I tuned out the world last week and let myself build everything I could think of. I stopped taking calls, I got off Twitter and all other social media, and I made myself sit in my own complexity and just dump it all out on the table.
It’s something I hadn’t done in a long time. Instead, I simply kept picking things up, putting them in the junk drawer of my brain, and continuing on. It made it impossible to figure out which parts of things were in my head and which were coming from others. But after dumping everything out, I spent three days throwing away everything that doesn’t actually matter right now.
I love the idea of a 72 week book project with structured characters. I love the idea of an AI Leonardo da Vinci leading me on a journey through the Innovation Nexus. After my prayers on Friday, I listened, and the universe delivered some guidance. So I spent the last three days making sure I truly understood what I was supposed to do with it. And in the end, the faith paid off. I have a clarity of purpose and goals now that show me exactly where I get off track and how to get back on.
Faith Friday
After yesterday’s post, I’ve ended up pulling everything I’ve done together into a very simple realization: I need more faith in my life.
I can do amazing things. I have an incredible amount of space in my head, and I’m learning how to truly use it effectively. And part of it is understanding what parts matter and what parts don’t. In the end, it wasn’t the 72 week book project that actually mattered. It was a pretty cool scaffolding that I needed in order to get to the simplicity I desired, but that’s it. It was a darling I had to learn how to kill for now. It’s not quite time yet, because I have something else I need to focus on first. A simple product with undeniable ROI that I can sell so I can pay people to handle the complexity that I hate dealing with.
And that’s my ability to hold an insane amount of complexity in my head and collapse it down to something simple. It’s my superpower, but I’ve been bad at using it because I was never really taught how. I had to figure out how my brain worked on my own. But I could. And I did.
So it’s time to say goodbye to the 72 week book project, at least for now. Because I realized something: It’s totally worth spending 72 hours to save 72 weeks. Saturday, I worked on integrating some feedback I got into the math I had around Time Violence, and saw everything I expected to with incredible detail for the first time.
And on Sunday and Monday, I spent a ton of time digging into all sorts of areas, thinking about everything I was going to do with the stuff I was seeing.
By the end, I started laughing. Because I was the biggest perpetrator of time violence against myself, and my math showed me that. I broke the calculation down into two parts: the ops cost, based on Kingman’s Formula, and then a complexity cost based on number of paths through the system.
Cool. Cool cool cool. Infinite mental queue at over 1 million times more complex than necessary. The one person not surprised by any of this math is probably
.
Yay! That’s taxes and the healthcare system running in my head. Six poorly coordinated process at 95% utilization.
The math doesn’t lie. That’s why I like it so much. Time to simplify. Other stuff will come, but only after I can focus on what matters now.
So I’ve got a test now. Can I navigate myself out of the complexity I’ve created? And the answer is a resounding yes right now because I have no problem giving up the stuff I created. It was fun, but it’s all ephemeral. Ideas exist while they are useful and then we can simply let them die.
It’s a lesson I’ve had to learn the hard way. I’ve become way too attached to ideas in the past and held on to them when I should have let them go so they could evolve into something else.
But now, I’ve realized I’m really good at helping people let go of the ideas that they think they need to hold on to, and I’m incredible at holding your complexity outside of your head so you can see it. I’m putting together some social proof from the people I’ve been helping, because I’ve helped them go from having 50 ideas and being unable to communicate them to having a single clear pitch for their product and an mvp, over a single month, after 15 years of being stuck in idea mode.
So if you want some help, I’m opening up 2 slots a month for founders who want me to break their brains down with them and help them get out of the way of their company’s growth.
If there’s one thing I’ve realized over the past five years, it’s that the job of the founder is to hold the complexity of everything for the team. And there usually aren’t people to help the founder sort through all of that complexity.
So that’s where I come in.
If I can help you simplify your future, please fill out this qualification survey. I’m opening up 2 slots for my new offer to spend 72 hours saving 72 weeks. Best $3K you’ll ever spend.
I wish you the simple future that I’m heading toward. That’s where the peace is.