Day 80: Pink Flags

Today my previous business partner wrote on LinkedIn about making investments. It was regarding monetary, time, and energy investments. As a professional investor, he has some very complex calculations to determine the valuation of a company. I’ve seen the spreadsheets, and they make me go cross-eyed.

I love when he talks about the other types of investments. Time and energy. Communicating the human element of investing is a gift he has.

He said in his post: “There are many things that I’ve done in the past that I probably would not do today if I knew the full scale of the downside. Usually after the fact I chalk it up to paying “tuition”. Nevertheless, those futile or barely break-even efforts were weighting errors or miscalculations.”

Which is what made me comment with: “Love this perspective. Just like with compound interest when you pay tuition and learn the hard way the red flags show up easier when a similar opportunity presents itself. No regrets!”.

I’m not sure if what I wrote came out clear (and definitely wasn’t concise) but what I meant is that: with every failure we make, we learn from it. Our brains take the data from the entire experience and then alchemizes it into intuition, or sometimes trauma.

His post made me think about the position I took in his partners company. The 3 of us knew it wasn’t a good fit. But I needed a bridge out of a role I wasn’t supposed to be in. My partner knew I’d competently assist him with building out the foundation of a department he wanted to create to mitigate risk in his partners business. And the business owner knew I was charismatic and would be an asset in making B2B relationships and getting clients contracts signed.

We all got what we set out for but it wasn’t nearly as magical as it could have been.

Because of the pink flag.

It wasn’t red.

We knew we weren’t putting ourselves in harms way working together.

We’d worked together and knew what each of us was capable of. Both the good and the bad.

Though the hesitation was there, the ambitious entrepreneur spirit within each of us clouded our judgment into thinking we could grit our way into making it work. The 3 of us are all shape shifters and used to eating shit. But…we are used to making ourselves shift and eat shit. Not having others do it. Especially not our peers.

I think the pink flags can be harder to navigate than red flags because we try to negotiate with our intuition. We play with, “Lets make a deal. I’ll get you into this, but then when things go sideways, I’ll wonder why you failed me.”.

Completely random comparison but I had an epiphany during my drugged induced stupor after I broke my collarbone last December. The loop in my head kept saying variations of, “You can’t be trusted to make decisions.” “This accident happened out of nowhere.” “You are not safe and you will never learn.”.

I was physically hurt and kept terrorizing myself psychologically. I got pretty depressed (narcotics and laying in bed for days on end helped with that!) and one day it snapped, “Marsh, you knew the experience was a bad idea the first time it was brought up.”. “When you saw that there were only e-bikes and not enough scooters for you, you knew you should have driven to the Capitol Tree.”.

My intuition reminded me: “You pushed back against the red flags I waved in front of your face because of your impulsiveness, fear of being left out, impatience, and stubbornness.”.

It was a beautiful moment that released so much of the mental anguish I had.

I’m loving this topic but have reached my time threshold for a Friday night so will have to continue on it at a later date!