# 8: “Actually, I Am Not Stupid”!? Letting Go…
English translation:
“Let go of everything that is not essential, that does not belong to you. Separation and changes are necessary.”
Story behind the Passage
This morning, I thought about a student of mine. Well, A. rather feels like a colleague and sometimes coach to me. She has many years of work experience and whenever I talk to her about business ideas, I gain more clarity. A. works for Media Markt, the consumer electronics chain that has become quite famous for its slogan “Actually, I Am Not Stupid.” This is how the book by one of the founders of the company came to my mind this morning. Actually, I do not read many books about German companies anymore but this one made me curious when I saw it in a book store last year or so. I had no idea that this company had started out as a ‘startup.’
I am putting the word into quotation marks because, as I mentioned before, the concept hardly ever gets defined properly and means different things in different things in Europe and the U.S. (I will write more about this in a book, I think). Nevertheless, the spirit that drove Walter Gunz, author of the story, and his co-founders to start the new company was very much rooted in startup culture. What I mean by that? In summary: Making the decision to do your own thing and then — actually doing it. When it comes to startups, it is mostly young people making that decision even before having a career in a corporate or as an employee anywhere else. But there are indeed ‘older’ people with the same maker spirit who are willing to leave behind many of the things that have made them successful and/or rich to then embark on a new entrepreneurial journey.
The book with the title Actually, I Was Not Stupid is quite unusual if you compare it to the stories about U.S. startups that I tend to focus on. As the subtitle reveals, it blends the business story of the company with insights into the author’s “intellectual and spiritual roots.” I remember that I very much enjoyed reading the book — exactly because of the many quotes and proverbs from spiritual leaders (see his “sources of inspiration” below). Like many people who are restless and thus start searching for the “truth” early on in life, I have traveled many different spiritual and religious roads already. (Who would have guessed that I was baptized in the River Jordan??? Different story… Let’s return to the narrative of Gunz.)
So, while I enjoyed the spiritual touch of the book very much, I remember wondering what other people might think about all this who do not have the slightest spiritual affinity. But as quickly as I started wondering, I also stopped again because at the time I had learned enough about business already that I knew the easy answer to this: People who do not like that combination of business and spirituality simply would not read the book! They would not buy it in the first place and if they had bought it by accident or received it as a present, they would open it, flip through the pages in a few seconds, and then probably decide to not even start reading it. Are you recognizing yourself here? Are you one of them?
What I am getting at with this example is exactly in line with the passage above. Clear standards in your mind, clear judgement about “right and wrong, black and white” allow you to quickly take action and “let go” of things — be it a book, ideas, even people or jobs. I have come to learn that letting go is indeed one of the most — if not the most — important and relieving skill to learn in life. But it is not an easy one, especially for entrepreneurs.
My Learnings
“Let go of everything that is not essential, that does not belong to you.” As with all spiritual teachings, every single word in a sentence like this one means something — or can have meaning for you, if you decide to get into it. No worries, this is not going to be some spiritual lecture today, simply because I am not a spiritual teacher. I will simply point out a few thoughts. To me, the first part of the sentence only gains meaning in connection with the second part. Yes, what is “essential” can be defined in universal terms as meaning life itself. That is the one and only thing that you can lose that puts an end to everything else — at least in your life. Apart from this truly universal, even metaphaphysical context, everything else depends on your individual perspective.
When we put this into the business context, you often experience the opposite of universal thinking. As you come up with your business idea and all the product and service details connected to it, everything suddenly appears essential. And as you continue to get into all of these ideas, they become even more essential — at least from your perspective. You cannot possibly imagine that it could be otherwise. Quickly, you find yourself overwhelmed by ideas, tasks, to dos, responsibilities, meetings, new ideas, more concepts, more meetings, more experts, more research… Does that sound familiar?
Why am I saying then that this first part about the “essential” things only makes sense in connection with the latter part? Your first impulse might be that all these pseudo-essential ideas that I am describing belong to you. How could it be otherwise? They originated in your thinking, right? Is that not how I described them above? Yes and no! If you think through this constant process of idea generation in business development — especially at the very beginning of a startup — it is usually not just your own thinking. Most likely, even if you are a one-wo/man show, you talk to people — peers, consultants, advisors, angels, friends, family — to get feedback. Yes, feeeeeeeedbaaaaack!
Feedback is usually understood to be a good thing and I do not generally disagree. But the thing with feedback, especially for very creative and fast-thinking people, is that it also works like adding fuel to the flames — almost literally. Or do you not sometimes feel that your head is getting so hot and your entire body so energized when you are deeply into business development and idea generation? See! And getting feedback, i.e., being in resonance with other people, usually leads to the opposite of letting go: More ideas are added to the ones that were there in the first place and these new ideas then get processed in your head which then causes even more or at least different ideas to be added to the full plate. You know what I am saying???
