DailyJim: Track records vs future plans

Hello everyone, welcome to another Daily Gym. Today is Friday, August 16th, 2024. Yes, a Friday edition because I missed, I think, Monday and Wednesday.

Today, I want to talk about track records versus future plans. So, this is inspired by a conversation I had earlier with a friend who was telling me, man you need a business model you need a business plan you need to show down like put down on paper exactly what it is you hope to achieve in the next who knows how many years the structure of how it's supposed to work and that is how one gets funding that's how one raises money that's how one gets trust in people for going forward and i push back on the idea because i'm familiar with the MacArthur Fellows Program, which is sometimes called the Genius Grant, where they actually don't require any future plan documentation. What they do is they go around and they look for people who they believe have very solid track records of creation, innovation, challenging the bounds of culture and society and science and all these things. And then when they find that person through a very secretive process, but once they find that person, they give, I think, $800,000 over five years. And I think they choose like 20 or 30 people a year. And for me, that is a counterexample to the idea that we actually need. Tremendous amount of detail and data on how the future is going to plan out or how we think it's going to plan out in order to gain trust with other people. And so when I worked in innovation consulting before. The one thing we talked about a lot was that it's very hard to sell a project by telling them what innovation consulting is because most people don't know. It's very intangible. Consulting in general depends on the type of consulting, but some businesses tend to sell intangible goods more than tangible ones. And in this, sometimes the qualitative experience of people in the past, also known as testimonials, can really shed light on what the service is and how it has helped people in the past, and therefore give an insight into how it might help people in the future. This is also for restaurants, we look at reviews. Reviews are track records. There are past events and how those past events impacted people, and we use these to to predict the future. Arguably, I think human.

And maybe other animal intelligences. I think most brains probably operate in this way, where we look at past experience and therefore try to predict the future. I think emotion actually is very core to this, that a lot of times when we have something that strongly shakes us emotionally, whether it's fear, whether it's anger, whether it's sadness, excitement, joy, it can get so deeply embedded in us that we expect certain things will happen when that thing happens again. in. So with this argument, even if it's not super emotional, I had this idea many years ago, like 13 years ago. It's like the brain is an expectation machine and we are predicting what happened based on what has happened before. And if something is not sufficiently different than what we expect, we don't even notice it. But if it's sufficiently different, we notice it. And if it is not yet sufficiently similar to what we expect, then we are totally confused by it. And again, a lot of this is based on our prior experience, based on our track records or other people's track records to see they've done this and this and this and this. Therefore, they are likely to behave this way in the future. I actually think a lot of funding and a lot of trust is based on this it's not based on what people say they're going to do it's based on what people have done before or what we have experienced when people have said that they're going to do certain things or what we've experienced of how we think people who look like them or behave like them have behaved in the past and therefore will behave in the future, So I think sometimes we put so much focus on what is the person going to do in the future when a lot of times the future is not so predictable. But what we can do is we can look at how someone behaved in the past and in this case specifically how those behaviors impacted other people and then make guesses on what's going to happen in the future.

That's the approach i think i prefer to take when it comes to life in general but especially when it comes to fundraising it comes to running giving services or providing help to people in the future because for example i didn't know that i was going to meet a guy out dancing in the club who is from south sudan who works with is a negotiator with the peace talks that are happening at a high level, high government level, to try to bring peace to South Sudan? And who might be interested in having me come out and give a talk or a workshop? I didn't predict that. I don't know if I could have planned that. But that serendipity happened. And while it may not come to fruition, it might. And if it does, that can be another example of something that has happened, which can inform things that might happen in the future or give people a perspective of what might happen in the future and um yeah so i'm super excited about that and i don't know when people put pressure on me describe what you're going to do with the money or describe what you're going to do with i don't know specifically my best description is well this is what i've done with it before and i'm likely to probably use it for very similar things in the future too because i've done this this and this and this and this like i have a track record i I'm pretty habitual in using it in specific ways, whether that's paying for websites, whether that's hosting workshops, whether that's experimenting with new tools so I can spread these tools faster on the internet, whether that's building websites. Whether that's, paying for flights so I can go and stay in northern Uganda and volunteer at an organization that helps bring peer-to-peer counseling to the villages. Or whether that's flying to Germany and helping people on a train the trainers deal with some deep emotional issues or having conversations with people on a Make Music Not War project about conflict resolution, about war, the war in Gaza, and different places as well. And having some deep philosophical conversations and helping people process on things like this. I didn't predict necessarily that that's what I'm going to do, but this is what I've done in the past. And as a likelihood, I'm going to do something similar in the future. So the whole point of today's episode really is just that I think sometimes we can get so lost on focusing, well, what are you going to do in the future?

Especially when it comes to business or business related things and not looking or giving enough credence to what people have done in the past and trying to see patterns from that. Now, again, what somebody has done in the past does not necessarily predict how they're going to behave in the future, but it can give us some insight. And again, what somebody says they're going to do in the future doesn't necessarily guarantee that they're going to do it in the future. And I don't know, just this idea of trying to not only look at the five-year, 10-year plan that people have, but also paying attention to what have they done? Therefore, what are they maybe likely to continue doing?

Yeah. Last thing I'll say is that a lot of times in Silicon Valley, people that do get funding for their projects, for their apps, for their businesses and such, yeah, they get it. Maybe a part of it is the business plan and how it looks like they're going to go forward with it. Sometimes they just get it because they've I've had prior success and people go, oh, oh, this is the person that started whatever company. Screw Twitter for calling it X. I don't like that at all. But, you know, this is the person that started blank company. And so therefore that company was quite large. So I trust that they're going to use the money probably in a good way.

So I think that happens a lot. I think it's actually trust comes from prior actions more than actions we say we're going to do in the future.

And yeah, so I guess really what I'm trying to say is I want to do a better job of telling people the things that I have already done, showing people the things that are already done, and also showing the impacts. And so part of that is, I think I've already done before, asking people to share stories of how my work has helped you. Um, and that can be my work in a very formal way, whether that's a class like emotional self-defense, or it could be one of the trainings I've done in Germany. Um, it can be, uh, from the podcast. It can be from iFelio back in the day. It can be from one-on-one conversations we've had. It can be from just, uh, kind of admiring from afar or just, I don't know, very informal interactions. It doesn't have to be something really big, but if you do want to share something like that, I'd be super grateful. You can go to tell.jimkleiber.com

tell t-e-l-l dot jim kleiber k-l-e-i-b-e-r dot com and then there's a form you can fill out and i would be so happy and grateful if you filled just sent a little story uh letting me know how i have helped you in the past and if you prefer or if you allow for me to share with other people so that other people have a better idea of what i've actually done and how my work has impacted people. I think a lot more than maybe even I expect. So on that note, thank you so much. Hope you have a great weekend and look to talk to you on Monday if I don't miss Monday's episode, but I want to get better. Ciao.