You can change the past by changing the meaning of your memories.

Lesson #1

The smarter you get, the faster you lose friends

Lesson #2

Money doesn't change you. It amplifies who you are!

Lesson #3

You don't suck at managing your time, you just don't know how valuable it is.

Lesson #4

A beautiful life is to know how to live alone, but never have the need to.

Lesson #5

Your fear of embarrassing yourself is your biggest hurdle to growth.

Lesson #6

No one is coming to save you. Your life is 100% your responsibility.

Lesson #7

The hardest thing is to focus. The easiest thing is to complain.

Lesson #8

You will free yourself the day you forgive your parents and stop blaming them.

Lesson #9

The more available you are, the less respected you'd be.

Lesson #10

If you truly know who you are, no one can ever touch you!

Lesson #11

The day you stop asking when should I do it, is the day you are ready to do it.

Lesson #12

We all have two money lives. The second one begins when we realize we have enough money for our life.

Lesson #13

If you say the truth, you do not have to remember what you said to whom.

Lesson #14

True growth lies in doing boring things over and over again.

Lesson #15

When in doubt don't ask what should I do. Instead, ask what I want to do. Solve for making that happen.

Lesson #16

If you aren't happy doing it, why are you still in it?

Lesson #17

Focus on efforts, not on results.

Lesson #18

If your parents are not rich, but you got a good education, be grateful for their sacrifices.

Lesson #19

A truly happy person will never troll anyone.

Lesson #20

The face can be misleading. Fall in love with the mind

Lesson #21

If you are loved only when you are around, then it's not love. It's convenience.

Lesson #22

Bonus: The only thing that matter in the world is your opinion about your own.

Bonus: 

productivity

Productivity

personaldevelopment

Personal Development

mindfulness

Mindfulness

communication

Communication

timemanagement

Time Management

22 Lessons From 2022

Successful people are always producers, which is why imitators never get far in life.When <a href="https://giovannispezia.com/what-you-do-shapes-who-you-are/">consuming too much content</a>, our brains unconsciously create expectations, reference points and standards, and that kills creativity, ultimately it will kill any chance of success.

Are You a Consumer or a Producer?

If you really want something, you’ll do anything in order to achieve it. And you won’t stop until you achieve it.

Do You Really Want Success?

In life, there are many types of success: financial success, spiritual success, physical success, passion success, etc. What type of success do you want to work towards?Always <a href="https://giovannispezia.com/memento-mori/">remember your priorities</a> in life.You may arrive too late at the realization that what you always really wanted was to have a family and some kids, rather than financial wealth.

What Type of Success do You Want?

What is your purpose in this world? What is the first step you can take towards the achievement of it? Don’t wait. Act now. Your future realized self is waiting for you.

Conclusion

If you're interested in the topics of personal development, mindset, and both physical and mental well-being, consider checking out my content at:<ul><li><a href="https://giovannispezia.com">GiovanniSpezia.com</a></li><li><a href="https://twitter.com/GiovaSpezia">Twitter</a></li><li><a href="https://www.pinterest.it/Giovanni_Spezia/">Pinterest</a></li></ul>Thank you all for the support! 🫶

Liked These Ideas? Consider Checking Out My Blog

motivationandinspiration

Motivation & Inspiration

The Secret Successful People Don't Tell You - Giovanni Spezia

"The Talent Code" is a book by Daniel Coyle that explores the science of skill development and how to achieve mastery in any field. Here are ten key takeaways from the book:1. Talent is not a gift, but a combination of skill and drive that can be developed through practice and repetition.2. Imitation is an important part of skill development, as it allows you to learn from others' successes and mistakes.3.Developing talent requires patience and persistence, as it takes time to build myelin and master a skill.4.Ignition, or the drive to improve, is an important factor in developing talent.

5. Deep practice, which focuses on repeating small pieces of a skill until they are mastered, is essential for developing talent. 6. Myelin, a fatty insulation that wraps around nerve fibers, plays a key role in the development of skill.7. To develop talent, it's important to find the "sweet spot" of difficulty, where the task is challenging enough to push you out of your comfort zone but still achievable.

