#02 | On cultivating ignorance

🌱 Growth mindset and discovering things we didn't know we don't know

Sep 20, 2020

Welcome to the 2nd edition of Day One - a newsletter designed to cultivate your curiosity and bring humanity back to entrepreneurship. Thanks for being here! If this email was forwarded to you, get your own here:

✨ TL;DR

Most of the time, I have no idea what I'm doing. But that's a good thing. Entrepreneurship, like science, is about just knowing enough to start framing and testing the unknowns. And as we grow our knowledge, our ignorance grows too.
Our true potential is unknown (and unknowable). People with a growth mindset believe that it's impossible to predict what can be accomplished with years of passion and training.
How do we apply a growth mindset to our life in practical terms. In my experience, this requires an effective learning loop, commitment to deliberate practice and the willingness to make a food of oneself.

🤔 Most of the time, I have no idea what I'm doing.

But while this thought had been causing some mild anxiety over the past 2 weeks, I now realise that this is my new normal. When building a venture, one of the biggest challenges is operating in a fast-moving world full of unknowns and uncertainty.

It's kind of like science.

In his TED Talk, The pursuit of ignorance, Stuart Firestein claims that knowledge generates ignorance. The purpose of knowing stuff is not, simply, to be know stuff - but to be able to ask thoughtful and interesting questions about what we don't know.

This made me reflect on the process of building a business from scratch: It's not about knowing everything when getting started - it's about knowing enough to be able to frame and test the unknowns. It's those unanswered questions that have the potential of a break-through.

The exciting part of this is that, as we grow our knowledge, we don't reduce our ignorance. Instead, our ignorance grows too, as we find more things we didn't previously know we don't know 🕳️.

P.S: If you haven't yet, I highly recommend you to 🎧 listen to Stuart Firestein's TED talk. Not only is it insightful, but it also made me laugh out loud!

🌱 The uncertainty of our true potential

“I have not failed 10,000 times. I have not failed once. I have succeeded in proving that those 10,000 ways will not work.”
— Thomas Edison.

As a society, we tend to overestimate natural ability and underestimate effort and mindset. The stories we read about successful founders, often don't tell us about the hard work and many failed attempts that came before the big break-through.

In the early days, Google's cofounders approached an investor with the idea of selling their firm for $1 million so they could go back and focus on their school work. They were turned down.

The Airbnb founding team sold around 1,000 special edition election-themed cereal boxes to raise approx $30,000. Still, the site didn't get much traction and they were living off the rest of cereals that hadn't sold.

Of course that, looking back, both cases got off the ground soon after their low point. But back then, they were living in uncertainty. None of them knew what their companies would grow and become today (or even if they would turn into anything at all). They could have just labeled themselves as a failure, but they had the mental toughness to keep working hard and stretching themselves in the face of the many setbacks.

This is the true nature of the 🧠 growth mindset.

[ People with a growth mindset ] believe that a person’s true potential is unknown (and unknowable); that it’s impossible to foresee what can be accomplished with years of passion, toil, and training.
— Dr. Carol Dweck, author of Mindset

This doesn't mean that they don't fail and won't feel hurt or disappointment. It's human nature. But they won't allow their failures to define them. It is just another data-point for them, a learning.

Many people think of the brain as a mystery. They don’t know much about intelligence and how it works. When they do think about what intelligence is, many people believe that a person is born either smart, average, or dumb—and stays that way for life. But new research shows that the brain is more like a muscle—it changes and gets stronger when you use it. And scientists have been able to show just how the brain grows and gets stronger when you learn.
— Dr. Carol Dweck, author of Mindset

❗How do we apply a growth mindset to our life in practical terms

In my experience, this comes down to 3 things:

➰Building a learning loop
I've written about applying the scientific method at work before, but versions of this can be translated into anything we put our minds on. The simplest version is to start by formulating an hypothesis, designing and executing experiments to validate or reject it, measuring your results and refining the hypothesis based on the learnings you extract from it.
Further reading: Fail like a scientist to overcome fear of failure
✍🏽 Committing to practice deliberately
Deliberate practice is not mindless repetition - it's purposeful and systematic, with a concrete goal in mind. It requires sustainable effort and concentration. One of the keys in making practice deliberate is by measuring the output. It's the only way to figure out what works for you and what doesn't.
Further reading: The beginner's guide to deliberate practice
🤡 Willingness to make a fool of oneself
In the beginning, you need to get comfortable with feeling stupid, uncertain and unskilled. As children, we fall and get easily. This has proven to be harder as we got older, because we are more self-conscious and fear what others might be thinking of ourselves. The good news here is: most of what we want to do is an asymmetrical game: bad moves cost almost nothing, and good moves are worth a lot (i.e. launching a newsletter, start oil painting or building a side hustle).
Further reading: Creativity is a process not an event

Ultimately, you want to move from being outcome-focused to becoming process-focused. With practice, training, and above all, method, we manage to grow and strengthen our brain.

Curiosity snippets

🎬 The Social Dilemma. This documentary from Jeff Orkowski explores how addition and privacy breaches are features purposefully built into social media platforms. If, like me, you've found yourself mindlessly scrolling or feeling the need to check your phone immediately upon receiving a notification - this documentary might as well help you take at least a step towards breaking that habit.
📰 The Crossroad between Should and Must. This read gives optimism and bravery to anyway facing a dilemma. Every day, we find ourselves at a crossroad between should and must. Should is the familiar, it's what external sources tell us we should do. In contrast, Must, comes from our inside - it's what our values long us to do. It's up to us to choose which route to take.
📰 Worker-owned co-ops are coming for the digital gig economy. Though already a couple of years old, I recently read this article on platform cooperativism and how this could look like for the gig economy. How do you imagine a world in which Uber was owned by its drivers and Rappi by its tenderos?
🔈 The Math of Community. The podcast explores the measurable impact of community. As Jacob puts it: “If you had 2 groups of people and put them together to create a 4 person community you’d actually have 6 unique ways in which those people can connect with one another. Community is exponentially more powerful.”

💫 Thank you

Thank you so much for reading. If you have thoughts/feedback or any interesting content to share, I'd love to hear from you! And if you believe a friend might enjoy this newsletter - I'd very much appreciate you sending it to them by sending them this link or clicking below.

Thanks for being there!

— Kat

Day One