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What happens when all you do is ask from a relationship without giving anything back? The other party won't feel there is any value in continuing to interact with you.
What happens if all someone does in a relationship is 'give' to you without taking anything you offer them? You won't feel you are contributing to the relationship, you won't feel valued for what you bring to the relationship, and the interaction will be discontinued.
There is a distinction between the habit of being productive and being busy — being busy is activity-based execution with no direction, and being productive means executing the activities that bring you closer to the experience of personal and professional fulfillment. Busy-ness diminishes your well-being, while true productivity enriches you from the inside out.
At Valence Advisory, we've put together a simple 5-point productivity cycle that will help you:
Focus on the work you find rewarding and enjoyable.
Lead, manage, and foster reports, helping them develop a stronger immune response to ‘productivity theater.’
Feel clearer, more confident, and in control.
To think that work-life ‘balance’ exists for founders during the formative and growth stages of a company is an illusion— the operating contexts is demanding, and appropriately so. However, that does not mean:
Growing your startup needs to be net-negative to your wellbeing.
Caring for your wellbeing has to be time-consuming.
In this post, we share 9 simple activities we use to optimize our wellbeing without having to sacrifice large amounts of time. We have shared them with our professional networks informally— clients, colleagues, and partners. In codifying it in a post, we hope it inspires you to create your own rituals around wellbeing and happiness.
One way to grow your self-awareness is to clarify and articulate your core values. Understanding your— and others'— core values can lead to several benefits:
Clearer and more confident decision-making.
Inspired action-taking.
Ease of identifying the right stakeholders you want to partner with— investors, employers, advisors.
Better trust and alignment with people in your life— colleagues, reports, partners, family, and friends.
Greater personal satisfaction and fulfillment.
A friend of a friend happens to be looking to hire someone like you.
Your ex-boss decides to be an angel investor just as you choose to found a startup.
A relative happens to work for the key decision-maker at the very company you want to secure an enterprise contract with.
You successfully raise a round of funding, and an employee happens to know a team of talented, tight-knit engineers looking for a new company to work for—
— These serendipitous events can turn into great opportunities for everyone involved. However, unless someone activates their relationships and networks with clear intent, a lot of these brilliant opportunities can go by unrealized.
The opportunity: when you combine the right approach with modern-day technology, you can effectively activate your networks to reach people who would otherwise remain strangers.
As investors, advisors, and mentors who genuinely want to enrich the entrepreneurial ecosystem, our ongoing challenge is to strategically steward capital and people in a way that the resulting venture (business, fund, organization) is:
Aligned with people’s best interests and talents.
Supported by the right people, including investors, employees, teams and other key stakeholders.
Grown at the right pace and at the right time.
Structured with the best chance to succeed and scale.
In this post, I share some of my perspectives and thoughts. I also look forward to hearing your thoughts and questions and learning from your experiences too.
