When the Kirby team turned into shareholders in our new company. The feeling of owning the company together as a team had a big, positive impact on me.
Small, consistent steps get you a lot further and are more sustainable than exhausting jumps. It sounds like such an obvious learning, but to choose exciting jumps over boring small steps keeps being way too tempting.
I was a solo freelancer for too long and that blocked me from being a good team player. To truly see myself as part of a team and not just as an individual within a team was a very important shift in mindset.
As design students, we had to learn to be very critical with our work and throw it in the bin without regrets. It's a skill that still helps me a lot, although I'm far from perfect at it. It's more like constantly training a muscle. Keeping your ego in check and learning how to be good at receiving, but also giving constructive critique is often seen as a given, but in reality it comes with hard challenges for everyone.
Turning away from the screen whenever possible. No matter if it's time with the family, sport, building physical objects or playing guitar – I can really feel how my brain and my heart need more screen antidotes the longer I work in the digital realm.
Trust. I trust us as a team and each one individually, that we make the right choices together, that we are honest with each other and that we make mistakes but also manage to learn from them together.
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When I was 16 (way before the internet) I founded a travel-partner agency to connect people from different backgrounds seeking travel companions. After a year, I had to close the agency due to a lack of customers and the confusion some callers had regarding the nature of the “service.” Despite this setback, I gained invaluable insights into sales, communication and people’s needs, solidifying my desire to run a business that helps people.
After graduating, I worked for an extremely well-paying automotive company. But I always had the feeling that there was more out there. So I quit and went into research with the aim of becoming a founder.
There are no overnight miracles, it's very hard work: both physically and emotionally. Requires resilience, grit, strategic approach and grind.
One of our core values is experimentation. Rather than get stuck in arguing about what solution may best solve a problem or play to our ego, we focus on the smallest step we could possibly take to learn whether that’s true. It moves our minds away from thinking too big without sweating the small stuff and from getting stuck in discussions rather than actually doing something to understand the possible solutions better.