What’s in store for me in San Francisco?
Not sure. But here’s what’s on my mind:
Startups. Obviously what you think when you think of SF. Startups are cool. They do things that have never been done before. They offer the rare opportunity to build something worth obscene amounts of money. They have the potential to shape the future in extraordinary and unimaginable ways.
Sounds good to me.
Trouble is, I have no technical experience. I have little to no technical knowledge. I can’t code, and I can’t even tell you what I don’t know because I know so little. I know the front of the internet, a tiny piece of the puzzle, but next to nothing about the backend of anything.
How do you get involved in startups if you’re not in tech? Should you even try? You need at least one technical co-founder, they say. But even that seems like a stretch. Ideally, I think, you’d want them all to be. And that raises the question of what I would bring to the table, if I’m not the one(s) with technical ability.
I’m a pretty good writer and a reasonably good thinker. Writing is a useful skill, but not if you’re making software. Thinking is useful too, but only if you can turn it into something real.
Putting the pieces together, I guess. That’s what I might be good at. And that’s what a big part of entrepreneurship is – identifying the right pieces and putting them together. That, plus the idea for what you want to build. I don’t have that just yet (but I think it’s coming).
With no relevant skills, experience or knowledge, one might think that I have no chance of achieving anything here. Sometimes I think that too.
But I also know I’m pretty adaptable. A few years ago, with no relevant skills, experience or knowledge, I thought “Let’s do the nomad thing.” Now I’m doing it full time.
That might be a bad analogy. This is certainly much harder. But easy and hard are relative – relative to what you’ve done before.
And I do think that if you work hard at something, even starting from ground zero, you’ll get there eventually. It might take some time, but you’ll get there.
Barring genetic limitations, I think you can reasonably expect be in the top 10% in the world for something if you work seriously on it for 3-5 years. At the very least, I do believe that about myself.
And, getting good at things helps you get good at other things later, faster. The details are different but the process is the same.
In my experience, it’s good to start before you’re ready. This is true even if you don’t know exactly what you’re jumping into. And it stays true even if all you find is that you’d rather jump right back out.
In any case, those are my thoughts. This is an experiment, so let’s see what happens next.
Read next: Recreating the Psychedelic Experience in Virtual Reality