STEP 1: Understand what it means to be a founder and decide to do it
When should this step happen? Any time.
I want you to take action as soon as possible. If it were up to me, you’d already be out on the streets working on your projects, because learning by doing is the only way of learning that I believe in. #LearningByDoing
However, I want to make a couple of things clear before you take your first steps.
You are going to create a team, so you have to be clear about your place in the team, and above all: what is not your place in the team. Your role is not to command, but to lead both the team and yourself. You don’t have to give orders, but inspire.
To inspire and lead, the first thing you must be clear about are your own objectives, and be able to establish indicators.
But what does all this mean and why is it so important? It is normal that it sounds a bit strange to you, because nobody has educated you to lead or to set your own goals. On the contrary: they have educated you to study, obey orders, sit down and take notes. Therefore, first we are going to clarify a series of ideas.
This is not for everyone
I believe we are all made of the same stuff. However, our free will causes us to make different decisions. This is how I see it: there are no extraordinary people, but people who make extraordinary decisions.
People who start movements are not extraordinary people, but their lives are. Some decide to travel and others decide to stay where they grew up. Some decide to challenge themselves and others decide to accommodate. There are those who day after day, for more than four years, decide over and over again to go to the same college to sit in front of a blackboard and study from their notes, and there are those who question the academic path to learn directly what life has to teach him. It is all a matter of decisions.
Students who build teams are not necessarily smarter or better qualified than the rest. Even so, it is they who originate the movements to which others later join. They tend to be people with the ability to think big and consider themselves capable of achieving any goal they set for themselves. They are also usually stubborn people - although this is not always the case. The point is that not all people want to face great challenges or live an extraordinary life.
If you plan to start a company, start a movement or lead a revolution, you have to know something: it is not for everyone. It is only for people whose motivation is greater than the fear of the unknown. People whose willingness to learn is greater than their ignorance. People with self-discipline and determination, who do not care what others think. And above all: people willing to discover themselves, however difficult it may be.
If this is not your case, join someone who fits that description. And if this is your case, great. Now you just have to show the rest of the world who you are.
Stop Listening to People
Never are your successful friends the ones posting inspiration quotes on facebook, right? People who really make it don’t go around giving advice, that’s why most of the advice you hear is mediocre and comes from people who don’t have much idea.
The first thing you must understand is that most of what you have heard is wrong. Very wrong. Your mother has been repeating incorrect ideas for years: “study hard”, “don’t do risky things”… but how many companies has your mother created? And your teachers are worse; at least your mother is wrong out of concern: your teachers simply enjoy hearing their own voice and reinforcing their own ideas.
Never follow advice, unless it comes from people whose lives you really want to emulate. If you want to have the same life as your mother, follow her advice. If you want to have the same life as your teachers, follow their advice. If you want to explore your own path, listen to everyone, but don’t follow anyone.
About creating companies, it is very curious: everyone talks as if they knew how to create a company, but how many have really tried? That’s why I want to debunk some of the myths that circulate out there.
1. You don’t need money to start
Anti-advice: You need money to start
People love making excuses and this is the most used one. It is used so much that people end up believing it is a rule. Error. The truth is that to create a company you don’t need money, even less so if you study at a university. These are the necessary resources:
- a team
- workspace
- tools
- legal forms
- advice
All of this is within your reach, within your own university. Don’t worry, I explain this extensively later.
Repeat with me:
I don’t need money, what I need is learning.
If you don’t see the path that takes you from an idea to materialization, it’s because you don’t know the path yet; not because of lack of money.
2. You don’t need prior experience in creating companies
Anti-advice: You need experience to start creating companies
As a university student, you have probably heard that in order to have a good job, you need prior experience. But how are you going to get experience if they don’t hire you? It’s the fish that bites its tail. The solution is to be an intern or lie on your resume. Forget that.
To carry out your projects you don’t need experience. You need the desire to do it. You can be your own boss even if you know nothing. In fact, being your own boss despite having no experience is the only way to learn to be your own boss. Being an apprentice to a boss you are not going to learn to create a company; yes, you are going to make wonderful coffees.
Repeat with me:
He who starts from scratch does not have to start from the bottom.
You don’t need experience. You need to want to do it.
3. You are going to change and that is good
Anti-advice: Never change
There are people who take this as an offense. They believe that changing is bad. “Never change” is the worst advice I’ve ever heard. You still have a lot to learn. Not only as a professional, but as a person.
