Congratulations for showing up here.
Let's acknowledge the land we are on and its ancestral stewards.
Keep in mind: I don't know anything, and I'm full of shit.
“Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” — Mary Oliver
"All that you touch, You Change. All that you Change, Changes you." - Octavia Butler
How much do you want to be changed? What are you ready for? What do you want your kids to be proud of?
The landscape is vast. The bar is getting raised. This is a lifelong journey.
The way we do business is going to radically change in the coming years. We have the opportunity to practice a new way together in community. Everything needs to evolve. The business plan and deck, the self education and oath, the tech stack, the mindsets and culture.
Building the muscles of self and world awareness can have extraordinary returns on investment personally and professionally. They are omni-relevant life skills.
Personal Questions To Answer
- Why are you here?
- What is your positionally in the web of life
- How can I live in alignment with the values I seek to create with?
Creation Questions To Answer
- What is your baby all about?
- How does this fit into the tapestry of history?
- What are the conditions that will best support what you are birthing?
Topics
- Purpose discovery
- Connecting with your Why
- Personal storytelling
- Tomorrow's entrepreneur
- Embodied lifestyle
- Mindset investigation
Personal success metrics.
Our Great Work is not something we choose, Thomas says. It is something we find ourselves thrown into by virtue only of being born in a certain time and place. The task may seem overwhelming, one coming in response to some huge historical difficulty, but, he observes, just as we are given our historical task by some power beyond ourselves, we must also believe we are given the abilities to fulfill this task.
The Great Work into which we and our children are born, Thomas says, comes in response to the devastation of the planet caused by human activity. We are facing a breakdown in the life systems that can only be understood by comparison with events that marked the great transitions in the geo-biological eras of Earth’s history, such as the extinction of the dinosaurs and countless other species when the Mesozoic Era ended and our present Cenozoic Era began (p. 3).
(Re)commit to your role. (edition of Anti-Racism Daily)
Startup will most likely fail. How will you optimize for learnings? What do you want to avoid sacrificing? List of common founder regrets.
When you get really honest with yourself, why are you doing this? Getting to the root. Could be uncomfortable.
What are you trying to prove?
We are aware of the follies of chasing wealth and fame.
Nobody remembers who invented the paperclip.
Your kids won't even want your wealth.
Daoism: tend to the part of the garden you're in
"And it’s why, whatever you have chosen to work on, it has to be worthy of your time here. Because if you have any success at all, it will be at least a decade of your life. A decade of life where you are doing nothing but working on the problem you have chosen, obsessing over it and neglecting friends and family, a decade of barely taking care of yourself because there isn’t enough time to do anything but build." - Tracy Young
https://tracy.posthaven.com/the-truth-about-starting-a-startup
Exercises
-Purpose Discovery -Ancestor connection
Everybody has a cute answer for what did you want to be when you were younger? B/c we’re talking like 5, before you know too much about limitations. I’m curious - what did you want to be when you were 18? I don’t know is a very common answer. But odds are you were excited about some specific part of society, maybe had a role model or two, or a vision of what “making it” and “being somebody” in that world might be like. Though inevitably, it didn’t really happen like that. Settled. Swayed.
Even at my most righteous, I still had in the back of my mind the possibility of this being something that makes me a billionaire. Or really the energy of achievement. That out there is some moment where I’ve done it. Maybe it's a moving target?
"The child who is not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth" - African proverb
I recently remembered that my favorite unit in elementary school was on Explorers - those adventurous European leaders who discovered new lands all around the world. So cool! I wanted to be one. Even in high school in AP World History and while working in international development in 2013, I was fascinated with which modern nation states were colonized by whom and when and how the map of the world would shift through historical events.
It has only been through listening to conversations over the last couple of years on decolonization that I started to see this youthful obsession as so interconnected with
- Western Christian hegemony and white supremacy
- Domination culture
- Achievement and pressures of expectation,
- Messiah / white savior complex
- Colonizer urgency