You know that sitting isn’t healthy, that the hours you spend in your chair cancel out the minutes you spend in the gym.
You know that standing while you work improves your health and can help you drop pounds by burning extra calories.
But you’re still sitting all day
You’ve wanted to switch to a standing desk, and you even rigged up a temporary desk to give it a shot. But after an hour, you started casting longing glances at your cushy desk chair.
Your arches ached.
Your back hurt.
You had trouble focusing on your work.
And after the newness of the idea wore off, it started to seem like a terrible burden to move your laptop all the way over there.
So there you sit
But what if you could bypass the pain and start reaping the health benefits of standing?
This week was all about scratching for that startup change.
I’m glad to say that after being so doubtful about people’s (specifically my father) willingness to fund a project with absolutely no other investors involved or better yet- a project run by a 19-year old undergrad with dreadlocks- I was proved wrong, gladly.It turns out that the gates weren’t so hard to open. All it took was an email to my distant father with my “proposal” attached, it then became the longest 48-hour wait I’ve ever had to go through. Everything depended on the response from this man so there was absolutely nothing to be done this week except for some coding of the site’s system (which I had no involvement in as I’ve only recently been taking an online course in Javascript- making me pretty useless). So I spent most of the week creating, editing and revising my 30-second sales pitch, catching up on some writing and vehemently pending a response that could just make or break our progress in terms of the deadline we had set for the project. Two hours of practicing, 12-pages of writing and 48-hours later I couldn’t wait no longer so I reached for my BlackBerry and sent a text to my father: “Have you gone through the document as yet?”
His answer was so simple and yet so significant: “I… finally got thru it, it’s brilliant.” My reaction was synonymous to that of an 8-year old after finding out that he’s getting a new bicycle! I was just so over-joyed. He then sent the document to my uncle and we’re now going to have a meeting to discuss exactly how much we need and what the way forward looks like. Next week is going to be all about prioritizing, delegating and committing.
As I mentioned earlier, this week will be dedicated to finding enough resources from the web in order for us to determine how to construct the perfect team for our various startups, right? I find it quite interesting that Jay Adelson mentioned that the team members at first need to be “Jack of all traits and Master none”.
This view mad me think about how, as entrepreneurs, we often try to over think who we should get on the various projects. We ask: is he qualified enough to give me the right advice? Can I trust this person or will they just end up stealing my ideas and making them better? Although leading towards paranoia; these concerns are justified by the fact that our startups are essentially our lives. If we want the start up to work- we ave to eat and live our startup. If, like me, you have an entrepreneurial state of mind- you begin to make certain projections that excite you and make the Idea/Concept that much more valuable in your life.
I had a meeting on Monday with a couple of partners that I have for another startup I’m involved in and one that I plan on investing greatly on. Before me, I saw a group of very ambitious and intelligent set of young men. This for me is all you need from a team. A bit of hunger and some natural ability. These two traits ensure that your team can put in the long hours where their needed and also be able think on their feet when things go slightly out of plan (as they normally do with young startups). I use the term “a bit of hunger” because I’ve realised that no one’s going to want your startup to be successful as much you do. As entrepreneurs, our lives revolve around the idea that this new business, is our key to economic emancipation, recognition etc. So we have to compensate this lack of natural commitment to our startup by using our basic understanding of certain existing human dynamics.
Jay Adelson mentioned one of the human dynamics: incentive. By offering the early members of your team parts of the company as opposed to just the usual underpaid salary, you create a need/ incentive for their hard work. They feel more like a part of the startup then just being the “help” thus increasing their propensity to deliver great work.
Project ZooLoo 