Читать книгу The Path Redefined - Lauren Maillian Bias - Страница 16

FOR EVERY SUCCESSFUL MAN OR WOMAN, there are plenty of others who, for some reason or another, don’t make it. The reasons for failure in business—and in life—are many. In fact, when you run down the list of possible problems, obstacles, and missed opportunities, you’d think it’s a miracle that anyone succeeds at all. But succeed they do. And although on some rare occasions, people succeed merely because they happen to be in the right place at the right time, in my experience, you’ve got to plan to be a success if you want to ensure that you will be a success. This is true whether you’re an entrepreneur starting up a new venture, a manager in a large corporation hoping to land a promotion, or an active volunteer in a community-based organization. Success is not synonymous with winging it. Like I said above, you’ve got to plan for your success, not just hope for it. You’ve also got to be ready for the inevitable failures—see Chapter 14 for more about that.

I have found that one of the most powerful (and as it turns out, one of the simplest) actions you can take to get you on your path to success is to simply set goals. But not any old goals will do. I personally need huge, aspirational goals that excite and motivate me through any ups and downs that I may encounter—they are the light I expect to see at the end of the tunnel. Here’s how I approach this task:

 Find a quiet, comfortable place where I can avoid interruption for an hour or so.

 Begin to form a picture in my mind of what I want to be doing six months from now, a year from now, five years from now—and where I want to be doing it.

 Allow my mind to wander without limits and to consider all the possibilities for how I can attain the vision of my future—especially the ones that seem most nearly impossible to attain, but with the greatest potential rewards.

 Choose the one path to the future that gets me most excited and motivated, and turn it into an aspirational goal.

 Set smaller, readily attainable goals that define the exact path I will follow along the way to achieving my aspirational goal. It’s not these smaller goals that keep me motivated, however, but more the process of setting the lofty, aspirational goal and then coming as close as I possibly can to achieving it.

I’ve been responsible for my actions—both the successes and the mistakes—since I was a teenager. I juggled school and a modeling career, achieved grades that made my parents proud, and pulled down the kind of summer income from my lemonade stand that most children only dream of. I learned to negotiate for myself, first as a model negotiating with my agent, and ultimately with clients. I next developed an interest in investing in real estate, so I learned how to create plans to turn properties that were depressed into lucrative assets.

Lauren on … Taking Risks

When pursuing an opportunity, ask yourself, “Will it have been worth it even if I fail?” Once that answer is clearly a resounding “yes,” the potential risks morph into rewards, such as acceleration and expansion of business experience.

I know no other way than to thrive under pressure, but I always have a plan about what my end goal is. The plan to get there may not always be as methodical, but the purpose in my journey is clear and my contingency plan if all else fails is even clearer.

I have lost count of the number of times I’ve talked to someone in the corporate world who’s thinking of starting his or her own business. In almost every case, the person thinks that starting a business is going to be easy—come up with a great idea for a new product or service, throw together a website, and wait for those orders to roll in, right? Wrong. The dream is often not as great as the promise. You’ve got to have the right idea and the right mind-set—you’ve got to think like an entrepreneur. And you’ve got to have a plan.

When I talk about having a plan, I don’t mean that you’ve got to devote a year of your life creating a 359-page document that details every single action that you’re going to do to build your business and make it run. That’s not necessary. When I talk about having a plan, I mean that you’ve got to have a clear vision of what your business is going to be, and then a simple schedule of milestones and benchmarks that you create, even if you’re only creating them for yourself.

Having a plan also means that you know and are very clear and comfortable with your personal goals and your non-negotiables, and that any opportunity you accept aligns with those values and furthers your personal goals. My most prominent non-negotiables are

 anything that compromises my integrity;

 not having the level of autonomy that allows me to control the majority of how I schedule my time;

 inflexibility for an indefinite period of time;

 lack of complete transparency in a partnership; and

 unclear benchmarks and milestones by which to measure expectations and gauge success.

Don’t constantly recalibrate your barometer for success, despite all temptations. If you attempt to recalibrate your goals after each accomplishment, your benchmarks will get thrown out of whack and you will never feel proud of the progress you have made and all of the efforts you put forth to make it happen. You’ll lose sight of your ultimate goal because your target will keep moving; it will quickly turn into mental warfare and you’ll feel like a hamster on a treadmill. You will slowly but surely frustrate yourself and doubt if the progress you’ve made is good enough.

You must know when to hold out for the right opportunity. Think of your life as an ecosystem—each part has to work to the benefit and betterment of the other.

Identifying and Establishing Your Non-Negotiables

Non-negotiables are the theoretical underpinning of what enables us to accept responsibility and accountability with ease and joy. You should establish this set of rules, both professionally and personally, to help you maintain your inner compass. These guidelines should motivate you toward bigger and better things, and they should help you achieve happiness and preserve your sanity despite difficult situations. It’s important to take the time to establish your list of non-negotiables so you are prepared and resolute when the time comes.