8. The best way to develop talent is to find a master teacher, someone who can provide targeted feedback and help you find your "sweet spot" of difficulty.9.Culture plays an important role in developing talent, as certain environments are more conducive to skill development than others.10.Talent can be developed in many different fields, not just sports or the arts.

The Talent Code is a well-researched and informative book that provides a detailed understanding of the science of skill development and how to develop mastery in any field. It's a book that provides practical tips and techniques to help you achieve your potential and become an expert in your chosen field.

It's a book that provides practical tips and techniques to help you achieve your potential and become an expert in your chosen field.

'Talent. You've either got it or you haven't.' Not true, actually. In The Talent Code, award-winning journalist Daniel Coyle draws on cutting-edge research to reveal that, far from being some abstract mystical power fixed at birth, ability really can be created and nurtured. In the process, he considers talent at work in venues as diverse as a music school in Dallas and a tennis academy near Moscow to demonstrate how the wiring of our brains can be transformed by the way we approach particular tasks. He explains what is really going on when apparently unremarkable people suddenly make a major leap forward. He reveals why some teaching methods are so much more effective than others. Above all, he shows how all of us can achieve our full potential if we set about training our brains in the right way.

books

Books

What is the secret of talent? How do we unlock it? This groundbreaking work provides readers with tools they can use to maximize potential in themselves and others. Whether you’re coaching soccer or teaching a child to play the piano, writing a novel or trying to improve your golf swing, this revolutionary book shows you how to grow talent by tapping into a newly discovered brain mechanism.Drawing on cutting-edge neurology and firsthand research gathered on journeys to nine of the world’s talent hotbeds—from the baseball fields of the Caribbean to a classical-music academy in upstate New York—Coyle identifies the three key elements that will allow you to develop your gifts and optimize your performance in sports, art, music, math, or just about anything.• Deep Practice Everyone knows that practice is a key to success. What everyone doesn’t know is that specific kinds of practice can increase skill up to ten times faster than conventional practice.• Ignition We all need a little motivation to get started. But what separates truly high achievers from the rest of the pack? A higher level of commitment—call it passion—born out of our deepest unconscious desires and triggered by certain primal cues. Understanding how these signals work can help you ignite passion and catalyze skill development.• Master Coaching What are the secrets of the world’s most effective teachers, trainers, and coaches? Discover the four virtues that enable these “talent whisperers” to fuel passion, inspire deep practice, and bring out the best in their students.These three elements work together within your brain to form myelin, a microscopic neural substance that adds vast amounts of speed and accuracy to your movements and thoughts. Scientists have discovered that myelin might just be the holy grail: the foundation of all forms of greatness, from Michelangelo’s to Michael Jordan’s. The good news about myelin is that it isn’t fixed at birth; to the contrary, it grows, and like anything that grows, it can be cultivated and nourished.Combining revelatory analysis with illuminating examples of regular people who have achieved greatness, this book will not only change the way you think about talent, but equip you to reach your own highest potential.

Daniel Coyle is the author of the upcoming book The Culture Code (January 2018). He is the New York Times bestselling author of The Talent Code, The Little Book of Talent, The Secret Race (with Tyler Hamilton), and other books. Winner (with Hamilton) of the 2012 William Hill Sports Book of the Year Prize, he is a contributing editor for Outside magazine, and also works a special advisor to the Cleveland Indians. Coyle lives in Cleveland, Ohio during the school year and in Homer, Alaska, during the summer with his wife Jen, and their four children.

Daniel Coyle

The Talent Code

<ol><li>Talent requires deep practice;</li><li>Deep practice requires vast amounts of energy;</li><li>Primal cues trigger huge outpourings of energy. Safety and future belonging are two powerful primal cues.</li></ol>

<ul><li>Deep practice is built on a paradox: struggling in certain targeted ways—operating at the edges of your ability, where you make mistakes—makes you smarter.</li><li>Or to put it a slightly different way, experiences where you're forced to slow down, make errors, and correct them—as you would if you were walking up an ice-covered hill, slipping and stumbling as you go—end up making you swift and graceful without your realizing it.</li></ul>

Deep Practice 

<ol><li>Every human movement, thought, or feeling is a precisely timed electric signal traveling through a chain of neurons—a circuit of nerve fiber.</li><li>Myelin is the insulation that wraps these nerve fibers and increases signal strength, speed, and accuracy.</li><li>The more we fire a particular circuit, the more myelin optimizes that circuit, and the stronger, faster, and more fluent our movements and thoughts become.</li></ol>

How A Skill Is Formed? 

