For many years, one of the most coveted pieces of nonprofit intelligence has been true Social Impact Measurement (SIM), or how effective an organization’s efforts have been in achieving a desired project outcome.

What is the 100%, quantifiable impact of, for example, building a school in an underserved area? What is the true value of building a well and providing clean drinking water to a population previously plagued by cholera?

Until now, such evaluations have been plagued by issues of poor data collection strategies, unreliable data sources, and most critically, an inability to properly collect all the possible data points that can be affected by an organization’s impact.

Without such foundational elements in place, it becomes virtually impossible to achieve the necessary reliability of data for true impact measurement to be the revolutionary source of reporting that it can eventually be.

However, the rise of a new form of unparalleled data analysis — Quantum Computing — may be the key to solving the ‘holy grail’ of nonprofit intelligence, whilst simultaneously offer massive potential both to nonprofit fundraisers and donors alike to truly assess the best opportunities for making a social impact.

An Intro to Quantum Computing

With Artificial Intelligence (AI) and its related tools now widely adopted amongst the for-profit sector, and quickly growing traction in the nonprofit space, eyes are now beginning to turn towards the technologies of the far-future: whether it be cybernetics, ubiquitous internet, or Quantum.

In a nutshell, Quantum computing uses quantum mechanics to to perform certain kinds of computations much, much more efficiently than a regular computer can.

Specifically, Quantum computing utilizes two aspects of quantum mechanics — superposition and entanglement — to change the way computers traditionally store and manipulate information.

Whereas computers as we know them today store information in a binary state, manipulating individual bits designated as 0s and 1s, Quantum computers instead utilize what is known as qubits.

Qubits exist in two simultaneous states that cannot be explained with classical logic, acting as both the 0 and 1 in a binary state at the same time, rather than independently. As an example, I recommend watching the excellent TED Talk by Shohini Ghose on the subject.

Voice Isn't Dead - How AI is Changing The Call Tech Game | Data Driven Investor

Because of this ability to play both sides of a piece of data, so to speak, quantum computers can intake vastly more data, and perform exponentially more complex calculations than traditional computers can.

Google’s quantum computer was reportedly able to solve a calculation — proving the randomness of numbers produced by a random number generator — in 3 minutes and 20 seconds that would take the world’s fastest traditional supercomputer, Summit, around 10,000 years. This effectively means that the calculation cannot be performed by a traditional computer.

Quantum’s Impact on Nonprofit Impact

The nonprofit sector’s astronomical growth has for years now exacerbated a crisis in donor faith — with so many organizations to choose from, nonprofits are increasingly pressured to demonstrate quantifiable impact to their potential donors, or risk losing their funding.

As this crisis has worsened, nonprofits more and more have turned to how they demonstrate their impact and how they tell their stories (which is where our team at Hopeful comes in). However, determining how an organization measures it impact has remained difficult for a number of reasons, as told by Donorbox:

1. It includes measuring complex concepts, such as “increase in self-esteem of an individual” or “increase in overall well-being”.
2. Measuring social impact also means accounting for other factors that might have influenced the element you’re trying to measure i.e. to what extent can the change be attributed to the activities of your nonprofit.
3. It is long-term and requires consistent and dedicated work throughout the span of several years.
4. It requires a relevant system/framework and robust tools, which can be hard to develop, especially for smaller nonprofits.
5. Even larger and more established nonprofits struggle to evaluate the quality of their impact measurement process.
6. There are no set rules, so approaches and terminology can radically differ from one nonprofit to another, which makes communication and collaboration more difficult.
7. The phrase “social impact” is increasingly vague and often misused to imply small changes.

Utilizing Quantum’s ability to handle massive datasets, the nonprofit intelligence question can, for the first time, be reasonably addressed. Whereas previously the bottleneck of data gathering and management proved to be an insurmountable barrier, it is now becoming possible to ‘brute force’ the system — collecting as much raw qualitative and quantitive data as needed in order to create what we call Quantum Powered Data Associations(QPDA).

Such associations are not perfect, but create a tangible step forward in the path to true Social Impact Measurement. What is key, however, is that QPDA’s would in theory also be able to calculate datasets that are generally considered unquantifiable, such as the irrationality of human and what actually leads us to make long-term decisions in the first place.

The Quantum Altruism Calculator

The quantum mind or quantum consciousness is a group of hypotheses proposing that classical mechanics as we know them are not capable of explaining how or why humans make decisions the way they do, but that there are correlations between Quantum concepts and the functioning of the human mind.

According to Xiaochu Zhang, a biophysicist and neuroscientist at the University of Science and Technology of China in Hefei, “Cognitive scientists found that there are many ‘irrational’ human behaviors.” Classical theories of decision-making attempt to predict what choice a person will make given certain parameters, but we humans don’t always behave as expected, including making irrational choices and finding choice options that did not exist previously. Recent research suggests that these lapses in logic “can be well explained by quantum probability theory,” according to Zhang.

In essence — what is truly exciting about Quantum’s data capabilities is to not only determine impact, but also to complete the equation on why people give in the first place.

What I am proposing is the first Quantum Altruism Calculator — utilizing Quantum Computing to identify, parse, and glean insights as to why, where, when, and how humans identify and support the causes they support the most.

At the macro level, such a Calculator could quickly be piloted using the UN 17 Sustainable Development Goals (UNSDG17) as a framework. The causes presented within the framework, including the eradication of poverty, reduction of hunger, etc, allow for rapid identification of which causes people most associate too at the global scale, and niching down from there.

This article is a proposal for a radical new application of Quantum Computing for Social Good, and will be further built upon in the coming days, months, and years.

Disclaimer: I am the CEO and Cofounder of Hopeful Inc, a high-growth startup enabling nonprofits to tell more compelling stories to the right people, at the right time, using Artificial Intelligence. We ourselves are currently raising our Seed Round. To learn more, please feel free to send me an email at ajivov@hopefulinc.me

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How Do We Calculate Goodness? Quantum Computing’s Implications for Nonprofit Impact was originally published in DataDrivenInvestor on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Social Media hosts the long-standing battleground of digital brand marketing — where both for-profit and nonprofit organizations compete for an ever-expanding number of viewers, clicks, and (hopefully) consumers.

Whether it be Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, and/or Tik Tok, these platforms have amassed followings so large that it has become borderline mandatory for organizations to craft specific strategies on how to grow clientele on each of these channels.

As I’ve previously mentioned, we live in an era of 95 Million Instagram posts a day, 3,125 Facebook posts per minute, and 6,000 Tweets a Second. This amasses an incredibly high volume of both raw data and raw noise that is being generated every second of every day and poses an increasing challenge for brands everywhere looking to gain mainstream awareness.

While Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been used extensively in email and website growth over the past decade, social has remained mostly immune to the benefits that AI can foster for an organization. Until recently, the assumption was that social media was too broad of a category to effectively leverage AI, as the mass of unorganized data being generated across each competing platform proved too daunting to organize.

However, this assumption has been increasingly challenged in the past several years. According to a Markets and Markets report, AI-powered social media marketing is predicted to grow from $633 million in 2018 to exceed $2.1bn by 2023.

Additionally, the COVID-19 crisis has elevated social media’s position in our society — making it a centerpiece of how people interact and share information on a day to day basis.

With the rise of companies like Hopeful, Trufan, Cortex, and others, AI technologies are quickly appearing online which will change the way digital marketing is conducted, how social media data is analysed, and ultimately how brands reach their audiences.

What is AI Social Media Marketing?

Artificial Intelligence has begun to be used ubiquitously by Social Media companies in the past several years, using its data crunching and learning capabilities to determine what should be trending, which content to serve consumers, where to properly position the dog ear filter on one’s head, and much more.

From the generalist side, AI has been used in a number of ways, but one of the most popular is customer service and chatbot tools when it comes to social media. By identifying the tone of comments, questions, and general engagement, AI tools can sort through customer requests and either independently answer them, or parse them to a human customer success agent to deal with as they see fit.

For driving revenue, there have been a number of different approaches social media tools have taken to improve the bottom line for organizations. First and foremost, there is the process of Social Listening, which is essentially using technology to monitor the feedback from prospective clients across your social media channels.

Specifically, these tools identify any direct mentions of your brand, making sure to provide insights on how to best target acquisition opportunities. Social Listening is a step up from Social Monitoring, which simply monitors (as the name implies) social media for any mentions of your brand, sans insights.

These types of tools are often where AI begins to enter the realm of social media marketing, and are the tip of the iceberg of where AI has the potential to go. We are increasingly we’re seeing innovative companies realize AI’s data parsing aptitude can be used from the very beginning of content ideation all the way through post posting analysis.

Social Media AI — Where It’s Going

One of the most intriguing evolutions in the AI Social Media space in the past several years has been the rise of the end-to-end Social Analytics tech company. Our company, Hopeful Inc, is one of several new startups building solutions that allow organizations to use historical data to automatically create, schedule, post, and analyze their social media in one place.

At the base level, these new tools allow smaller organizations that are not able to engage a marketing analytics team, to effectively and efficiently progress into the social media realm, essentially launching themselves into the big leagues of brand recognition right from the outset.

This has a democratizing effect that has not been seen in either the for-profit or nonprofit sector since the rise of social media itself and has profound implications for lowering barriers of entry for smaller startups at the cost of incumbents.

However, Using past data to create content is just the beginning. With the proper implementation of AI, organizations will be able to analyze key commonalities between images and videos rather than just text. These analytical techniques have been largely impossible to execute in the past, as the sheer diversity of content makes it difficult for a person to distinguish common elements.

Given the progressively more meme-focused world we live in, customer sentiment can be localized around witty imagery rather than back and forth online text. Given the diversity of imagery posted online, AI is able to determine whether the meme a customer just posted about your brand is all in good fun or the start of a negative trend that should be managed effectively.

Finally, this brings us to the last big piece of improvement AI will bring to the Social Media space: rapid and accurate sentiment analysis.

Ultimately, Sentiment Analysis (SA) is the cornerstone of what dictates the direction of social media marketing. Traditionally, SA has been used to parse a customer’s emotional responses into three buckets — positive, neutral, and negative.

However, arranging the full spectrum of human emotion into three categories obviously comes with flaws, including incorrect categorization and inability to predict sentiment trends past the first few messages identified.

With the advent of AI in Social Media, SA can now be developed to closely reflect a brand’s customers’ true feelings, rather than awkwardly boxing them into a close-ish approximation. With major companies such as IBM’s Watson already offering advanced Sentiment Analysis for the enterprise, it is only a matter of time until prices fall and expertise grows to the point required for SMBs to gain access to such technology.

In particular, unlocking AI-backed sentiment analysis for organizations such as nonprofits, restaurants, retail, and any others that rely on positive customer sentiment on a day-by-day basis will be a huge force multiplier for these SMBs’ brands.

By being able to easily and affordably tap into what customers are feeling, business owners, can either use AI to influence their online marketing as described above or simply use AI’s data-crunching abilities to get a hyper-accurate read on their customers’ perception of the brand and plan accordingly.

Conclusion

It is important to note that this article is an extremely high-level view of AI and its applications to Social Media marketing — there are countless unique use cases where AI technologies have been revolutionizing the social media space for the past decade. This is all to say, the high-level descriptions within this article displays an underrepresentation of AI capabilities in social media. Over the next decade, AI will continue to improve social media analytics, resulting in more innovation to help small to medium-sized businesses manage their brand and online social presence.

AI and its subsets continue to be extremely exciting technologies for all aspects of human life and in particular the ability to power a brand’s foundational revenue elements.

This article was originally published on LinkedIn

Disclaimer: I am the CEO and Cofounder of Hopeful Inc, a high-growth startup enabling nonprofits to go beyond likes and get more funds through social media and online giving sources utilizing Artificial Intelligence. We ourselves are currently raising our Seed Round. To learn more, please feel free to send me an email at ajivov@hopefulinc.me

AI and The Social Media Campaign: How It Changes the Game was originally published in DataDrivenInvestor on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In the last several weeks, my writing has focused specifically on the macro impacts of AI technology in the nonprofit industry and how investors should consider the impact such emerging tech will have on the sector. As the COVID-19 crisis continues, despite the start of gradual economic reopening in North America and around the world, we at Hopeful have been closely tracking the intense damage the pandemic has caused to the nonprofit sector and tech startups in Canada.

Over the long weekend, I reflected on the potential $9 Billion+ loss facing charities as a result of COVID, while flipping through tabs displaying our growth exponentially trending upwards. While contemplating this odd juxtaposition, I realized that over the last year and a half of Hopeful’s existence, we had extensively discussed the meaning behind our purpose, our ‘why’ , but never actually documented it.

Through countless internal discussions, external investor pitches, pitch contests, and technology conferences, we consistently reflected upon Hopeful’s culture, purpose, mandate, and overall ‘why’ we continue to strive towards our goals. However, the conversation about ‘why’ was always prematurely assumed by the audience, the forum, or Q&A, and would be left open to interpretation unless we directly intervened.

Therefore, consider this week’s article as official documentation on ‘why’ we are Hopeful for the future, how we got here, and what we’ve learned along the way.

The Framework

Simon Sinek, in his seminal work Start with Why, provides an excellent framework for us to move through. In essence, Sinek argues that great companies market themselves in such a way as to explain why they are doing something, rather than the how or the what.

