Building a compass to navigate life and entrepreneurship

Bonjour à tous,

Welcome to this second log on this Reefs Rebuilding journey. Today’s reflections will be centered on our new project definition process.

I remember landing back in France last year feeling purposefully lost. We had left our comfort zone, were happy about it, but felt a bit overwhelmed by the blank page and the diversity of options.

Do we stay in the education world we just left ? Do we stay in France ? Do we try something new ? If so what ? Where ? Why ?

I felt the need of building some sort of a “compass” that would help me find my new way, but I wasn’t sure about how to do that.

So our exploration phase looked a little bit messy and we did pivot a lot going through the following ideas :

• Open a restaurant

• Take over an oyster farm

• Diversify an existing oyster farm

• Consult for French oyster farmers

• Be an entrepreneur in residence

• Open an online store for oyster farmers’ gear

• Apply to become co-founder of impact driven company in any field

• Move back abroad and get a teaching or admin position 😱

• Host sustainable aquaculture summer camps

• Create a Sino-French sustainable aquaculture best practice sharing platform (this one I actively started with DeDu, don’t hesiteate to check it out)

• Open a sustainable aquaculture vocational school for international students

• Build an oyster shell upcycling company

• Create a pedagogical sea farm

• Frantically apply to any job 😱

• Create an innovation-oriented pilot sea farm

• Consult on the creation of a sustainable aquaculture ecovillage in Hainan, China (currently on the backburner but still around)

• Become the French representative for foreign sea farming technologies and gear

• Create online content such as newsletters (Hello there !) and web based trainings (more on this one at a later date)

• Identify the need to put value on the environmental services provided by bivalves, such as oysters, and seaweed and look for ways to monetize them to foster their restoration to fight climate change and biodiversity loss.

So here is where we are at now. I am pretty sure there will be some fine tuning, angle redefinitions, that we may circle back to some of theses ideas we didn’t follow up on.

It was nothing like a straight line. It has been an often frustrating learning process. Scary even. Especially when my wife and I started to see the bottom of the war chest we had set aside to keep us going (hence the 😱 panic applying to get back to safety at different times).

But I feel my compass is now much clearer. Here is how :

1. Fall in love with the problem, not your solution

2. Entrepreneurship is an infinite game, get your mindset right

3. Less is more, don’t try to do everything

This one took me a while, and it is not until I wrote it down here that I was able to see it so clearly, so thank you for that !

• As I shared in my last log, my “why” has a lot to do with hope, it’s preservation and restoration for myself and future generations.

• My “how” is currently to work on marine ecosystems as they appear to me more efficient and offering a large underused potential to many of the upcoming challenges (land use, food supply, climate change…) and contribute to a more hopeful world.

• My “what” currently focuses on developping projects to foster restoration of oysters reefs, sea meadows and macro algae forests on the French coastline.

I am committed to this path as long as science based evidences suggest that is it is a sound approach and that I believe that I have some value to add here.

Should one or the other change, I am ready to make my “what” evolve in order to better serve my “how” without diverting from my “why”.

I do not believe anymore in the idea that a project, a company, is a “baby” and that you should look after it as a parent would, with unconditionnal love and self-sacrifice.

I fully believe in commitment and vision but a company is merely a tool built in order to solve an issue that was identified.

It can be a tool created with a lot of thought, mindfulness and even love, but even the most mindfully and lovingly crafted hammer won’t help you sew a button.

Nothing wrong in itself with the hammer, but don’t get so emotionally attached to it that you are trying to convince seamstresses everywhere to be more open minded and to “just give me a chance to show you how it works”.

I love the idea of working to promote hope. For me it encompasses a lot of things, notably preserving a still livable planet, and that is something I feel I can keep doing building tools for many different ways and for quite a long time.

Which is fortunate because :

There is no end. There is no : “and then they were done", “happily ever after but let’s not dwell and the details…”

I remember reading somewhere that :

“being an adult is repeating that “I’m quite swamped these days, but it should get better in a few weeks” over and over until you die.”

It stuck with me and I must confess I found myself more than once repeating this mantra out loud or simply in the back of my mind.