My non-negotiables are the foundations and moral basis for my decisions and they determine if and how I am incentivized. My non-negotiables are the rules I am not willing to break. They help me to maintain the level and type of autonomy that I know I need to make me happy and thrive under the most pressured circumstances.

Everyone’s non-negotiables are different. What are yours?

To me, the best entrepreneurs know how to spot an opportunity and they understand the value of seizing the moment; the advantages of being the first to make a move or get in on the deal early; and they understand the importance of adaptability, which is always necessary along the way. Again, this doesn’t mean that you don’t need a plan. Opportunities rarely come out of nowhere. It can take many years of hard work, planning, and preparation to be in the right place at the right time so that when that opportunity comes down the road you’ll be able to act on it.

In his book Outliers: The Story of Success (Little, Brown and Company, 2008), Malcolm Gladwell presented the idea that to get to the top in your chosen field, you’ve got to devote at least ten thousand hours of your life to that pursuit. Ten thousand hours works out to about five years of full-time practice, laser-focused on a particular skill or area of expertise—or, that works out to 2.75 years if you’re a real go-getter working fifteen-hour days, five days a week, and taking two to three weeks of vacation each year. When you put it in these terms, imagine how many industries you could be an expert in within a single lifetime, excluding, of course, mastering love, parenthood, and the greatest joys of your personal life.

Being prepared to act on an opportunity has nothing to do with luck, but it has everything to do with having the wherewithal—mental, financial, or whatever—to be ready, willing, and able to act on that opportunity.

No matter how successful you may think you are, the fact is you’re always adapting. In his book, The Start-Up of You: Adapt to the Future, Invest in Yourself, and Transform Your Career (Crown Publishing Group, 2012), LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman discusses the concept of permanent beta. According to Hoffman, the best entrepreneurial career strategy is one that emphasizes being adaptable and light on your feet while also planning smart. The idea is to pick a market or industry that accounts for your existing competitive assets, aspirations, and market needs; launch a thought-out Plan A on a leap of faith; and then systematically experiment and adapt as you accumulate lessons, pivoting to a Plan B as necessary. Entrepreneurs are always a work in progress; they are in permanent beta.

I never know what’s going to happen on the other end of a phone call or an e-mail. I always have to be prepared. For years I’d been thinking about starting a business in the beauty industry, but I hadn’t found the right opportunity.

What I’ve learned about business from my colleagues…

Matt Mullenweg, the founder of WordPress, is one of the most humble geniuses I know. He has a clear vision and no one can derail his focus. I admire his dedication to creating a business with longevity and relevance in an era of entrepreneurs who want to get rich fast and move on. Here is his advice on business:

1 Work with the best people you can find, whether they’re your friends or not.

2 Be impeccable in your word. If you demonstrate accountability, it will inspire others to do the same.

3 I’ve been working on WordPress for ten years now, and I plan to do it for at least ten more.

4 I’m patient, and I don’t mind working on the same problem for years at a time.

5 Don’t run out of money.

6 The people I work with have had the greatest impact on my own success.

In June 2013, my opportunity magnet went into high gear when I met Ido Leffler, cofounder of Yes To Inc., a natural-beauty-products company that’s the number two natural brand in the United States; you can find Yes To … products in more than twenty-eight thousand stores in twenty-five countries—including Walmart, Walgreens, and Whole Foods Market.

Ido and I are connected through many of our entrepreneur networks—we have at least fifty colleagues and friends in common—and it was very easy for us to vet each other. We quickly discovered that, for the past couple of years, we’d both been thinking about starting a new business—one that would introduce a ground-breaking line of beauty products. Given our mutual interests, we decided to see if we could combine our energies and talents and networks to create something fun, new, and interesting.

So, I flew to San Francisco, where Yes To Inc. has its headquarters, to meet with Ido. When I arrived, I didn’t really know what the plan was for our day other than that my day was going to be spent with Ido. We were going to see if we liked each other and if we could make our concept work and if we could make it have life and breath and vision.

We immediately started discussing creating a line of beauty products for women—Ido and I are real go-getters in every sense of the word, so it didn’t take us long to create our list of products. Ido also asked me to create a list of must-haves for myself as a founder and also for myself as a woman who knows the market. Soon we were in Union Square doing market research, walking from Bloomingdales to Target to Walgreens, checking out existing products.

