I think it depends on what stages and who you ask. I would say the consistent things that people would have said is, for probably my whole life even before Khan Academy, out of the box, you know, maybe to a fault, you know, kind of sometimes head in the clouds, sometimes, but always feels a sense of urgency. We did one of these personality tests that we did at work, and this one was called colors. There's four colors. There's red, blue, green and yellow. Red is, someone who's red wants to get stuff done. Someone who's blue is daydreaming and thinking about what the world could be. Someone who's yellow knows how to communicate and bring people along. Someone who's green is very good at process.
So I, at least on the personality test and I'm somewhat skeptical of them 'cause you kind of know when you're answering the questions, so it's almost like self-reported. I was all blue and red, which is actually an unusual combination. My head's in the clouds sometimes where I am daydreaming, but I have a strong urgency to get something done. Now those have positives to it. That's probably the exact right combination that you want for an early stage entrepreneur. You want someone who can look at systems and say this could be different, like why is everyone assuming it's this way, this could be a different way, but they also have the most like, and I'm going to make a prototype by next week, to prove it out.
I'd say another thing and this is what my executive coach told me, he's told me for many years and I've been working on it is, is that I've often been non-confrontational. If I disagree with something or if I feel like you're not doing it quite right, instead of telling you, I might just try to do it myself or just grumble a little bit or wait too long until it's become a big issue, and that's not fair to the other person because they didn't have a chance to course correct and now it's become this big issue and everyone has climbed their ladder of inference.
So it's a muscle that I've built, of just being able to be more open with feedback. Sometimes that's with donors, you can imagine if someone is giving you money, you want to please them, but it's been a muscle that I've built to say well, thank you so much, but honestly this is going to be out of focus for us, or honestly this is too much. You know I'm already traveling four times this month, I just won't be able to do it and I found that's actually led to even healthier relationships and deeper relationships when you can get to those places with people.
