30 Days and 30 Years

It was the 27th of May 2018, at the time I was writing this book. I was cycling near my house when all of a sudden, a car hit me from behind. I went flying. Then thud! Everything went black. That accident caused head injuries, including some bleeding in my brain, and fractures on three spinal vertebrae, my left shoulder, right elbow and right leg, not to mention multiple wounds. As an Ironman triathlete, I regularly cycle over 100 kilometres at a time. This was just a short ride from home to test my new electronic shifters. Two weeks before that, I had qualified for the Ironman 70.3 World Championships in South Africa in September 2018. I had made detailed plans to make a trip of a lifetime to compete on the world stage.

As I lay in my hospital bed, groggy after multiple surgeries and scans and immobile with three of my limbs in casts, I could barely make any sense of this sudden change. I was worried, not only about having to abandon my World Championship dreams but whether I would regain my full physical and mental self. How much would all the medical procedures cost? I had limited medical insurance coverage as I had left corporate employment and embarked on building my own startup company. What if I had to abandon that too? Would I still be able to provide for my wife and school-going children?

I’m my own biggest critic and I put a lot of pressure on myself. But when well-meaning friends and family admonished me for cycling on the road and said it was irresponsible of me to take that risk since I had a family to take care of, something suddenly triggered inside me. I discovered a powerful purpose. I may not be able to change the circumstances that happen to me but I’m in full control of how I respond to them. As I thought about my children, I wanted them to learn that risks are not to be avoided. Living a safe, cautious life is living a life unfulfilled. I want them to venture out into the unknown, even if that often means experiencing failure and being knocked down.

Our lives are like crayons in a box. We can remain a perfect crayon if we stay safely in our box, but we are meant to colour the world. That requires us to go out of the box, and often that means being broken. But a broken crayon can still colour the world.I turned all of my angst and frustrations into an unrelenting desire to get back up. My body might have been broken, but my mind willed it to heal. I had been given a second chance, and I was determined to make full use of it. Although I had spent three days in the intensive care unit, on the fifth day I was ready to take off my casts and on the sixth day I started to walk. I was discharged after a week. Three months later I was back on my bike, cycling with my club on our usual routes and going on long runs outdoors. I also started swimming again. I registered for an Ironman triathlon race in Malaysia in November 2018. It was not the World Championships but it was my personal world championship race. Completing it would be my sweetest comeback victory.

What did l learn from this accident? One thing’s for sure—it reaffirmed my belief all this while that ‘nothing goes according to plan’. My intense preparation to compete on the world stage had been dashed in seconds. Accidents, catastrophes and unimaginable changes can render the most detailed of plans useless. The adage goes, “If you fail to plan, you plan to fail.” But sometimes planning can lead to failure. I learned that there’s a danger in overplanning, especially when I take on major new challenges and when building new business ventures with unproven ideas that go against the status quo.

My past experiences have taught me that every well laid out plan, constructed in meticulous detail, can be rendered useless within a few months of ‘going live’. I’ve also learned that to survive, moving with speed and agility to adapt to rapidly changing external environments, is critically more important than having a ‘great plan’. Underpinning speed and agility is having a foundation of curiosity and purposefulness to keep questioning existing beliefs and assumptions and to have a thirst for learning and constant reinvention. When we take on a new challenge or build an attacker business from scratch, we go against the incumbency of the status quo with its might of inertial force. Incumbents have deep pockets, established brands and distribution channels, scale and capital. The only sustainable advantage that a startup attacker has is speed. The day that a startup moves as fast as an incumbent is the day the incumbent catches up and crushes the attacker with its powerful might.

But directionless speed spells chaos. Contrary to some perceptions, successful attacker startups are not free-flowing hives of creativity in an unstructured environment. Startups need even more structure than established corporate incumbents. But it’s a special blend of structure and precision that allows for high speed. It must thrive on the extremes and not the conventional middle ground of predictability, stability and acceptability. What conventional businesses do in one year, a startup needs to achieve in 30 days. What companies map out as long-term five-year plans, startups must answer existential questions on their purpose for being over the next 30 years.

30 Days and 30 Years refers to planning time horizons. Conventional planning methods use twelve months for planning and budgeting cycles and performance appraisals and reviews. A longer-term horizon would typically be three to five years. For these, enormous management resources are devoted to detailing strategic plans over the period, with financial statements and cash flows mapped out for each of the 36 to 60 months, in order to create a sense of comfort and confidence that business leaders know exactly where they are going. 30 Days also represents the values of Curiosity and Learning, while 30 Years represents the value of Purposefulness. I’ve found that leading with these values has helped me build organizations that can survive and ultimately thrive in today’s volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous times.

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