It is obvious, but not everyone understands it. People are afraid of change. Everyone wants to improve their living conditions, but no one is willing to change. Changing can be painful, because your ego resists. You feel fear. But it is important to understand that if you live a story and have not experienced a transformation, you have wasted the experience.
If you don’t experience a transformation, you will stay in the same place; making the same mistakes over and over again, doing what you always do, with the same limitations. To achieve any kind of development, in any area of your life, it is necessary to experience a process. That’s why there can be no professional development if there is no personal development.
There are also those who believe that people cannot change. I know for sure that is a lie. Maturing is the effect of our values changing. It’s part of life. The question is whether you are going to change consciously or unconsciously. My advice is to do it consciously.
Don’t be ashamed to read self-help books. All the people who make it quote a book of that genre when asked about their favorite books. Check it out, you’ll see.
Do you have clear objectives?
Before you start, it is important that you think about your objectives. Where do you want to go? What do you want to achieve? How will you know you have achieved it?
No teacher is going to teach you to set your own goals. There is no class in which you learn to decide your own course in life.
No one has taught us to set goals; even less to design strategies to achieve them and establish progress indicators. However, it is essential that you know what you want to achieve. Creating a team is a personal decision that responds to a motivation and the clearer your motivation is, the easier you can design a strategy and make decisions.
A large part of WaLP consists of teaching students to be their own leader, reflect on their life, set their own goals and design strategies.
It is also important that you question your own limits, because no one sets goals that they believe they cannot achieve. It is a matter of belief, of subjective opinion. That’s why the difference between someone who achieves great things and someone who doesn’t is their mindset. They set different goals because their mindset defines what they can or cannot do.
Think about it. Not long ago, the vast majority of people believed that the earth was flat. During this period there were very few explorers. Everyone feared reaching the edge of the earth and falling into the abyss. No one wanted to sail too far. Human behavior changed massively when a small detail was revealed: the earth is round. After this correction, societies began to explore and travel around the world. Merchants established trade routes and spread new ideas, unleashing all kinds of innovations and advances. The correction of a simple idea made humanity progress incredibly. Just one idea; a small variation in the minds of men, and history changes its course completely.
The true nature of learning
After a couple of years creating teams at my university I realized something very important. It was like a revelation that helped me a lot.
I had always been blinded by the strange notion that human learning happens in a staggered way. All my life I had thought that it was necessary to do the first course, then the second, third, fourth… always go from course to course. As if experience were something that must be accumulated, to a point where you ascend a level and become capable of performing new actions. Step by step. Level by level. In a staggered way.
Just as a Pokémon rises to level 16 and learns an attack because it has accumulated 1500 experience points, we believe that it is necessary to accumulate years of work or studies to progress, learn and achieve personal or professional development that enables us to perform a task. As if learning happened through small successive and staggered steps that must be traveled one by one in a linear way, step by step, in a cumulative process. But in reality it is not like that.
Traditional Japanese vocabulary harbors a concept that I find very interesting: shunpo, whose translation would be something like “instant step”. A shunpo is like a space-time jump. Like teleporting.
You close your eyes and, in just one movement - a shunpo - you find yourself on the roof of a Bangkok skyscraper. Another sudden shunpo and you have Niagara Falls so close that the noise doesn’t allow you to hear your own thoughts. A third shunpo, and you find yourself in the twenty-fifth seat of a train. Can you imagine it? A single movement that transports you millions of kilometers, as if distance were an illusion, as if the ocean that separates two continents meant nothing. The metric system becomes absurd. No more taking one step and then another and then another to get to a certain place. That is a shunpo.
I realized that the learning and personal development of a human being resembles a shunpo more than the linear and staggered progress we are used to, because it happens inside the mind, where the distance and time that separates two points is illusory.
Inside the mind there are no oceans, roads, stairs or elevators. There are no kilometers, except those you want to imagine. Psychological time differs from chronological time. In your mind, seconds can become hours and sometimes years seem like days. The mind is not subject to the same laws as the outside world. That’s why there are crazy people, happy people and people who do extraordinary things. Learning is not a progress, it is an event. It is not gradual, it does not need time to occur. The distance you need to travel to advance is the distance you imagine for yourself.
What does all this mean? That there are no limits other than the ones you imagine. That you don’t need to go through your studies course by course to start working; you can start even if you are in your first year. WaLP is a shunpo. That’s why it’s important to keep an open mind throughout the process.
