Learning

One of my mentors¹ talks often about the idea that when businesses put something valuable into the world, they earn one or more of these things:

Capitalism emphasizes measuring our earnings on the first category, Money. And to some extent it also cares about measuring earned Reputation too: we look at brand visibility, marketing / attention / influence metrics, etc.

Recently I’ve been thinking more and more about the idea of a business earning Knowledge too. I think in this moment of rapid change and turmoil, the knowledge we harvest from our work might be the most valuable of all three - but only if we treat it with the same seriousness with which we treat the pursuit and measurement of money.

Whenever I tell people about starting OpenTent, I describe how I did not know a damn thing about business or consulting. I had thought I wanted to be a rabbi, but on the way there I stumbled into meeting a bunch of nonprofits who needed help with their messy spreadsheets. So I thought “I can help!”

But much of my first few years trying to build the business involved Googling “what needs to go in an invoice” and “do I need liability insurance” and “how much to pay people” and “what to do when a client says I promised to do something but I never said I would do that because why would I agree to that it wouldn’t make any sense but they keep insisting I did.”²

It was thrilling not knowing a damn thing. I found it intensely energizing. My pace of learning - about business, about technology, about myself - was SO fast. It had to be. It was like drinking from a firehouse except I was a thirsty sponge with no saturation limit.

It’s like what they say about babies: part of why they learn so fast is because there is no countervailing information in their brain to get in the way of incoming knowledge. Everything can just flow in and stick. That’s the idea behind Beginner’s Mind: getting back to that state of radical openness.

Because I didn’t know anything, in every situation I had to figure out how I wanted to approach it, rather than just doing what I had been taught or absorbed from somewhere else. Contracts. Hiring. Pricing. Branding. I didn’t know better so I felt free to do it how I thought it should be done.

When we talked with a prospect client, I kept assuming that we would be too small or too inexperienced for them. But we kept getting selected - because we did things differently, and because we were responding in a more custom and personalized way to each situation rather than applying a boilerplate template. That was the case with our first client in 2015 and it was the case all the way up to winning our biggest client yet last year.

Looking back, that Beginner’s Mind attitude was a major factor in OpenTent’s success over time (in addition to 2-3 awesome/lucky early clients, 2-3 awesome/lucky early hires, and catching the wave of a new market at the right time…).

Now I’m working on starting a new business.³ And it feels very different from starting OpenTent: I now have a team of people who are looking to me to chart the path where we’re headed. The biggest ask from my team is about vision: where are we going? How will we know if we got there? What matters along the way?

These are reasonable questions from smart people who care. I want to be able to come through with specific answers that make them feel excited and aligned. But every time I try to come up with answers, it feels disingenuous. The most truthful answer right now is:

I don’t really know.

What I actually want to try to do is keep us all in student mode for as long as we possibly can. Partly because I have seen that to be effective in charting a different course for a new business, but mostly because I believe right now our biggest opportunity is in earning Learnings, not Money.

So what I want to try doing is getting much more intentional and structured about this learning. We need a weekly ritual for harvesting our learnings together. Too often, business agendas are “What happened? What needs to happen next?” I want to add to the agenda: “What did we learn? What do we need to learn next?”

I think about how I grew up the oldest kid of two educators, and dinnertime conversation often revolved around “what did you learn today"?” and “how did you get that answer?” That orientation is so core to how I see the world now. And that’s the question that I find myself always wanting to ask my teammates.

What did you learn this week?

How did you figure that out?

In the AI era, Beginner’s Mind matters immensely. One might imagine that because AI knows everything and learns faster than we do, our own pace and volume of learning doesn’t matter that much. But it really really does, because there is a certain set of learning that only we humans can do: the emotional, the spiritual, the energetic. Our brain is a mush of neurons that scientists still don’t fully understand. It’s fundamentally different than a data center with rows and rows of chips. We can benefit from AI’s structured learning but AI can also benefit from our unstructured mass of hormones and insights and unpredictability. Our intelligences are stronger when paired.

The other reason why Beginner’s Mind matters right now is that everyone feels like they are behind, like things are changing much too fast, and we’re all just darn stressed about it. Beginner’s Mind says that no matter what we know or don’t right now, we are still just starting. We are new (I love reading this children’s book with Lev!). Living in that mindset reduces stress and increases creativity. Which we need to do! The only way we figure out how to navigate all these challenges is through reducing stress, accessing our creativity, and making decisions borne out of love of learning rather than fear of missing an arbitrary money goal.

What do you intend to learn this week?

P.S. I was going to write about the article below in this week’s email but we’re already well past my 1,000 word target so I will bump it to next week. If you want to prep with me, read it this week so you’re ready for my take on it!! It’s long (loooonnnngggg) but it has to be one of the most fascinating things I’ve read this whole year. Worth it! See you next Sunday!