ISSUE #50

Welcome to the Forward Obsessed Founder, my newsletter with insights, awesome tools, and real-world advice to grow your business and career.

GO FORWARD THOUGHT OF THE WEEK ➡️

My 3-Year-Old Has the Keys to Innovation and Success 🗝️ Do You?

The other day, I was with my son on the playground as he turned a beaten-up steering wheel into a monster tractor. The kid's boundless energy was off the charts; he was jumping up and down with glee. And he could’ve stayed in the park all night if I let him.

Watching him made me think how much more interested I was in telling his story than all the boring, rote stories I hear in boardrooms and Zoom meetings.

This isn’t a humblebrag about my kid. It got my brain going down a rabbit hole, as it often does, thinking about what it takes to move people. I wondered how I could flip a switch that lights up the people I serve (aka my clients) with delight — and move them into action.

In the Age of Big Data, wonks want you to believe you can dissect a human and understand precisely what motivates them. If you dig deep enough into “the story data tells,” you’ll be successful.

Doesn’t exactly work like that. Plus, when you read the words “boardroom” and “Zoom meetings," didn’t a tiny part of your soul die?

As a founder, you are, by definition, a creator. And if you allow all of the creativity to be sucked out of your day-to-day, you’ll be left with nothing save a stress-induced ulcer. (Trust me, been there, felt that!)

In this Go Forward Thought, I want you to get a little playful about how you think about data and stories. I see them as two sides of the same coin:

Data helps you understand the market's needs, desires, and problems.

Stories help you communicate solutions in a way that resonates emotionally.

By combining both, you win.

Data on its own can be a bunch of garbage.

Recently, I saw this post from the Hustle’s Trends.co’s Trung T. Phan, who I love because he’s straight-up no BS, and so smart.

Trung Phan @TrungTPhan New York City paid Mckinsey $4m to conduct a feasibility study on whether trash bins are better than leaving garbage on the street. The deck is 95-slides long and titled “The Future of Trash”. Some highlights: ▫️The official term is “containerization”, which is the “storage… https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1810821636016500902 4:41 PM • Jul 9, 2024 2500 Retweets 17010 Likes Read 624 replies

​

Ninety-five slides and $4 million later, McKinsey’s answer to NYC’s trash problem was to use cans so the rats don’t have a nightly banquet. In my opinion, this is a sad story whose moral is that an utter lack of imagination only works when delivered by a gold-standard brand.
​
To be clear, I'm not knocking McKinsey because they've got some of the brightest brains in the world.

But I’m also pointing out that very few of us founders would get away with selling that story.

Trung’s X post did motivate me in a way you wouldn’t expect. And it’s something that any successful founder with a business that thrives on imagination and innovation (ahem, all of us, in other words) needs to get busy with.

Play like your livelihood depends on it (because it does).

I did something readers of this newsletter may notice that I’ve been doing a lot lately. I decided to play around with a few machine-learning models. So, I challenged myself to see if I could create decks as enticing as one created by a McKinsey consultant.

Here, go ahead and play with what I came up with. It’s something I callStrategyForge: Intelligent Presentation Generator.

I must admit, I have much more in common with my son than just our first names. I’ve always loved to tinker, experiment, and play. A good example is the newest GPT model, OpenAI o1-preview, which came out about a week ago. I scheduled 15 minutes to play with it the day it was released.

See, you don’t have to make day-long playdates with a consultant or plan a creative retreat or anything like that to factor playtime into your workday. (Although, if you want to, I’m here for you!)

Before you know it, making time for fun that actually moves the needle for your business becomes part of your daily life. My messing around with the new GPT release and building Strategy Forge gave me more ideas, so I soon found myself staying up until all hours of the night working on more fun new projects — a little this or that for my newest entrepreneurial venture, The Resonance, for example.

Again, go ahead and play with that tool.

It’s an enjoyable way to craft your brand’s visual identity, which is essential to your success, but until now, it would have been a long, pretty expensive process.

And even though it was fun and games for me, I was solving a problem. Brand identity is visual.
​
Traditionally, the info-gathering stage happens with a boring, black-and-white questionnaire.

Wouldn’t everyone be happier with a fun process that was like a game and helped people easily articulate their aesthetic priorities and preferences?

Play for the win.

You can tell my answer to that last question is a big YES.

Research supports how important creativity is — and how easily (and young!) we lose our natural instinct to just goof around like my son. If you give him or one of his preschool buddies a paperclip to play with, their creativity (or, as I prefer to call it, divergent thinking) is off the chart.

According to the Torrance Test of Creative Thinking, 98 percent of those young children can be considered “creative geniuses.”

Then, school, life, and work happen.

By age 25, only three percent of the population are considered creative geniuses.

Now, extend that to the workplace. One of my favorite stats to make a case for less work, more play comes from a classic Harvard Business Review study on the curiosity of 3,000 employees from a wide range of firms and industries. Sadly, but not shockingly, only about 24 percent said they regularly feel curious in their jobs, and about 70 percent reported experiencing barriers to asking more questions at work.

That ritualistic, linear thinking that gets pounded into our adult brains can have negative consequences, from lower performance and innovation to less job satisfaction, productivity, and teamwork.

On the flip side, we have history making a vital point. Countless profound inventions have happened through free association and what I call “connected curiosity” — using your imagination to make novel associations that pave the way for game-changing innovations.

Scientific research from some of my favorite authors and thinkers, including Dr. Stuart Brown, Steven Johnson, and Daniel Pink, among others, provides empirical evidence that play is the true engine of success in business and life.

We might be in the age of robots 🤖, but don’t be one.

Better to play with one. 🦾

Always here to help 🙌
​
​Pete Sena​

Obsession of the Week 🖤:
Linkin Park

Did you realize Linkin Park is still packing stadiums? I didn’t, but now I see why. A friend of mine surprised me with tickets, and I got to see firsthand how the story you tell, no matter who you are, can make or break your success.

In Linkin Park’s case, the double entendre of the "From Zero" world tour name includes a fan secret for the band's origin story. It also serves as a revival and rebirth story after the tragic loss of their lead singer, Chester Bennington, to suicide in 2017.

The whole experience was inspiring from the minute I stepped into the venue until the lights went up at the end. You’d have to experience it yourself, but it was the usage of story, audio, and visuals that made this relaunch so powerful.

Bottom line: Stories that work on multiple levels and utilize different media rock.

Thanks so much for reading this edition of The Forward Obsessed Founder — you can also check out this issue on the web [Link].
​
​Spread the word and grow my mission together

Please take a second and hit the FWD button ▶️, to share this email with your favorite growth-obsessed peer. I want to inspire 1 million awesome minds like you.

​​​​

​

​Unsubscribe | Update your profile | 470 James Street, Suite 02, New Haven, CT 06511