Entrepreneur Office Hours: Issue #183
Great entrepreneurs know how to tell great stories
Next week, I’ll be teaching one of my favorite entrepreneurship classes. It’s a week-long, 2-hour-per-day summer seminar called “Narrative Design,” and it’s a required course for graduate students in Duke’s entrepreneurship program. In it, I focus on teaching students how to tell compelling narratives about themselves and their work.
Part of the reason I love the class is purely selfish: I’m responsible for its existence. Back when my department was first trying to get a curriculum for graduate students approved by the university, I successfully argued that a class on narrative structures was critical for entrepreneurs.
At the time, this was a radical idea. After all, when most people think “entrepreneurship education” they think about product development, customer acquisition, fundraising, and other business-related subjects. They don’t think about narrative arcs and rhetorical stylings.
I disagreed. As someone who was approaching entrepreneurship with a background in English Literature, I believed my education in narrative construction was a huge part of my success. Specifically, understanding how to construct compelling narratives helped me in sales, marketings, fundraising, hiring, and just about anywhere else I needed to communicate with others (like board meetings!).
I’d argue the same is true for all of you. You don’t need to be a master rhetorician, but you should familiarize yourself with some fundamental principles.
Unfortunately, you can’t take my narrative design class. However, you can pick up an old copy of Aristotle’s Rhetoric or search “the hero’s journey” on YouTube. At the very least, spend a few hours next week learning to control narrative in ways that’ll more successfully convey information about yourself and your work. I promise, it’ll be time well spent.
-Aaron
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Office Hours Q&A
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QUESTION:
In your article titled “The Three Skills You Didn’t Know You Needed as an Entrepreneur” you write that time management is an important skill.
This is something I feel like I struggle with a lot, and I was curious if you had any advice on your best time management hacks.
- Maddie
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I’ve got lots of specific-to-me time management hacks, but those probably aren’t going to be helpful. However, two broad “hacks” popped into my head after reading this question that are universally applicable.
The first hack is to learn to shave small amounts of time off regular tasks. For example, my children have a habit of taking their clothes off inside-out and throwing them into the laundry that way. This gets annoying when we’re folding laundry because every piece takes twice as long to fold since it has to be turned right-side-in.
That might not seem like a huge deal until you add a bit of math. If they spend an extra 5 seconds on each piece of laundry turning it right-side-in for 20 articles of clothing, that’s an extra 100 seconds per laundry session. If they do laundry roughly every week (~50 weeks per year), that’s 5,000 seconds per year, or 83 minutes. If they live to be 80 years old, they’ll have spent 4.5 days of their life simply turning laundry right-side-in. How crazy is that?
The fix is simple: Learn to take your clothes off without turning them inside-out. It won’t take you any longer to get undressed, but, in aggregate, it’ll save lots of time.
And that’s just one example. We do tons of unnecessary things in our lives that take an extra minute here or minute there. We don’t tend to notice those wasted minutes because they’re minor amounts of time in the moment. However, if we do the wasteful things often, they aggregate into large chunks of time we could be spending in more meaningful ways.
My second time-saving hack is learning to repurpose work for multiple outputs. For example, I remember back when I was a student, I’d figure out how to write research papers in two classes on the same subject. To be clear, I’d still write two completely different research papers. However, I’d only have to research one topic because I’d use the same topic and research for both papers. If researching for a paper took 10 hours, it meant I saved myself 10 hours by only having to research one time for two papers.
I did similar things back when I was running my companies. For example, if I had to make a trip somewhere – whether it was across the country to San Francisco or across the city to the other side of town – I’d schedule as many relevant meetings during that trip as possible to take care of anything else that needed to be done in the same place. This helped me avoid unnecessary travel time.
To be clear, I realize neither of the hacks I’ve described are unique to me. Surely you’ve heard other people mention them, or you’ve already thought of them yourself. That’s because identifying the time-saving hacks isn’t the hard part. The hard part is actually remembering to implement them. Unfortunately, I can’t help with that… you’re going to have to build discipline for yourself.
Got startup questions of your own? Reply to this email with whatever you want to know, and I’ll do my best to answer!