Because the best way to build a good circuit is to fire it, attend to mistakes, then fire it again, over and over. Struggle is not an option: it's a biological requirement : in order to get your skill circuit to fire optimally, you must by definition fire the circuit suboptimally; you must make mistakes and pay.

Why is targeted, mistake-focused practice so effective?

"Try again. Fail again. Fail better."

<ul><li>Because wrapping myelin around a big circuit requires immense energy and time. If you don't love it, you'll never work hard enough to be great.</li><li>The more we develop a skill circuit, the less we're aware that we're using it. We're built to make skills automatic, to stash them in our unconscious mind .</li></ul>

Why are passion and persistence key ingredients of talent?

Excellence is a habit.

Myelin wraps it doesn't unwrap. Like a highway-—paving machine, myelination happens in one direction. Once a skill circuit is insulated, you can't uninsulate it (except through age or disease). That's why habits are hard to break. The only way to change them is to build new habits by repeating new behaviors—by myelinating new circuits.

Why Are Habits Hard To Break? 

Every expert in every field is the result of around ten thousand hours of committed practice. Ericsson called this process "deliberate practice" and defined it as working on technique, seeking constant critical feedback, and focusing ruthlessly on shoring up weaknesses.

10,000 Hours Of Deep Practice 

“High motivation is not the kind of language that ignites people. What works is precisely the opposite: not reaching up but reaching down, speaking to the ground-level effort, affirming the struggle.”

<ul><li>ABSORB THE WHOLE THING. This means spending time staring at or listening to the desired skill.</li><li>It sounds rather Zen, but it basically amounts to absorbing a picture of the skill until you can imagine yourself doing it.</li></ul>

RULE ONE: CHUNK IT UP

<ul><li>There is, biologically speaking, no substitute for attentive repetition.</li><li>Myelin is living tissue. Like everything else in the body, it's in a constant cycle of breakdown and repair. That's why daily practice matters, particularly as we get older.</li></ul>

RULE TWO: REPEAT IT

"If I skip practice for one day, I notice. If I skip practice for two days, my wife notices. If I skip for three days, the world notices."

Deep practice is not simply about struggling; it's about seeking out a particular struggle, which involves a cycle of distinct actions.1. Pick a target.2. Reach for it.3. Evaluate the gap between the target and the reach.4. Return to step one.

RULE THREE : LEARN TO FEEL IT

<ul><li>Going slow allows you to attend more closely to errors, creating a higher degree of precision with each firing—and when it comes to growing myelin, precision is everything.</li><li>"I am slow to learn and slow to forget what I have learned," Lincoln wrote. "My mind is like a piece of steel, very hard to scratch anything on it and almost impossible after you get it there to rub it out."</li></ul>

Why does slowing down work so well? 

<ul><li>Ignition: The moments that lead us to say that is who you want to be. We usually think of passion as an inner quality. But it is something that came first from the outside world.</li><li>Future belonging is a primal cue. </li><li>It's not as simple as saying I want X. It's rather saying: I want X later, so I better do Y like crazy right now.</li></ul>

Future Belonging 

“See someone you want to become? Better get busy. Want to catch up with a desirable group? Better get busy.”

Brains are always looking for a cue as to where to spend energy now. Now? Now? We're swimming in an ocean of cues, constantly responding to them, but like fish in water, we just don't see it."

Ocean Of Cues

"If we're in a nice, easy, pleasant environment, we naturally shut off effort, Why work? But if people get the signal that it's rough, they get motivated now. A nice, well-kept tennis academy gives them the luxury future right now—of course they'd be demotivated. They can't help it."

Greatness isn't born, it's grown. Here's how.....

