Someday.

I hear a lot of kids in my age cohort talk about someday.

Someday they'll be on time to meetings. Someday they'll care. Someday they'll do things differently... when it matters someday.

I believe that they are right. Someday you will care. Someday.. when things matter you'll try to do things differently.

But none of that will matter because you won't have the capacity to survive when that opportunity comes. When you have been spending years practicing the art of 'just getting by', you get crushed by opportunities that require everything you have.

Not that there is anything wrong with mastering the art of getting by, in fact, I think that it speaks to the potential of human beings to get whatever it is they are committed to getting. It takes a highly optimized machine to get exactly the outcomes they are striving for. The implied heuristic here is that humans aren't broken - they are actually finely tuned. Aristotle makes this point best when he says,

"Excellence is an art won by training and habituation. We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have those because we have acted rightly. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit."

I love how eloquently Aristotle states that we don't do things excellently because we are born with an excellence gene - we become excellent (at anything) simply by repetition.

This is good news and bad news.

The good news is that over time (some people say 10,000 hours/625 days/1.71 years) you can become excellent at anything. The bad news is that you can be excellent at anything.

You can be excellent at avoiding conflict. seeking conflict, just getting by, keeping emotional distance from risky endeavors of the heart. Fill in the blank.

So what? What's the next step?

The next step is doing. Simply doing. Again, Aristotle ('cos he's smart) weighs in:

"We become just by performing just actions. Temperate by performing actions. Brave by performing brave actions."

Someday is NOT some state of being that you wake up to one morning somewhere in the future. Someday does not announce itself with you walking in slow motion through smoke. Someday does not arrive after a montage with the latest Kanye West song playing in the background.

Someday is right now. The choice you make every morning to play for keeps or 'do what you can with what you have'. There is a huge difference between playing to win and playing to not lose.

Because when that once-in-a-lifetime opportunities arrives - when you see that wave forming on the horizon- your ability to simply get on and ride is a product of how you chose to ride every other wave in your life prior to that.

And in that moment, when you are put to the ultimate test of doing something you've never done before when it really counts - getting married, building a company, offering forgiveness - how you decided to live your life 'when it didn't matter' is going to be the difference between getting smashed into the rocks or making history in the narrative of your life.

Business Planning v. Business Discovery

He never risked sh#!,

He hoped and he wished it,

But it didn't fall in his lap,

So he ain't even here, he pretends

That airplanes in the night sky

Are like shooting stars.

- Eminem

For a majority of my undergrad career, I've turned in some pretty stellar plans. Marketing plans, operations plans, accounting plans.. name any part of the business and I've made a plan for it. I thought that this made me equipped to start a business so I ventured out into the elements, equipped with faux-optimism and faux-fearlessness, to start my first company, Dash & Cooper.

Let me just say that I was not equipped. The root cause for failure were twofold: I was scared out of my mind and all the plan development trickery I learned in my classes didn't help - in fact, it might have hurt me.

This is not to say that my education was useless; these classes laid a foundational understanding of basic business management concepts - many of which I use to optimize my metrics and provide the form of tracking my progress as I find product-market fit. What was useless was thinking that I was smart enough to know how the business was going to work and then take actions to accomplish that.

Unfortunately, common literature teaches this exact thing to nascent entrepreneurs.

To me, I see the following problem with writing plans: 1) they discount the value of customer feedback (rather than put a premium on it) 2) they typically assume that resources are not constrained or easily obtained 3) they assume that the business has already been running (as opposed to creating from scratch).

Thankfully I took Business Development this semester and it's not about writing a plan as an artifact to execute (erroneously) from. The class assumes that the plan is a catalytic byproduct of the pivoting that occurs as you race to find what your market wants - something that's called business discovery.

The big insight from the class last night is that business plans are mythical post-hoc documents that make logic out of the thrashing that occurs in the early days. It's a convenient narrative for founders and managers to say after the fact that they had a 'vision' and just 'got it done' when in reality, they happened to discover (often by accident) something new that was valued by others. Most human beings aren't that smart enough to have a 'vision' for Amazon.com, Groupon or Coca-Cola. These companies, as we know them today, began as something else and they pivoted back and forth until they found something that worked. THEN they scaled. They couldn't write a plan about what would happen, because no one knows how the market is going to respond to anything that you introduce to it.

There's nothing wrong with "Business Plans", they are a great byproduct that documents the experiments you are making to discover what's actually going to work. But to assume that you can write one and actually execute well is like driving backwards down the freeway and using your rear-view mirror to direct your actions: it's possible but increases the likelihood of crashing and burning.

To further my point, I recommend that you watch the following video about how the Groupon founder thrashed for 3 years before focusing on a small portion of his initial idea that would eventually become Groupon.

Perspective

I love experential knowledge.

Learning something through an experience is an experience in itself, often because we didn't expect to learn anything as the events started to unfold. Sometimes, this learning, at an even more basic is really the just the identification of something we didn't know was there before.

