Month: August 2018

The Race Across America, or RAAM, is the ultimate test piece in endurance sports.

This 3,000 mile race starts from California and winds its way through to New York.

Unlike the Tour de France, the clock doesn’t stop. Riders will often go for 22 hours a day for eight days straight.

Every rider who registers for this race knows they are going to get tired. The question is Where are you going to put the tired?

When you have nothing left to give, where are you going to find the strength to continue?

How are you going to put aside the internal narrative that you can’t go any further?

After moving as hard as you can for 22 hours, how are you going to start again tomorrow?

Of course, it’s not meant to last forever. The idea of a sprint is to go fast, to stretch for a short time period, to create forward motion.

Putting aside the noises in our head that says we can’t do it is crux of any sprint.

[I riff a bit about this at the beginning of my presentation at 1 Million Cups.]

Because you can.

Each person has agency, the capacity to choose.

No one is born a revolutionary or a linchpin or an artist. You become one.

Of course, it’s not for everyone, but you’re kidding yourself if you think it’s not for you.

Not enough time, money, resources, is the story we tell ourselves to keep us off the hook. It’s another form of hiding. What can you do? What will you do?

Conditions will never be perfect. As the tide rises (or falls) so do the rest of the boats.

Not everyone sees what you see, knows what you know, believes what you believe. So, start.

Yesterday was the best time to begin. Today is the next best thing. (Someday is not a day of the week.)

Will it stick? Not at first. Little by little, drip by drip, we bring more dignity, respect and opportunity for those in need. We give our projects away, building more trust and attention in the process.

Because if we want to go fast, we go alone. But if we want to go far, we go together.

You have more power than you can imagine. Think big. Now bigger. Go. Do. Make a ruckus.

When we treat our home as an investment instead of a place to raise our family, how does it change the way we view our neighbor when they park an old RV in the driveway?

What happens when we view the Dow Jones as the health of the economy?

What happens when we measure ourselves by our bank accounts? How does that change our decision-making?

There are many ways to measure. Money is just one of the easiest.

In a classic example, before Ford shipped the Pinto it discovered that at low speed collisions, it could potentially cause gasoline to spill and start a fire.

The three devices Ford tested cost $1, $5 and $11. After Ford ran a cost-benefit analysis measuring “the cost of safety parts versus the cost of lives lost,” it was decide not to include any of them.

As a result, 500 people burned to death because of this shortcut.

If we view everything we do from a financial standpoint, well, then we are in a race to the bottom.

In a race to the bottom, we treat people as statistics, we assign value by profit and we try to quantify happiness.

The problem with a race to the bottom is that you might win. But you probably won’t, which makes it even worse.

This is an easy way to identify market needs.

Draw a graph. Identify on each axis a selling point your competitors use. (An example could be price and quality.)

Start plotting which quadrant your competitors fall into.

If everyone is trying to be cheap, why don’t you consider being expensive?

If everyone is slow, why not be faster?

If everyone is going big, should you be small?

You can’t be cheap and expensive at the same time. Nor can you provide higher quality goods and be at the bottom with pricing.

You should be here, if everyone’s over there.

Jim Bishop wrote a book called The Day Lincoln was Shot.

It was rejected 22 times before it was ever published and became a national best seller.

Bishop had one of those rejection letters from Random House framed on his wall. It said,

“Dear Jim, everyone knows the story.”

Of course, we all do. But that wasn’t the point. The point wasn’t to be original.

What Bishop did was bring the story to life—shine a light on details that readers didn’t know, tell a story in a way that would resonate with his tribe.

Just because everyone has heard the story before, doesn’t mean there isn’t an opportunity to tell it better.

1. Treat others how you want to be treated.

Is the goal to be right or to bring about change? It might feel great to tell someone off but, of course, it doesn’t last. Revenge never does.

2. If you have nothing nice to say, don’t say anything at all.

Too many of us fall into the trap of walking into the argument room. Better to stay clear.

For a long time, it was widely believed that stomach ulcers were mainly caused by stress. But in 1982, Dr. Barry Marshall and Dr. Robin Warren had discovered that it was actually caused by a bacteria called Helicobacter pylori.

It was ground breaking research that could make the lives of millions better. Except…

Except, no one believed them.

Doctors carried a worldview that such a big discovery was reserved for the elite schools, not the University of Western Australia and that bacteria couldn’t live in such an acidic environment.

After years of ridicule and rejection, Dr. Barry Marshall decided to drink(!) a broth full of Helicobacter pylori, which caused a stomach ulcer. He then treated it with simple antibiotics.

When you know something to be true, it’s important to remember to be persistent long enough for others to see what you see. Sometimes, it might mean doing something that has never been done before.

In 1888, Karl Benz was struggling to launch the first automobile in Europe. He needed to prove to the public that his vehicle would work. It was his wife, Bertha Benz (who financed the project to begin with), who had the guts to test it.

Bertha Benz, along with her two kids, took the Patent-Motorwagen No. 3 without her husband’s knowledge and without permission from the authorities, then illegally drove it on the first long-distance automobile road trip.

Over the next 121 miles, she had to clean the carburetor with her hat pin and used her garter to insulate a wire. Enlisted a blacksmith to fix a broken chain. She then refueled at a local pharmacy using highly volatile ligroin, making it the first fueling station in history. When the wooden brakes wore down, she asked a local cobbler to nail leather on the brake blocks, inventing the first brake pads.

Once Bertha reached her destination, she sent a telegram to Karl confirming her arrival. Her marketing campaign worked. The Benz car gained considerable attention from her adventure.

You’ll never know which projects will work until you find the courage to test them.

Much easier to test projects we believe in. But it’s easier to believe what we can imagine. The challenge then is to help others to see, to bridge the gap of what is and what could be.

Neither was lost luggage or lousy food service.

Because there was no air traffic to speak of.

The fact is, no matter what problem we solve (like transferring large quantities of people over great distances in a fraction of the time), the more ubiquitous technology becomes, the more we find to complain about.

It’s in our nature to focus on the negative, to find what is out-of-place. It’s part of our default setting to think about the now instead of the past and future.

It’s easy to see, once one problem is solved (flight), two more pop in its place (airports, pilots, air traffic control, security…).

It’s up to us to choose whether we see the world as half full or half empty.

Wall Street missed its projection on Facebook this quarter. Instead of $13.4 billion in revenue, it grew $13.2. And instead of a 13% increase in user growth, Facebook came short at 11%.

As a result, Facebook shares dropped 25% in one day. But as Bob Lefsetz points out, Facebook will bounce back.

The problem wasn’t growth, clearly there was plenty of that. The problem wasn’t enough growth.

So, the question becomes When is enough, enough?

And I think part of the crux of all of this is when we can’t be satisfied with a number, the default answer is always more.

But is more money really the answer to our problems?

Is the fact you’re unhappy with the work you do, the projects you ship, going to be fixed with a larger bank account?

Does money fix your boss’s attitude? Will it fix yours?

Probably not. And neither will continuous growth. It’s easy to forget that temporary setbacks are just that—temporary.

Numbers are a lousy way to predict the uncertain future, quit putting so much confidence in them.