The Right Mindset

Are you willing to dig deeper? To persist through fear, uncertainty and doubt? Are you willing to do whatever it takes to realize your goals? It requires a clear focus and your all-out effort to challenge your assumptions, tolerate ambiguity, manage risk and act in the midst of a world of evolving risk. Once you see failure as feedback and not as a sign of stupidity you will understand mistakes as learning opportunities.

Attention, Intention and Action: Aligning Your Mind

Aligning these three elements of mind empowers your actions and improves outcomes. What you attend to  is your life. When your life is driven by your attention you are living in a world that at best maintains your status quo and at worse reduces opportunities for growth you are not doing the things that produce happiness and productive outcomes. Living a life driven by what you notice rather then what you intend is a recipe for frustration and unhappiness. Your busy all the time with very little in return.

When attention aligns with intention magic happens. The two together make action purposeful and naturally aligned with what you plan on accomplishing. Getting the proper understanding of each is critical to your success. When they are in the right alignment, follow-through is the natural result and success is realized through a series of “attention-intention”  sequences.

Knowing where your attention is and what your intention is the key to productive moments. Attention concentrates your five senses and awareness on an object or thought in the present moment. The problem is these moments of attention are often distractions that defeat your goals and drain your energy for productive action. Intention is the road map that one creates to produce a desired future outcome. Attention puts your focus on the now. It is mission critical to your startup’s success that you clarify your intentions and discipline your attention so that the two work together in perfect harmony.

Zen Mind, Ken Mind

Zen is a disciplined practice of meditation which seeks to dissolve the subject-object duality which enables a clearer view of reality. Knowing “what’s so” is critical to properly engaging creative tension with “what’s possible.” This approach to product creation and ideation is essential to produce both novelty and real customer value. Understanding the process of exploring the adjacent possibles requires a deeper understanding of “what’s so” or what actually exists.

What is Ken? Ken is knowledge, understanding and acumen. Kenning is knowledge in action. Right action at the right time. Zen is clarity. Zen is waking up to the ordinary and extraordinary experiences of being human. Zen’s a paradox, a gateway and an awakening which allows us to be more aware, better balanced, happier and more effective in our actions. It’s all about right actions at the right time. A Zen attitude creates clarity. And clarity leads to right actions.

What distinguishes this approach from a straight Lean launch or disciplined entrepreneurship implementation is the Ken and Zen parts. Both are key to a mindset that is both growth oriented and centered in reality. The Ken of Zen is an approach to entrepreneurial thinking and innovation I’ve formulated that aids the innovator in seeing the bigger picture and cultivating a growth mindset that considers the impact of this value creation in the world at large. It integrates mindset and value creation in a structured approach that maximizes learning, improves understanding of market needs and manages risk in the evolution of your startup from value proposition to business model, while you seek both problem-solution and product-market fit.

With the right mindset and a correct set of instructions, failures are seen as part of the validated learning process.  This reorientation around the meaning of failure allows you to accept failures as necessary steps in the path to a successful startup. Failure is part of the validated learning process. The key, as you will discover, is to fail fast before the cost of failure becomes insurmountable or your will to act disappears.

What’s Zen got to do with entrepreneurship?

For our purposes, mindset falls into two categories; a fixed mindset and a growth mindset. The growth is essential for entrepreneurial success.

Doing it elegantly, efficiently and effectively is where Zen mind and Ken mind meet. Together they seek balance, integrity, inspiration and fulfillment which produces a framework for efficient and effective entrepreneurship.

The Ken is knowledge in action. The right knowledge applied mindfully at the right time. The Zen is clarity. It clarifies intentions through mindful inquiries. It restores balance of intellect and intuition. It helps to initiate and sustain the process of change. It directs your attention to the right part of the here-end-now…and most importantly empowers you with a sense of a bigger and better future.

Zen, as applied to this end, seeks to create and deliver value from a place of clarity resting on these three principles:

• Do Good
The essence of every entrepreneurial effort is to achieve product-market fit. This is a non-trivial task as you are about to discover. If we were to rethink entrepreneurship in terms of doing ‘good’ we would frame our value delivery around the wants, needs and desires of our customers. We would and should seek to create and deliver the value that they want and need. If we do this ‘good’ correctly we will in time capture value back from our customers in the form of a currency transaction. If we do it in a scalable and sustainable way we will enjoy both financial success and personal fulfillment.

• Avoid Harm
Most startups fail. They fail to find the real pain in the marketplace. They waste time, our most precious resource and money seeking the wrong solution for the wrong problem. They fail to wake up to their self-defeating behavior and assumptions. With Zen mind and Lean methods we can avoid harm to ourselves, our customers and our startup with a smart scientific approach to finding the optimal path to a product that delivers real solutions and real value for our customers and in return delivers value back to our enterprise.

• Help Others
This is the essence of entrepreneurship. It is a means to bring conscious capitalism into the development of your idea. The purpose of our entrepreneurial initiative is find a problem worth solving, create a worthy solution and be compensated for the help we have delivered. It’s the summation of the basic human exchange of value for value and completes the circuit between supply and demand.