Week 2: Un-TODO-list

TL;DR: Attempts to un-TODO-list myself and deliberately slow down to make room for exploration, binging Shark Tank India and thinking about angel investing, teaching a toddler something, completing my first 2-pager, and more ideas! And losing 3 lbs, I think.

The past week brought a mix of things - some new, some old. In hindsight, the earlier week had been a pretty active one, with many enjoyable catchup conversations, during the course of which I mentally signed up to write 2-pagers about multiple ideas. Come Monday I was looking at a TODO list, and had that familiar feeling of the start of a regular workday.

“mraw… grmhhmm” From her perch in the sunny window, Niki reminded me that she didn’t care. Had I made actual promises to anyone? No. Ok then, what was the hurry? Look, there’s a new bird outside!

Her point made, she went back to sunning herself, leaving me to think about how I might consciously shift my time in the coming week to more exploration and discovery (vs. ‘achievement’, which is what the TODO list mindset would have me do). This is harder for me that I’d thought, since I have the tendency to ask myself “did I explore and discover to my best potential/ some arbitrary target”, when I want the framing to be more of “what did I discover or explore today, and did I have fun doing it?” More on that later - it is an evolving experiment for now and more about feeling vs. thinking and measuring. Not something PM-ing really rewards you for ;) With no 2-pagers to write immediately, I decided to thin out my calendar and spread out some planned calls over a few more days.

I binged on Shark Tank India and the derivative memes, and spent some time talking to friends who’ve done some angel investments in India to ask them if their deal-making was also so entertaining. It wasn’t. I think the show’s most valuable contribution to the country will be “normalising” startup activity, which in turn will encourage millions of otherwise risk-averse families to let one of their own try to build a business. And not just the youngsters, but more so the older ones who’ve spent their last 15, 20, 30 years doing a “regular” job, or attending to their family. It’s never too late to try.

During some of these conversations, my friends asked me “Tumhe bhi angel investing karni hai?” (Do you also want to do angel investing?)

Now if I were Aman, I’d be like:

But instead, I took a more circumspect view:

Jokes aside, some of these conversations got me thinking: How might I identify opportunities where I could be useful to tech startups, esp. aside from writing a small check? In the past, I’d only made a couple of tiny investments in companies where I knew the founder as a friend, and not thought any more of it. Now, being free of company non-competes, sabbatical time is the perfect time to dig a little deeper. And so I had some more conversations, and looked over a few pitch decks and so on. I asked a few friends who are part of groups with regular deal flow to read me when they can.. I’ve barely scratched the surface, but it has been an invigorating start. My current thinking is to approach this activity with an open mind, and try to find situations where I can genuinely help the people building a company by contributing my time, and leveraging my network. As a strong E, I get my energy from people, and this feels like a good way to use a few hours every week. I’ve been fairly warned of the FOMO too, with a lot of angel capital chasing talented founders and good ideas. I think having a small check book will be a good balancing and prioritising force against FOMO. That, and Namita’s advice above :)

Another very enjoyable thing I tried with my time this week was to teach my ~4-year old nephew some new skills. It began with a casual conversation with his parents - my close friends - about how one might teach anything to a 4-year old, and having had limited experience trying to teach my 7-year old niece mental math, I may have made some overconfident statements. A challenge was proposed, and accepted. For two days, an hour each day, I attempted to teach him how to solve a small jigsaw puzzle, and count to 25. My tools of choice were a chocolate biscuit, broken into many pieces, and a lollipop, which was a holy grail prize that was shown but never given. We have completed the assigned tasks, and I’ve discovered

1. how to explain “straight edge only joins with straight edge” with first principles
2. that deception and motivation work well together, and it is entirely possible to get a toddler to count when his cars are being repaired by a mechanic who must count the money he receives often
3. that half a biscuit can actually make a kid sugar-high enough to not want the other half as badly…
4. … but Kahneman was spot on about loss-aversion. Me eating the other half is a powerful threat.

In the rest of the week, I did end up jamming some more with some friends and former colleagues about ideas in the Education space (esp. job-relevant skills like Product Management, Accounting/Finance, Marketing, etc). And I wrote a 2-pager about it too, which gave me a sense of satisfaction that only a TODO-list checkbox can. I’m thinking one 2-pager a week is probably healthy…

A couple of new ideas began to brew during the week - a “personal CRM”, a “daily-habits enabler” idea, and a variation on the education 2-pager above - but these are too nascent to write too much on. Also I doubt anyone is reading this far, this is more a mile-marker-to-self. Another mile-marker to self is that resuming working out seems to be yielding results, and the entirety of 3 lbs worth of besan laddoos that I gorged on in December seems to have been shed. Which only moves me back to “pre-India-trip” weight, so there’s more work to be done here. Quick, before another trip comes up or the weather gets good enough for beer ;)

As always, I end with a cat-pic. Below, Niki is literally radiating a rainbow of zen thoughts. Or at least being smart enough to sit in an opportune spot. We’ll never know.