What is the secret of talent? How do we unlock it? This groundbreaking work provides readers with tools they can use to maximize potential in themselves and others. Whether you’re coaching soccer or teaching a child to play the piano, writing a novel or trying to improve your golf swing, this revolutionary book shows you how to grow talent by tapping into a newly discovered brain mechanism. Drawing on cutting-edge neurology and firsthand research gathered on journeys to nine of the world’s talent hotbeds—from the baseball fields of the Caribbean to a classical-music academy in upstate New York—Coyle identifies the three key elements that will allow you to develop your gifts and optimize your performance in sports, art, music, math, or just about anything. • Deep Practice Everyone knows that practice is a key to success. What everyone doesn’t know is that specific kinds of practice can increase skill up to ten times faster than conventional practice. • Ignition We all need a little motivation to get started. But what separates truly high achievers from the rest of the pack? A higher level of commitment—call it passion—born out of our deepest unconscious desires and triggered by certain primal cues. Understanding how these signals work can help you ignite passion and catalyze skill development. • Master Coaching What are the secrets of the world’s most effective teachers, trainers, and coaches? Discover the four virtues that enable these “talent whisperers” to fuel passion, inspire deep practice, and bring out the best in their students. These three elements work together within your brain to form myelin, a microscopic neural substance that adds vast amounts of speed and accuracy to your movements and thoughts. Scientists have discovered that myelin might just be the holy grail: the foundation of all forms of greatness, from Michelangelo’s to Michael Jordan’s. The good news about myelin is that it isn’t fixed at birth; to the contrary, it grows, and like anything that grows, it can be cultivated and nourished. Combining revelatory analysis with illuminating examples of regular people who have achieved greatness, this book will not only change the way you think about talent, but equip you to reach your own highest potential.

Understand yourself and those around you.

psychology

Psychology

problemsolving

Problem Solving

scienceandnature

Science & Nature

Procrastination is that urge to distract yourself from important tasks. Productive procrastination is a nice way to tell yourself that you're not really procrastinating because you're still being productive in some way.

Can Productive Procrastination Be A Useful Tool?

<ul><li>Smaller Tasks: Break your project into bite-sized pieces using <a href="https://monday.com/blog/project-management/task-analysis/#:~:text=Task%20analysis%20is%20important%20because,streamlines%20processes%2C%20and%20increases%20productivity">task analysis</a>. Re-ordering your tasks or jumping between can help to move the process along.</li><li>Establishing Structure: "Unnecessary" but important tasks help you stay motivated without forcing your attention on something you just can't focus on.</li><li>Reducing Stress: Procrastination leads to stress, which takes a toll on mental health and, in turn, productivity. If you feel like you're still being productive because you're at least checking off something, you're helping to reduce the risk of heightened stress.</li></ul>

Using Procrastination to Your Advantage

Monitor Your TimeThe key to using productive procrastination to your advantage is to keep it under control. Keep the miscellaneous tasks under half an hour.

Controlling Productive Procrastination

Keep Tasks Simple<ul><li>Stick to a routine</li><li>Keep your focus on a relevant area</li><li>Find accountability partners</li><li>Avoid falling into old habits</li></ul>

Don't get started on a whole new project!

Take BreaksTake the time to recharge and completely turn your mind away from your obligations once or twice a day. This helps reduce stress and improve your outlook on the day.

Sometimes the best use of your time is to do nothing

Productive procrastination is a quality tool when used in moderation. But don't give “meaningless” tasks the role of being productive just because you want to feel better about how you’re using your time. It’s a good practice to adjust your productivity shortcomings and acknowledge the procrastination traps you commonly fall into. Stay structured, find a system that works for you, and be honest about your mental capacity each day.

A Word of Caution

Here are a few key take-aways from my latest article!

What is productive procrastination? Use these "secondary tasks" to your advantage and avoid procrastination traps.

remotework

Remote Work

habits

Habits

People who are time poor are less happy, less productive and more stressed out. They exercise less, eat fattier food and have a higher incidence of cardiovascular disease. Time poverty forces us to compromise. Time poverty doesn’t arise from a mismatch between the hours we have and the hours we need; it results from how we think about and value those hours.

There is an 8 out of 10 chance that you are one of the poorest people in the world: time-poor.

Time confetti: the little bits of seconds and minutes lost to unproductive multitasking. Each bit alone is not very bad, but all add up to something more pernicious.Time confetti fragments an hour of leisure to smaller chunks (5-6 minutes long). It takes time to cognitively recover from shifting our minds from the present to a stress-inducing activity. Time confetti makes us feel even more time impoverished than we actually are.