A key example would be Apple advertising “1,000 songs in your pocket” for the iPod Touch, beating out Creative Technologies (CT) near identical product released twenty two months earlier, which had simply been marketed as a “6.5GB Storage Capacity Multimedia Player, with the ability to store over 100 hours of digital audio”

The iPod successfully broke through the mainstream because, from a layman’s perspective, its description was straightforward and significantly more consumable than that of the CT Creative Nomad.

Hopeful, from a technical perspective, is a social media analytics platform that drives donations and reduces marketing costs, helping nonprofit leaders expand their donor bases by providing them hard data on what social media content (images, text, hashtags, etc), on specific platforms, are leading people to donate. But why did we choose this route?

Hopeful for the Why

With 95 Million Instagram posts a day, 3,125 Facebook posts per minute, and 6,000 Tweets a Second, social media is without a doubt a key battleground for nonprofits vying for online presence in the modern age.

However, with the sector itself growing at an eye-popping rate nearly 4 times greater than the for-profit sector since 2008, nonprofits find themselves facing the same issues that all for-profit businesses face when managing their brand on social media — how do you cut above the noise when there is more and more being added every day?

Furthermore, how do you get onto a platform that your sector avoided until just recently? As traditional donors get older, traditional nonprofit fundraising — email, physical mail, and the like — lose their efficacy. This has forced more and more nonprofits to rush to join social media, creating a bottleneck for younger, millennial donors, overwhelmed by the amount of causes they can potentially support.

“With 95 Million Instagram posts a day, 3,125 Facebook posts per minute, and 6,000 Tweets a Second, social media is without a doubt a key battleground for nonprofits vying for online presence in the modern age.”

After a year of interviewing hundreds of nonprofits, my team and I kept hearing the same thing over and over and over again — that nonprofit directors and marketing teams were posting on social media “for the sake of posting.”

So Hopeful’s ‘why’ now has two key facets — nonprofits need to determine how to enter social media effectively, and potential donors need tailored dissemination of information to engage with them so they can better see messaging that resonates with them.

Rarely was there a plan or an ability to track the data needed to better optimize their messaging to reach new audiences — even when many nonprofits everywhere are increasingly desperate to reach new donors as repeat giving declines.

Coming from the for-profit sector, where message targeting is not only the norm, but a critical piece of any marketing strategy, seeking a total absence of the same within the nonprofit space was not only disheartening, but actively frustrating. Nonprofits are on the forefront of changing people’s lives for the better, yet are unable to access technologies that have existed for years in the profit-first world.

Thus ‘why’ we do what we do — Hopeful is a company that brings the technologies nonprofits deserve to their doorstep. To use the iPod example from earlier, we are on a mission to help nonprofits put 1,000 donors into their pockets — donors who are waiting to support the causes they believe in, but who have not been connected with due to lack of insight into social media messaging, awareness for the nonprofit’s brand, and lack of technology to combine these goals.

This article was originally published on LinkedIn

Disclaimer: I am the CEO and Cofounder of Hopeful Inc, a high-growth startup enabling nonprofits to go beyond likes and get more funds through social media and online giving sources utilizing Artificial Intelligence. We ourselves are currently raising our Seed Round. To learn more, please feel free to send me an email at ajivov@hopefulinc.me

Why We’re Hopeful: The Philosophy of a Social Impact Startup was originally published in DataDrivenInvestor on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In my article last week, I discussed why investors are potentially missing the boat on the nonprofit technology revolution. This piece, which focuses on artificial intelligence in the nonprofit world specifically, is to illustrate how this revolutionary piece of technology is going to change the entire landscape of social impact.

The move to artificial intelligence in the nonprofit world has been a steady, albeit slow march forward. While the space has generally been slow to adopt technology, the increasing competition surrounding noise on social media and declining donor pools has necessitated an acceleration in the adoption of digital solutions that bring in dollars.

Artificial Intelligence in particular is well oriented to not only handle, but completely transform the myriad of issues that nonprofits have been facing in the past two decades. With costs rapidly falling for AI technologies that focus on managing large data sets, in addition to their capability to streamline internal nonprofit processes and better targeting potential donors, the nonprofit sector is on the precipice of a technological advancement not yet seen before in its history.

The Battle of Data Overload

Hopeful was started because nonprofits, at their base level, were struggling to manage and act upon the massive amount of data they were handling. Without an ability to manage existing donors and internal data, it became extremely challenging to set internal goals and Key Performance Indicators, much less bring advanced technologies online to reach them.

To illustrate how critical the handling of data is at this point in society, it is estimated that 17 megabytes of information will be generated by every human being every second by the end of this year alone. No person is physically capable of accurately processing such a high volume of data for any given organization. With nonprofits collecting data points including payment information, demographics, donor interests and more, this issue is a particularly acute one for the space.

This is where we introduce artificial intelligence as a solution. AI, at its base level, is meant to accomplish three key objectives:

• Capture data
• Learn from Data
• Act on insights

Utilizing such a framework, the process of helping a nonprofit is fairly straightforward:

• Help smaller, younger nonprofits capture their data
• As the nonprofit grows and acquires more data, have the AI and the nonprofit’s users learn how that data can help them
• Provide data-backed insights to spur fundraising and reduce overhead related to content production

The volume of insights that a nonprofit can glean from its data is already staggering in its opportunity, but also provides a large barrier to entry for any nonprofit technology companies hoping to immediately tackle large, enterprise level charities, foundations, and supporting players. Each piece of a nonprofit’s operations must be closely examined to identify if and when AI is required — should AI be acquired before other essential functions are fulfilled and the organization risks its stability and success.

AI’s Impact on Internal Nonprofit Processes

According to a recent report from the AI in Advocacy Advisory Council (AAAC), 89% of nonprofit leaders believe that AI will make their organizations more efficient. Additionally, 73% of nonprofits believe AI innovation aligns with their beliefs and 75% believe AI makes their life easier.

This is a trend that has already started to appear on the implementation side, with 15% of nonprofits surveyed already having put AI technologies in place in the last year.

Despite this, 72% of nonprofits are either in the early stage of research or have no plans to implement AI in the next 12 months. While this clashes with the original statistics of heavy nonprofit support for AI’s impact on efficiency, it is also important to note that only 23% of AI nonprofit solutions are actually reaching their intended users today, which indicates a lack of adequate market penetration.

The strong support for AI Implementation stems from the immense impact AI can have on internal nonprofit processes. At nearly every level of a nonprofit organization there exist base tasks that can be easily automated to return much needed time to overstretched marketing, executive, and fundraising teams within the organization.

How AI can impact the inner workings of a nonprofit can be divided into what we call fully internal and internal/external processes. In effect, processes that allow the nonprofit to efficiently function from within and processes that allow them to bring in donor dollars. In the for-profit world, these would essentially be your ‘customer-facing’ processes.

