I’ve been feeling increasingly restless lately. I sleep for 3 hours and then start my day, wide awake and pumped to move. Existential angst. It’s an opportunity to drive a new idea into innovation. I want to be an entrepreneur in residence. Someone who strolls in for a class that interests him but whose primary focus is inventing things. I want the security of not worrying about paying bills but the freedom to pursue any and every direction that I choose. I would have access to the latest tech available and be free to go for a swim and enjoy freshly brewed tea on the roof of my office. Essentially, this inventor’s life would be akin to the life of a professor on tenure.

At this moment, I see the anxiety that I am experiencing is rooted in the concern that the app we are about to release will not be adopted by users. That I will have fallen in love with an app alone over the past 6 months. Which is similar to several relationships that I have had… except that the market is less kind than an ex-lover who distantly cares for your pain and suffering.

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Are we destined to be fools and repeat our flaws in various shapes and forms? I thought that I could study and analyze myself enough to avoid repeating my mistakes. But what I find difficult to learn about myself today is that what held true for me just a few months ago no longer holds true for me now. I feel and look different today. I have changed. I cannot really predict where I will be tomorrow because there are too many directions within which to grow. How can one plan to act when the act itself necessarily disrupts the plan? What I know before I make a decision is less than what I know after I make it. I now realize that due to the recently dynamic nature of my life, I am sharpening my tools of execution, but at the expense of understanding the immediate impact that those tools will have on the world.

It’s like when you are in the moment of first learning how to ride a bike. You have nothing in your past to base your current experience on, but you necessarily are learning by each moment attempting to ride. It is both exhilarating and terrorizing. As you build your experience, through each successive failure, you eventually kick-off to command the ride. But what is truly amazing is the biomechanical wonder that goes on behind the scenes to make this happen. The electrical, mechanical, and chemical integration that brings forth such a fluidly complex motion that is completely oblivious to our conscious minds. We are not aware of these details and never need to concern ourselves with them because we are blessed with a blissful ability to automate and encapsulate a sequential string of mundane processes. But somewhere in the synchronized orchestration of these tasks our blood pressures and cholesterol levels lowered, our levels of happiness increased, and our lifetimes extended. Without us ever intending this impact in the first place.

Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance, you must keep moving.

– Albert Einstein

This analogy explains how I feel as I lead my team into the unknown. The trust and commitment that I am cultivating within the team are synergistically feeding me and inspiring me to grow and become an even stronger leader. With each passing day, I have the opportunity to ride a bike for the first time with either dominating confidence or paralyzing fear. I have to trust that when I fall, I will be able to get back on the bike and ride on within the same day. I have to remain positive about how my sharpened tools are affecting the world around me as I deliberately move in partially planned directions. There will be ample pivots and failures, but how I respond to those events will set the tone for my team, be it inspirational or hopeless.