Month: June 2019

Elizabeth Gilbert has a fascinating look at this.

For centuries, the Greeks and the Romans viewed our milieu as a place where ideas visit you.

That each of us has a genius or a muse reaching out. You acted as the conduit for ideas to flow. You didn’t have the responsibility to create. Your job was to bring the work from the imaginative world to the real one.

It’s not a bad way to look at things if you are feeling blocked.

Each of us is capable of great ideas that can change the world. Each of us has had a moment of inspiration where you can see with your mind’s eye the very possibility of a world that doesn’t exist.

But we don’t follow through.

And sometimes, we see that very idea executed by someone else later down the road.

The difference was that they said Yes. They said Yes to pushing through the dip and shipped the work into the world.

It turns out, the term, “Butterflies in our stomach” didn’t come from nowhere. Our viscera has a brain of its own and can send signals to influences emotions.

Whether it is a muse or a feeling in our stomach, you have the call to action. Don’t ignore it. Trust your gut.

And when it seems like the well of ideas has gone dry, keep working. And when all you are writing is bad ideas, keep typing.

That is when great work shows up.

Salto mortale. Dare to take the leap into the unknown to see what happens.

Statistically speaking, there are few accidents that occur during high-frequency activities. While saying “practice makes perfect” is a bit of a stretch. In reality, practice makes better. 

Which is why we can jump on the freeway going 80 and not have this fear of death stalking us from around the corner. We do it every day (high frequency) and we’ve gained the knowledge and experience to manage the risks involved. That is not to say, if we were to get in an accident, the consequences wouldn’t be catastrophic (high risk).

High-frequency activities trigger what is called RPDM (recognition prime decision making). Which basically means, that our brain is a massive hard drive that pulls data from the past to match with the incident at hand and adopts the behavior to problem solve.

Adolescents traditionally are not great risk managers for this very reason. If they were, none of them would ever smoke or drink. They wouldn’t text and drive (although too many adults still do this) or engage in unsafe sex.

One of the main reasons why is because they don’t have the experience yet. They don’t have the data to pull from the hard drive. They haven’t done the reps. Another part of this is, they haven’t taken the time to think through the consequences of their actions. They don’t know how to look that far ahead.

Tasks done that are very risky, that are done very rarely, with no time to think it through, are the types of incidences where bad things happen.

The good news is that high risk/low-frequency incidences can be mitigated by simply slowing down. Taking time to think through actions and consequences (discretionary time versus non-discretionary time).

At Pivot Adventure Co., we get this question all the time if the activities we do are safe. The answer is that we engage in adventure activities that carry a lot of perception of high risk.

Hanging at the top of the rock wall can seem very dangerous. The amygdala (fight, flight, freeze response) doesn’t understand anchors, belay devices or the strength of ropes. All it is saying is, “Stop this! Save our life! Get down from here!”

All of our guides have lots of experience (high frequency) and follow industry standards to mitigate risk. The goal is to intentionally put our students in a situation out of their comfort zone. As we say on the trail, “there is no growth in comfort zone and no comfort in growing zones.” Learning how to move from reacting to responding to this fear is at the heart at what we teach.

The students may perceive the situation as high risk/low frequency jumping on a rock wall for the first time. This is why our guides with deep domain knowledge (high frequency again) set up the anchors, double-check their harnesses and knots, belay the climbers so that the risk is properly managed while using all the time in the world that is necessary to complete a task safely.

This is why we remind parents that sometimes we might be late dropping off your child and to not panic. Because we are being good risk managers. We are not compounding the problem by acting as if there is no discretionary time available.

Getting everyone back home safely is our number one priority.

The bottom line: Part of the experience at Pivot Adventure is learning how to become a better risk manager. Parents benefit from learning how to identify the real risks in their teen’s lives. Students learn how to slow down and think about the consequences before taking unnecessary risks.

HT Gordon Graham

In a social media-driven world, it’s easy to see and to think that you’re doing something wrong. That everyone must have it figured out better than you.

It is also easy to think you are doing something right because of all the friends and likes you have…

Except, the next post doesn’t get as many likes. What did you do wrong?

Caparison is a trap.

It isn’t healthy to tie your self-esteem (confidence in your own worth) and your self-efficacy (belief to do hard things) to your social media channel.

The reason why we incessantly check Facebook is because of the instant feedback we receive and the fear of missing out.

As human beings, we crave connection. We crave to feel validated and accepted within a tribe.

