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second TMP 111 essay: "What I have learned that will help me in my…

- - - - But through the challenges he faced, whether it be recruiting top talent for a world-renowned skateboard team or shooting a fast-paced documentary on the sport, he realized that "while things like talent or self-confidence are nice to have, you don't need it" (Stacy INTERVIEW). What allowed him to improve when others stagnated and always stay focused on working on what mattered the most was paying attention and asking a lot of questions.
        
        The most important thing, the one thing that you can call your own and no one else's, he says, is "where you put your awareness. Pay attention where you pay your attention to." Because of this, he also cautions us of how your attention could be put to less important things. He says that iPhones, while they can be a fantastic tool, can be "one of the wonderful distractors of your life" and that "it’s important to do what’s in your head and heart, because iPhones are not as smart as those" (Stacy INTERVIEW).
        
        When he was going around and attending skateboard competitions, while he was busy manning his booth and getting his brand's word out there, he wouldn't waste a second of attention on anything but keeping his eyes peeled, scouting out who was performing well, who the up-and-coming skaters were and in-effect, along with his foresight, allowed him to have a significant edge when it came to recruiting top talent. When he lacked a skill that other great leaders had, he would pay attention to them and observed how and why they did the things they did, very, very intently.
        
        He also stressed the importance of asking a ton of questions.
        
        "I had to not be afraid to not know," he says in his interview, "if I wanted any chance to get better at what I did." He admitted that when starting his skateboarding business, he knew nothing of product strategy, marketing, sales, or anything, but what he had was the ability to not be bothered when chastised about asking questions on "elementary" things.
  - - - Many points along her journey as a product manager, then head of product, then venture capitalist, Julie McNamara found herself over and over again finding opportunities simply out of the people she knew. Going from the collapsing eToys to the hypergrowth startup Rent.com was largely due to the folks from eToys she knew had left. The same thing happened again when leaving Rent.com for Evite, where she met John Foley, where she was able to partner with him and greatly accelerate her career. Well, OK, you might say, everyone knows that having a good network is very important to build a top-tier team in startups. But how does one go about this?
        
        For Julie, this often came down to just "being a yes" (Julie INTERVIEW). When she was just starting out her career as an intern, she admittedly had no idea what product management was. But when she was given an opportunity to interview and later work at that company as one, despite her fears and doubts in her adequacy, she jumped at it anyways. But how was it possible for her to learn to do her job well?
        
        The answer turned out to be simple: "just talk to people."
        
        Through her internship, she had to ask a lot of "dumb" questions shamelessly (just like Stacy) to her peers, but this is what allowed her to grow very fast.
        
        And even after the internship, many of the relationships she formed working with those people grew to be life-long connections. "It's all about the people," she says, emphasizing the importance of meeting and getting to know others so they can help you (Julie INTERVIEW).
        
        Greathouse, the interviewer at UCSB TMP, adds that, "you'd be surprised by how willing people are willing to give advice to younger people" and to, just like Julie, overcome fears when it comes to reaching out to help from those who are further in their career development than you.
      - To pay attention and not fear asking question is great for gaining knowledge, but often it's not what you know but who you know that allows you to excel in startups.
  - - - Especially as a woman founder, and especially being young, it's often the case that many investors simply don't take you seriously and are prejudiced on your abilities to start and grow your startup.
        
        Thus, she had to pretty much be shameless in her self-promotion. She describes this as "opportunity meets preparation" (Haley INTERVIEW). By continuously broadcasting your message, most of the time, nothing will come out of it, but occasionally, you get lucky. Opportunity comes: talking to a reporter, she gets a contact to Ellen to be on the Ellen show, talking to a barista, the person behind Haley was an investor and invested in her vision, and the list goes on.
        
        The important thing was that to take advantage of that opportunity, she had to be prepared. She took those lucky opportunities that could perhaps be completely passed by on by others and turned it into more investment, more connections, and consulting to get more direction on how she could guide her company to success.
        
        Her key takeaways were that always be shamelessly promoting your vision and when luck strikes right, be prepared to do the right things to best take advantage of it. As Kevin and Woody of HearHere say, "five years feels like forever in startups." It's hard to know what things will look like in five years or even just three or two years given how crazy situations completely outside your control can come along and completely turn your business upside down (e.g., we saw this with COVID), and to be able to adapt to any situation is to always pay attention and always pitch your idea and by putting yourself out there, you can "engineer" luck to ensure it will eventually strike.
- - - - No one is in control of luck, and sometimes some are luckier than others, but in the end, a common theme among all speakers was that they were constantly out there, putting themselves out there, going into uncomfortable environments to grow (like Julie at her first product management jobs and Haley shamelessly promoting her vision to everyone and anyone who would listen). None of the speakers got as lucky as they did without being unlucky so many times that luck was inevitably eventually--and when luck struck, they pursued it mercilessly.
        
        As famed entrepreneur and VC Peter Thiel said, "The harder I work, the more luck I have" (https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/07/21/luck-hard-work/). You might have all the skill in the world, but you also need to grit and patience to just keep swinging until it's just the right enough conditions to hit a home run.
        
        Additionally, the speakers reinforced how important knowing the right people was to building your startup.
        
        What largely empowered Julie to excel in the later part of her career was meeting John Foley, who, when meeting Julie, saw something in her and believed in her potential. He took a chance to have Julie as their head of product and that was when she took her skills to the next level and accomplished even more for herself and the company. However, it's also important to know that the converse was also true. One of the things John showed Julie was the ability to fire fast and efficiently. When someone isn't a fit, it really drags the entire team down, and often, leaving the team for another both brings in a higher efficiency to the original team and, intuitively, the fired person often find themselves happier at their new job.
    - - At first, I though that success was really timing + luck + skill + hard work + talent. However, it doesn't mention where to focus your hard work or which skills to develop. To that, Stacy's idea of always paying attention and observing the great leaders that possessed skills that you didn't have as well as asking questions whenever possible, even if it meant being possibly chastised for asking them, was the best way to get direction and grow fast.