One week with your BFF to take the first step in finding yourself 🧘‍♂️
By: Vlad Oustinov
Tags: Introspection, Personal Development, Focus, Self, Entrepreneurship

Intensity & deep focus

⚖️ The decision (Indecision)

November 2017: I am completely lost.

Like any random management student in France, it is hard for me to figure out what I am going to do with my life at the end of my last year of studies. I just started my master’s second year and it’s great: I’m meeting a lot of people with tremendous backgrounds, the teachers are inspiring and the whole atmosphere pleases me.

During this year, we all do an apprenticeship & I joined a pharmaceutical firm in the internal M&A department, working on the acquisition of small innovative companies. I am learning a lot but it is different from what I used to know: The company is quite big, I wear suits and spend my whole days on Excel for business plans and Powerpoint for slides.

Literally 😅

People around me start getting interviews for full-time jobs (yes, as soon as November for a starting date in September) and I feel I have figure out exactly what I want to do. I am truly excited by startups & innovation, I want to have an impact, I have a profound need to learn stuff all the time, my curiosity is hardly satisfied… In short, I am divided between a wide range of options:

Joining a startup, an incubator, a VC fund, an innovation department in a big firm, a consulting firm, an M&A team, an NGO

Continuing studies in politics, programming, design or finance

Building my own startup

Traveling around the world

Leaving for Japan and finding a job there

Focusing on rap (yeah, because I rap 🤜)

I am really considering all of these and I don’t feel it’s a decision I should take easily. It lasted for weeks. I was changing my mind two or three times a day — a nightmare. 💩

I had to do something about it.

I had to take some time & dig into it calmly. So I called my best friend (Régis Lopez Kaufman): “Hey bro, what do you think about going somewhere during holidays just the two of us and work on our future?” “Yeah, let’s do it!”

When common decisions are obvious like this, you can be sure it’s someone you’re aligned with.

⛩️ The organisation (Expectations)

We thought about woofing but we understood we didn’t want to have any other activity: We had to focus entirely on our introspection. We needed a quiet place where we would be able to think about who we are, what we are going to do & what our plan is to achieve our goals. We finally decided to go to Régis’s grandma’s quiet house near Toulouse.

Our arrival at Toulouse

We had one week.

It was one week of retreat, just the two of us. I did it with a really close friend, someone I trust 100%. Not everyone can be with you at this moment, you have to choose wisely, you must completely fit with this person in terms of aspirations, functioning and values.

We entirely focused on introspection — digital detox, healthy food, stable rhythm, not a single contact with the outside world. 🏝️

We needed to optimise our time. Of course, one week seems like a lot of time, but for us it was needed to cover many aspects of our identity, desires & goals.

🎨 This is how we designed this week 🎨

Day one: Problem

What are the global, social and environmental issues in the world? What issues particularly affect or move us? Which ones matter so much to us we would like to dedicate a large part of our lives to trying to solve them?

Some old festival posters & a marker pen

Day 2: All about Régis

Full expedition into Régis’ world. Hard part. Régis had to speak about his all life, it was a deep introspection.

We had some clear rules: I had to listen and ask the relevant questions without giving my own opinion except if Régis asked.

We did it chronologically: He told me everything of significance that happened to him up until that day and then we talked about aspects of his personality. We dug into his past, passions, fears, important life moments… It was a complete, 360-degree overview of his person. 🌐

Day 3: All about me

Same thing.

Day 4: Solutions

Based on the problems we identified and our introspection, we had to figure out what kind of projects could drive us for a very long time. What did we want to build in this world? These were long-term projections, and also deciding if we would work on a project together or not.

Day 5: 10-years plan

What do we want to do in the next ten years before working full-time on this life project? Our logic at the time: No regrets. We need to do things we’re dreaming about in the next years. 🌈

Day 6: Wrap-up & next year steps

What do we have to change right now to make it all possible?

