DESIGN YOUR LIFE LIKE A START UP
#ChangeJourneys
“Always do what you are afraid to do.” said Ralph Waldo Emerson. Indeed, confronting what scares us most can be both shaking and empowering, and can help us to be our best selves. In this spirit, today I’m walking a path that twist fear into a power that can fuel my creative process and transform the way I live my life.
Since the first year of college, I’ve collected range of experience from mobile marketing to digital media, from strategic consultancy to product management, from entrepreneurship to change management. There’s still a lot to learn. For more than a decade my job was to figure out how to get more people sign up for the services, products, everywhere in the world. So far I have touched to hundreds of millions people, through Telco, FMCG and destination marketing and services. How do we onboard mobile-only users? Okay, now how do we do it in the remotest corners of the globe? How to make them engaged? How to make them love our brand? What should be the essence of our brand?
Now I decided to apply these growth superpowers to convert my life into a meaningful interaction with the world. I am a single mother of two, survived through many milestone life moments others find extraordinary. In this article I’ll share my key learnings to help you, your startup or your company of all types navigate through change in your personal and business lives.
1-Take Your First Step!
There is a saying as; If there is no enemy within, the enemy outside can do us no harm. Make peace with yourself. What I found out over the years is that you can still be scared of failure, but dare to take the first step without trying to be perfect. You don’t have to be perfect to get what you want. Dare to get out of your comfort zone. What will keep you in the game is your courage, your belief and your ability to grow and extend your limits.
Reclaim failure. Failure is not a step back, it is a step forward. Overtime you fail, you can gain an important lesson. That’s a progress in every sense of the word. And you never know after which failure, you’ll achieve what you want. In design thinking, that’s why there is no right or wrong. There is a constant exploration going towards the best option specific to any given time under that given situation.
People say; ‘The world is the way it is. Try not to get into trouble.’ Life can be a lot broader than that. There is no guarantee of a tomorrow. If you don’t take any action today, there won’t be any outcomes. That’s a guarantee.
So much of the fear comes from lack of control or trying to control everything. You can notcontrol everything such as competition. In those environments we discover more, the more we get used to those uncomfortable situations, we can discover bigger learnings. Not getting to your goals can be a part of the design, to discover further.
Look at your life; where are you? Strengths, weaknesses, sense of fullfillment, joy? What is your understanding of a full rich life, what is it you can do for 7 days a week and brings sense of now to your life? Try new ideas, implement new approaches, Measure your effect. And restart all over again.
No matter how much progress you make, you’re constantly understanding, learning, and testing. Set big ambitious goals, meet them, and then set higher ones. You’re doing growth right if you accept that your work will never be done. It’s now a matter of how committed you are.
2-Genuine Relationships
I recently celebrated my birthday and this time I did not want to receive automatic birthday celebrations on Facebook. That’s when I decided to crowdsource ideas from my friends about how I should spend my year ahead: I asked for book, travel destination, artist, song, movie and hobby suggestions.
Here is what happened; Out of my 1,000+ connections, I received around 300 birthday celebrations, and around 80 people sent their recommendations. More than half of the suggestions were things that ı haven’t tried yet. Amazing interaction has happened when I asked for genuine support, not only they contributed to me but some wrote they have put serious effort into what to do inspirational next year which inspired them as well. There is no way you can grow yourself, your service or your product if you don’t genuinely take or provide honest feedbacks.
Meeting with new people doesn’t really make sense unless you already have healthy relation with your existing network. Same goes with your users and customers. As you grow, and more and more people learn about you or your company. And as they interact with you or use your product, your audience will begin to change. It’s inevitable.
For example, for your companies the first million users you onboard will probably look very different than the next million. You can have a great growth plan, but it won’t work if you don’t have the humility it takes to understand your audience and the truth about how they’re using your product.
Keep in mind that user experience is not limited to the service. You may focus on generating awareness and testing your core product experience, but so much of what we do is also about understanding the path people needed to take before they even got to our front door. My takeaway from many services and companies is that there’s no silver bullet. You need to listen and anticipate your users’ expectations.
3-Core Team of Believers
Both in your personal and business lives; Get the losers out of your life if you want to live your dream. That includes your core team, your clients and your investors. Not everybody will join you. Not everybody will have the vision. It’s necessary that you align yourself with and attract people into your business who are hungry, unstoppable, and unreasonable. Find people who are refusing to live life just as it is and who want more. People who believe if it’s gonna happen, it’s up to them! That should be your core stakeholders.
When you find the right team of people of believers into a vision and that’s when magic happens; investments are made, more talented people que to work with you.
Take care of your team. Do talent management. Trusting employees to make the best decisions for themselves and the company is a huge part of building a great team. This means you have to give them the rope to be creative and work on their own terms. But you also need to make sure everyone has a built-in commitment to your company’s success above all.
Focus on the processes. Align stakeholders on one vision. In all my projects, with startups and corporate companies, we work in ways that leverage many minds at once, mainly through workshops. The topics and the goals may vary. For example, during a workshop we may apply positioning model to the business and in another we can wireframe the service. All participants have the chance to share their thoughts at the end of the hour or two. The objective of this exercise is to capture and articulate what others value about a company, so it’s critical to get many perspectives.
