ADAPT #23 - You Are Learning On The Go

I always say to my kids:
“Remember, I learn to be a parent at the same speed as you learn to be a kid!
Even if I sound certain, you can challenge me. But equally, cut me some slack if I don’t get it right ;-)”

Today’s newsletter is going to be more personal and not follow the same ADAPT pattern.

I want to share some thinking about parenting that I am sure will resonate with parents and non-parents alike.

Perhaps the greatest startup I have ever been involved with was founding my family in 2006 with my co-founder pretty wife :-).

We have been neck deep in developing three products we think the market will love - all three are in various stages of development with the newest probably still in prototype and the last one about to be released.

Cashflow issues are real, we have a number of investors who support mostly our capital acquisitions and the number of stakeholders we need to manage is never short of hundreds!

This startup life is an insane ride.
It’s always intense but I think our vision is clear and the rewards are worth the pain!

Like with any product, we need to feed ours continuously.... and not just food (oh my god teenage boys eat SOOOOOO much) but also information and experiences and knowledge.

Seems that exposing the product to novelty and diversity aligns them well with a market that is continuously shifting needs! ha!

If I think of wealth generation and not just survival or growth, I quickly come to realize that my family startup is also going through the challenges and pains of scalability and expansion that any other startup endures.

One of our products is about to move from Beta to a full-fledged stand-alone product.

I am not entirely sure if that transition will be immediate or over a long period of time (seems that home is very comfy at the moment!) but we are proud and pretty certain it will be able to stand the rigours of the market.

Some of the features have been fully tested - ie: the loving capacity, honesty, principled, and goodness features, but other features like maturity, judgement, decision making, patience and more are still improving! Hehe!
Mind you, not dissimilar to any product launch in any business or startup I’ve ever been involved in!

A peculiarity of our products is that they meet other products and decide to partner with them (what the hell?) without even checking with us, the co-founders and product managers.

Kinda weird and hard at the start I must admit, but we are slowly getting used to it.

Our two most mature products have gone through partnership discussions with other developing products and it’s not the easiest thing to navigate when their various features seem to collide and adjust to each other hahahah!
(Now I can’t think of how this takes place in the startup or business world, but I assume when Lego and Warner met to work on the Lego Movie it wasn’t the easiest of partnerships!)

What other parallels can you find between parenting and startups?
Between startups and large corporations?
Between biology and business?
Between physics and team dynamics? etc

I love doing it and it’s amazing how there are emerging patterns that replicate irrespective of the medium (like when I told you about waves remember?)

They are medium agnostic. 

Ok, back to the start and the intent of this newsletter.

Go easy on yourself, whether it’s parenting that you are doing or a startup or a project at work or all of them all at once! 

You won’t always get it right and more often than not you are learning on the go*. 

That’s ok, that’s what humans are actually really good at: LEARNING.

One of the theories as to why we have been able to expand as a species the way we did is that exact capacity we have to learn.

Anyway, chill, big hugs to all!

X

Gus

*If you are not learning anything, refer to all my posts and provocations around NOVELTY…you need more of it in your life! ha!

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