Opening my Schrödinger Dream Box
A few months ago I finally opened my long-awaited Schrodinger dream box - my passion to start my own startup. Anyone who desire to achieve something big, will eventually need to face reality. As long as there is some risk and ambiguity, it is “reasonable” that by opening the box, you would discover something you wasn’t ready for. It doesn’t matter how much time you invest in preparation for filling your backpack for this journey by reading books, going to meetups, talking to people, gathering founders..
The option of not opening the box is quite attractive, right…? After all, every dream hypothetically sounds great, amazing, promising (and I’m not talking about people who gave up on having a dream box, too many people, in my humble opinion). In the past, I set myself a goal to present my research at the most important computer graphics conference in front of 3,000 people. I was confidence I can do it, maybe even a bit arrogant. I achieved it, with a lot of help from my family, my adviser, my brain and Disney. It was a journey, a long one, with lot’s of failures and terrifying moments, but it was fun, insightful and meaningful.
The number of opportunities for me to fail in the last few months was exponentially bigger than anything I experienced in any previous career journey, and with the opportunity to fail - I failed, a lot, team-wise, business-wise, customer-wise, family-wise. With every failure I learnt something new about startups, about myself, and it’s not a cliche (well it is), but the power and the intensiveness of the learning experience did surprised me. I was surprised how startup books and classes are meaningless without actually doing it.
Similar to the Schrodinger experiment, it may be that by opening the box I killed the cat, I hope not - cats have nine lives they say, and I’m naturally attracted to challenges.
I’m still considering releasing my lesson learnt posts (as there are not enough medium posts and books about that), anyway, many of my personal lessons are well written by others, so you just need to fail to be able to learn from them:
- 13 Sentences and Startup Ideas - just read every Paul Graham essay
- Sam altman startup class - or start with the Startup Playbook
- The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick
- Zero to one by Peter Thiel
- Co-founders and Startups: What Makes a Successful Team?