For fully internal operations, much of AI’s impact comes from its ability to automate routine tasks. Specifically, AI’s ability to sort through the massive amounts of financial data nonprofits receive in order to quickly identify abnormalities and fraud is something that can be quickly applied to the sector and render massive benefits for nonprofits both large and small.

Furthermore, utilizing such data parsing abilities can also quickly allow nonprofit HR staff to screen qualified candidates and move them through the hiring process significantly quicker than a non-AI empowered team would be able to be able to.

Despite these benefits, however, it is the impact AI has on internal/external processes where nonprofits can truly benefit. From the ground up, nonprofits external advocacy, support, and fundraising services can be radically improved with the proper implementation of AI.

For instance, AI can provide advocacy and fundraising experts sophisticated metrics to assess what their donors really care about both on and offline. In Hopeful’s case, we have been working with nonprofits to harness AI’s processing power to identify which keywords, hashtags, videos, and images posted on an organization’s social media causes donors to support their cause. Using this information, Hopeful’s AI then creates automatic draft posts to save marketing teams time and energy from crafting messaging that is traditionally unsupported by supporting data.

AI, while being extremely effective at bringing in new donors, also has a key role to play in keeping existing donors in the funding cycle. Donor retention has been an extremely important challenge for the nonprofit space, with an average donor retention rate of just 45.5% across the industry as of 2018. This has been constant for the last decade, indicating a huge area of opportunity for new technologies to come in and change the status quo for the better.

AI’s ability to recognize patterns in massive datasets allows nonprofits to focus on what existing donors care about, and craft their programs and storytelling to maximize opportunities for re-donation. This is a critical revenue driver for nonprofits in its own right, with every $100 gained being subsequently offset by a staggering $96 in losses through donor attrition.

Conclusion

Nonprofits are ideally situated to benefit from Artificial Intelligence based technologies to increase their efficiency and drive extraordinary levels of revenue in the years ahead. While nonprofits have been slowly recognizing the need to begin implementation of innovative solutions to ensure their future growth, world conditions have been accelerating the sentiment that more needs to be done to catch up with for-profit technology practices.

This article serves as a follow up to a recent talk I gave for the Canadian AI, Machine Learning, Data Science & Engineering Meetup, which covered the same topics as this article at a high level.

Disclaimer: I am the CEO and Cofounder of Hopeful Inc, a high-growth startup enabling nonprofits to go beyond likes and get more funds through social media and online giving sources utilizing Artificial Intelligence. We ourselves are currently raising our Seed Round. To learn more, please feel free to send me an email at ajivov@hopefulinc.me

This article was originally published on LinkedIn

Why the Jump to AI Will Revolutionize Nonprofit Tech was originally published in DataDrivenInvestor on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

More often than not, the word ‘nonprofit’ immediately draws a look of skepticism from investors during a meeting. No matter how well a pitch goes, that one word is what draws the attention of investors once I finish the presentation and hit Q&A. Despite being a for-profit (albeit mission-driven) company here at Hopeful, the mere fact we are associated with a space that is decidedly not profit-focused is what becomes investors’ sole point of focus.

This article is dedicated to making the case that this unprofitable perception is not only inaccurate, but is a huge missed opportunity for investors.

When these conversations occur, there are usually three questions that are routinely asked:

1. Nonprofit customers are tough — how do you expect to sell to them when they have no money?
2. How can you successfully scale in such a tough sector?
3. With COVID-19, how are you selling into a space being wiped out?

I’ll frame this article around these 3 questions, as they not only allow me to give greater context to the state of the nonprofit sector, but also advocate why nonprofit tech is the new frontier for high-growth tech startups looking to make a tremendous social impact in their communities and around the world.

The Tough, Broke Customer

Almost universally, nonprofits are seen as the quintessential example of organizations struggling to get by on threadbare funding. With no discretional funding in place, it appears from the outside that selling into such a sector is a fool’s errand.

Looking at the data, a different story quickly becomes apparent. According to a March 2020 report by Imagine Canada, the Canadian nonprofit sector makes up a whopping 8.1% of our country’s GDP, employing 2.4 million Canadians, 70% of which are women, and contributing over $240 Billion to the economy in 2018. In the United States, this number is a staggering $1 Trillion — nearly the size of Germany’s GDP.

Utilizing these numbers, the Canadian nonprofit industry expenditures alone (not even including nonprofits that are not charities) eclipses the following industries as a percentage of GDP:

• Mining, quarrying and oil or gas extraction (8.14%)
• Finance and insurance (7.1%), Public administration (6.33%)
• Wholesale trade (5.66%)
• Retail trade (5.41%)
• Transportation and warehousing (4.44%)
• Utilities (2.27%)
• Accommodation and food services (2.17%)
• Agriculture, forestry, fishing and hunting (1.65%)

At the highest level, this indicates an industry with resources available. Digging further, over 45% of annual nonprofit budgets come from independent sales of goods and services, indicating these statistics are not distortions tied to government subsidies for such organizations.

On the technology front, nonprofits have started to recognize their need to bring new and advanced technologies to bear, with very large nonprofits (categorized as having an annual operating budget (AOB) of $10+ million/year) spending an average of $3,000 on IT per staff member.

Outside of the enterprise size nonprofit, the numbers paint an even more intriguing picture — with large ($5-$10 Million AOB) and medium-sized ($1–5 Million AOB) organizations spending more per staff member — $5,016.32 and $3,468.11. Even smaller, grassroots nonprofits spend an average $2,127.45 on technology per staff member.

Scaling in the Nonprofit Sector

So, there is money to be spent by nonprofits — but how does a nonprofit technology company hope to scale in such a diffuse market?

Many indications, especially with the rise of COVID19, point toward the rapid acceleration of new technology adoption in the nonprofit space — a golden opportunity for mission driven startups to quickly bring their innovations to a large number of nonprofits on the frontlines of the world’s most pressing issues.

First and foremost, Spring is a prime fundraising period for charities and nonprofits, and physical distancing protocols have forced the cancellation of virtually every group-based fundraising event planned across Canada.

Even for the most luddite nonprofits, this has forced them to examine digital solutions for management and fundraising. Namely, technologies that will reduce their overheard and increase donations from Online Giving.

According to the M+R 2018 Online Study of Giving:

• Total online revenue grew by 10% in 2019.
• Online giving increased 23% in 2017, after 15% growth in 2016.
• Monthly online giving grew 40% from the previous year.
• One time online giving grew 19% from the previous year.

Moving to digital solutions involves the creation of massive amounts of data, something that the nonprofit sector has infamously struggled with in the past decade. Even with a mandated move to online fundraising and an increased need for technological solutions, only 6% of nonprofits worldwide reported optimizing their data for success — another opportunity for mission-drive tech companies to have a serious impact.