Comfort zone
The comfort zone is a state in which a person feels at ease, in control and experiences low anxiety. It is a set of all those physical or psychological places where our mind feels safe, comfortable and protected.
Leaving the comfort zone increases the level of anxiety generating a stress response, the result of which, if managed well, is a higher level of concentration and focus. Leaving the comfort zone also helps us destroy the limits that, subtly, we end up confusing with the framework of our intimate existence.
Creating a team, founding a company and working on your own projects is a journey full of triumphs and failures. It is a journey that will touch your emotions and test your personality. Why? First, because it is full of first times: the first time you register a legal entity, the first time you recruit a team, the first meeting with someone important, the first client, the first income in the account, trips, unforgettable moments and many new friends.
But it may also be the first time a partner abandons you, the first time something you had given yourself to doesn’t work out, or the first time you can’t blame someone else.
It will be a process with strong doses of learning. You will constantly find yourself outside your comfort zone. That means you will feel lost on many occasions.
You say you want to do it, but are you willing to do that? On many occasions, it will be like a war, except the enemy is yourself. You are going to discover that you set your own limitations and that if you are not able to achieve something it is because you are the barrier. This is very hard for anyone to face, because people are afraid to change and without change there is no progress. Maturing is the effect of your values changing.
What you must remember is that success is a matter of learning, and therefore of time and perseverance.
You must be prepared for…
Working as a team
It doesn’t matter how good a professional you are. Even if you are a genius at whatever: if you are not able to work as a team, communicate and listen, you are going to have a hard time. Your main strength will be your ability to work as a team. That is what makes us strong as a species. No human being has achieved anything extraordinary alone.
If you believe that working as a team is not for you and that you can’t do anything to change it, you are wrong. It is a lie that you have told yourself and that you have accepted. That is called being a coward. The sooner you get rid of that idea, the better for you.
Relating to other human beings is a skill that is learned and trained. Some learned it in their childhood and others learn it as adults. Whatever your case, it is something you are interested in improving. Not only because it will help you succeed, but because it will make you happier. Believe me: it is comforting to know that every stranger on this planet is potentially a friend.
Here is a list of books that will improve your ability to understand others and for others to understand you:
- How to win friends by Dale Carnegie
- The Truth About Leadership by James M. Kouzes and Barry Z. Posner
- The Five Dysfunctions Of A Team: A Leadership Fable By Patrick Lencioni
Keep an agenda
It doesn’t matter how good your memory is: no one can remember all the events, meetings, deliveries and important dates of their life. If until now you have survived without keeping an agenda, it is because you were doing very few things or because you were doing them wrong.
It may also be because, until now, your calendar has been decided by someone else. The dean’s office of your faculty decides when each exam is and the teachers tell you the delivery dates for each assignment. You don’t decide when your vacations are or when you go back to work. However, in this process you are going to decide your own calendar. If you don’t schedule something on your agenda, it won’t happen. If you don’t remember something, no one will remind you.
That’s why, keep an agenda. It is something really basic. My recommendation is Google Calendar, but iCal also works. And you can have an agenda in physical format, if that is more your thing. Personally I do not recommend it, because you will probably have to share the information of your events with your teammates.
Here is a list of books that will improve your organization skills and help you plan your life better:
- Getting Things Done by David Allen
- The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey
Be humble
It is difficult to be a person with so much self-esteem that they believe they are capable of creating a successful company at their university, and at the same time be humble, right? Well, it is necessary.
There is a close relationship between your success and how other people see you. Your chances of success will be directly proportional to the number of people who want you to succeed. That’s why you must strive to be humble. If you manage to suppress the need to constantly prove that you are as great as you think you are, everything will go better. And if you are also able to appreciate the greatness of others and reserve yours for important moments, then everything will be wonderful.
Now decide: are you willing to do it?
Now that you know what a founder is, you have to decide if this is for you. If not, give this book to someone who needs it more. And if you want to live the process, just keep reading.
From here on, everything will be learning by doing.
Learning diary (Important)
This is very important: go to a bookstore and buy a blank notebook. Choose the notebook well because it will accompany you throughout this process and you will become very fond of it.
WaLP is like a subject in which there are no exams or notes. You are your teacher. That’s why it is important that you document your learning, and write your ideas and take notes of what happens in meetings and projects.
Why? First: documenting what happens is a way to measure progress. It will also be a source of motivation, being a tangible object that serves as proof of all the mental processes you are living.
On the other hand, taking a few minutes to pause to write down what is happening around you will help you meditate on the situation, analyze and better understand things.