4-Step Up To Something Bigger
Your brand is the unique story that people recall when they think of you. As you express your company’s benefits, always put yourself in your customers’ shoes. All human aspirations are opportunities for brands to build relationships.
For the consumer, you need to answer who you are, how you’ll improve my life and what it’s like to work with you, respectively. But it takes a few more steps to deeply anchor your brand in a consumer’s mind. That brings you to the the branding pyramid:
The difference between good and great brands is that they define emotional benefits and “something bigger” that they deliver. Gibson Biddle says, “Emotional benefits relate to the way in which I, as your customer, can gain confident control of my life by using you. The ‘something bigger’ speaks to what you aim to deliver to your customers, but also to the world in ten years. Like a company’s mission or vision, this brand promise or ‘something bigger’ should be inspirational and help define ‘true north’ for the brand and the product you’re building.”
By adding these elements to the positioning model, you’ve created a branding pyramid. It’s meant to be approached from bottom to top, with each section serving as the foundation for the one above it.
Let’s take some of the leading brands in the Branding Pyramid;
Nike:
-Product Attributes; Fashionable, lightweight, durable, athletic wear
-Product Benefits; Look great, perform, get fit
-Emotional Benefits; Mentally and physically empowered
-Something Bigger; Reach your full human potential.
Apple:
-Product Attributes; Mobile, digital products and services
-Product Benefits; Ease of use, creativity, productivity
-Emotional Benefits; Freedom
-Something Bigger; Change people’s lives
Netflix:
-Product Attributes: Streaming TV Shows, movies and original content
-Product Benefits; Convenience, selection, value
-Emotional Benefits; Satisfied, delighted
-Something Bigger; Escape from reality
That something bigger is also your personal compass. I like to call it ‘your life meaning’. It’s about why you are holding the space on earth. That’s the source; when you tap into it, it gives you immerse power.
Know your purpose. What things mean to you. No matter what happens in your life, what it means to you is yours. Make up connections, get your lesson and be comfortable with uncertainty. Open up your senses and use your brain. Don’t always let others to teach you what to think.
Meaning gives you certainity. Change is happening everywhere. We get so much excitement and so much fear about the pace of change. It’s so overused we become numb to it. You need to find something that’s your foundation. The entire industry people get fired, the entire industry can shift. But your purpose is available to you anytime in your life. We can not sustain a fulfilling life without a meaning. Your uniqueness need to serve to your reason. Why are you here? What are you here to do?
Pay attention to what drives you, what controls you; Your fears? Your past? Sense of adventure? Are you driven by guilt? Is it your parents? Is it your competition? Is it your desire of joy or happiness? Is it a sense of meaning? We are not stimulus response animals but we can be. Our nervous system is here to help us. Then we don’t think things through, we are not different than animals. Your nervous system makes connections to pain and pleasure, don’t let it to run on an auto pilot. Find your meaning. Live your life.
5-Take Responsibility
You can do better when you know better. You don’t have to hold yourself hostage to who you used to be or anything you used to do. Everybody makes mistakes. I now know that I was giving over my power who did not mean to me much. I don’t hold any grudges because I was the one giving over my power. Since I know better now, I won’t do the same mistakes again. Taking the responsibility of your life is the most important essence of self discovery, which will unfold the real success towards a satisfactory life.
Don’t cheat yourself by living an average life. It’s not about what happens to you, they happen to everyone. Some chose to cry over past mistakes, some chose to understand what just happened, how they could have acted differently, stand up and keep on walking or running this time. Do take full responsibility of your life.
Invest in yourself. Expand your know how and experience to understand What gives your life meaning, what drives you, what makes you come alive? You are crafting, creating your life now. Tap into your skills, increase your capabilities and grow yourself. Chose your path out of love, out of passion and to serve to your meaning. Not out of fear, not because that’s what is expected.
Find out reasons, why you do what you do, that will make you strong. Everybody has talents and skills to flourish. It’s not easy that’s why it’s rare to see people succeeding. Life can be hard. Manifest your faith, empower yourself, be your best friend. Imagine your unfulfilled potential, ideas you never acted on, talents you have never used. That hurts, doesn’t it? One of my inspirational coaches Nil Gun from Kuraldisi used to say ‘Cemeteries are full of returned envelopes that are unopened’. There is no passion to playing small.
You know what is right. Do what is right. It is not always the most profitable or the easiest thing to do. But it’ll satisfy your soul. Be all you can be. Be your best. Do it because it’s right to do. Most of the people’s deepest fear is we are powerful beyond measure, are you ready to take that responsibility? Take up the battle. This is your life. You make your own choices. Try it, see it. Your life is your design. Pick it up and make it a better world. It can be better. And it must be better.
Life needs us to be ourselves, with our individual colors, and to live what we are created to be. If you could achieve that on an individual level as complex as human, you can achieve in the organizations, the communities and nations. You can eventually touch and positively impact millions of lives, starting with yours.
