Achille Morin Lemoine

What I learned from taking my dreams seriously

For broader context, this post is the prologue to the Why Cyrius Failed series.

From confused student to the first customer

I’ve always dreamed of being a “businessman”.

It may sound dumb, but while other children’s wishes were to become a firefighter or a pilot, I was picturing myself in an impeccable three-piece suit, jumping from flight to flight to “do business” all around the world.

I have no idea why it sounded so appealing to me -it was certainly not fame nor money- but it made my eyes shine.

Yet, as I grew up though, it faded off.

I became unsure of what I wanted to achieve in life. I had no real passion, no activity in which I was excelling, no specific goal to reach. “Businessman” does not mean much, right?

At least that’s what I thought.

(Read until the end to discover what I think as of now)

This feeling has followed me through all my younger years, even after I eventually landed in a business school. I thought it could help me figuring out my life but it turned out that what you learn there is not business at all.

The supreme goal of a business school (the reason why you pay half a hundred thousand euros to get in, that is) is to have you accepted in some huge corporate firm with a +40k€ salary from the start. Period.

That is the only way they can attract and bill new first-year students on the following September.

Anyway I was not exactly feeling fulfilled when being a student there, and my short professional experiences -although each one being interesting in its own way- did not set a direction either.

Then, it all changed.

It changed because I made a decision that sounded crazy for most of my classmates and friends.

When deciding what to do for my fourth and last year before graduation, I gave up my exchange program of one year in Seoul, Korea, to follow Entrepreneurship courses.

I felt that I needed somewhere to start, and experiencing the chill life of a student abroad did not sound right to me.

I know that living in a foreign country as a student must be an amazing experience.

I know that Korea and Seoul are definitely worth exploring.

I know that I may not be given that opportunity twice.

But someone once told me:

“Do you know it? (pointing at her head)

Or do you know it? (showing her belly)”

I knew it in my guts that I needed that initial push to finally get back on track to my dream. It would have been a headlong rush to go backpacking in Asia and letting them die.

Not going was actually one of the best decisions of my life, as you will discover soon.

So here is Lesson #1:

What people think is right for them is not necessarily right for you.

That one may sound obvious. But let’s talk about it again when 10 people you trust make you feel like you’re rushing straight into a wall because of that crazy plan of yours. It is actually harder than I thought it would be.

Hence, I started the year into the city that had been witnessing my -blurred- student nights, and where I had sworn not to come back ever.

But one thing was different that time.

I had a goal. An imprecise, doubtful goal, but a goal.

So I started to work towards that goal. Since I had no clue where to start, I took the many venture ideas that were pilling up in my notes and considered them seriously.

School didn’t help much at that stage, but at least they asked us to form groups for our main project of the year, i.e. launching a company.

Stick around, Lesson #2 is coming forth.

With no fixed business ideas, the only trick I could play was picking my teammates with caution. My reasoning was the following: “Better have good teammates on a shitty project than a potential good idea with strings attached by people I don’t like”.

I did my “homework”, carefully and rigorously selecting the people I would spend the following months with.

And dear, was I right to be selective.

I met two brothers in arms in the same situation than me, both hard-working and hilarious people. Everything good that happened since then happened thanks to them, and I am for ever thankful to have found them.

Please choose your business partners seriously. They can as much take your idea to the next stage and boost your motivation, or impede your vision and prevent you from reaching what you aim.

You will spend a LOT of time with those people, so better be certain that you can get along. Above all, make sure that you can laugh with them and be yourself.

My Lesson #2 would then be:

In business like in life, people are the most important.

Surround yourself with inspiring humans to maximise your odds of success. And to enjoy your life, as well.

1_OxkAlhUGLfHDvb4ILpmyOQ These guys are fun

Now that we were three in our little adventure, we put ourselves to work. After years of listening to podcasts and reading entrepreneurial stuff, time had come to actually apply the advice.

“Thanks to” the lockdown in France, we had the opportunity to genuinely focus on the project. And again, we did the homework. We followed a nearly scientific method to generate and sort business ideas with strict guidelines.

Each of us had to generate as much proposals as he could. We then examined them in a table under the light of various criteria, such as

Starting from 30 ideas or so, we labelled them green, orange, or red according to their potential. That method enabled us to efficiently reduce the list to 6 projects.

After delving deeper into each one for one week, we got rid of 3 others.

Ultimately, in order to select THE idea among the last 3 challengers, we called potential customers to gain a better understanding of the market. A few brainstormings later, our 10-billion dollars startup idea was officially selected.

That was before we pivoted 3 times on the same market to find a suitable format, obviously (:

What I want to highlight here is that we did not merely fall upon a marvellous shower thought and rushed into it. Idea generation takes time and craft, at least if your aim is to reduce the dependency on luck.

Today, even after a two successful MVP steps and a first customer (yayyy), we’re still improving our product each week in order to find our product market fit. We harvest user, prospect, and expert feedback to make our way to growth.

Which brings us to Lesson #3:

Smart work outperforms hard work, as it reduces the reliance on luck.

You can find an amazing idea out of the blue, spend your nights executing it, until you eventually fail and call it “bad luck”. Or you can quickly look at the math before and figure out that it was indeed a shitty idea. I believe that success lies in the balance between strategy and execution.

So here we are, trying to make our way through the tough world of entrepreneurship to bring value to the people we serve.

The path is hard but exciting. Most importantly, I learn something new nearly every hour. I have gained so much from an intellectual and human perspective during the past few months.

Remember the doubts I mentioned before? Well, I can say that I have found a way to overcome them.

But not exactly as I thought.

The very lesson that I learned this year, on top of the previous ones, is that not knowing is ok.

It’s ok not to have a passion.

It’s ok not to know what your job will be.

It’s ok to take your time and enjoy the present even when the future is so blurred for everyone.

I eventually figured out that the “businessman” I wanted to become in my dreams was merely an ideal of a “proactive person”. Just do stuff, and the path will get clearer along the way.

Wanna feel less confused? Listen to yourself and not to people, surround yourself with humans you admire and have fun with, and get to (smart) work.

That’s all.

The key is not to stop feeling lost.

The key is to make your peace with that feeling.

PS: My two other childhood dreams were being an adventurer, and/or an inventor. Perhaps my next move is to leave everything behind and perform a circumnavigation around the globe. Or to unveil the next technological breakthrough in quantum computing. Stay tuned.