#1. Why I’m starting this blog

I’m creating an organisation and want to capture my thinking and experiences from day one.

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At every stage in life you hold some unique vantage point based on where you stand in a given process. Whether we are building, learning, or attempting to drive some change in the world, our current position can be viewed as part of a much wider journey. Every point in time therefore provides a unique opportunity to describe our ongoing experiences from a first-hand perspective.

Humans love to craft narratives that ground past events in a logical sequence of steps. Our affinity for storytelling to facilitate communication and memory means that we often oversimplify in retrospect and look back on things as being far more inevitable than they really were. The reality is that most paths in life are meandering and unpredictable, and it’s easy to miss the small but crucial details when looking back many years later.

I want to use the opportunity I have right now to capture the process of creating an organisation from day one, without introducing any hindsight bias or attempting to iron out the messiness in favour of a neat retrospective narrative.

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Why do I see this as a good investment of time?

It’s usually always sensible to pursue projects where the skills we develop or the relationships we build transcend the outcome of the project itself. Before starting to share my thinking, I therefore wanted to test whether the process of writing would add enough value to my life that I’d choose to continue doing it regardless of whether people read these posts.

I decided to spend the last few months writing ~15 short articles that I have not yet shared, and have come to believe this is a good investment of time for several reasons…

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• More robust interrogation of what I’m thinking. The last few months of structured writing has helped me to clarify my thinking. The knowledge that I may one day share something with the world has introduced an additional layer of thoughtfulness and interrogation, owing to a new sense of external accountability. It’s forced me to look more closely at why I’m doing the things I’m doing and why I’m saying the things I’m saying, and has helped to keep important principles more top of mind. I intend to therefore write in a way that helps me to identify blind-spots and become more intentional in my approach to life and work.

• A small change to my current processes. When making decisions on how to spend our time, I often return to the concept coined by Naval Ravikant: Figuring out the things that look like work to others but feel like play to you. For me, reflection, journalling and ideation are largely part of who I am and what I love to spend my time doing. The effort to move from these practices as they exist in my life today to those needed to create this blog are therefore relatively minimal and mostly a question of adding a little more structure and consistency.

• Acting today in a way that reflects who you want to be later. I often think that if there is something we want to do or become, then we should just find a way to start doing or being it now, in one form or another. For me, I decided several years back that I’d want my future professional life to involve some form of developing and sharing ideas. However, despite having known this for some time now, I’ve not really done anything about it. Starting to write has provided me with a sense of assurance that I’m aligning myself with where I want to be going; it has confirmed that I actually enjoy the process of documenting ideas; and, unsurprisingly, it’s helping to improve my writing.

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So what should you expect from this blog?

As I move forward my intention is to share weekly thoughts and experiences. On one level, these will relate to the challenges, opportunities and learnings of building an organisation from day one. More broadly however, they will tie to the wider mission of figuring out how to think better (i.e., making better decisions more closely aligned with one’s values and aspirations).

Welcome to the story.