Time trap #1: Technology interruptions break our hours into confetti 

Money protects against sadness but doesn’t buy joy. Once we make enough money to pay our bills, save for the future and have some fun, making more does little for our happiness.A culture obsessed with making more money believes, wrongly, that the way to become more time affluent is to become financially wealthier. Focusing on chasing wealth leads only to an increased focus on chasing wealth.

Time trap #2: We focus too much on work and money

Because of a cultural obsession with money, many people protect their money in ways that are counterproductive to time affluence. We reflexively go for the lowest cost when we shouldn’t.Even if we’re making a bad trade-off between time and money — such as driving two miles out of our way to save 10 cents per gallon on gas — it doesn’t feel like a bad choice. That’s because we don’t really know the worth of the time it took.

Time trap #3: We undervalue our time

Our identities are tied to work.Financial insecurity drives workism. Most of us cope by working more and trying to make more money. And we feel guilty about spending money on things that make us happy, such as dining out or vacations.The social appearance of being busy makes us feel good about ourselves. In contrast, focusing our attention on something other than work can threaten our livelihood and status.

Time trap #4: We regard busyness as a status symbol

Being constantly connected to our devices prevents the brain from recovering, keeps our stress levels elevated and takes us out of the present.Idleness has been shown to be a valuable form of leisure and can increase time affluence. The physical and mental benefits of disengaging the brain are far more valuable than the stress created by keeping the mind engaged at all times.

Time trap #5: We have an aversion to idleness

The best predictor of how busy we are going to be next week is how busy we are right now.

Time trap #6: We think we have more time tomorrow than we actually do 

Which of these 6 time traps is eating up all your time?

1. RitualsAt its core, Confucianism describes a way for humans to live together in the world, writes Stephen Angle in Growing Moral. One way to help us live in harmony with each other is through rituals. The Confucians’ idea of rituals could also be described as semi-scripted practices or even etiquette.

Rituals

In the Socrates Express, Eric Weiner (a previous podcast guest) explains, “Thousands of miles separated Confucius and Socrates, yet the two philosophers had a lot in common. Both men occupied precarious positions, admired by their disciples, and mistrusted by the elites. Both had an informal, conversational teaching style. Both questioned assumptions. Both were sticklers for definitions. ‘If words are not right, judgments are not clear,’ Confucius said.”

According to Confucianism, we need to recognize and embrace the central role of rituals in our lives. Rituals help us notice things we might not pay attention to otherwise. Do you hold the door for the person coming in behind you? What color clothing do you wear to a funeral? We all regularly follow rituals, even if we are unaware of them. There are three dimensions to how we should think about ritual: what one does, how one does it, and its effects. Rituals help us to think about others and to integrate practices like respect and kindness into society.

2. ReadingWisdom traditions place great emphasis on the practice of reading. But very few of these traditions provide as much guidance as Confucianism. The Chinese philosopher Zhu Xi from the 12th century wrote,“The books you read should be embodied in your person. I don’t know whether what you routinely study is on your mind at all times or not. But if it isn’t, you’re just hurrying through the texts, reading for their literal meaning and taking little pleasure in them. This, I fear, will be of no benefit to you in the end.”

Reading 

Angle writes that Zhu Xi advised students to keep these three rules: (1) read little but become intimately familiar; (2) don’t scrutinize the text, rather personally experience it over and over; (3) concentrate fully, without thought of gain.The Confucian way of reading says books themselves are secondary. It is the open-minded and questioning attitude with which one reads that matters. In Confucianism, questioning and even challenging one’s teacher is seen as an acceptable way to seek greater understanding.

3. ReflectionConfucians put a significant emphasis on the practice of reflection. In the Analects, reflection generally means to look within oneself and backward in time. Although the practice of reflection is not so much about the actions but rather the motivations underlying those actions, writes Angle. The Chinese philosopher Mengzi put it this way,“It not the function of the ears and eyes to reflect, and they are misled by things. Things interact with things and simply lead them along. But the function of the heartmind is to reflect. If it reflects, then it will attain virtue.”

