Monday memo #82
Push your baby birds out of the nest.
The Monday memo is food for thought to fuel your week.
Imagine a baby bird at the edge of the nest. The parent doesn’t spend months theorizing about aerodynamics or weather conditions. When the time feels right, they nudge the little one out. Some birds soar immediately. Others flutter awkwardly before finding their wings. A few might need to try again later.
Your ideas work the same way.
Some of my best learnings have come from pushing ideas out into the world like little birds. It’s a great way to see if they are ready to fly.
We live in a culture that worships the perfect launch, the polished product, the flawless presentation. But perfection is the enemy of learning. While you’re busy perfecting your idea in isolation, the world is moving on without you.
The magic happens in the gap between your intention and what happens when it makes contact with reality. When you push an idea out into the world, you discover things you could never learn in private. You find out what resonates and what falls flat. You discover unexpected audiences. You uncover problems you didn’t know existed and solutions you could never have imagined.
How many brilliant ideas have died in notebooks because their creators were waiting for the right moment to share them? How many innovations never happened because someone was trying to make their first attempt perfect?
You learn faster when you iterate in public and let the world teach you what works.
Exercise.
Choose one idea you've been sitting on. Something you’ve been thinking about but haven’t shared yet. It could be a blog post, a product concept, a creative project, or even just a conversation you’ve been avoiding. A question for the universe.
Don’t perfect it. Don’t overthink it. Just push it out, like a little bird.
Share it with one person. Post it online. Send it in an email. Have that conversation.
Pay attention to what happens. What did you learn? What surprised you? What would you do differently next time?
The goal isn’t to have your idea fly perfectly on the first try. The goal is to make mistakes you can learn from, to spark happy accidents, to allow your ideas to play in the messy, muddy, complex world of reality. To initiate a learning loop.
Some ideas will soar immediately. Others will need more work. And some may go nowhere.
The nest is comfortable, but the sky is where ideas learn to fly. Push an idea out of the nest this week, and see what happens.
This fall we will be playing with time.
The working title for fall 2025 is Project Kairos: It will be all about timing and ways that we can warp and bend time to organize our creative work. We will be experimenting with different kinds of time-boxes, and deadlines, and how we might use those to help us get motivated and sustain momentum. If you have time for a 1:1 chat to help me think through the fall semester, please send me a note so I can hear your thoughts and ideas, and we can talk about how I can make it work for you.
Here are a few summertime experiments that happening now.
Kicking off this week:
Both/and book club: Erin Rodat-Savla and Karen Brothers are hosting a business book club where the group reads two books with contrasting points of view. Half the group reads one book, half reads the other, and we compare notes.
This club will be capped at about 8 to 12 people. If the description above sounds like you, you can register your interest here.
Ongoing:
Vibe club: Dan Collin kicked off “vibe club” last week. Vibe club is a regular meetup focused on “mutual interests around AI + coding + related vibing activities—design, art, marketing, venturing,” so reach out to Dan if you want to be part of that.
Digital art club: I’m hosting this every Monday at noon Pacific, 3 PM Eastern, 8 PM BST and 9 PM CET. Here’s a link to register which will allow you to add this recurring event to your calendar.
There are more ideas floating around on the summertime board so please check it out and add your thoughts.
And I’ve got more time this summer which means more time for 1:1 calls. So please do send me a note if you’d like to chat.
See you soon!
