Lately I’ve felt like I am on a roller coaster ride between excitement and dread. This is probably part of a larger lesson about entrepreneurship from Gary and Christina. I am dreading the end of the term, and how far behind I feel with regards to the entrepreneurial design final project.

Running experiments is essential for finding product-market fit, and we do that by building minimum viable products and putting them out in the world.  We as a class haven’t run a lot of experiments so far. I certainly haven’t. All I have had are ideas, scribbled excitedly in the notebook, where they stay, unrealized, untested and thus unbroken. What’s stopping me? Basically dread.

The whole enterprise of trying to put yourself and your work out there is not just the technical matter of sending relevant emails and writing regular blogposts. There’s a whole psychological and emotional aspect of being vulnerable and embracing failure as your teacher. When you’re putting yourself out there, you’re opening yourself up to the possibility of failing publicly. If we are following Giff’s advice and pumping out minimal viable experiments, then we are guaranteed to fail at some point.

There in lies the emotional lesson, one which I have not yet mastered. I must be invested enough in an experiment to make it good and valid for experimentation. I must also be mature enough to not take an experiment’s failure personally. I must have the courage to be vulnerable.

(See: Brené Brown - “Vulnerability is the birthplace of innovation, creativity, and change”) 

It takes a certain emotional resilience to work entrepreneurially. As makers we are often emotionally invested in our work, and our work is often tightly wound up with our identity. We want our work to appear polished, even as our ego is polished. One of the reasons why I’ve found the assignments in Entrepreneurial Design so difficult is that the essence of experiments is disposability.  A good maker wants to create timeless objects.  A good experimenter must be ready to throw everything away and start over in pursuit of what failure teaches.

I need to find the courage to be vulnerable. I need to start running experiments and being entrepreneurial. Fortunately, desperation is starting to force the issue. I’ve began to send emails to the people I need to talk to inorder to make some of these ideas happen. A couple balls are starting to roll. Stay tuned!