I am not a Visionary

An enlightening, initially pride-depleting realization I’ve recently come to—I am not a Visionary. I’ve built my career around the early stage startup realm and vision is a big component to innovative companies, but that’s not where I thrive. I’m the exact complement to a Visionary. I’m an Executor. I don’t spend my time brainstorming big ideas out of thin air, I spend my time calculating the most effective execution strategy for big ideas. I spend my time peeling back the layers to successful companies and studying their processes and steps that got them to where they are. I spend my time analyzing an existing landscape in a startup and its market, and craft the best Get Shit Done approach. This is how I choose my founders that I work with. I *synergize* best with visionaries. BIG visionaries—planning a roadmap is much more enrapturing for me when it’s never been done and it has the potential for global impact. I think of myself as a big cone filter--founders throw their box of fairies, rainbows, and unicorns down the filter, I analyze what we have, what we need, and what’s already out in the world, and design a system of calculated and thoughtful unicorn/fairy/rainbow development and release. What’s the most effective engineering/design team structure? What target audience should we focus on? Who should we approach for partnerships? Which product features should we include or shelve for later? What should the development cadence and process look like? What’s our priority list? What’s our timeline and target milestones? These are the questions I like to ask. And any one of my founders will tell you I do, after they ask questions like—How can we disrupt this market? What’s a problem that effects more than 10,000 people? What’s never been done to solve this problem? The perfect duo. 

Nothing is more satisfying to me than immediately talking strategy and plan of attack. I can’t discuss big ideas without doing this. I’ll be the asshole in the room writing out an execution roadmap, calling manufacturers, and assigning engineers tasks while Elon and Bezos are brainstorming how to become a multi-planetary species. Founders provide the block of beautiful, rare, carefully mined block of marble, I start chipping away to build the statue. Founders give me the materials for a stunning beachside mansion that’s never been built into the rocks in that way, I construct the unique but lasting structure that turns the materials into an inhabitable anomaly. 

I’ve focused a lot of mental energy into developing self-awareness in the past year, I’ve gotten pretty good at it. The trick is to develop a self-awareness that remains an open box, avoiding boxing yourself into the traits and behaviors that you’ve recognized in that introspection. We are all malleable, influenceable creatures. We are not static or concrete. Thank god. If we want to change, we can. Even if we don’t want to, we do. Some more often than others, depending on how often your surroundings are altered. It’s certainly uncomfortable at first, but vital for growth—lack of movement is death. But I believe it’s important to seek and acknowledge the core components of what makes you tick, the foundational skills and motivators that remain throughout the fluidity of your life, observe and become aware of them, and leverage and apply them in a way that allows you to be your best self in the world. 

Must fulfillment come from the tangible?

I remember some of the most satisfying flow states I’ve experienced were days in my graphic design course in high school. I spent hours immersed in a concept I was crafting in photoshop. When I was finished, and it received praise from my teacher and others, it was a deeply satisfying feeling. I had a tangible art piece that came from thoughts and random neuron firing (that’s all creativity really is, see my post "The Philomath's Dilemma V2"), harnessed by my hands putting it onto a computer screen. Most instances of a flow state followed by deep personal fulfillment come from something that leads to tangible evidence of the work put in during the flow state. There are many opportunities for this in school. Art class, English essays, plays, projects, presentations. But in adult life, you must seek it out yourself. I’ve envied engineers and designers and artists because this is a default occurrence in their careers. They’re creators. Tangible evidence of their work is the only way for them to continue on with those careers. It’s very black and white whether they’re doing well or not so well in those careers (except maybe artists, where output is much more ambiguously valued on a personal vs. general level). There is tangible evidence of their work in the form of an app, home, website, machine, product, or otherwise, that either sparks user adoption and revenue or it doesn’t. They can look at something or touch something that made someone’s life better and say “I built that”. 

So what gets managers, leaders, and strategists off? How do we reach that sense of fulfillment without a tangible product that was shaped with our own hands? Can we achieve second-hand fulfillment from the team we led in shaping that product? Can it be as strong? I was an engineer for over 2 years before moving to product and strategy. Nothing was more satisfying than discovering a bug or getting a feature request from stakeholders and being able to dive into the code and fix it right then and there, with my own hands, and display the fix in the same meeting. It felt powerful having the ‘doing’ power that no one else in the room had, especially considering their deep reliance on the product's success. That was fulfilling. 

But with great ‘doing’ power came a lot of dictating and micromanaging. It was a constant “Add this” “Fix this” “Change this”, all focused on very minute, tiny things that made me feel like I was becoming increasingly separated from the product’s mission and north star. Tweaking a button color or moving a label too many times will do that to you. Of course, this wasn’t always the case. We solved many challenging, interesting problems. We replaced the entire deposits system for a 30-year-old bank with 30-year-old tech, not an easy feat. But considering we were the only hands capable of shaping the perfect gem they wanted, much of the specs were nitty-gritty gripes from the executives. That’s when I realized I couldn’t always be the low-level, front-line creator. I needed to step back over that line, and do the high-level thinking of product direction and strategy. 

I miss the tangible evidence that came with being a builder, but I’ve been able to shift my sources of fulfillment. It now comes from the success of my engineering team in completing and releasing a robust sprint, the feature I prioritized yielding beneficial results, the designers I led creating a compelling UX, the users/clients I support providing positive feedback, the process I implemented becoming an effective productivity machine, the startup I'm helping build hitting hockey stick growth.

Maybe the fact that I used to be a creator provides the contrast for me more so than others. But I believe they are vastly different career focuses that cater to different personas. It’s valuable to know what works best for you and which you can harness the most fulfillment from. Because that’s all any of us are lookin for.