Finding Flow
For roughly half of my life (age 5-21), my dream was to play professional soccer. I pursued that dream through 4 years of collegiate competition, but in my junior year, a combination of lingering injuries, disappointments I felt toward America's collegiate style of play (another topic), and broadening academic & professional interests, led me toward different pursuits.
Somewhat ironically, after this change, I went on to play semi-professionally for a number of years, while also working to build a career outside of the game, and it was during that post-collegiate period that I played some of the best games of my life.
In athletics, individual performance is often a derivative of an athlete's confidence, and confidence is best understood as the competitor's ability to perform almost unconsciously — unencumbered by doubt and liberated by an embedded trust in his/her competence & muscle memory.
I can remember in high school, at college showcase tournaments, moments when fear that I wouldn't impress the scouts would destroy confidence and drive unforced mistakes. I remember in college fearing that if I didn’t make the safe pass to keep the ball in the team, that I’d be substituted. Too much thinking, not enough flow.
As I learned more about the game, and more importantly about how to cultivate confidence, those moments became fewer and further between, to the point that by the time I was playing post-collegiately, the multi-year accumulation of many little victories -- thousands of small moments when I trusted myself -- made the discovery of flow consistently easier to come by. By the time I stopped playing competitively, I'd come to appreciate how special flow state really is -- it's the place where joy is compounding.
How do companies operate well?
In my early 20’s, the drive to build companies replaced the drive to pursue soccer. The study of flow state through the beautiful game and the study of business building (the most interesting game :-)), has led to an enduring interest in both the psychology that individuals master to cultivate their own confidence, as well as the operational best practices great companies adopt & cultivate to drive longterm durability.
An individual's performance is a derivative of confidence. Is the same true for business performance?
The obvious difference between individual performance and company performance is that the latter is a collective, and so not as clearly a derivative of muscle-memory infused flow states. Instead, company performance is more often a derivative of collaboration, which is a further derivative of communication quality (thank you Barbara Minto, the master of greasing the gears & and a true business hero).
But then, not so fast!
We all know that when communication is clear & respectful, trust accelerates, and when trust accelerates, individual confidence spreads, and when more individuals across companies are acting with confidence (not to be mistaken with arrogance), the business performs better.
So, arguably, individual performance and collective performance are tied to the same root cause -- confidence -- confidence that is hard-won through the practice of accumulating the small victories of deepening not only competence, but just as importantly, trust in that competence.
I recently heard a long-time CEO describe his journey with a couple of bad companies, a mediocre company, and a couple of great companies, and that across 60 straight quarters of being accountable to the number, he’d learned the good, the bad, and the ugly of operating. And in that statement, I felt inclined to explore more deeply how good companies operate.
How can entrepreneurs think about building companies that operate well?
How does what a company needs to be good at change over time?
When valuation multiples soar and the balance of top-line growth and bottom line growth matters less to investors, does the definition of what a company needs to be good at change?
And finally, what are predictable methods & best practices for operating well?
I'll explore these questions in Part II.