In the early days of working at FutureSight, seeing the impact of my work was often challenging. But onboarding a new team member and seeing them leverage my learnings changed that.

I struggled with two main problems:

1. Not seeing results in the short term
2. Constantly shifting priorities

My responsibility is to experiment and create processes from scratch. It’s an exciting challenge, but by nature, there are successes and failures. And because of the early nature of it, the successes feel small. As we’re building for the long term, achieving substantial results would require years. Like any startup, there is also a lot of firefighting. I would invest my energy into projects, only to stop and shift gears midway to address more urgent issues. I consistently felt stuck at a 3 or 5 on a scale of 10 and it was incredibly frustrating.

That’s when I received this advice from my mentor, Prathna Ramesh. We’re building something for the long haul, and that can make it hard to appreciate the small steps. But this first step is the hardest step, and each of the incremental values I’ve created is very valuable.

Though I intellectually understood this concept, I hadn’t fully internalized it. My focus remained on the big goals while being stuck in the day-to-day grind. I couldn’t appreciate the process.

But I had a significant shift in mindset when we onboarded our new talent leader.

Watching Anu Joshi, our talent leader, take what I’d started and elevate it from a 5 to a solid 10 was eye-opening. The learnings from both my failures and successes created a solid foundation for her to run on. Suddenly, I realized it’s not just about getting to the destination. It’s about setting the stage for someone else to take it even further. 

In a world driven by instant results, this experience taught me about patience, persistence, and starting small. To fellow early team members and founders, remember to celebrate the small milestones in these initial stages.  Even when the big payoff seems miles away, each of these is the bedrock for future scaling. We’re setting ourselves up for genuinely remarkable victories, one step at a time.