Reflection 

Is reflection the answer to the challenge of being a good person? According to Angle, no, for two distinct reasons. First, reflection on its own is misleading. Confucius said, “Study without reflection is a waste. Reflection without study is a danger.” Reflection is not an end in itself but part of a development process.Angle concludes, “Because reflection always comes after we’ve acted (or failed to act), it cannot be the whole answer to living a good Confucian life, but it is a crucial part of self-cultivation.”

Today's generation is involved too much in the social media and they are harming their own selves. These tactics will help them in regaining their natural being.

Medium is an open platform where readers find dynamic thinking, and where expert and undiscovered voices can share their writing on any topic.

writing

Reading & Writing

education

Learning & Education

Medium – Three Practices from Confucius — That Can Change Your Life

<ul><li>Start with a visionary founder who is obsessed with product design, who is an engineer by trade, and who is a natural salesman. Most companies don’t even get past this first step. Hopin did because we have Johnny.</li><li>Hire just engineers as contractors and one other generalist entrepreneur who can write, sell, and help customers succeed.</li><li>Build a great product with a viral growth loop built into it. </li></ul>(continue below)

Hypergrowth Playbook: Steps to Hopin’s 6 Months of Rapid Growth

<ul><li>Work closely with key ICPs to shape your product roadmap. Remember that the market you start out serving may not be the market you end up dominating in. With Hopin, we began with solopreneurs, boutique agencies, and influencers but accelerated upmarket quickly.</li><li>Hire more engineers.</li><li>Sign your first annual contracts to anchor desirable customers.</li><li>Begin talking with investors about a pre-seed or seed round.</li><li>Hire a customer success person, a support person, and a salesperson with a proclivity for ops.</li></ul>(cont. below)

Hypergrowth Playbook (cont. 1) 

<ul><li>Launch in early access. Build a waitlist, letting in customers slowly. Use a lean marketing tech stack like Hubspot CRM, Zapier, Stripe, and Typeform. This waitlist is your community. StreamYard has an amazing blueprint for building a community of raving fans.</li><li>Get customer permissions to use recognizable logos and publish select case studies with good logos and/or numbers. These case studies reflect back to the market the type of customers you are built for (i.e., enterprise vs. SMBs)</li><li>Hire a PR firm to build buzz.</li></ul>(cont. below)

Hypergrowth Playbook (cont. 2)

<ul><li class="ql-align-justify">Hire more engineers. Begin to focus on organization, product management, and start to work with GTM on a customer-friendly product release process. Hire a product marketer. ARWAG. Always Release With A GIF.</li><li class="ql-align-justify">Scale the sales team to do demos and close more deals. Bring in a business operations (biz ops) leader.</li><li class="ql-align-justify">Scale the success and support teams. The better the product, the smaller these should be. The more complicated the product, the larger these teams need to be. Also, in hyperscaling, support content becomes outdated fast so build in a process for keeping it fresh and up to date.</li></ul>(cont below)

Hypergrowth Playbook (cont. 3)

<ul><li class="ql-align-justify">You should be working with 5+ agencies by now to outsource most of your marketing efforts (brand, creative, paid ads, SEO, content, events, and PR). Write clear briefs. Bring vendors into Slack. Be quick to move on from agencies who are not good fits.</li><li class="ql-align-justify">Experiment with pricing. Where do you want to be in the market compared to competitors? Ideally, you can offer a free version that has your branding watermarked somewhere (feed the viral growth loop). Also, always be working on the next plan up.</li></ul>(cont. below)

Hypergrowth Playbook (cont. 4)

<ul><li class="ql-align-justify">Leverage community feedback (a Facebook group is fine) and user surveys (HotJar is great) for identifying the must-have features that will move customers up to the next plan.</li><li class="ql-align-justify">Product/market fit is when growth numbers are up and to the right WoW for a dependable amount of time. The waitlist should be swelling. Customers should be regularly writing happy reviews, if not, incentivize them, getting you to the top of the review sites where your customers are researching products.</li></ul>(cont. below)

Hypergrowth Playbook (cont. 5)

<ul><li class="ql-align-justify">Couple the launch with your Series A announcement, directing traffic to your first customer event where you announce a flagship feature.</li></ul>

Hypergrowth Playbook (cont. 6)

“If you haven’t done something at least three times successfully, don’t assume you know how to do it successfully.”