For a Mid-Market SaaS company such as Hopeful, such opportunities represent a $90 Million+ ARR opportunity in the Canadian market alone, and such opportunity continues to scale rapidly depending on the size of nonprofits a particular organization may be offering solutions to.

The COVID Effect

The unprecedented COVID19 Pandemic has universally put every sector on the planet (except perhaps Telecom and video conferencing) in a very difficult situation.

The nonprofit sector in particular has been hit hard by the crisis, with Imagine Canada projecting charities losing between $9.5 billion and 15.6 Billion and layoff between 117,000 and 194,000 employees (assuming a 3–6 month quarantine window).

However, COVID19 is a crisis of the material, not digital, realm. Companies that implement value-first sales strategies benefit from offering free services and support to nonprofit that need to consistently drive donations to stay afloat.

Contributing back to the community is a key tenet of how Hopeful conducts business and mobilizing non-product resources is essential to the continuing success of nonprofits. Here at Hopeful, we highly encourage our team members to contribute what they can to nonprofits in their communities, whether it be financial or in-kind donations to help out those in need.

Doubling down on mission-first goals, rather than financial objectives, has been a tremendously powerful force in driving revenue for many nonprofit and for-profit tech companies, and in turn, achieving desired returns for their investors.

(Note: Hopeful has been offering free access to any nonprofit needing our social media analytics tools during COVID19)

Conclusion

The nonprofit sector is poised for a renaissance of digital transformation as a result of trends accelerated by the current crisis. With a market size well in excess of $1 Trillion, many organizations in the space are yearning for new, nonprofit focused tools and business models to help support them and the constituents they service.

Disclaimer: I am the CEO and Cofounder of Hopeful Inc, a high-growth startup enabling nonprofits to go beyond likes and get more funds through social media and online giving sources utilizing Artificial Intelligence. We ourselves are currently raising our Seed Round. To learn more, please feel free to send me an email at ajivov@hopefulinc.me

This article was originally posted on LinkedIn

Why Investors Should Be Looking at Nonprofit Tech in a Post-COVID World was originally published in DataDrivenInvestor on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Planning a dinner party is a lot like building a business plan. While it is a less stressful process that you are most certainly going to lose money on, the steps are largely similar.

Firstly, you have to evaluate the market. How many people are coming to the party? Are they experiencing a compelling problem that you can solve (i.e. a deep craving for Mexican food)?

How will you segment the customer base — are you making a lot of different tacos or are you making a big plate of nachos to appeal to a homogenous group of gluttons?

Second, what’s your product? Are you going to be the master French chef of the evening, or does your industry experience position you for better success in the Fried Chicken and Biscuits sector?

How are you going to market your special dinner party? Are you setting up a group chat marketing channel to directly connect with your leads? Or is this going to be leveraging the video marketing of a Snapchat “Hey Roll Thru Tn” ad campaign?

What are your dinner startup capital requirements? Is it a pay week and you can afford Whole Foods Organic Spinach? Or will you bootstrap this venture and reduce costs by going to the local No Frills?

All critical questions that need to be answered, both in business and in gluttony.

I write this food analogy article having just hired my first employee for Hopeful, a data analytics company for nonprofits that I have proudly been working on for the better part of a year.

While by all accounts we are very early on in our entrepreneur’s journey, I still think reflection important. Specifically, on how exactly I cobbled together this entire enterprise from the beginning, and how I even knew where to begin in the first place.

After six years as an amateur Chef, food blogger, published cookbook author, and now CEO, I now tend to think about a lot of things through the medium of food.

Food can be as simple or as complex as you want it to be. You are 100% in control of its creation- from sourcing the ingredients to how it is finally plated for optimal consumption.

Externalities can easily be predicted and controlled, you don’t have life-or-death consequences associated with it — unless you are making Japanese Fugu- and the only stakeholders involved are those you are planning to feed.

Food is entrepreneurship made less dire.

Starting a company, in many ways, is like fumbling around in a kitchen for the first time. You don’t know what does what, what is the best pan or pot to use for a certain recipe, or even what exactly the ingredients are that you need for a certain dish.

I started my cooking journey with instant ramen in a $7 Target Pot — barely qualifying as cooking, but it was a start.

With my company, I started with a $12 Dollarama whiteboard and a rough idea (which has subsequently changed several times).

Over time, I began adding to my basic ramen — Scallions, Eggs, Hot Sauce, whatever I had on hand.

With my company, I began teaching myself about the nonprofit industry, how to build a business plan, and basic accounting.

And so in tandem these skills grew. Ramen became fresh pasta, which evolved into making my own homemade sauces and condiments, which evolved into Sous Vide Steaks and French Style Veal Chops, which eventually came together into a cookbook.

As the precision and time requirements of my recipes grew, the more they began to reflect the basic aspects of building a company.

Cooking, like many other skills, is dependent on a building block style approach to mastery — start simple and work your way up. You don’t start as a Michelin Star Chef, just as you don’t start as the CEO/Founder of a billion dollar company.

Food analogies help me process the insanity that is starting a business, but I challenge you to take a look at your own hobbies and find your own process.

Once I realized the comparison, I applied the same principles to building Hopeful. Those principles became a guiding star — where I started and where I wanted to go.

The Ramen

You have an idea, but no real idea of what you are doing. The basics can be found all around you, so you go with the cheapest and simplest starting pointing and go from there.

This is the birth of your company, which has an infinite possible number of possible beginnings.

Perhaps, like me, you started with ramen (blind Googling and Medium/Quora reading), or perhaps you already had something to go on (A Java Dev with a Java-built kind of business).

Regardless, this is when you start slowly adding in the additions to your pot. Your scallions (a business plan), your eggs (a go-to-market strategy), your hot sauce (the basics of an MVP), and more.

The Sauce

You have some knowledge under your belt. You’ve incorporated, started potentially fleshing out a founding team, and learning the complimentary business skills you need to get started.

A business plan is built, and you either already have your MVP built or are actively testing for product/market fit with your target market. Calls are being made, tech is being evaluated, and you test for everything you can to see what is going to solve for the most pain and create the most compelling reason to buy.

Things are starting to take shape, and you feel optimistic about the future.

The Steak

Customers have been acquired, and money is being made. You still have challenges — steaks and clients are still getting burned once in a while — but you are off to the races.

This is the dinner party stage, where you have enough of a network to be the host for a whole new offering of business cuisine, and where you are in control of your destiny.

You are now a business, and can justifiably put “Founder/CEO” on your social accounts without being labelled a dreaded Wantrapreneur.

Welcome to the kitchen.

Conclusion

Food analogies help me process the insanity that is starting a business, but I challenge you to take a look at your own hobbies and find your own process.

