Month: January 2017

Most Americans have never heard of the name Donald Bradman. Bradman was the greatest cricket player of all time. And it’s not even close.

Bradman’s lifetime batting average was 99.94. The next best batting average was Graeme Pollock’s 60.97. It’s like a baseball player batting over .500 every season for his entire career.

If you look at the standard deviation for above average athletes in sports, 2.3 would put you in the top 1%. Bradman had a standard deviation of 4.4. He was better at cricket then Jordan was to basketball (3.4), Nicklaus was to golf (3.5), and Cobb was to baseball (3.6).

By these metrics, you can argue that Bradman was the greatest athlete of all time.

The lizard brain is very good at tricking us into believing that we have to be the best in order to belong.

If you are going to wait to be as good as Bradman to feel like you belong, you will be waiting for a long time.

Because you will never be as good as Donald Bradman at anything you choose to do.

So why wait?

You belong when you decide you belong. You belong when you start contributing to the tribe. You belong when you start making a difference.

Now.

Go.

Make your ruckus.

We need you.

The person who invented the ship also invented the shipwreck.

So when there’s no chance for failure, we’ve eliminated all of the risk.

But without risk, there is no art.

Are you doing work that is remarkable or are you doing the kind of work that is keeping you from being fired?

Are your working for your customers or for your boss?

Do you have 30 years of experience or do you have 1 year of experience repeated 30 times?

Can your job be broken down into a simple set of instructions or is it a project without a map?

When people work with no goal other than attracting a better job or getting tenure or rank advancement, you’ll always find menial and trivial research.

On the other hand, contributions to knowledge come from those wanting to make a difference.

It takes guts to put yourself in the arena knowing you’re going to be banged up. But the other alternative is to sit in the cheap seats with the critics and trolls.

[The world is waiting for you to take your turn.]

It turns out a blue moon is when two full moons occur in the same month.

And it is not as rare as you might think.

It occurs every 28 to 30 months.

The next blue moon will occur on January 31, 2018.

Forget about all the plans you’re making between now and then.

Instead, make a commitment: A quantum leap just might occur once in a blue moon.

The magic of opening night isn’t that everything is going to be perfect. The magic is that this might not work.

If I wanted to go see a show that was perfect, I would just stream something on Netflix.

Because the chance that it might not stream is low. The chance for someone messing up a line or missing a lighting que or having a wardrobe malfunction is virtually zero.

The reason you go to a show and pay ten times the price you would to stream a movie isn’t to see perfection. No, it’s to interact with a tribe. (People like us do stuff like this.) It is to watch something remarkable and meaningful. We want to see something that can make us cry.

It is a safe bet that nothing will go wrong by staying home. But if failure is not an option, then neither is success.

In 1954, there were so many polio cases at the Boston Children’s Hospital they had to perform sidewalk triage in front of distressed parents seated in idling cars.

The polio vaccine was successfully tested the following year. By 1979, polio was eradicated in the United States.

Most people today don’t even know the name Jonas Salk, the scientist who discovered the polio vaccine. But to an entire generation, he was a beloved hero.

Interestingly, Salk never received the Nobel Prize. You might be shocked to find out neither did Mahatma Gandhi and Eleanor Roosevelt. While credit and recognition are nice, it’s not a necessity for leaving behind a legacy.

His discovery is not the only thing Salk left behind. It was his example: His sole focus was to develop a vaccine that would make the world a safer place. He didn’t worry about credit or money or fame.

When asked who owned the patent, Salk simply replied, “There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?”

That vaccine is estimated to be worth over seven billion dollars today.

While awards, accolades and a bigger paycheck are nice, it’s not what professionals care about. They do the work because it matters. They do it because it brings meaning. And, more importantly, they give it in a generous way.

That is what creating art is all about.

Every time an adult male orca is brought into captivity their dorsal fin will begin to collapse.

Scientist still don’t have a definitive answer for why this happens.

I think there are some things in life that are not meant to be in captivity.

And after a while, it’s easy to feel defeated about the things holding us back from reaching our full potential.

I worry about the physical restraints we put on ourselves with the rise of debt and substance abuse. But the deeper concern is the emotional cages we put ourselves in: Somehow, the world has tricked us to believe that the choices we are making don’t really matter.

But each of us has infinite worth. Everything we do has a purpose. All that’s left is finding a way to fulfill it.

In 1770, Wolfgang von Kempelen created the Mechanical Turk. The Turk was a chess-playing machine.

The joke, of course, was that it was fake.

Inside the Turk, there was chess master that would operate the machine. For 84 years, the Turk toured around the world beating most of its opponents. And for 84 years, audiences stood in awe inspired by magic.

The lizard brain inside all of us cannot reconcile with the fact when magic has taken place. Because magic isn’t real. Many of us cannot deal with this tension. So we have to find a way to release it.

But the illusion loses all of its magic after the trick has been revealed.

There is something to be said about the 5-year-old who stands amazed and in wonder of the impossible: We can learn to live with this tension instead of spending all of our time trying to make it go away.

Not much left to discover from the 8 year that says he knows how you did the trick.

We don’t live in the past.

The big moment for us is tomorrow.

By small and simple means are great things brought to pass.

[Like this blog.]

We don’t have to make a big splash to make an impact.

It’s the ripples that reach out and touch us.

It turns out, birds are not meant to live in cages.

But sadly, many of them have been conditioned to keep going back into them because they think it’s safe.

And people are the same way. We move from cage to another. (One job after another. One credit card after another.)

It’s fake.

And there are lots of things in our world and choices that we are making that are fake.

By engaging in things that are fake, we end up making ourselves more desperate and less likely to make a difference in the world for what we think is safety.

We’re not often faced in situations of real risk anymore. I’m talking about the kind of risk that if we were to fail, we would die. No, a safe is not going to fall on our head, a shark is not going to land on our house, and we’re not going to spontaneously combust (even if we think we will).

So then we need to decide what kind of choice are we going to make: Do we want what’s safer or do we want what’s better?

If we want safer, we can keep doing what we’ve been doing. But at some point, we hit the bottom. We can’t go faster than instant, we can’t go cheaper than free, and we can’t go more accurate than 100%.

So the alternative is to race to the top. If we are going to choose better, we are going to have to reconcile the fact that we will be judged. It comes with the choice of freedom. And yeah, sometimes things might not work. But we have an opportunity to fly, to do work that matters, and to make a difference.

[What are you going to do now that you realize the cage door has been unlocked this whole time?]