Why your personality needs to sync with your projects

We are a company of geeks. We like to code, deploy, hack and develop. But we also organize events. And events have their own kind of rhythm that’s different from building digital products.

With code, you theorize and plan…. and then you write and check and deploy – TADA! – you see your code live. If you screwed up, you fix it. If you majorly screwed up, you revert. And then you go back to the drawing board to theorize and plan some more. That’s the rhythm of code, and it’s a flow we feel comfortable with.

But a conference is different. 95 percent of it is planning, the rest is actually doing it. And, of course, improvising for everything you didn’t get right.

By the time the event takes place that’s just it. You can’t revert back to anything, and if you screwed up, well, there’s not a whole lot you can do. Didn’t order enough lunch? Good luck making 500 extra sandwiches. Not enough chairs in the room? Guess people will have to stand.

That’s the rhythm of doing a conference. One isn’t better than the other, obviously, but the differences are interesting to me.

In 12 days we’re hosting another TNW event in New York, and I can see the tension rising in the team. They don’t have the luxury to deploy and just see what happens. Everything needs to be perfect and planned ahead, and that can be nerve-racking.

As an entrepreneur I think it helps to think about the rhythm of your work. Your personality needs to be in sync and it helps to think of projects as having their own flow and adjusting to it.

I look forward to rocking along to our event in a few days. Hope to see you there.

This is my introduction text for last week’s issue of our TNW Weekly update. You can read the whole newsletter here, or sign up to receive your own copy.