3 Cheat Codes for Founders

by @farzatv - 2 minute read

(1) Read for 25-minutes a day

Go read a comic book, a research paper, Harry Potter, a book on the development of Halo 2 - whatever gets you excited.

Don't feel like you need to read something "useful".

The important thing is establishing the habit. Once you establish the habit you can move up and start reading things that are more "useful" to you.

I actually read a lot of manga before reading stuff that was more "useful" for me like biographies of founders or new machine-learning research papers.

(2) Identify the one A+ task each day

Each morning, spend 10-minutes alone and write down all your potential tasks for the day. At the end figure out the A+ task. This is the one task you can complete within the day that will move your company forward the most.

It could be a 30-minute meeting with an investor to close your round or perhaps spending 1.5 hours coding a small feature that 80% of users asked for.

The A+ task doesn't have to be big or take up a ton of time. It just has to be high impact.

Once you identified the A+ task, make it your goal for the day to complete the A+ task no matter what. You'll likely have a bunch of other stuff to do, but, promise yourself you will make time for the A+ task.

(3) Break a sweat

Break a sweat at least once during the day. Go for a 10 minute run, do 30 pushups in your room, do pretend karate kicks, whatever.

I think founders have a lot of pent up emotion (both positive / negative) and breaking a sweat will let you channel that emotion into something that isn't your company for a little bit.

For a brief moment, you'll forget about your company, and when you return to the grind you'll likely be a little clearer.