Here’s the thing, reassurance is futile.

I don’t think it is easier for someone like Ed Sheeran to sit down and write another hit just because Shape of You was viewed four billion times. (There’s probably more pressure.)

And consider the fact that Gangnam Style has three billion views, there is no telling what will be the next great hit. (Good luck replicating that.)

You wouldn’t compare your first novel to a Stephen King novel, would you?

Of course not.

The work would become too discouraging for anyone to continue to produce if we were only going to measure it by popularity.

Someone’s life is always going to look better through a lens. Real validation comes when we can accept the blemishes.

We are all very familiar with “What is”. “What is” is the current condition of things. Our status-quo.

The world as we can see it.

On the other hand, “What if” is the state linchpins operate in. What if things could be different? What if the world looked like this?

In other words, the world as we can imagine it.

Guardrails are an important part of our system we’ve built.

Consumers use the guardrails as a signal to know that what they are about to engage with is safe. (Think of the pop you hear when you open a new jar of pickles.)

They’re also important to help regulate private entities.

I don’t think anyone wants to buy a cardiac defibrillator out of someone’s garage. And we don’t want the FDA to stop inspecting them anytime soon either.

Yet, even with guardrails, designs can still be flawed.

Case in point, defibrillators use an unencrypted wireless protocol that could allow an attacker to change the settings of this lifesaving device.

That’s a problem.

It’s a problem because it only takes one bad actor to misbehave and throw the whole system out of sync.

It’s worth examining the systems we have built at home.

What are the guardrails you have in place?

Who can come in and take advantage of that system by circumnavigating the guardrails?

Because despite our best efforts, despite the guardrails we put in place, there might be a bug in the system that can’t be detected.

Worth being vigilant with.

You can do things bigger by simply doing bigger things.

Bigger goals.

Bigger clients.

Bigger sales.

Bigger must mean better, right?

No.

Better is better.

You can do things better by simply doing better things…

Better goals.

Better clients.

Better sales.

Each of us has an internal and external locus of control.

We either believe that we have control over our outcomes or that our external conditions have control over us.

While there are certain things that are out of control (height, the zip code you are born into…), we have way more control than we think we do.

Because that is what we can choose.

You can choose which story to tell.

No, you can’t choose to ignore gravity. That’s the law. Yet, learning how to defy gravity is what makes us most alive.

It’s a massive shift and ever more important to understand where our economy is going.

With the means of productions in the hands of the masses, instead of the elect, we no longer have to follow the model of the top-down approach.

We don’t need to wait to be told what to do next. We don’t need to wait for instructions. We get to decide what forward looks like.

Which means we can look around at each other, to our peers, horizontally.

“What do people like us do?”

That is so vastly different from the last two hundred years of industrialism. The mindset of “What should I do now?”

We have never had so many choices in human history. The challenge now is to learn how to make choices that leave people better off.

Why is it so difficult for an ex-con to find a job after he has paid his debt to society.

Because we focus on the “con” instead of the “ex.”

We read only what we agree with. Listen to what we want to hear. And treat people as we see them. 

With that label, we have already made a snap judgment about who this person is. We have filled in the blanks without leaving any room for better explanations.

Contrast that with the label of Harvard Law grad and immediately we begin to act differently.

The labels we put on others, along with the labels we carry, change the way we play our status roles.

Do we see ourselves as a higher class to this person or lower? Do they see us as above or below? Which story do we tell? Which story do they tell?

It’s difficult to shed labels that the culture slaps on us. But once we help someone flip the lights on, see what you see, things begin to change.

Now, when someone all of a sudden sees themselves giving a TED talk, they carry themselves differently.

Their conduct changes once they realize they belong, that they qualify, that they are good enough. It changes our posture. It shifts our perspective. It raises the bar. Changes expectations and our status-quo.

The key to building a better future, a culture that we can all be proud of, begins when we see the best and potential in others. But we can’t do that until we learn to look past the labels others have slapped on us.

Hollywood doesn’t invest in one movie or in one monster anymore.

It invests in worlds.

Avengers: Endgame didn’t become the highest-grossing opening weekend movie of all time because it was the best movie of all time.

No, it was because the audience had to heavily invest in the series by watching 20 movies beforehand to get the joke.

The lesson to take away is this:

Hollywood understands that not everyone is going to see Avengers and that’s fine. Because they made it for the ones who are willing enough and weird enough to dive into.

Create a world and a journey for those you seek to change.