Ariel Garten is probably one of the most interesting people you will meet. She is a psychotherapist, Neuroscientist, mom, former fashion designer, and the female founder and visionary of an amazing and highly successful tech start-up Muse. Muse tracks your brain during meditation to give you real-time feedback on your meditation, guiding you into the “zone” and solving the problem most of us have when starting a meditation practice- letting you know when you are doing it right. When she is not reading brains (literally) or investing in, inspiring and advising other start-ups and women in biz, you can find her on stages across the world, from TED to MIT to SXSW, inspiring people to understand that they can accomplish anything they want by learning what goes on in their own mind.
Entrepreneurial Role Models:
Anti Role Model Marissa Mayer
When business started difficulties overcame:
“before each of my businesses I didn’t know everything I need to know to do it and I didn’t have all the skills required to execute it. And in all of the cases… I really didn’t know everything I need to know and that ended up being okay and probably had I known how difficult it was going to be at the outset I would never have started. So, in some ways thankfully I didn’t realise how gargantuan a task it was. I was able in both businesses to put one foot in front of the next and do the next thing that I needed to do to build the business and hire the people I needed to hire who knew what to do”…[Listen for More]
Favourite Books:
Seven Practices of a Mindful Leader: Lessons from Google and a Zen Monastery Kitchen Book by Marc LesserFavourite Quote:
“there is nothing to fear but fear itself”
Recommended Online Resources:
Facebook, Inc. is an American online social media and social networking service company based in Menlo Park, California. Its website was launched on February 4, 2004, by Mark Zuckerberg, along with fellow Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes.
Best Advice to Other Entrepreneurs:
“there is nothing to fear but fear itself. Really, we are so held back by the thoughts that we have in our head, by the voices that try to warn us of things that we don’t actually need to be afraid of, by the fear that we create ourselves. And if you move that fear out of the way, if you move those voices out of the way you can really accomplish and do anything you want in the world. You don’t need to have the skills and capabilities; you can just hire people who are good at it; funding there is lots of sources to find it these days. You can really accomplish anything that you put your mind to”…[Listen for More]
More About Ariel Garten:
Neil’s Quote at the Beginning:
“One finds limits by pushing them.” Herbert Simon
Other Quotes From the Chat with Ariel Garten:
- “the business was a train that was going whether I was on it or not… By year seven the business was so kind of complete in and of itself in that that train was going to drive whether I was driving it not”
- “I took a full year of maternity leave from my own business, it ran, it ran beautifully, the train moved very nicely down the road without me driving it, with Derek our new CEO and it was probably the best decision of my life”
- “imagine what this is going to be. So, if you are building something you are building it because you passionately believe that there’s a thing that you need to build or you passionately believe that there is a business that you want to have. So, what is that see it, make it real, feel it and then take the first step required to get there. And it might be calling experts in the field, interview them to find out what’s going on in the field, in might be looking for a co-founder, it might be finding the first few people who will be your initial employees. And to do that takes the risk of making those calls and reaching out. So often we don’t do things because we are scared of them always feel uncomfortable and that keeps us from taking the steps. And so, if you simply swallow it, fear feel it, just sit with it, you may hit discomfort but it doesn’t matter, sit with the discomfort and just do the thing anyway. You might feel the fear associated with and do it anyways. That’s the thing that is going to get you to the other side of making those calls, reaching out to the experts, hiring the first people, doing things that are outside of your comfort zone that I going to get you to the next step”
- “when you learn to shift the relationship between the fear and the anxiety that you can have in your body and the reality that is in the world that actually things are good and things are fine and things are okay then you are able to really accomplish some extraordinary things”
Leave a Reply