In the era of the entrepreneur, clever ideas can seem like a dime a dozen. But it’s the committed willingness to act on an idea that turns an epiphany into something much more than an ephemeral intention. To illustrate this, we present insights from the Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders (ETL) Seminar, featuring recent speakers sharing different but equally poignant perspectives on the value and mechanics of taking action. One of the most notable hotbeds for technological leaps is Alphabet, and in particular, X, its well-known “moonshot factory.” From balloon-enabled Internet to self-driving cars, the division has earned a reputation for conceiving some of the most audacious ideas for improving our lives through technology and seeing them through – at least to the prototype phase. Astro Teller, “captain of moonshots” at X, spoke a little of the lab’s secret sauce at his ETL talk, saying that its success starts with a culture that sounds contrary to its mission: While crazy ideas are encouraged and celebrated, they are immediately scrutinized for flaws in feasibility. Calling himself a “culture engineer,” Teller emphasizes the importance of fostering workplace norms that encourage the sharing of big ideas, and of creating a space where people feel safe knowing no limits will be imposed on the imagination. Teller notes that adults often feel they have lost their sense of creativity and miss out because of it. The rate-limiting step to innovation, as he sees it, is that we don’t put all our ideas out on the table because of our self-defeating doubts. https://youtu.be/Uv5irB6L54c Now, once you’ve gotten all those great ideas out in the open and have identified the one with the most potential, it’s time to execute. And while there are many ways to move forward, there’s a tried-and-true formula that works for most teams – whether they are in large corporations or small startups. It’s called product management, and below, entrepreneur Minnie Ingersoll describes its three phases from her time at Google, where she led efforts to create Google Fiber, deploy a citywide WiFi network and improve Google AdWords – all non-trivial tasks for sure. Now the co-founder and chief operating officer of the online used-car marketplace Shift, Ingersoll describes the three phases as 1) defining the vision, 2) deciding what product to build, and 3) execution. The first phase involves getting to know who you’re building for and what problem you’re solving. After all, what good is a solution if you haven’t taken the time to put yourself in the shoes of the user? The latter two phases are setting up a product roadmap and, perhaps most importantly, holding yourself and your team accountable to the product milestones you established. This is where relentless execution on the vision you crafted in the first step of the process separates the ideas that come to fruition from those that don’t. https://youtu.be/iyN5SjPumc0 But imagine a circumstance where, after much debate and deliberation, your team decides to move forward with an idea you vehemently disagree with. What then? After all, we’re proud of our ideas and often find it difficult to set them aside. According to Bob Sutton, organizational-behavior expert and professor in Stanford’s Department of Management Science & Engineering, that’s precisely when we should forego ego and give 100 percent. Citing the wisdom of late Intel co-founder Andy Grove, Sutton says that by fully committing to the project you initially resisted, you’ll know that, if it fails, the flaw was in the idea itself and not in the execution. https://youtu.be/oZw2cg8AXDw To have a good idea without the ability or drive to bring it to life is like having a dinner table without sturdy legs: It’s nothing more than an illusion of having something valuable. This is not to diminish the value of a good idea, which is half the battle in and of itself. But to discover an opportunity worth pursuing and follow through with committed and thoughtful execution, bolstered by strong team alignment, is the very essence of entrepreneurship.

With entrepreneurs all vying to come up with the “next big thing,” it’s easy to see why everyone is putting work first — and the rest of life second. There are, however, some positives that can result from being obsessed, along with the better-known negatives we seek to avoid. So, while it’s important to keep tabs on when our obsession might turn into something destructive, it’s also worth noting that such behavior can play an incredibly empowering role in entrepreneurship. Take the tale of Blue Bottle Coffee, founded just six years ago in the San Francisco Bay Area, with a mission to deliver coffee in a way that paid special attention to the roasting process. James Freeman, Blue Bottle’s founder and a recent guest at the Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders (ETL) Seminar, explained how his foray into business paralleled the artistic process of a musician. All too often, we’re told about the “greats” in any field: Mozart in music, Einstein in science and, nowadays, perhaps Elon Musk in engineering. But Freeman notes in the video clip below that, all too often, striving for that level of perfection is both unrealistic and paralyzing. [embed]https://youtu.be/c-Rt4mguzDc[/embed] Freeman makes a good point when he describes his passion for perfecting the process, not the outcome: It’s worth being obsessed with the ritual and practice of an art, as opposed to being driven to achieve a particular end result. This nuanced form of obsession is rare — and remarkable when we find it in a person. A healthy obsession with the product or service is just what entrepreneurs need to cut out all other distractions and get an idea off the ground.Prominent venture capitalist and author Michael Mortiz echoed this very concept in his conversation with Lisa Sugar, founder and president of Popsugar, who he says embodies this sort of obsession. With a company motto that once read “Insanely Addicted,” the pop-culture website for women highlights what pragmatic obsession and undying focus can empower an entrepreneur to accomplish. It certainly made a believer out of Moritz. [embed]https://youtu.be/b_2kGEmjQ9s[/embed] Besides obsessing over a product, entrepreneurs constantly think about the health of the company they founded – at least the good ones do. This internally focused obsession is evident in a 128-slide presentation published by HubSpot Co-Founder Dharmesh Shah, famously known as the Culture Code. In a recent ETL talk by Shah, he emphasizes the importance of talking about something like culture incessantly because it’s the only way to ensure that it continues to evolve and improve over time. Like any good product or idea will show, being obsessed with iteration and growth is the only path to staying relevant. [embed]https://youtu.be/yHZUa-2BnjA[/embed] This sort of focus is indicative of a personal conviction and dedication to the journey that entrepreneurship represents. But the downside of obsession is equally real, and the initial phases of a startup can easily eat up a founder’s every waking hour. You’re busy building your business and your team, iterating on your product and raising capital all at once. For Derek Belch, co-founder and CEO of Strivr Labs, his goal was to generate revenue and make his startup profitable. Strivr Labs uses virtual reality to train athletes, and in order to capitalize on all the current buzz around VR, Belch said he spent an entire summer on the road — away from his pregnant wife — to sign up professional and college sports teams around the country. Fortunately, he returned just in time for the birth, explaining in this segment of his ETL talk that opportunities sometimes present themselves to a fledgling startup … and you simply have to “sprint.” [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuJzB6ZPB8U[/embed] Putting our personal lives on hold in order to grow a project or idea into something that will outlive us may be worth throwing work-life balance off in the interim. Just realize obsession for what it is, and how it could benefit your endeavors as long as you know how to harness it. And hopefully, those closest to you will understand when you aren’t getting back to them.

