PhD v. Entrepreneurship

Hi,

Back in the old college days, I was obsessed with the idea of getting my PhD. Some of that still lingers, but it isn’t as intense as before.

I think there are two ways that goals like this fade away:

Life gets in the way, or better put, you find something you want more.
You find something that quenches your thirst.

Obviously, there are other factors, and these can oftentimes blend together, but for the sake of simplicity, these are the two.

For me, my aspirations for my PhD were satisfied by a different pursuit.

We all know that thing was The Hero’s Journal, but it may not be for the reasons you think.

The allure of a PhD program is the deep dive, learning everything about one thing. I had a professor say, “The higher you climb the academic ladder, the more you learn about fewer things.”

The higher you climb in academia, the more and more narrow your scope. I loved that.

I think the connotation of starting a business is that you are a generalist, and in many ways you are, but when you get a peek under the hood, you realize it takes a hyper-specialist.

Over the course of your journey, you are learning everything about one specific thing.

The deeper you go, you don’t get to the bottom—you learn there is even more you don’t know.

The Hero’s Journal
The chapter of the story we are getting into is going to be a long one. It may even be a saga.

In 2023, we decided to expand our product line. Since the beginning, we had The Hero’s Journal. In 2022, we introduced the SideQuest Deck, but we had a new product line that we knew we needed to add: a planner.

The product description for The Hero’s Journal reads “journal/planner hybrid,” which is not untrue. It just isn’t perfectly positioned to be a planner that a planner person would be proud of.

In the stationery community, planner people are the most effervescent, but they can turn on you. If you don’t nail it, you are in deep water.

Which is fair. Planners are like a command center for the year. They house all of the dates and times for all the most important events that the year holds.

We had a few obstacles to overcome: we make undated products, we needed to find a story that fits the function of a planner, and Nick and I aren’t planner people.

Creating a product that works for a problem that you yourself don’t have intimate knowledge of is very difficult.

We had a solution. We were going to “build in public.” We created an online community where people would get to trial-test the planner pages, give us feedback as we built it, and help us make sure the function worked for planner people.

It worked. We got tons of great feedback, built a stronger product, and a stronger relationship with our heroes.

Everything was great. We raised the money on Kickstarter. They got here a little late, but not too bad. Once people started receiving them, we started to receive the bad news.

There was a flaw.

There were 13 sections in 4 weeks. Which is a full year, but the issue was people wanted to plan out their entire year in them. The month sections weren’t long enough to foreshadow. For a portion of our heroes, the product was unusable.

There are two reasons this happened:
We tested the product in an environment that the final form wouldn’t exist in. Each month, we gave our testers pages that were digital, and we would jerryrig them to fit the month that they received them (something you can do with a digital product). You can’t do that with a physical product.

Nick and I were operating outside of our expertise. We had grown to a place where we needed to have multiple mainline products, but the issue was that Nick and I were still stuck in the daily journaling mindset. We thought this was a daily-use product rather than a forecasting product.

We dove so deep into our expertise that we tried to treat another expertise with the same logic.

Building a planner is a whole new PhD program.

Atypical
I was listening to LeBron’s podcast with future head coach Steve Nash this week. They talked about recovery and how it has changed over his 22-year career. He talked about how, as he got older, he had to narrow in his training to fit more and more specific outcomes.

As he went deeper into his career, his understanding of what was necessary got deeper.

The same thing is happening to Trey. Over the past 6 years, he hasn’t just had to focus on how to get better at the game, but he has also had to figure out how to get his body ready for the season and how to peak at the right time.

He just had a monster game with only a few weeks until the playoffs. The season wasn’t without trials, but he is starting to peak at the right time.

Just as he planned.

Reading
I started reading The Practice by Seth Godin. It is really good, but more than the quality of the writing, it is convicting. If writing is something I truly want to get better at (the thesis of this newsletter), then I have to find a way to create daily flow.

“Work starts when the excitement to work ends.” – Alex Hormozi

Coffee
I made a coffee with chocolate milk this morning. It was really good, and I made a pretty design. Doesn’t get better than that.

Conclusion

Entrepreneurs don’t win because they are great. They win because of focus.

The immature builder tries to build multiple things at once because they fear they are going to reach the bottom of the well.

The mature builder knows that, at the perceived bottom of the well, there is more to learn than has already been learned.

The more you know, the more you know how much you don’t.

Remember, if you are working on something and you don’t want to anymore, that’s just the beginning.

Toodles,
Kyle