After our market research in Union Square, our next stop was the Yes To Inc. office and then we headed to lunch and began to map out what this company would look like. We discussed the details of selecting and trademarking a name, moving forward with branding based on that name, researching the products that we wanted, and creating and testing products. We asked: What does the market have and not have and really need? Where do most women shop? What are the must-have products? We made a list of key roles that we would need for our founding team—the positions and which departments these positions would be in, and then we literally plugged in people from our respective networks that we’d immediately turn to for consultation or full-time employment. We did the same for an advisory board, deciding which perspectives would be of value, as well as the people who could bring them to us. We wrote that down and then made a list of people to reach out to. We talked through our marketing strategy, our distribution strategy—the whole nine yards.

Throughout the day, we further developed our idea. We headed to Factory Zero, a unique live-work facility for entrepreneurs who are creating new businesses. The resident entrepreneurs live upstairs and work downstairs; if you have a meeting, you have it in one of the downstairs workspaces or on the patio.

We dove into phoning our respective networks, saying, “Hey, I’m working on a top-secret company. It’s in this genre, and it’s with this individual. Will you advise, will you this, will you that, will you get prepared and know that I’m going to ask more of you? I’ll share more about what’s going on in thirty or sixty days.”

It was an absolutely amazing day. It was a lot like those “startup” weekends that they hold in the technology world, when a few hundred aspiring entrepreneurs have forty-eight hours to meet a cofounder and present their business concepts—the best company wins. We did everything that those entrepreneurs did in forty-eight hours, but we did it in one day with only two people. And it was the most efficient, productive, exhilarating, exciting, fun day I’ve ever had in my life.

After a few hours, we decided to leave because Ido had made a promise to his family that he’d be home by 5 pm every day that he’s in town. Before we left, Ido asked me, “So, are you excited? What are you thinking about all this?”

I replied, “I’m excited, yes. If I seem like I’m not that excited, one thing you need to know about me is that I’m big on planning, and I’m big on details. I’m super excited, but my mind is racing.”

Ido asked, “So where is your mind racing to?”

I said, “My mind is going exactly here: company name, trademark, operations, legal stuff, incorporation, up and running, picking a PR firm, branding around the name, branding everything else—from logo to website to the look—and making sure we can get the URL. I’m thinking about hiring the first two or three core people, along with the right interns if need be. Yes, I’m super excited but my head is in all these places.” He looked at me, put his right hand up. I put my right hand up and we gave each other a high five.

Ido and his wife, Ronit, invited me to dinner that evening and I was able to meet his children, who are within six months and a year, respectively, of my own. It was a great opportunity to get to know the man I was going into business with on an entirely different level.

Later that evening there was a charity event for an organization called the Mama Hope Foundation, founded by our mutual friend, Nyla Rodgers, who we knew through Summit Series, a highly private invitation-only group of leaders that meet at an annual conference and work to inspire and connect entrepreneurs, artists, musicians, and nonprofit leaders. Ido planned to attend, so I went with him. We ran into a bunch of people at the event that we both knew; it was a confirmation that this new business was a good move for us and that we were going in the right direction. As we got out of the car, I said to Ido, “Look, we’re probably going to run into a lot of people we know—what do you want to say when someone asks us what we’re up to? Should we tell them we’re working on a ‘stealth start-up,’ like everyone else in San Francisco?” But Ido had a different idea. He said, “Let’s call it our ‘top-secret project,’ and let everybody know that we’re going into business together.”

So that’s what we did, and everyone was buzzing—wondering what we were up to. “Oh my God, Lauren Maillian Bias and Ido Leffler doing something together? So what is it?” “Is it organic?” “Is it natural?” “Is it clothing? It must be fashion—or beauty.”

Of course, Ido and I were smirking, “We can’t tell you; it’s top secret!” But it was an absolute confirmation that this was going to be an amazing opportunity, a great partnership, and that this awesome future lay ahead of us.

For me, this was a major claim-it-and-shine moment (see Chapter 8 for more on the concept of “claim it and shine”). Together, Ido and I had sketched out the beginnings of an ambitious brand that had game-changing potential for the beauty industry while making a meaningful impact by giving back. We’re in a socially conscious society today, where people want to know that they’re doing good—even with the products and purchases that they make. It’s the new way of making philanthropy accessible. We ultimately said, “Let’s focus on getting the company right and let’s come up with one nonprofit that is most deserving and really fits our mission best and who we believe in and have a connection with.”

As you consider the people in your network, make no small plans. When you think big, you honestly never know where your connections will lead you. Be prepared for and open to anything. Be a powerful venture magnet, attracting amazing opportunities into your life and business.

FOR REFLECTION

 You don’t have to be big to think and believe big. Start getting comfortable with the latter.

 Want more for yourself (theoretically) than anyone else ever could.

 In order to grow, you have to be in permanent beta, always.

 Work hard to become an expert in everything you don’t, but need to, know.

 Your network of support should be so diverse and meaningful that exploring your next opportunity should only be one degree of separation away.