-centric company and an egocentric company.

you have to compromise on one dimension: you can either build something a large number of people want a small amount, or something a small number of people want a large amount. Choose the latter. Not all ideas of that type are good start-up ideas, but nearly all good start-up ideas are of that type.

Here’s the paradox: even if you make two great items right out of the gates, just by having two you make it harder for the customer to know what job to hire you for. Why start with two, when it creates more risk, requires more capital, dilutes your focus, and makes it harder to message who you are in those precious early innings? Remember: you’ll have opportunities to grow revenue and extend the brand later.

Be wary of the creator’s tendency to add more and more features and options. Grand visions must be boiled down to be effective visions. While the intricacies of your product may fascinate you, it’s quite possible that they complicate the product and frustrate your users.

Which means that the default experience is the one you want to focus on the most. It’s difficult to do this because you, as the product’s creator, will always be an advanced user. But your newest users will always matter more than you.

Our most important asset is our time, so I think it’s best to manage your time well right now and be happy about it, rather than focus on some deferred goal, like buying a fancy car in the future. The data shows that people who are rich aren’t any happier, so you might as well derive your happiness from what you are doing today.

At some time, everybody is driven by fear. But we need to—as much as we can—take fear out of the game. One way to do this is to imagine that you are already successful. You’ve looked into the future, and you’ve succeeded. What would you enjoy doing today given that knowledge?

But if you know everything, you can’t possibly innovate, right? It’s impossible, because there is nothing new to learn or discover. There’s this funny saying that I like: “After high school, kids know everything, after their bachelor’s degree, they know something, and after a PhD, they now know that they know nothing.”

This culture of sharing didn’t just happen by itself, however. We nurtured it by designing for people who were likely to share their insights (e.g., people who love learning, sharing, and spending time online), and by connecting on a personal level with all our early users.

Don’t limit the shape of the solution too early in the product development process. Remove constraints, focus on the problem, and work from “first principles.”

Focus on making one great product that a small group of people truly want. Nail that first; then (and only then) think about expanding your offerings.

Hone your product by empathizing with the first-time user. Assume you have fifteen seconds or less to convince them it’s worth their time.

Start experimenting with, and releasing, prototypes (or beta versions) as soon as possible. If you’re not iterating and failing, you’re not learning.

I think it goes back to transparency. The first thing to do is admit it. Explain what happened and apologize. Your customers can be very understanding provided that you enable them to be understanding, which means that you need to have an honest discussion with them and fess up when you make a mistake.

You do not control your brand anymore. You can influence it and help guide the conversation, but there’s a limit to how precisely you can define your brand on your own.

The first thing is the need to be empathetic and the importance of being friendly, super-friendly. Now, we can’t teach them how to be friendly, of course; that’s something that we try to identify during the interview process. But one thing that we can teach in training is how to take pride in being friendly, and how to view a difficult situation as a challenge, where you strive to resolve it so that you’re happy and the customer is happy. So, essentially, taking pride in turning a negative experience for a customer into a positive one.

How can you share more of the process behind your product with customers? It can be good, bad, or ugly—as long as it’s honest.