If there’s one thing we know for sure, it’s that entrepreneurship is an uncertain and risky journey where surprising discoveries often lead to breakthrough progress. So, how do we set ourselves up to be open to these “aha” moments and learn from them? In our daily lives, we tend to have certain expectations about what will happen in any given situation. But it’s when actual results don’t line up with those expectations that we should learn to really pay attention. Let’s take Intuit as an example. In the video below, Scott Cook, co-founder of the accounting software maker, describes how he ignored one bit of customer feedback year after year because it didn’t make sense to him … until it finally did. And once he accepted the unexpected data, it opened the door to a whole new market. Welcoming cognitive dissonance isn’t trivial. As we’ve now seen, for entrepreneurs, puzzling findings can lead to lucrative opportunities. And this can also hold true for the venture capitalist who invests in them. Here in Silicon Valley, where perhaps the world’s highest concentration of VCs hear pitches from an equally high number of potential founders throughout the year, it’s easy to see how startup investors eventually adopt a “seen it all before” swagger. But it’s the ones who resist thinking that way, and remain open to letting their beliefs be challenged, that increase their chances of discovering the next big thing. Rebecca Lynn, co-founder and general partner at Canvas Venture Fund, emphasizes the importance of paying particularly close attention when something doesn’t make sense. She explains that her ability to hone in during these moments has opened her up to some of the most interesting ideas she’s ever come across. Even opportunities for self-development come by way of opening up ourselves to contrarian views. As Mike Rothenberg of Rothenberg Ventures discusses in the video below, growing as an entrepreneur hinges on relentlessly inviting feedback from others. And beyond listening intently when we experience cognitive dissonance, Rothenberg says we should express our gratitude for the new learning. The truth is, expectations, beliefs and worldviews are uniquely personal and, as a result, are bound to vary from one person to the next. But as entrepreneurs and growing individuals, moments of utter surprise that challenge our deeply held beliefs should be reframed as valuable opportunities to pause, listen and learn. Insights about how to grow our careers, our businesses and, most importantly, ourselves come disguised as experiences that cause cognitive dissonance. The key is to embrace the anomalies, not ignore them.

Too many of us use the terms “going to school” and “getting an education” interchangeably when, in fact, a formal education is just one part of it. The experience of classical schooling is multi-faceted and encompasses a mix of acquiring academic knowledge and softer, more abstract skills. Though fundamental knowledge serves as the foundation for any innovation, being an entrepreneur takes much more than just book smarts alone. Once, in the midst of his own academic pursuits, Albert Einstein beautifully captured all that an education is: “Education is what remains after one has forgotten what one has learned in school.” That’s not to say school isn’t important — it is. But perhaps the biggest takeaways are retaining the thirst for knowledge beyond graduation, and building upon the life skills that helped get us there. While impressive, graduating from a prestigious college with a slew of classes aced and a degree in hand doesn’t necessarily say anything about a person’s ability to succeed professionally. In the video below, Stewart Butterfield, co-founder and CEO of Slack, dispels the notion that an elite education guarantees excellence. So what else should we look for in an education? The true test should be that we are able to demonstrate our learning and showcase the skills we acquire. And perhaps grades alone can’t adequately capture this. Then what can? In the following clip, Sal Khan describes a new model for education from his book The One World Schoolhouse. The founder and executive director of the free learning platform Khan Academy highlights that walking out of school with a portfolio of work, projects and accomplishments says more about one’s ability — both as a student and as a member of the workforce — than grades and a degree do alone. This is already the case at Stanford and campuses across the country, where experiential education is being emphasized just as heavily as traditional learning approaches. There is obvious value in both, but differing opinions abound on the importance of domain-specific expertise versus the development of someone who can just jump in and learn along the way. The debate is particularly fascinating when you pose that question to scholars and practitioners sitting right next to each other – as we see here: A formal education remains incredibly important for a variety of reasons: It offers a venue for exposure to a wide breadth of topics and offers us the opportunity to make connections across disciplines. For entrepreneurs, school not only provides subject-matter knowledge, but also the frameworks necessary to remain a lifelong learner. Academic institutions are incredible places where curious minds gather to learn for the sake of learning. Ultimately, however, let’s not forget that classes, schooling and degrees are just part of the education equation.

