On Balancing Stones (and Building Our Projects)

I went down a rabbit hole with this woman's YouTube channel — what a fascinating lifestyle! I love how she's inviting folks into her world in every single episode.

One of her more popular uploads is a wonderful reminder of the fundamentals of life as she seeks to find the right balance of her stones:

You might spend a lot of time trying to balance a stone that will never balance. But, you learn something every time. — Jonna Jinton

The process of working hard over a long period of time without an obvious conclusion or positive outcome is effectively what life is all about; and startups, mostly.

Sadly, we don’t often consider the “learning something every time” as important or as valuable in our business-building and entrepreneurial process, but, the lessons are available for those who have enough self-awareness to recognize them for what they are and we can always come away with something lifelong and precious.

I won’t lie: Watching Jonna balance rocks is both calming and maddening at the same time! I’m not entirely sure I would easily find the patience to do this, but, I’m interested in giving it a serious try.

I also love the idea about learning how to feel and understand each individual rock and stone — at some point, you gain empirical, tacit insight and knowledge that allows you to just “intuit” placement and positioning.

This is also very-much like the process of building-up nascent projects over a long period of time; you gain (hard-earned) tacit wisdom that helps you “shortcut” some of the workflows that can get you to important milestones in the early-stages.

For instance, the first time I started a business I didn’t know the difference between an LLC, S-Corp, and C-Corp registration and the taxation laws, the distinct administrative filing required for each type of company, and the downstream consequences of each type related to raising venture capital.

Now, I do.

Would I have loved to know the differences when I started my first, real business? I suppose it would have been nice but I’m not sure it would have been as important as simple deciding to try it out and learn the process.

As I get older, I no longer have any silly expectations that everything I do will result in an overly-positive outcome; in fact, I’m much more wise to the fundamentals of life which remind me, daily, that life is to be lived and experienced, not conquered nor won.

We all have our own stones to balance — let’s do a good job with the ones that we’ve got.