Creators beware!

The game of creation

When I first decided to create my "solo" business, I had no idea what it was about.

I had a fine education and was confident in my knowledge.

That confidence was later reinforced at an audit firm where we had “best practices.” We knew better.

Trusting my knowledge was fine to make a decent career in the game of experts. But creators play a different game.

I was missing a skill that was not advertised as a skill. It had to tag to it. Over time, it grew on me that something was missing in my education. The problem is that I did not know what.

The name of my pain

I could not find the name of my pain.

Can you image that?

You are bound to the operation room for a surgery, but nobody can tell you what that surgery should be about.

An open heart surgery?

A kidney replacement?

You get the picture.

I could not recognize what my struggle was about, I came to discover, because it was the result of my education.

(Unlearning is hard.)

I was on top of the world, I believed, because I had “great” ideas, was smarter and knew more stuff than others.

How silly.

Break through

My first breakthrough as a solo-entrepreneur came in the most unexpected manner.

At the onset of a magical season, my younger brother talked me into an expedition in Asia that became the journey of a lifetime.

On a sunny day, as we were drinking tea in Yangon, Laurent made a casual comment in a context I cannot remember.

Little did he know that it would stick with me.

“- Look at traffic,” he said pointing to the street.

Unlike a street in Paris, that street was crowded with broken cars, buses and rickshaws. There were no red lights, no roundabouts, no cops. There was no apparent order, yet everybody was finding their way in the whole mess.

“- What you see is chaos, he continued. If you want to cross the street, you cannot plan what you are going to do. Instead, you must observe and find your way through.”

With that picture, I came to understand that life is inconstant.

It soon became clear that I could not solely rely on my knowledge or understanding of the world.

This became even more apparent when I realized that my younger brother had a critical skill.

I was light-years from mastering it.

He could talk to strangers.

And God, he could do it well!

In matters of second, by the blink of an eye, my younger brother could turn a total stranger into a fellow companion that was willing to help or come along.

He knew no strangers.

Our adventure, which we shared in a Swiss media, became eye-opening.

I discovered that I loved writing.

More importantly, a pattern started emerging in my life and never-ending journey of discovery.

The Jungle vs. Civilization

That pattern is what I now call the jungle.

Entrepreneurship is a journey.

That journey takes you deep into the “jungle.”

In the “jungle,” there are no best practices.

No processes.

Every situation is new.

Unexpected.

You are brought, by your own choices, into unknown territory.

To make progress in the “Jungle,” what matters is not what you think you know or understand at some point.

When you are stuck, what you know may not be what you need to learn to make progress.

The stuff you knew out there, in “civilization,” can even be a burden.

Once in the “jungle,” some experts never recover.

Powerless we are, when in expertise we trust.

So, you may ask, what is the name of that skill that I painfully discovered I was totally deprived of?

It is the skill of asking questions.

Simple, right?

Asking great questions

Asking great questions that open your eyes to new possibilities, and help you break-through when you are stuck.

Not as simple as it seems.

Now, if you are willing to follow me, I believe there is better and more actionable way to describe that skill.

I am talking about the skill -- better put, the awareness --- of what you don’t know yet can hope to learn to make progress.

What matters when you talk to strangers is not what you know about yourself or about the man you are talking to.

What matters is the “space between.”

The unknown territory.

The more I started being in touch with my own ignorance, the more I started asking “good” questions to strangers.

Strangers became clients.

Clients became a business.

What my younger brother taught me was both deep and simple.

The less you know, the more you can learn.

And perhaps, perhaps, that’s what entrepreneurship is about.

A different game.

At least for those who (like you) may sometimes feel a little bit lost out there, in the “jungle.”