Remember, cooking is just my chosen skill, but the building block concept is applicable to almost all hobbies.

Want to follow along as I learn how to make the steak? Follow me in my entrepreneur’s kitchen on LinkedIn, Quora, and Instagram.

Why segregating your dream and your job only slows you down

It’s 2019 now.

I’m sitting in the Delhi Airport coming back from my cross-country India trip, quietly sipping espresso and desperately trying to remember how exactly I do my job and where my office is.

Work clients, my side hustle investors and my cookbook editors are slowly coming out of the woodwork on my Gmail tab, sensing my Out of Office Responder will be turning off soon.

Each new email notification that pops up is a new shark fin breaking the surface of the calm waters that are Alex’s sense of self-reflection.

Looking forward, 2019 is set to be a groundbreaking year. With the launch of my cookbook, Live Big Eat Bigger, and my company both fast approaching, I can’t help but start contemplating on how exactly I’m going to manage so many different balls in the air while still holding down my day job.

Having previously written about being becoming a devout follower of high-energy entrepreneur gurus like Gary Vaynerchuk, Tim Ferriss, and Adam Grant in 2018, I am beginning to realize that there is an underlying flaw in the “work your 9–5 and work your side-hustle until 2 am” ethos that seems to have been massively popularized of late.

The flaw being that, for some reason, it is assumed that you have to fully segregate your dream from your income, until you can combine the two together on launch day.

The greater the workload approaching my own personal launch day, the more I come to reject the gurus’ assumption.

Granted, there are a great many careers that may demand such segregation — whether it be due to high workload, high meeting volume, or hours that do not align with your side-hustle’s target market — but there are also a great many jobs that do not.

For example, I work for a high-growth stage technology company based in Toronto, Canada. Specifically, I am a Sales Executive — much of my day-to-day centers on client-facing meetings, dealing with existing customers, and basically being glued to my phone at all hours.

However, sales being a highly cyclical career, there is a fairly limited window in the year in which I am so slammed than an entire 10am — 6pm (yes, we’re one of those companies…) day is completely filled with such meetings.

So there are patches. Patches of glorious, unscheduled time that are ripe for conquering.

These are often not significant periods of time either. While I am sometimes blessed with a free morning or afternoon, more often than not these are increments of five, ten, fifteen minutes. Max.

Then a new day job fire begins and my attention has to turn back to the desk I am actually sitting at, rather than the one sitting in my imagination.

If I go and get myself fired, then this entire exercise is useless, isn’t it?

I have found such unscheduled time to be absolutely critical in the past several months for building up my businesses. With the limited time I have, these blocks usually just involve jumping to another email tab to check for any investor updates, opening up my editor to make changes to the cookbook as it approaches publishing day, or even just a quick LinkedIn hop to see if any potentially qualified engineers have entered my network.

These little bites of activity, individually, don’t get too much done. But in the aggregate, over about a four-month period, they have helped me:

1. Find my mentor

2. Make connections with top business incubators

3. Connect with my first investors

4. Build an MVP and launch a company

It is important to note that the above milestones weren’t reached JUST by utilizing unscheduled work time.

With some tasks, such as the MVP, you will definitely need to combine in-job time with the late nights of Gary Vee.

But, extrapolating backwards, those milestones would have taken at least an extra two to three months to reach without the creative use of the free time I had at work.

This is how you do it.

Build Your System

Before leaving for India, I had begun experimenting with different approaches to optimize the balance between managing actual job responsibilities and my side-hustles.

Constructing such a system definitely has some prerequisites to be successful, and if you are lacking any of the below, it may take some tweaking to achieve the best results.

The Tim Ferriss Approach — Emails in Batches

Outside of internal meetings, the number one consumer of time at most modern workplaces is the never-ending email loop. Answer one, another appears, answer that one, and yet another pops up — and so on and so forth.

Dealing with those emails strategically is the number one priority if you want to be able to take advantage of unscheduled time. If you get trapped in the traditional cycle of answering each email as it crops up, your clients will quickly consume any time you do have available.

In Tim Ferriss’s famous/infamous book The Four-Hour Workweek; one of the most interesting concepts Tim introduces to deal with this issue is the email batching approach.

Essentially, Ferriss recommends restricting your email responses to (strictly enforced) blocks of time throughout the day, and then answering them all in one fell swoop.

To go a step further, he even recommends setting an automatic response message when you are outside of those times so that your clients know when to expect a response.

While I personally do not go that far, I have found that creating such blocks has tremendously helped in freeing up large chunks of my day that otherwise would be spent responding to emails.

The transition at first can be jarring — especially if you work somewhere with very high inbound email volume — but after about two weeks the majority of your clients will become accustomed to it.

You have full freedom on when those blocks are set. In the Four Hour Workweek, Tim uses 12pm and 4pm as his respective response blocks. Given my hours, I usually utilize 10am (right when I get into the office) and 5pm (when things are winding down).

Manage Your Managers

The degree of difficulty for this step will vary wildly from person to person, depending on their individual relationship(s) with their managers, how many managers they actually have, and a variety of other inter-personal factors.

I am blessed to have incredibly supportive and understanding managers, who act more as mentors than actual bosses at times, but that doesn’t mean I get more leeway. I still have sales quotas and targets to hit, and for a salesperson, quotas are your God.

What did allow me the flexibility to work more openly on my side projects, however, was creating an environment of open communication with my managers.

By bringing them into the process of what you are building, you accomplish two things — demonstrating personal initiative by pursuing your own projects outside of work, and also showing that you care deeply enough about your day job obligations, and their personal opinions, to communicate with them what you are doing.

In a best case scenario, this approach can even help you make progress in your actual day career, if you are far enough off from launch day that you are still considering promotion prospects at your current employer.

Get Started

So there you have it. Start slow and try the techniques above to maximize every second of your day’s productivity. If done correctly, you can shave months of time off the goals you have set for yourself.

Even if its some emails here and there, every little inch of activity will eventually grow into an empire.

Let’s begin.

Does What We Build Define Society?

I walk out of the airport terminal in Jaipur, India. Its 9:25 am local time — I’m tired and starved, and definitely not on alert for anything that would throw me for a loop.

Having been in India for several weeks at this point, I was no longer moved by traditional culture shock fare. An elephant in rush hour traffic? Sure, seems like there are more efficient forms of transport, but have it. Camels walking around munching on any stray café food that you may have been planning to eat?

No problem my slobbering, four-legged friend.

Complacency, however, is an interesting four-legging beast of its own.

Driving into Jaipur — the “Pink City” — I suddenly find myself massively overwhelmed. The nickname isn’t a metaphor.

This city is really, really pink.

Everywhere I look, whether it be the building façades, the wooden carts stocked with all manner of different souvenirs, the road itself; it’s all pink. Not only that, but Jaipur is an advertising heavy city — and all the ads are referencing how pink the city is.

