“You have to be shit to be great”

Classic quote from Diren Kartal, but I saw this and I thought, yeah.. I get it.

You have to start somewhere. Just start.

You will be shit, but you will get better. And that’s the key, you will look back and see that progression. It’s so important. I remember thinking this with my uniwork as year on year I would look back and cringe. But that’s good! That’s progression.

I think your life needs forward momentum. Dress in a crazy way if it makes you feel good. You’re not trying to curate a life of perfect photos to look back on. You want to live in the moment. Make decisions and some will fail and some will succeed. You will fall over and you will learn to pick yourself back up. You will become more resilient and you will look back in awe of how far you have become.

“50% of all decision I made were wrong”.

Undisclosed CEO

Leaders make decisions. They learn from their mistakes and move on. Indecision is as damaging as bad decisions. I learnt this the hard way at university and constantly over thought creative decisions in the fear of ‘getting it wrong’ but ultimately so much is still learnt in the process of making a decision and whilst the outcome may have been the ‘wrong’ decision, the skill is adapting to this information, being grateful for what you learnt and moving forward.

I’ve learnt that when you start your own company, and forging into the unknown, that this skill to adapt to mistakes and treat everything as a opportunity to grow, is actually the very core skill to creating something.

“Jump in and splash around”

Ted Cullinan

Ted tutored at our university for a while and he had this really playful outlook in architecture and taught us to stop worrying about the output and just get in their and make a creative playful mess and you would always learn far more in that process than by trying to create the perfect final visual.

“Just make mistakes and think how much you will learn”. I get it, this is SO much harder to do than to say. We are all in an environment where work mistakes come at a cost. But i’ve realised if you scale down every problem there is a place to “splash around”.

I feel like I’ve spent a large portion of my life running around and through thousands of hours of trail and error I have ended up running a company. Never planned it. But my tolerance to trail and error and the unpredictable and trusting my gut has proved invaluable. Not just creatively but also in building relationships.

So, don’t worry. Get yourself used to unpredictability and the world of possibility opens up.

Go splash around.

Try it.

It’s fun.