Day 7: Just in case

Nothing planned in case we needed this time for something else.

⚠️ Our way of doing this was specific to our need ⚠️

Don’t exactly replicate our week, that just wouldn’t make sense. We had our own context: We wanted to have an impact, Régis & I were interested in starting a business, we were thinking about doing it together, we were students.

I could detail each one of these days and how it helped us, the reasons we did it this way, but it doesn’t really matter: What matters is the focus. Think about your own context & design your week accordingly. Even us, we would do something different today, since now we’ve evolved.

💦 The week (Reality)

I will only give my own perspective. I won’t try to summarise Régis’ experience.

Day 1: I understood many issues deeply matter to me, it’s linked to some of my core values such as curiosity and empathy. I wanted to find global solutions & target the roots. Education & community issues became obvious to me as the ones I should focus on.

Day 2: We did the work on Régis — I learned a lot about him and about which things from the past can be linked to our current behaviour.

Day 3: Which key things happened to me and how it affected me? What were the key learnings of this day? 🗝️

I was bullied as a child at school and during trips. People laughed at me, treated me meanly just for fun. I promised myself when I was around 12–13 years old that I would show them all. I wanted to prove that I could be really successful, I wanted to be finally seen for who I am. I was a smart boy who loved sports but who had his head in the clouds. It was a lot about ego and vengeance. Nothing to be proud of but it is what it is.

I love evasion. Books when I was younger, movies, mangas, series, music — the world is not as exciting as it could be, as I would like it to be. I was really convinced at 10 that my Hogwarts letter would come, like really convinced. Evasion comes with a fear of conflict but is also a powerful imaginative stimulus. This is why I love entrepreneurship, it’s all about creating something new, building the future you want. ✨

I wasn’t happy.

I badly needed someone in my life. This was something essential to my inner balance, something I couldn’t set aside. I had to find the one. 💌

Day 4: I was thinking about creating local communities around eco-villages. Kind of like Colibris is doing with Oasis but a really profitable and ambitious company building smart and sexy eco-villages which could attract urban citizens, creating hamlets of harmony answering various issues simultaneously and providing a concrete answer to rural deserts. Ambitious and crazy, that’s the way I like it 😃

This project is 1) without Régis who doesn’t identify with it and 2) not currently happening because it doesn’t make sense to me right now. But I still think it can drive me for a very long time, we’ll see. 🏘️

Day 5: I wanted to do various things in the next ten years before starting this generously sized project. Find the woman I want to live with for the rest of my life, work at The Family (it is the company that attracted me the most as an employee for many reasons), live in Japan, do a round-the-world trip, become a famous rapper.

Day 6: For 2018, I decided to find the one, get a job at The Family, smile more, find happiness in each moment of my life, stop avoiding conflict. I decided to fully focus on these goals.

🎯 The results (Deep focus & prioritisation)

One week later, I met someone I truly consider as “the one”. Today I work at The Family. I am happy. I am less afraid of conflict (& yes I think that’s positive). I smile more. I am at peace. 🕊️

But it was a hard year for me. A really hard one. More life questions showed up, I had a lot of trouble finding a job (43 interviews, hard and long processes with tons of refusals). But I had my girlfriend, which helped a lot. Luck helped as well. I had my focus, I knew what I wanted the most, I never gave up and I finally got it (thank you, Alice, for putting your trust in me).

A new Family

People don’t take enough time to know themselves

They just live and make decisions based on what they want at the time. They are in this continuous life flow and are surrounded by too many options. So many of us are lost, I clearly see it just with my own friends. Above all, as we enter the Entrepreneurial Age, the Internet offers us amazing opportunities to learn, to try new things, but also to lose our focus by being distracted.

I don’t say “plan your life”, “know what you want to do in the next ten years”. I have some ideas about my own plans & goals but I’m flexible and ready to change. I just say we should learn to know ourselves, to know what matters to us, to decide which direction we want to give to our lives. 🛤️