<ul><li class="ql-align-justify">There’s a lot of insecurity when you’re doing something you’ve never done before.</li><li class="ql-align-justify">But I wasn’t alone. No one had experienced this type of rapid growth before. </li><li class="ql-align-justify">When you realize everyone else is neck-deep in imposter syndrome just like you, it’s mildly reassuring. </li><li class="ql-align-justify">What matters is that you keep learning, keep driving, keep experimenting, and keep solving problems wherever you are. </li><li class="ql-align-justify">Constantly ask yourself the question, “What am I not seeing?” to try to stretch your thinking.</li></ul>

Everyone has imposter syndrome.

Self-protection is the enemy of growth. Rigidity is the number one way to fail as an early startup employee. The sooner you can learn to let go, the sooner you can help grow the company and grow as a professional.

<ul><li class="ql-align-justify">Don’t be afraid to sell a feature that isn’t quite in production yet. Sell the roadmap. </li><li class="ql-align-justify">Not only does it light a fire under the whole company to delight a client by delivering by a deadline, it also is highly probable that by the time it’s shipped, you’ll have just gotten through legal and procurement.</li></ul>

Roadmap marketing.

<ul><li class="ql-align-justify">This is simply a startup-y way of restating Steven Covey’s principle “Begin with the end in mind.” </li><li class="ql-align-justify">The key to early-stage rapid growth is to not just think and talk about ideas, but to attach everything you spend your time on to its external impact on the customer and on revenue. </li><li class="ql-align-justify">Don’t waste time with grand plans and six-month strategy decks at this stage — they’ll need to be updated or thrown out completely as changes happen rapidly and it’s impossible to predict anything beyond a quarter. </li><li class="ql-align-justify">You need to be thinking two steps ahead while always delivering on the now.</li></ul>

Think in deliverables.

<ul><li class="ql-align-justify">Adaptability and flexibility are key to hyperscaling. </li><li class="ql-align-justify">“Be like water” was a common management mantra at Hopin used to remind the company to stay agile, embrace change, roll with the bumps, don’t take yourself too seriously, and be ready for any curveball the market might throw at us.</li></ul>

“Be like water.”

<ul><li class="ql-align-justify">In the early days, speed wins. </li><li class="ql-align-justify">Hopin became known for shipping features fast. Almost every week we would release a capability just in time for a big event to showcase it. </li><li class="ql-align-justify">This speed and responsiveness helped us bring in whales and beat out the competition. </li><li class="ql-align-justify">Quality was also massively important and we evolved to emphasize both speed and quality for our long-term strategy and customer success.</li><li class="ql-align-justify">Speed and quality tend to be at odds with each other. Every startup needs to balance both but also needs to decide which one they’re optimizing for.</li></ul>

Move at Hopin Speed

<ul><li class="ql-align-justify">Hopin has acquired five companies: StreamYard, Streamable, Jamm, Attendify, and Boomset. </li><li class="ql-align-justify">It's important for the acquiring company to not come in with guns a-blazing. </li><li class="ql-align-justify">You’re not coming in as a superior but as a supporter. </li><li class="ql-align-justify">Don’t disrupt the good that’s currently going on. </li><li class="ql-align-justify">Instead, become a student. Learn what’s working and what’s not and even when you see inefficiencies, resist the temptation to give orders. </li><li class="ql-align-justify">It takes more than a few meetings to understand what’s really going on. Do an extended listening tour. There’s no need to prove anything. Simply take the time to build trust. </li></ul>

Acquisitions are the Ultimate Test of Adaptability, Trust

<ul><li class="ql-align-justify">As managers, feedback won’t happen unless you ask for it. </li><li class="ql-align-justify">It also won’t happen unless you free up the calendar space for it. </li><li class="ql-align-justify">Being back to back all day every day sends the message that you’re too busy to talk through something. </li></ul>

Don’t just Ask for Feedback, Make Space for it.

Learning from what worked from others experience bears a lot of wisdom. Nonetheless, it is through our own actions and experience that'll make true difference in our own lives. Hope this inspires and serves as useful guidance to all of us. 

I just celebrated my two-year anniversary at Hopin, having joined the company when it was just a few months old and in beta — pre-revenue, pre-funding, no full-time employees. Today, Hopin is over…

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