The Importance of "Auto-pilot" Thinking
what does stringing a racket have to do with running a business (photo by ryamane)
TheBlogFrog is not my first startup. During college I had the idea of starting a tennis school. I checked out a couple books from the University library and went to work training, making flyers, and making lesson plans. I had my first expirience with gorilla marketing by going door-to-door and spending hours on the phone (always asking for referrals) signing up students. In the end it was a succesful startup, providing more income during the summer than most of my friends made year long.
But this blog post isn't about the tennis school. It's about what really made the tennis school succesful, and that was the hours of "auto-pilot" thinking that was done while stringing tennis rackets. Every night I had at least two tennis rackets to string. This was something I had done so many times that I could definitely do on auto-pilot where my body was working but my mind was free to think. This is when I planned lessons and thought about all the little things that made the school a success.
With girls it was always shooting the basketball. We had a hoop in the backyard and whenever there was a girl question or problem that needed to be worked out, I would shoot the ball around alone. Again this was something that my body could do on auto-pilot.
This is mostly how my current startup was shaped. At my previously employer, I had gotten to the point where I could mostly perform my job on a sort of auto-pilot. I could sit at the computer and be designing circuits, but my brain was solving the problems associated with blogging and social networking.
Now that I am executing the unending day-to-day tasks that come with a startup, it can be a challenge to sit back and engage in the type of creative thinking that got me here in the first place. A couple of times I have gone down in the basement where we have a ping-pong table. This is where I now do my thinking. I put one end of the ping-pong table up and hit against the wall Forest Gump Style.
I encourage everyone to engage in some serious auto-pilot thinking.
