What I learned from Launch X

This weekend, I came home from Launch X, a month-long summer business program. Launch was an exciting experience and I’ve been reflecting upon my experience these past few days. While I learned a more strategic way to approach starting a business and some scary realities about entrepreneurship in general, what strikes me as most valuable is the mindset this program instilled in me about areas outside of entrepreneurship. 

Everything is learnable if you put in the time. I write about this because I struggled quite a bit in physics this past year and it’s not something I try to hide. I remember being extremely frustrated during the school year because I couldn’t understand the homework questions and the concepts. My frustration led me to call my parents frantically, trying to get help. It also led me to bang my fists on my desk, crumple up sheets of scratch paper, and bury my head deep in frustration. I've been reflecting on my experience learning physics and in retrospect, I probably would have understood the topics better had I spent more time. Over the year, physics became one of those subjects I walked into believing it was hard. I almost gave myself leeway for not understanding and I was easily frustrated when I couldn’t understand something right away. Being immersed in a startup at Launch taught me that while so many things in life are out of control, learning is one of the most controllable things we can do. During the program, my team and I met often. We worked long nights, we debugged our website, and we worked to better our product constantly. Yet even with all that time spent, nothing is guaranteed. Whether we will get investors, whether our team dynamic will stay fresh, and whether we will actually breach into the market are aspects out of our control. What is in my control though, is how much time I want to spend learning new skills to better our company. Launch has helped me come to this new realization that if I put in the time, I can learn anything. So many things are out of control, but how much we know about anything is within our control. I aspire to have this tenacious mindset and patience with myself during the most stressful nights of the upcoming school year.

It’s not the experience that matters. It’s the mindset. Many students who came to Launch already started companies and non-profits. Some had several nonprofits, a company, and a school club all under their belt. I’m not gonna lie: it felt a little bit disorienting when I learned how much the people around me had done. By the end of the program, however, when I looked at the more further developed startups, I noticed that the experience of each individual team member didn’t dictate the strength of the startup. The mindset did. The more developed teams had strong-willed individuals who felt passionate about their idea. The team comprised of people who believed their idea could make a difference in this world, driving them to excel in their efforts, time commitment, and dedication. I suppose this bounces off my first point about having the right mindset when learning new things. At the end of the day, nothing is 100% innate and a large portion of success comes from making the most of what we’re given. 

Even though this program lasted a little longer than my schedule would have liked, I don't regret it one bit. While I learned about entrepreneurship, physically being immersed in that startup environment and under those pressures alleviated some of my other mindsets about life. Thank you to those at the program who made it so amazing and thank you to my parents who made this experience possible.