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Telling the stories of startup founders and creators and their unique journey. Each episode features actionable tips, practical advice and inspirational insight.
Welcome to the Founders Journey podcast. Inspiration Education for founders by founders welcome back to the Founders Journey podcast, weekly Curation. This week we're talking about mastering growth and how founders tackle tough challenges and need to stop playing Superman. It's a really important thing, I think, for any founder. Every founder finds themselves in that role of Superman, flying in to try to save the day when really what you're doing is creating a lot of problems around you. So the first theme we're going to hit on this week is around emotional intelligence and learning. And this is really about the idea of really just the critical importance to manage your emotions, learn from experiences, and avoid creating those crisis that we often do. And it's really about the need to really build our emotional intelligence and leadership.
So the first clip we're going to hit on is really about taking the emotion out of the situation and just learning. And this is from Jason Frar, who's the CEO of full circle insight.
Well, we talked about not falling in love with the things you create, the marketing that you create. Being objective about that win loss review, especially loss review, is exactly that. You have to be open to someone telling you that the thing you created did not meet their needs. And when a founder or anybody in your company is able to do that and learn from that to me, is what being a business executive is about. Taken that emotional level out of it to learn so then I can make positive change as we move forward in the business.
The next clip. I love this one. This was from our guest this week, actually on the podcast. And it's Townsend Wardlaw, who's the founder of founder Os coaching. And Townsend talks about when there's nothing on fire, founders have a tendency to create know.
You get to the point where you can sort of see the finish line. You're where you need to be, and what you need to do is stop touching stuff and let what you've built play itself out, right. And every day for the past decade, you've woken up with your firefighters hat and your action in your extinguisher to put out fires. And there's like, no fires. You're like, oh, I know what to do. Let me get a match. Right? And the Jerry can. Right? So you start setting these, because when there's no fires, this doesn't feel right. This can't be okay. There's got to be something burning. I got to find it. Well, maybe I'll light it.
The other big theme that came out of this, that as we're talking about mastering emotions here, is around acceptance and overcoming flaws. And this is really about being self aware, accepting your limitations and your flaws, and then really taking, being proactive about preventing these from becoming a real hindrance to growth and progress. We all have them. It's really, do we have the awareness to actually do something about them? So the first clip we're going to talk about is actually from Jeff Evans, who was a few episodes back. He's a famous speaker, an adventurer. And Jeff talks about the fact that we're all flawed.
These perceptions that we have, or this portrayal that I think a lot of folks have, whether in whatever facet it is always perhaps best foot forward and not the true representation. And that's okay. That is okay, man. We need to know that it is okay to be flawed. And we need to know that it is okay to start and stop and pause and hesitate and reevaluate and not get it perfect. Every single step that we take, we're going to trip, we're going to fall.
Jasper Pollock is a renowned expert on practical project management. We interviewed him a couple of months ago. And Jasper talks about if you're not careful, you're going to become the bottleneck in your business.
The earlier you understand as founder that what got you from zero to one won't get you from one to ten and won't get you from ten to 100. The faster you'll go and the bigger you'll grow because it's inevitable you will become the bottleneck at some point and you just have to figure out when that is and how to mitigate it. And the founders I have most respect for are the founders who at some point realize that they are the bottleneck and they can't solve that. So therefore they step back. That's right, the founder that goes at some point from CEO to saying, you know what, I really just love product. So I'm now going to hire a CEO. I'm going to report to that person while I stay on the board, and I'm going to be product officer.
I have an incredible amount of respect for that. That takes guts.
The last theme that we wanted to hit on this week is really around the need for efficiency and simplification. And this is really about tackling challenges head on, streamlining process, recognizing that not all tasks have to be overly complicated, but it's really talking about building efficiency, building simplicity into management operations. So Jen Openshaw, CEO of Girls with Impact we interviewed Jen a little while ago. Great clip here about getting the hard things out of the way.
I'm somebody who tries to do the hard stuff first, including in my day, which I heard Jeff Bezos does, like, because you feel better that you've gotten the hard thing out of the way. Right. Or chop it up into smaller pieces and time it out when you're going to get that done.
And we'll wrap it up this week again with Townsend Wardlaw, who we interviewed this week. If you haven't caught Townsend's episode, make sure you go back and do it. And Townsend, I think, talks about something that sounds profound, sounds simple, but is pretty profound. Right. And that is not everything needs to be hard.
Just looking at the guy, what you know is he knows how to work hard. Right?
Yeah.
Like, literally, life for him is if I work hard, I get what I want. So if you watch him, you'd say, well, what he does is he works hard. What I would say is, actually who he's being is, life is hard, and I'm going to work hard. So he walks up one day and he says, okay, I need to raise some money. Well, what he's going to see in the world, literally, what he's going to perceive in the thoughts in his head, are going to be all the things where he could apply his superpower of, I know how to work hard. He can do hard. Harder or hardest. What he will never see or perceive is the door marked, oh, this is easy. Just go through there. One guy will write you a check. Will be done in 30 days.
So again, thanks for joining us, as always, on the Founders Journey podcast, I hope you enjoy these weekly curations. Make sure you take a minute, like subscribe to it so you never miss an episode. And if something resonated with you, I hope you'll really share it to help us get the word out. Thanks. Have a great week. Bye.