| Sunday, 24 September 2023 |
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Good morning [%first_name |Dear Reader%],
It’s Sunday once again, and I’m back with what will hopefully be another contemplative edition of the First Principles newsletter—edition #14.
Let’s start with a question: what are you bad at?
It’s a question that at once seems trivial and trite. Of course, there could be so many things we’re bad at. Even more that we’re average at.
But when we’re asked to list them out, what comes out on the top of our list? What are the top three? Would our colleagues agree with them? Would our partners? Our close friends?
It’s not that easy. Certainly nowhere near as easy as answering “what are you good at?”
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Some of us will come up with answers after thinking on the spot. Those are what I call the “shallow” or “unconscious” bads. We don’t have much conviction in them. They’re the kind of superficial answers most of us have come up with sometime in our careers when someone asks us, “what are your weaknesses?”
But there are some of us who have spent time contemplating what they’re bad at, and more importantly, what they’re okay being bad at. These are the conscious bads.
And counterintuitively, knowing what you’re truly bad at is a liberating experience. And it makes it easier for you to become better at the things you’re good at.
I’ll take you back to a conversation I had in February with Srikanth Iyer, the incredibly candid and contrarian co-founder and CEO of Home Lane, an online interior-design platform.
Srikanth sort of stumbled into the interior-decoration space after exiting his earlier startup, Edurite, an edtech. Like many founders, he ran into a problem and decided to solve it with a startup. 🙂
[aesop_nutgraf_quote_block title=”“One was about two years before I started Home Lane. I had gotten one or two homes done. Had a terrible experience then. I never in my wildest dreams thought that I would go and try and solve this problem.
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