A medium-length conniption later, I get out my laptop and start typing. After seeing the glitz of the terracotta (Jaipur is only known as the Pink City due to the error of a British journalist, who could not accurately describe the colour of terracotta), I began to notice the people of the city itself.

Jaipur, more so than many of the other cities I had seen, was objectively very poor. Regular power cuts meant that people could be seen shivering around trash fires on the side of the street at night. Emaciated wild dogs roamed freely, and outside of the more affluent downtown core, the population of the city often looked as if they themselves hadn’t had a proper meal in quite some time.

The poverty, coupled with the absurdity of the physical city, created an interesting overshadowing effect.

Walking through the streets of Jaipur, the city’s populace faded starkly into the background. They were, for all intents and purposes, divorced from the city they themselves inhabited.

Even removing the noise and activity everyone generated around me, Jaipur itself would be exactly the same if it were all suddenly removed.

In effect, the city had transcended the humans who built it.

In North America, the brutalism of modern architecture has largely eliminated any possibility of such a weird effect occurring. With every city looking largely the same, we are defined by the cultures we build within the walls of each matte grey skyscraper.

It is a beautifully heterogeneous creation sitting within a not so brilliant homogenous fish tank, but what are the implications of these two radically different societies existing at the same time?

Both extremes have critical defects that can potentially be solved by looking at the opposite case.

For example, lets take a classic case study in North America — New York City.

One of the financial, and increasingly technological, capitals of the world, New York is a city that definitely has its own pockets of character; walking through Greenwich Village or SoHo proves that point.

As a whole, however, it is a quintessentially modern-built city. The vast majority of New York’s character is associated with the people and companies that inhabit it, and much of popular culture reflects that.

If you took New York and broke it down to just the skeletal frame of the city, keeping the people, the cultural impact would be significantly less than what would happen if the same were to be done in Jaipur.

That vibrancy of people-driven culture drives economic progress unlike anything ever seen before in modern history. Absolute poverty is near non-existent, with opportunities for entrepreneurship in every conceivable nook and cranny.

So how can New York learn from Jaipur?

This is a tough question I am still wrestling with, even as I write this piece. To give an answer like “make it pink!” is powerfully tempting, for the sake of comedy at a minimum, but its not going to quite cut it.

Looking deeper, the closest thing I’ve found to an answer so far lies in how modern Jaipur itself is sustained.

At its core, Jaipur a tourist town through and through. Whether it be the converted palaces of the royal house of Jaipur, the magnificent Royal Observatory, or the brilliant artists that use their skills with natural colours to produce one of a kind works, there is something for every type of traveler to see (and buy).

That money, as can be seen just by walking the streets, is clearly not going to the people who need it the most — but that is a topic for another time.

What the focus on tourism does highlight, however, is the ability to channel a singular purpose for an entire city. Jaipur isn’t just known as the Pink City, it has groomed that title to become part of its very essence for being.

So back to New York, then. What if such a singular purpose, starting at a grassroots level, were to transform the city’s foundations at the most fundamental level?

What would be the effect of focusing on the city’s key physical attractions — Greenwich Village, the Meatpacking District, Brooklyn, the Statue of Liberty, etc. — and allowing their influence to spread into parts of the city that they previously had been strictly segregated from?

This is something I will continue to think about, so consider this article an introduction to a wider thread of weird thinking.

Returning to writing from the comfort of an airport lounge

Firstly, I’d like to thank Sinem Günel for being the genesis for this article.

We’ve never met or interacted in any way, but whether through a stroke of fate or something else, the notification email I received that she had highlighted something in one of my older articles just caused something to click — before I knew it, half this article was already filling up my screen.

So… what’s new?

It’s December 21st, 2018 and I’m sitting in the Mumbai International Airport, waiting to board a flight to the City of Lakes and Palaces, Udaipur. The jet lag has had me up since 4:30am, and I’ve been monotonously editing pages of my new cookbook, Live Big, Eat Bigger, for what seems like several thousand years.

Nominally, I’m in India on vacation with my family, but in reality, I’ve been doing more editing and sending emails than I have actually been taking in the sights and sounds of this beautiful, profoundly strange, country.

Whether it be dealing with publishers, potential investors for my other convoluted business ideas, or clients from my actual day job wondering where I was, there was always something to be done or someone who needed a good hand-holding.

And all is well in the world.

Since you last joined me, I had gone from using Medium as a kind of high-effort stress relief machine, to using it to espouse my new philosophy for dealing with productivity, to dropping off the map altogether to start focusing on implementing the philosophy I had been writing about.

I’m in the final stages of publishing a cookbook, chatting with investment firms in Toronto, New York, and London about a business venture I’m launching, and coming to the conclusion that, no, overcommitting to your personal success does not inevitably drive you nuts.

But what is the game-changer here?

Everything I’ve written about previously has been a collection of broad ideas to help those struggling to break free of their own personal opinion prisons, but nothing in there actually gave concrete examples of what to do once you hopped that prison wall.

That, at the time, was intentional; I still almost militantly believe that every single person has his or her own destiny that should not be tampered with by suggesting boilerplate projects (i.e. think of how many “start your own blog and make millions” articles exist) to work on.

Scrolling through old feedback emails here in the airport, however, I now realize that perhaps I leaned too far the other way.

Yes, my philosophy of selective independence seemingly has worked — for one person (me). But describing something without an anchor to attach it to, without one or multiple examples of how specifically you can replicate the same, makes the entire effort useless.

Build something.

Literally, anything. That is the anchor here — whether it be building a new LEGO set, a car engine, a startup — anything here works. Human beings are hardwired as a collective to inevitably build rather than destroy, and therein lies the opportunity for every single person reading this article to take advantage of everything I have written about so far.

If you have read this and are now faced with the classic “but I’m not good at anything / don’t know what to do” dilemma, just relax. You aren’t doomed.

1. Look around you — what do you see of even the smallest interest?

2. Look at whatever you’re reading this on — what apps or files are saved there?

From personal experience, option 1 or 2 will usually get you moving in the right direction, even if it is in the tiniest way. You may think you aren’t good at anything or don’t know what to do, but the likeliest scenario is that you are blocking yourself from figuring it out — subconsciously.

Human beings are hardwired as a collective to inevitably build rather than destroy, and therein lies the opportunity for every single person reading this article to take advantage of everything I have written about so far.

For example — in 2013, I stumbled upon an article on Buzzfeed called “22 Ways to Spice Up Your Store Bought Ramen.” No previous interest in cooking whatsoever, but thought maybe surviving off plain ramen in college was getting a little old.

So I tried it.

I began slowly — cracking an egg into some finished ramen, then taking a look into some good spices to add, then learning about fresh herbs that could really elevate things, and so on and so forth.