After these endless feedback loops which, undoubtedly, feel like fun and progress at first — how can you actually tell your essential ideas apart from everything else; the ideas that “belonged to you” in the first place? See, this is why the ‘belonging’ part is so crucial to me. If you do take a break from all the voices surrounding you and you reflect back on the starting point of your journey, you will be able to tell the difference again: to retrieve the essential and pure idea that only belonged to you in the first place. After having gone through many — and I mean mannnnnyyyyyy — circles of ideas that I came up with based on the exchange with others, I can tell that the only way of finding out what is essential and what is not can only be told by a combination of your gut feeling and by looking at your first notebook in which you find the original idea. And you will be surprised what a relief that can be and how much sense this idea suddenly makes now that you have gone through all these distractions of adding stuff that is not essential because it never came from you in the first place. Now, am I saying that every founder is a genius and should therefore only stick to his/her own thinking? No!
“Separation and changes are necessary.” I feel like I have explained the “separation” part above already. Letting go of unessential ideas is a form of separation. But again, all this mostly refers to ideas. Let us talk a bit more about people now with a focus on ‘change’ that can result from ‘separation.’ And people means above all: YOU. Of course, every “unessential” thought that you might or might not let go off, will bring development and thus change to your life and eventually to your business. But I argue that especially the letting go part triggers change that is essential. Usually this kind of change happens when you let go of the things that seem to be extremely essential for some reason. Maybe it is an ego issue, maybe it is simply the lack of knowledge. In any case, whenever you let go of exactly these big things that may have been with you for a long time — maybe months, years, even decades — you will experience a change that is irreversible because it is the result of deep learning.
Now, I sound like one of these guru voices in the Media Market book. This is all very abstract, right? So, let me try to make it personal and thus more specific. That is not easy but I will try. When I started my business as a ghostwriter, it was a 100% based on what belonged to me. I had decided to earn my living as a writer one Saturday in the spring of 2018 and quit my university job three days later. It was not important that it was ghostwriting. It could have been any kind of writing. I was not too picky about that. What mattered was the writing part as the essential ingredient and the first contract came exactly three days after I had quit my job. Hence — I let go of something and this made room for something new. That could be the equation I am trying to underline here, right? But that is only the beginning of the story…
What followed then was the reverse of letting go. I came up with all kinds of ideas on how to change ghostwriting into journalistic writing, biographical writing, analytical writing, and then even — no writing at all because I somehow followed a weird idea that I wanted to do business consulting. Are you getting it? Where was the writing part in the end? Where was the essential that had clearly belonged to me at the very beginning? For sure, all the people I talked to in the course of these two years were knowledgeable and only wanted the best for my business. Surely, I also wanted the best for my business and obviously, I was not afraid of change. I even ended up changing my business model almost weekly.
If this had continued, you would never be reading these lines (maybe nobody is doing that anyways?!) because I would never have started this blog. This step of returning to writing as my essential element could only happen when I was at Point 0 again a few weeks ago. That Point 0, as I have come to call these moments, came up when an old goal (of mine) popped up again that I had let go of many years ago already— as I had thought... It was a professional path that I had pursued over several year and that had frequently made me sick in many ways. Even though I knew that, all of a sudden, it was there again and I started getting very serious about it. All my writing pleasure, the success of the past years, and all the other business ideas suddenly seemed to have vanished, minimized to the unessential. What was happening?
Well, I think, letting go of some big thing that was truly essential for you for a certain period of your life takes a long time. And even after you think and truly feel you have left it behind, it keeps coming back again and again. You struggle, you wish it were otherwise, you try to ignore it… nothing works. And then, at some point, this Point 0, you are so desperate and tired of it that you simply accept that it is there and that it will keep haunting you. And then, without even realizing it in the first instance, it suddently goes away. It leaves you in peace. And that is change that you truly feel. It makes room for the new essential to become clearly visible and this frees you of many more things — also people — that do not belong to you in that new phase of your life. And since this life is going to change continuously without you being aware of it all the time, you can never be sure when this happens again but it probably will.
Wow, is this really what Gunz wanted to tell his readers with these two lines? A guy who had left behind a career as a top executive at a department store chain to start an electronics chain that could just as well have failed?
You know, honestly, I have no clue. I cannot remember exactly what followed after this passage and I am not looking it up again. I just saw, when I found the passage this morning, that it occurs in the chapter “Successful Work.” I truly believe that only work that you enjoy can ever be successful in the long run. That is because you are the only one who judges what “success” means. And if you decide to “not be stupid,” you let go of all the things that do not really belong to you in the present moment. This moment is the only thing that you can take charge of. The chances are good that exactly these things are also the ones that are not essential to your startup. Leaving them behind might be a big step but it can make the rocket take off.
Reflection Questions
1) What does reading about a former executive and entrepreneur who mentions spiritual teachings and philosophy as his sources make you feel like?
2) Think back of one time in your life when you let go of something. What happened afterwards?
3) Remember the very first days of your startup. What was the original product/service idea? Is it still reflected in the current business model?