As a founder, your primary role is not to sign documents or to raise money or to make speeches
at events or to have fireside chats.
Your primary role is to contemplate, contemplate about your values and your vision.
You are the chief contemplation officer of your startup.
Your primary role is to become a thought leader in whatever you do and inspire others.
In the rush of operations, you might come to believe that restless execution is the
way to go.
It can also make you feel very busy, very productive and very important.
People across the startup ecosystem often confuse working hard and long hours with working
in the right direction.
You tend to differentiate between the two.
Constantly being connected with the outside world might seem like an obvious trait to
possess.
But what you really need to do is the opposite.
You need to cut off from the external and go inward.
You need to spend hours and hours doing nothing but thinking deeply about your values and
your vision.
Assuming that you possess the energy, ability and perseverance.
It is this act of contemplation that will provide you with the insights that are almost
never visible on the surface.
Those insights will polish your vision slowly and steadily.
Contemplation allows you to master clarity of thought and communication.
That is a must-have ability for a leader.
You must be able to clearly lay out the path for others to follow.
And you need to contemplate silently.
Don't announce it to the world or discuss it on social media.
If you merely change your designation to Chief Contemplation Officer and post it online or
announce to the world, look, I went on my contemplation walk today.
You are still thinking about outside rather than inside and that change will be superficial.
It will not help you.
You have to talk less, physically reduce your quantity of speech, online or offline.
Talk less, think more.
Talking and looking outside consumes a lot of energy.
Spend less energy reading or replying to posts online.
Ask yourself, is this reading helping me get better or is it just entertaining me?
Use that energy instead to think deeply.
And don't rush back to instantly announce your deep thinking to the world.
Forget the external.
Look inward.
Stay inward.
As a founder, contemplation is your core technology.
Galileo used it.
Mozart used it.
Shakespeare used it.
Alan Turing used it.
You can use it too.
If you need a systematic program to develop your contemplation skills, you can use the
Core Level 1 program on adiosworld.com.
Next, you must pursue a hobby regularly.
Pursuing a hobby helps you do your work better.
It helps create new neural connections that might help you see things in a different light.
Apart from being a waste of time, it can actually help you become better at your work.
You could add new flavors in your work by finding inspiration from other fields.
Say music, art, poetry, theatre, sports.
Your hobby might also help you look at something differently.
For instance, if you're learning to paint or playing a sport, drawing analogies between
your hobby and your work can open completely fresh perspectives from which to look at your
work.
Reading more about those art forms and especially about the people who have been masters of those
fields, their approaches can open new doors of thinking altogether.
Pursue a hobby regularly.
Find a teacher in your town or online that usually helps maintain consistency.
This isn't about your startup.
This is about you, how you would like to live your next few years as you work on your
startup.
Would you prefer restless execution or contemplative execution?
What you prefer to do will also determine how you feel on a regular basis and in life
in general.
If you're destined to succeed using restless execution, imagine what you could do with
contemplative execution.
If you're destined to fail using restless execution, your chances of success increase
dramatically with contemplative execution.
If say 90% of the startups fail, that may just sound like 90 out of 100 fail, but that
also means that you have a 90% chance of failing.
Think about that for a second.
What should you do differently that others haven't done so you succeed?
If you just continue to do what those 90% of the startups have done, aren't you ensuring
that you would also be one of them?
And don't think this startup is the one, that's it.
It might not be.
And for all you know, it shouldn't be.
You will see it is a small component and you will eventually build something much more
important.
Focus on the process of improving yourself.
Trust the process.
It works.
There are many, many ways to create something large, but there is only one way to create
something truly inspiring.
And that is contemplation.
Think about someone in the startup world who did something truly inspiring.
Do you think they spent a lot of time contemplating or a lot of time trying to connect with as
many people online and attending as many startup events as possible?
Contemplation on the right values.
Contemplation on a non-financial vision.
That is your primary role as a founder.
Your justice to that role and you shall receive psychological and financial insurance
for the rest of your life.
The words values, vision and contemplation occur about 180 times in this course, while
the word valuation occurs about 25 times.
If you can follow the same proportion while running your startup, no one in this world
can stop you from succeeding.
So dissolve everything that is around you.
Forget about others and how they view you and what they think of you.
Focus only on yourself and do the right thing.
So go for it.
Use contemplation on your values and your vision as your neutrons and split that atom.
All the best.