The Wrong Kind of Urgency
On introspection, action, and the difference between momentum and ego
I spent most of this week in San Francisco. Coffees, dinners, walks, side conversations in lobbies and on the street between meetings. Founders and investors moving very fast, a lot of people with a lot going on. And the more time I spent in those rooms, the more I kept noticing the same thing underneath the motion.
Most people could not tell me what they were moving toward or where they thought the world was going. They could tell me what they were running from. The bad vintage. The missed window. The LPs who passed. The competitor who raised. The peer investor or founder who closed funding. The market that was supposed to open up and did not. They were moving with urgency, genuinely, not performing it. But the urgency was borrowed. It belonged to someone else’s timeline, someone else’s scoreboard, someone else’s definition of late.
I have felt that pull myself this year, the end of Q1 arriving faster than expected, and realizing that what I was calling preparation was sometimes just perfectionism in nicer clothes. I thought adulthood had taken most of the perfectionism out of me. It had not. It just taught it to dress better.
Which brings me to something that I have been following for the last few days.
