Hello, happy Sunday, and welcome to my weekend musings. Right now I’m sitting in our office in downtown Austin working away. I’ve always found that Sundays are a great day to get work done with minimal interruptions and today has been no exception. I absolutely love what we are doing and wake-up so excited about it I don’t want to wait until Monday, I want Monday to come sooner, hence working on Sunday. Here’s a photo of what I’m looking at right now:
You’ll probably also notice the fancy elevated monitor stand we put together in our office. Yes, we’re a startup so that means spending every penny wisely, and as a book-lover we happen to have a lot of books in our office.
One thing that I’ve had to get a lot better at in this phase of my life is saying no. It’s something I’ve always struggled with but in order to achieve the level of focus that I need, I need to say “no” a lot more than ever before. I wrote an article on Medium about the importance of Focus which is also directly related to saying no. It’s been incredibly hard but now I have to say that I’m getting used to it and it’s incredibly liberating.
Alex Iskold, the MD of Techstars New York wrote a great post today about goals, milestones and tasks, and I think he really nails it:
“We spend a lot of time talking to Techstars founders about focus. We talk a lot about saying ‘no’ to things that don’t matter. We talk a lot about not chasing too many things at once. We try to give founders tools for deciding what’s important. We try to give them a framework for how to get things done.” (Source – Alex Iskold’s Blog)
I still know people that like to brag about all the different things they are doing, I used to be one of those people, now I’m proud to be putting my time into one thing not a million different things. Of course that means saying no a lot more. I can’t go to every meetup group, dinner, happy hour, conference, etc. Instead I want to be here in the office with our team, if I travel it has to be for a very good reason.
I strongly believe that what we are doing right now in life will change the world forever, and that means staying focused, saying no, and knowing that that’s okay.