If you are lucky enough to overcome the challenge you are facing, a new one will soon appear, and a new one and a new one, until the time you are not able to overcome anymore or that you decide to stop playing.

And it can sometimes feel that there is never a good time to pause. Because it is true. Life doesn’t work this way and it is up to you to know when you need to take a minute to catch your breath and to act on it.

When I landed back in France my dream was to get a “minute of silence”. 

The last 3 years in China had been exhausting trying to keep the businesses I was involved in afloat under the Zero COVID policy.

I also believe I misunderstood the common saying “it’s not a sprint, it’s a marathon”. I am a pretty resilient guy, but even marathons have finish lines. And I kept seeing my mental finish line being pushed farther and farther until I realized there was none.

This realization pushed me to make my peace with taking my responsibilities as far as I could and needing a real break and a fresh start.

I was imagining it perfectly, and it kept me going during the more challenging times. It wouldn’t be during the first few weeks as we were expecting the whirlwind of family and friends reunions. It wouldn’t be until our kids were settled in their new school, their first experience away from the Beijing international community, that I felt I could finally enjoy a temporary bubble of nothingness, no expectation, no to-do, no mail, no call, no guilt… Nothing. Just me, my first sip of coffee on our terrace, under the rays of the Oleron island Autumn sun… It was glorious !

I managed this feeling of mindful unbearable lightness 3 times and sincerely wish for everyone to experience this it at least once in their life.

My wish now is to keep the long game in mind and adopt a mindset and a working routine in my new projects.

I wish to see them as a continuously evolving and improving journey that I am going to walk on, run on, pause on without even looking for the finish line.

To do that, I hope that I can implement the following :

If there is a new gold rush, be the one selling shovels.

This one I am still struggling with.

I understand it, I agree with it, but I still feel like a child trying to sneak around it with a “just a little bit” spirit.

I fight with my desire to look for “gold” myself. To actively “do the thing” and not just look at it from the sidelines.

The “gold rush/shovel” quote is often used to illustrate how to “make money” in a safer and surer way than just digging around.

I also see the value of contributing based on your own strengths and to provide an accurate “tool” for others to do their part, in a more cooperative way.

Tricky part, for many impact driven projects, there is no “gold limit”. We all want to make as much beneficial impact as we possibly can. And for that we often want to take more and more roles and responsibilities :

“Not only I am going to dig for gold, but I am also going to sustainably forge my shovel head, grow a forest to harvest the wood for the handle, and build my shovel with my own two hands.”

The projects then extend and internalize more and more skills until sometimes becoming unmanageable, exhausting their resources or diverting from their initial mission.

There is beauty in accepting that “just this” or “simply that” is where one can add most value for the amount of time and resources spent.

So, compass in hand, I will keep peeling off the “it would be so great if we also were doing…” layers and looking for what can be my “minimalistic shovel” to be of greater service to others.

Speaking of which here are 3 great projects I’d like to highlight today :

• If you are involved with anything related to biodiversity I absolutely urge you to follow Bloom Labs where Simas Gradeckas expertfully guides you in the meanders of the emerging biodiversity credits market. A must read.

• I had the chance to meet Olivier Meynard just last week. I was profoundly impressed not only by the technical skills he brings to his project of artificial reefs Seablocks, but even more so by his frugal innovation approach. Taking every step from material sourcing to implementation logistics into consideration to “do more with less”.

• In a similar fashion, I was really inspired by Damien Demoor’s when discussing his Greenov project and vision around the blue economy and its future development in France and in the world. Finding the right framing and backing to implement change is not easy. Greenov’s SubSea Quieter just got a lot of attention recently, winning first prize at the Ocean Pitch Challenge organized by RespectOcean and Sustainable Ocean Alliance, but I’m pretty sure that’s just the beginning !

If you made it to the end I guess we’re in this together. You’d better subscribe :

It is also a science based fact that thumbs-upping, commenting and sharing is, kinda making you a better person on all accounts. Just sayin’…

Simas 

CoolBlue

One Billion Oysters Project

Baseline shift