Even for those who aim to think “outside the box,” rules and constraints aren’t always bad. They focus our thinking and remind us to be deliberate with our execution by keeping our goal in mind. So in order to thrive in a landscape characterized by unmade decisions, it’s critical to be thoughtful about what rules we create and how they might guide our choices down the road. At her recent Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Seminar talk, Stanford Management Science & Engineering Professor Kathleen Eisenhardt drew on the principles from her new book, Simple Rules, on how heuristics are crafted. In the video below, we see how rule formation guides a multinational company through an uncertain future in a responsible manner: [embed]https://youtu.be/COBLkJYnaUk[/embed] Not only do rules inform intelligent choices about the way we do business, they also provide us with constraints, which, as David Heinemeier Hansson said in his 2010 ETL talk, “are your friends.” In an overwhelmingly competitive landscape, boundaries bring us face to face with a hard truth: Sometimes, you just can’t outdo your competition. But you can think differently than your rivals and, ultimately, succeed by recognizing and operating within your own zone of expertise. Amazon Founder and CEO Jeff Bezos once said: “One of the only ways to get out of a tight box is to invent your way out.” Teams and organizations that leverage their own operational limits to think more creatively about how they do business often reap the rewards of differentiation. This sort of creative exercise doesn’t just prompt us to think about how to do things faster, cheaper or better ‐ it makes us question our assumptions and sometimes reinvent ourselves entirely. Hansson — creator of the popular Ruby on Rails web-development framework and founder of the collaboration program Basecamp (formerly 37signals) — talks us through just how this looks in practice: [embed]https://youtu.be/cAr-g7gFvxg[/embed] Perhaps the most important part of developing constructive constraints in business is to first think about our own work ethic. Why do we make the choices we do? Are our own actions aptly guided by a simple set of rules? What personal limits to place on ourselves? Hemant Shah, CEO of Risk Management Solutions, underscores the seriousness of recognizing this as a means to then realizing when we should seek help from others. [embed]https://youtu.be/cOMG2hPCodA[/embed] Rules and limitations can seem like irritating constraints on what we can and cannot do. But think for a moment just how powerful they could be if harnessed in the right way: a simple set of guiding covenants that empower us to make informed choices, ask for help when necessary, and ultimately allow us to save our time and energy for the more important matters in our lives.

Taking time to reflect and understand what matters most to us, both professionally and personally, provides us with a strong framework for making decisions. In addition, staying clear on what matters to us often leads to a greater sense of fulfillment in life altogether. Whether implicitly or explicitly, some of our most recent speakers in the Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Seminar series discuss how introspection keeps their efforts in line with their values. Joshua Reeves, CEO and co-founder of ZenPayroll, raises the familiar point that professional success does not equal personal happiness, and hence, how crucial it is to choose our path carefully. In other words, take the time to understand what gives you a genuine sense of purpose and, yes, “mission.” In college, Reeves says the academic quarter system provided built-in breaks from work to reflect on where studies were leading you. But even after launching into a career, he insists that we can structure our lives in a way that allows for periodic reflection and soul searching. That’s how Reeves realized his passion for developing technology that empowers others to do what they love. https://youtu.be/IaZ8G0xMtWw Be it during a stroll through a neighborhood park or while commuting to work, taking the time to ask ourselves questions about why we do what we do can get us back in touch with what we consider meaningful and what our real priorities are. Again, it comes down to choice, according to longtime venture capitalist Kathryn Gould. We can spend our time responding to the many opportunities that come to us, or we can choose to actively seek out the opportunities that truly excite us. For Gould, one of the first women venture capitalists in Silicon Valley, the choice was clearly the latter. https://youtu.be/bpxOWEzH-BU However, it is also important to distinguish between what we desire most deeply and when we can compromise. For John Collison, co-founder of the online payment system Stripe, it was always about creating a way for commerce to be seamless across different countries and currencies. Everything else, such as app features and design elements, become bendable means to a steadfast end. This is especially relevant in entrepreneurship, where success depends largely on constant iteration based on customer feedback. But as Collison explains, understanding when to heed others and make adjustments, and knowing when not to budge, only comes after much self-reflection. https://youtu.be/gdloi-SkTr4 There are a few principles in life that keep us on track: a strong sense of what matters, our personal values and our vision. Adopting a ritual that allows for routine reflection keeps us asking the right questions of ourselves and, ultimately, allows us to lead a more fulfilling life. So think for a moment – are your actions in line with what matters to you?