Does it ever feel like we’re being information bombed every day? No doubt social media has made it easier for everyone to chat and communicate, but it also increased the noise signal to an extent our brain just can’t take it anymore.
How about your meetings? Like many I have my weeks booked full of meetings for the past several weeks. But at the end of the week and upon reflecting it, are even half of those meetings essential and contributed to our end goals?
I found that many face the same challenges I do. It's increasingly easy to do 'things' than doing the 'right things'. To make it more difficult, the boundaries are no longer clear. Without some brave enough people who tell us we are lost. It's easy to be - lost.
A recent task I have given myself is to understand start-up seed fundraising. After spending days reading through guides and booking intro calls, I thought I understood the procedures from start to finish. Of course, I couldn't be more wrong. It soon became clear to me talking to 5 people can produce 5 distinctively different answers. I poured so much time into this, but now I'm lost.
Many days after, I've learned the facts. Turns out who to ask the questions are the key. Asking a founder who raised Series-C, even just on a 15-minute call with them, could probably have saved me weeks of efforts. On the other hand, if you are only raising in Canada and ask for your first-hand advice from a US founder, it may not be helpful at all despite the other founder being gracious enough to take some time to guide you.
I concluded the key to care and act on the 'right things' is optimization. It's not the time and effort you've spent on something that matters, it's the process and how well you're able to make it better. You might now know the right answers to a question, but if you know the right path to get to the answer, and optimized it, it's much more possible you're focusing on the right things and not just anything.
At least next time when I want to get something serious done, I’ll pause and ask myself first: am I focusing on the right things? Am I optimizing this process enough? If not, I'll think again. If so, I'll proceed.