Last week, in the Pressyo chatroom, we were discussing the idea of resonance. Resonance happens when a driving force is applied to a system with a frequency that is the same and in phase with the system’s natural frequency. The result is that the system oscillates at a much higher amplitude than normal. A typical example used in high school physics classes is that of a swing.
Imagine a child on a swing and is being pushed by her parent. If the parent pushes the swing at random, the swing would not go very high. However, if the parent were being an irresponsible one and pushes the swing following the rhythm of the swing, the swing would go very high (and in one case I witnessed, went 360 degrees around the top bar, leaving a child that was scared shitless)
Running a startup is like trying to force a system to go into resonance. You first have to find the frequencies that click together. It’s an often repeated saying that people who think alike are people who are of the same wavelength.
That’s usually the easy part, even though much fuss had been made out of it. The difficult part is getting everyone in phase.
Having people being on the same frequency as you is one thing. Having everyone push in the same direction in the same time is another. Resonance is hard.
I count myself very lucky to have found cofounders who are of the same wavelength and are pretty much in every way much more capable than I am. We share the same or similar goals, but the one thing that we haven’t really gotten together is getting in phase with one another.
While we think very much alike, there are many times I feel that some of us are ahead and some of us are behind. Of course, what makes things worse is the positions are not always the same. Sometimes I would be ahead in terms of considering some things, and some times I would be behind.
This leads to high amounts of inefficiencies, especially with communications. An idea has to be communicated multiple times over multiple spans to cater for the different phases of thought processes. This is the main thing that is tiring me right now. I should probably get some mentoring. Then again, I’m so shit with communication I might have burned all my bridges.
We are indeed working hard to find a way to be more in phase with one another. Anyone have any suggestions?