That, over a period of 5 years, subsequently turned into a full-blown cooking hobby, then an Instagram account, then an invite to audition for MasterChef Canada, and then a cookbook.

Stupid way to start something? Sure, looking in from the outside.

Worth buying a dozen eggs and some basic spices for ramen, looking back on it? Absolutely.

Each individual success, whether it be a successfully delicious bowl of noodles or a broiled chicken au jus, spurred me further and further to push the limit on what I thought was possible.

Start at the lowest common denominator that works for you, and have it. As an added bonus, starting out at that low level and working upwards will significantly reduce the chance of failure, as you’re going to be learning all the way to the top.

Other people’s opinions will slow you down, but we’ve already covered how to manage that.

So I challenge you to start something today, no matter how small, and see how it plays out.

Recently, I’ve been embarking on a journey to try and optimize – cleanse myself of negative elements brought about by a social life which was less than ideal for what I was trying to achieve.

Six months in — progress has definitely been made, but with a surprising amount of new obstacles rearing their distracting heads along the way.

My own brain, turns out, is one of the worst offenders.

Although at times your inner voice can keep you clear, focused, and able to quickly prioritize as only the human brain can, at other times it can have different priorities.

While there have been countless numbers of memes and GIFs exploring the distractions your inner voice throws at you for no apparent reason, diving into that is a whole other beast entirely.

It’s the other part of that beast that I’m here to help fight.

This takes well thought out plans and throws in unrelated hypotheticals that always hold some kind of delicious appeal that make it hard to stay on track.

You could be writing, but you know what would be REALLY fun….

You could be coding, but you could use some more wins in Fortnite….

You could probably do this project due in 24 hours faster with a margarita in hand…..

All fun distractions, but annoying when it came to the long-term strategy of optimizing my time. It was time to take an audit of my own brain — why were these distractions happening at such a higher rate than before?

To try and generalize as to why this was happening was a sure-fire way for me to make a mistake. If I could not identify the problem while it was in the background, lurking, why would I be able to figure it out now that it was upon me?

I looked back at what had changed the past few months and, ironically, found that my own self-improvement methods had created a brand new problem.

See, as I started eliminating distractions and giving myself more time to work on my writing, my health, and my software development skills, there was a lot of time that was…. empty.

Empty — as in isolated. Time spent in solitude without having to deal with another human soul for more than a short conversation to check in.

The natural reaction was…

I’m screwed.

This is still an ongoing problem. However, after falling back on my defaults (Googling and inspirational Instagram pages) I’ve managed to not quiet, but heavily mitigate, the risk posed by the rampaging bear that is my subconscious. Here are the game-changers:

1. Lean Into the Emptiness of Productivity

This was the big one. If it is impossible to change the basic characteristics that cause your mind to run rampant, why not double down?

Harness that random chaotic energy and make it, forcefully, work towards what you were actually trying to accomplish.

The issue that arises with dedicated productivity is that it creates a vacuum at your peripheral vision. The brain is not designed to be focused on just one task for such a long period of time without the option of switching away.

But, luckily for myself, I had previously stumbled on the solution.

Habit formation is by far the most effective tool I have had in my arsenal for dealing with external stimuli, and it proved to be just as helpful, with a few tweaks, in dealing with this internal issue.

Say I was coding, and I get the urge to switch to Netflix – previously, Netflix and another episode of Luke Cage would win a disturbing amount of the time.

The solution? Have a list of my most pressing tasks, outside of coding, sitting on my desk, my lap, wherever. Remind myself that there are a multitude of different things that I enjoy that could take my attention, while also allowing myself to stay productive.

“Ok, Brain, I get coding is getting a bit stale for you… but let’s bang out a few hundred words on our newest Medium article instead of vegetating in bed, shall we?”

By giving myself off-ramps into other areas I could work on, I derailed my brain’s own distracted thought process for my own benefit.

2. Do NOT Lean Into the Burn-Out

Optimize, but not to the point of wanting to kill yourself. The longer I worked, the harder it became to stop my psyche from going rogue.

Mental balancing isn’t a struggle. It is, as it’s name implies, a balancing act between yourself and your worse self. The part that wants to create, and that part that wants to destroy (mostly yourself).

The beautiful thing about having the capacity for such creation and destruction in the same human vessel is where you can catch a break.

If you destroy yourself, your mind will destroy itself in short order. If you manage the process of your own success, keep the energy level at a point that a total collapse isn’t always on the horizon… that’s where the true capacity to shine lies.

This is a crucial point — I’m not pretending to be arrogant here and say that I achieved perfectly balanced Chi and I am the Master of My Own Mental Destiny. That is simply not a thing.

So get sleep as needed, exercise regularly, and reserve just the weekends for destroying your bank account and waistline through UberEats McDonalds orders.

3. Do Not Let Mediocrity Poison You

This was my last realization. The external and internal are linked entities in every respect, and not completely optimizing my external surroundings proved to be a prime way to cause a mental riot.

Clearing my surroundings of noise I didn’t want was just the first step. The noise addressed the underlying structure of my life, but not completely — there were still those key factors in the day that produced negative outcomes.

Mediocrity, being so subjective, is an impossible concept to generalize, so I can only provide you a tale of my situation as a frame of reference for your own self-examination.

As I did previously, I self-audited to see what I needed to change externally. Not for my external goal-setting, but to bring the most peace to my mind.

What I found was tough to bear.

I had known for a while that the job I was working in, for a top tier tech startup in downtown Toronto, was well-paying and provided a ton of mobility going forward.

We had just gotten a huge new round of funding, and everything looked to be bright and sunny for my career prospects if I just stayed put.

But as time went on, and the strings of my off-hours projects began to pull at my mind harder and harder, I realized that just because you’re in a “good” situation, doesn’t mean you are in an optimal situation for yourself.

I want to say I came up with this idea myself, but it never really hit home until I read Alice Vuong’s piece, The Experience Will Look Good On Your Resume. Her point regarding living your life for your passions, rather than exclusively for more money, shattered the mirror on a problem I couldn’t bring myself to accept.

That being said, I must say my story has yet to end with me “quitting my job and pursuing my dreams” as so many on Medium do. I still have financial obligations that need to be met, but damn if I’m not trying my hardest in the moonlit hours to make that optimal situation happen.

Call to Action

Next time your doing an important task and your brain starts running wild, take that energy and use it to self-audit. What is working in your life? Not in a good way, but in the way that is optimal for your own mental comfort, general happiness, and financial situation.

So remember:

Create habits to give your brain alternatives to isolation

Make sure to avoid anything that makes you feel like your stuck in mediocrity

Always take care of yourself — physically and mentally.

The answers may be hard to find at first, but once you have them, you have the steps necessary to make that one big change.