WTF am I doing #5

I've never been a big fan of new year resolutions. It never made sense to me to make fundamental changes to your life around an arbitrary date, just because you ate and drank a lot the past month. It's not that I don't like change, I love change, so much so I've moved my family around the world and launched a startup. The concept itself of a resolution or 'a firm decision to do or not to do something' will only get you so far. It is a one dimensional attempt at forcing change, it's not going to get you to actually achieve change. It also rarely works from a standing start, change needs ongoing momentum.

Momentum is everything in startup building, it's probably the most important aspect of it. You have to keep moving forward, finding the moments of success, and then push on and find the next. It's that focus on the next step, the progression, isolating what it takes to get there and then executing that keeps you going. It's exceptionally similar to surfing in many ways. The past few years I've been working with a world class surf coach remotely. Most average surfers surf along the middle of the wave and try and get to the end, that used to be me. But now he's taken my surfing to an incredible level I never thought possible for a 41-year-old (if you're interested you can hear him talk about my progression on this podcast). It's been possible through complete focus on what is needed for progression to the next level, isolation of that element and then execution in the water.

Surfing is probably the hardest sport in the world to progress at. It takes vast amounts of time, you're always a moving target that is never the same. You then need complete focus on executing the right technical movements at the right points on that moving target. It makes me laugh every time I read or hear a business leader use some sort of surfing analogy, usually 'business is like riding a wave, you've got to wait for the right wave'. They don't know or understand surfing. They've clearly never tried to execute a backhand reo, at the right point in the wave, with the right trajectory, timing and speed, and right lift of their arm and throw down coupled with the right twist of their upper body, suck in of front knee, drop down of back knee, to bust their fins above the lip.

That's really a much better analogy for business building.

It can feel absolutely impossible and daunting when you start. Just as that type of turn did for me in surfing. But I eventually got there with the right guidance, steps and focus. Establishing the foundations, building each technical element on top of the next, celebrating the successes, understanding the failures and moving onto the next goal each time.

I have two cards pinned to my wall by my desk all the time. One has my short term surfing goals broken down for this month - what I am going to achieve and the technical element I need to work on to achieve it. The other has the same for my business goals. Resolutions don't create change, long term goals with short term stepping stone goals, and absolute focus do.

Next week I'm sitting down with my coach to talk about my long term surfing goals for 2024. I'm living in a place with world class waves now and I'm excited to see what I can achieve. At the same time at NOAN we've started to bring in organic paying customers ticking one of my goals of the last few months of 2023 and we are seeing great engagement on our beta platform.

It's time to move things to the next level in 2024.