February 19th, 2011
admin
I was watching NCAA games and suddenly the following sentence popped up:
“Successful programs consists of people working hard, working together, while never worrying about who gets the credit”
Former Coach Don Meyer
I think this sentence has deep meaning for us, startup people. When I looked at this, I had team building, my SaveUp app, my team on my mind. There is so much value in these words. Everybody can use it, having your own way of digesting these words.
Cheers,
Arek
During my vacation time I was grabbed by a book written by Garri Kasparow: (world chess champion) which contains many interesting stories, a few anecdotes and above all the attempt to draw conclusions from Kasparow’s years of championship.
There is an excerpt in this book dedicated to the ability of reading patterns from actions taken in the past. I get a lot of pleasure out of reading and even more when it helps me develop SaveUp.pl. I think that Garri’s book is worth reading while doing business in our industry and moving in such uncertain space as startup.
Sometime ago while reading Harvard Business Review I read a sentence which contained more or less the following message: “Every day we should expose our brain to new experiences. Throwing our heads in the new schemes, in the new ambiguous situations, forcing ourselves to adapt, we train our brain in searching for exit solution. This makes us pack our memory with more patterns, which can be used in the future.
So I think running startup (probably large company as well, but I don’t have such experience) is a great matter because every day, as a CEO, we deal with need to adapt ourselves enormously and also to adapt our environment. Thanks to this compulsion we throw your brain in a whirl of continuous development which ensures even greater capacity in the future. At the same time, Kasparov suggests, using the analogy to chess, to do a performance review, after winning game: “At the end of the day perform a review of what you’ve accomplished today. Look critically at your decisions. What conclusions I drew today and how they will be used the next day” The goal is to save in our memory those patterns which are valuable and critically evaluate those that are wrong.
Let’s quickly take a look how this process can be helpful, for instance in obtaining funds from venture capital companies for your startup development. We can chair one meeting with venture capital company according to one pattern and the second meeting according to a different one. And maybe according to the idea of throwing brain into uncertain situations, we’ll talk to business angel in the movie theater when we come across him by the popcorn stand.
At the end let me quote a sentence from Kasparow’s book: „without continuous attempts it is not possible to discover your skills”.
