I’ve taken some time to reflect recently and gained perspective I’d like to share. Over the past few months I’ve looked to my network to write their own discoveries through “Lightbulb Moments” and in doing this, it helped my own perspective more than intended. A few lessons that I discovered along the way have really hit home and how we balance personal and professional identity is a key tenant in this perspective.

Personal:

Personal life, stop paying so much attention to what everyone else is doing and run my own race. How much time do we spend reading other people’s posts on social media (like this!), watching other people’s exploits in the news, listening to other people’s ideas on podcasts? Go have coffee with a friend, find their lightbulbs that they’ve turned on along their journey. Go make something. Go outside and run farther than you did last time. All those hours spent looking at someone else’s life on a screen could be used to take action in your own life. Time is currency, just like Justin taught us in the radically underrated movie “In Time”.

Professional:

We tend to do the opposite in business. We become insular with our ideas and what we will get wrong is that we don’t pay enough attention to our customers and / or users.

We will make up some idea in our head. We’ll call that our “vision“, and spend a lot of time thinking about this vision. In a cafe, in a meeting, with our coworkers and executive team. Then we go out and execute on the vision and build some elaborate thing without going and talking to customers. Why? Because asking our customers can be a pain in the ass, and they might not like our amazing idea. They might say no.

Because of this, we end up having “good” be the enemy of “perfect” and won’t seek for early customer feedback because we’re embarrassed to show something unfinished. We shrink from contact with the real world, contact with our users. Then we release the idea and get the feedback we should have gotten earlier in the process. We rationalize this by remembering the famous Steve Jobs quote:

You can’t just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they’ll want something new‘

– Steve Jobs

Just remember that you’re not Steve Jobs. This the mistake we make countless times.

Switch the two perspectives – be obsessed with your customer like you would doom scrolling and create your own vision for you. Easier said than done like always, so how about start right now? Close the laptop, shut off the phone after reading this, build your vision for yourself and talk to your customers (well you might need your phone for that).