Month: October 2017

The market gets to decide what is popular, what sells, what is talked about.

Of course, the mass market is paranoid, emotional and wrong about most things, it doesn’t have good taste.

Thanks to the internet and Google, we fortunately live in a golden age of the long tail—there are many markets to choose from, an infinite amount of choices.

It can be overwhelming. Where do we start? What if we are wrong?

Well, were you able to decide what to have for lunch? You picked something, right? You didn’t starve yourself.

You might be wrong at first. The cost of failure has never been lower. (Chances are, you won’t starve.)

Decision-making gets better by making decisions. So decide how it is you are going to improve the world and start. Tomorrow, you can choose again.

If you are still not sure what to pick, here are two options:

1. Put up a poster board with sticky notes of your favorite ideas and while blindfolded throw darts at it. Whatever sticks is your next project.
2. Make a giant wheel, spin it, where it lands is what you start.

Whatever you do, don’t ask your friends or family. Chances are they won’t be your customers. Much better to find a product for your customers rather than finding customers for your product.

Americans on average pick up their phone 47 times a day.

That is 17,155 times a year we are checking our phones for calls, texts, emails, tweets, pings, updates…

What if we cut the time we spent checking our phones in half?

What could you do with all that time?

“I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.”

“I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.”

“I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.”

“I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.”

“I wish that I had let myself be happier.”

Notice how no one wishes for more stuff or to watch more TV or to spend more hours at work. Seems to me that those who live to an older age don’t even wish for more time but rather they did more with the time they had.

It’s why it is so vital to always be creating something and shipping something. No matter how bad your job is or how hard life gets, you can point to your art and say, “Here, I made this.”

One more day is one more chance to find courage to live the live you always wanted. It’s merely a choice to march to the sound of your own drum.

[Thank you Bronnie for the work you do and the messages you spread.]

At first, it isn’t.

It doesn’t sound like much fun to mow an elderly woman’s lawn and it doesn’t sound like fun to serve soup to someone without a home.

And writing waivers or filling out insurance forms or putting together a binder of standard operating procedures for your new project isn’t much fun either.

But I don’t think fun is actually what we are looking for, what we are searching for is meaningful.

Riding your favorite roller coaster over and over again is boring because fun wears off rather quickly. Meaningful, however, invites us to do something a little harder and reach a little higher.

If you are not sure which project to create, which job to take or which business to start:

Pick something that sings to you.

(Of course, if you are refusing to make any difficult decisions because you are afraid to dance with the fear, well, that is just another form of hiding.)

The thing about pet peeves is that they make really terrible pets.

No matter how much love you give, they won’t love you back.

Steve House is one of the most accomplished climbers in history.

His resume includes a first ascent on the Rupal Face of Nanga Parbat, considered by many to be one of the biggest and most difficult walls in the world. Instead of sitting back and resting on his achievements though, he is teaching us.

(Steve wrote two blog posts that I think are worth reading. You can find them here and here.)

Anyone who has ever participated in any type of mountain sport understands that gear and knowledge will always be secondary to our capacity of accepting risk.

Of course, domain knowledge is essential and, of course, having the right gear is helpful. But none of that matters if you are unable to step into the void, the unknown, the areas that you can’t control.

Steve educates climbers on how to grow their capacity to accept risk by increasing their awareness, make proper risk assessments, do, rest and repeat.

I don’t think there is a better skill to develop for your art or your project than to develop a greater capacity to take risks.

Taking risks doesn’t mean pushing all your chips in the center. No. It means knowing that this might not work but having the guts to ship it. It’s knowing your true limits (and rejecting false ones). It is about dancing on the edge of something great and daring, to really see how far it is you can go.

What’s scarce is not time, money or other resources. I think what we need more of is courage. Courage to follow our hearts, to put our best work into the world and to share with those we seek to change.

Steve started Uphill Athlete earlier last year, it is a “platform for openly sharing proven training knowledge.”

Did you read that? Educational resources from one of the best climbers in the world all for free.

Yes.

What Steve understands is that building a tribe doesn’t cost anything extra to add one more person to it, all the while he is building more trust and more attention in the process. Most people won’t buy his specific training programs when there is so much readily available. That’s okay. It’s the few that are eager to pay that will allow Steve to make a living and continue his work.

About the quote: Steve mentioned it in one of his blog posts. It is sound advice. If you don’t have time to do it right, how are you going to have time to do it over?

Follow your heart.

You will be criticized for the decisions you make anyway.

Might as well be making choices that will help you sleep better at night.

In 1855, Charles Westhall set the first official mile-run world record at four minutes and twenty-eight seconds.

Over the decades, as attempts to break a four-minute mile became futile, it seemed we had reached the pinnacle of human potential, an impossible feat to accomplish. That was, of course, until Roger Bannister came along in 1954 and pushed the boundaries of what was possible.

What’s fascinating, is it took nearly 100 years for the first person to break the sub four-minute mile. The second person to do it? It only took a month.

How?

Because it is far easier to do things that we can imagine. Once we see the impossible enabled, once we connect the dots, a whole new world of possibility opens up to us.

There is no greater contribution we can make then to inspire those around us to reject false limits.

[Interestingly, Bannister spent most of his training studying neurology and would only run 30 minutes a day. Not a conventional form of training for a runner but, then again, doing something that hasn’t been done before, means we have to do something that hasn’t been done before.]

[When was the last time you did something for the first time?]

Rarely, do we run into a situation where we have no choice. No, rather there is no easy choices left to make.

When there are no easy decisions left to make, that is when we find out what kind of decision maker we actually are.