Part I: On not doing the work.

On Purpose:

sometimes it’s a long way up; it helps to know where you are going.

I am here to tell you about NOT doing the work.

Like so many organization with which I work, Made Better, a company that I founded and have run for the past five years, did not ourselves do the work we help others do. We did not define our brand, or articulate our purpose. I believe that such work is extraordinarily helpful to any company, for ourselves. We actively chose not to tell our story.

There’s a lot of irony in this. I spend nearly all of my time at work asking people about their purpose, and trying – hard – to convince them that stating, sharing and working towards that purpose will help their teams to succeed at whatever goal they choose to pursue. This decision - to by neglect or distraction fail to align our internal goals with our core capability is common. Many of the founders I work with have a similar story; there is some fundamental truth that we hold so close and believe to be so self-evident that we just expect it to be obvious to everyone we work with and for.

 But I do not miss the irony that it has taken me this long to finally do the work for myself, and for Made Better. This website, and this post is about NOT doing the work.

 But this story is also about doing the work. Work that has taken me five years. This work has been the purpose of five years.

This is the work. This is the outcome and process.

Five years ago, give or take, I left my leadership position at the first company that I founded. It was a company with a mission, team, story and product that I loved deeply.

The time of leaving was a period of extraordinary shame and pain for me. I left with the acrid taste of my own deeply personal failures in my mouth. I left acutely and painfully aware of not living up to the values and vision that I’ve held for myself for my whole life.

It was departure into the expansive horizon of humility. And it was a very scary and intimidating landscape; a dry, barren expanse so vast that nothing was visible on the other side. I hoped it would end in mountains to climb, like many of the places I’ve loved most. Leaving to cross that terrain was a very, very scary decision. And, honestly, it was a pretty bleak, hard and sad experience that was riddled with self-doubt and pain.

Shortly after I left, and began hiking into the flat, unknowable bleakness, I began to see very clearly the specific causes of my own - and my teams’ - failures. Where we had fallen short in the agreements we made to each other.  I saw even more clearly the profound responsibility that I bore for those failings. When I started Made Better, it was with a very clear sense of purpose – that I would learn something from where I had failed. I would work as hard as I could to help the people I loved, and to help colleagues, friends and friends of friends, and strangers, to avoid failing for the same reasons I had failed, however I could help.

 At first I felt like I was crossing that expanse alone, but that was just my ego, again. I have been so lucky to have so many people leading me, following me, encouraging me, and challenging me along the way.

Then, and every day since, I have tried to run Made Better grounded in the idea that for whatever I had learned, there is a much vaster universe of what I don’t know. Those two ideas – curiosity and possibility – have been my drivers.

I’ve also spent huge stretches of that time equivocating, doubting, pursuing unrelated opportunities and generally working in conflict to my own goals. While I’m grateful for the time, and grateful for everything I’ve learned along the way, I very much wish that I had started with doing the work: to write down why I started this company, what I hoped to build with it, how I hoped to do, and what core values would keep me on course.

That’s part two though; actually doing the work.