- The Impact Billionaires
- Posts
- We're BACK - introducing notes-to-self!
We're BACK - introducing notes-to-self!
Lessons learned as a VC-backed founder.
Back from never having been gone 🤷🏼‍♂️
Let me quickly catch you up on the last two years.
The last couple of years have been a wild ride. About six months after launching the Impact Billionaires in 2020, I realized I wasn’t on a path to becoming one building the agency I was building at the time. The impact you can have with an agency scales linearly, and to get to a billion+ people impacted, I need the potential for exponentially growing impact.
I decided to leave the agency behind & join Entrepreneur First in London to explore the venture-backed (VC) route. What followed was an incredibly intense two years of uncertainty, personal growth & punches in the face, if we’re calling it what it is. But also, I’m now certain I’m on the right track in learning the foundational lessons of massive worldwide impact & the truth is I’ve never felt this fulfilled & excited to be working on what I’m working on.
Right now, I’m in the US, building our startup Eden, at this founder residency organized by what I can only describe as the best (pre)-seed investors on the planet - brickyard.
It’s pretty obvious, that when it comes to the billion+ people impacted, I’ve got quite a ways to go. That being said, there are a TON of lessons that I’m learning on this path, and since they say that to “teach is to learn twice”, quite selfishly, I want to create this forcing function of sharing all the lessons I’m learning.
The fact that you’ve signed up to read them excites me - so please don’t be shy to make this a dialogue - reply if there’s shit that you’re resonating with or thinking of yourself. I want us to be friends who can learn from each other. xx
Introducing notes-to-self as a thing.
Why am I reviving this thing now? The problem I had/have is time. My days for the past two years have been up by 5, at my desk by 6 - until 8 pm & in bed by 9 to do it all again the next day. I tried keeping the podcasts going and thinking of a better, more manageable newsletter format. Still, all these things took too much time & effort to keep consistently doing & they just weren’t priority.
That’s until I realized I built too little reflection: we spent long days doing many things that, frankly, looking back, didn’t move the needle. I started recording three pieces of advice I would give myself from a year ago as a reflection forcing function. I found the “notes-to-self” prompt to be super helpful as it synthesizes the past & repackages it for the future.
Since they’re already recorded, I might as well share them.
So, without further ado, here are 10 minutes worth of notes-to-self:
If you don’t have the time to watch a 10min video, here are this week’s lessons distilled into their one-liners:
Sales before anything.
Trust your future self.
Treat energy & emotion like waves when you go surfing.
Trust your intuition no matter what.
Spend time to learn what to be dogmatic about & then be dogmatic about it.
Design the game so you can keep playing it because there are no shortcuts - only lucky breaks.
Getting past the first minute is everything.
State your needs.
Don’t play all your cards at once.
When having difficult convos don’t speak for the other.
Catch u next week xx