The thing about experience is that it takes your preconcieved notions about anything and changes the angle by which you view it. Sometimes that means just being closer to that object or notion. I think that often we think of a change of perspective as a matter of degrees but I have found that the world, your thoughts, your biases shift significantly when you get closer to something. The details of an ideal become more visible, as if you placed an HD lens over your perspective. You notice that it's not glossy, but rough and textured. Even more importantly, you realize that it's not as solid as you once thought in your former persective, but something that can be prodded, poked, and probed.. even molded; like slightly moist clay that you need to exert significant pressure to alter. You take a moment to reassess your surroundings, gauge your reaction, then reconcile them to previous thoughts and assumptions, then move on a slightly different person.

I have many ideals that have changed the closer that I moved to them. One moment you are at a seemingly significant distance from a lifestyle (group of actions, behaviors, thoughts, value system, consequences, etc), then a conversation throws you into the center of it. Now you are experiencing it from the inside looking out. Whereas you were previously looking at it from the outside at what you thought was an solid, opaque shell; you are realizing that your assumption was wrong: it's a permeable membrane that where you can move freely.

As I get further along in my college career, I also get closer to the "real world." My chosen profession is 'change agent', the world calls it entrepreneurship. I want my job to be invovled in start-ups. To many, this lends a sense of arrogance. I know because I felt the same way last year, when I was on the outside, looking at what were my (erroneous) assumptions about the entrepreneurship lifestyle. But I have been allowed to continue getting closer, and it's not some sugar-coated shell of wealth and adventure. Sure there's adventure, but there's massive sacrifice. I have learned about personal burn rate. That there is no trade-off, no tit-for-tat on focussing on one area of your life at the expense of another. In order to do this you have to change your perspective. Because of my passion for making awesome ideas a reality, I can align my personal life (what's that?) with my "work life".

To drive the point further, I am realizing that being an entrepreneur is an "all the time thing, not a some of the time thing". For those of us who played sports and excelled at them, we know that phrase is often Vince Lombardi's mantra on winning. Excellence, a critical component of anything that amounts to anything you do in life (should you so chose), is a state of being not something you turn on and off at will. So I have found a way to make my passion be the solvent and dropped the things in my life I thought I could compartmentalize to be dissolved into a whole new solution, spinning in the beaker of my life.

For years, up until a few weeks ago, I had no idea that I would have learned the things I just described, mainly because I didn't know they existed -that they were constant elements you had to accept as you walked through that membrane. Does it sound harsh? Well it depends on your perspective... The same company looks very different if you are viewing it through a corporate or entrepreneurial lens. Even more so depending where that particular lens is positioned.

But then again so is life. I once read that you actually train yourself to be a fatalist or opportunist. Even more interesting is that you can, through training, change. Your perspective, the lens in which you view anything, can be changed. Sometimes you move it under you own choice (intentional or not), sometimes life moves it for you. Or give you another one.

My challenge is this: take anything, anything, in your life that you feel absolutely certain on and change your perspective of it. Move the lens, adjust the focus, or get a new one altogether. See how things change and take notice of how you change in reaction to the new information. Then do it again. And keep doing it and see if you can alternate between all of these perspectives quickly and accurately. Then move on to something else, then let me know your reaction.

The Road Not Taken

As this is the first official post of "All the Difference", I will be sharing my favorite poem, written by my favorite poet. The poem and the quoted commentary below it are referenced at the end of this post.

The Road Not Taken

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I-
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all he difference.
-Robert Frost (1874-1963)

"We must interpret his choice of a road as a symbol for any choice in life between alternatives that appear almost equally attractive but will result through the years in a large difference in the kind of experience one knows."

I have had a lot of choices in my life, and like Robert Frost there are times in which I could have traveled both roads at the same time. Sometimes I have been blessed with a choice in which one alternative is clearly better than the other. But what about the ones in which the alternatives are in relative equality? I think about what my life would be like had I never left Utah for California. Had I never returned to Utah from California. Had I never made the mistakes that I have. Had my mistakes been timed differently or made different mistakes altogether.

One of my favorite parts of this poem is that statement of how "way leads on to way". Often in my times of quiet, ususally on the night drive home or when I park in an area that overlooks the valley, I think about how I got to where I am. Which events lead to another that were critical in providing me with the cards I currently have in my hand. I certainly feel like I'm being guided along in the journey of my life. At times its a strong sense of direction, and complete helplessness during others.

But the difference has been the way that I approach my reaction to life's events. Do I let it teach me? Or just surrender to sadness and try to cast blame on others? I have been fortunate enough to have parents and other sources of influence in my life constantly instill a sense of "fight." I am of course, referring to the animalistic fight or flight approach to any event. I strongly believe and have witnessed in my life as well as others, the power of "fight" inherent in any individual.

Reaction is a matter of choice.

And it is one of the few things in life that make all the difference.

Most of my biggest victories have come at the end of a path that began during a moment of crisis, where my reaction would be the very thing that made all the difference... because the course of direction was mine alone to make.

I feel like I have fighting all my life and the mistakes that led to times of crisis in my life is when I decided to retreat from the issues at hand: those things that are crucial for me to master before I can move on to the next chapter of my life. Oddly enough, the failures and crisis -products of path commanded by a chose to run away- have eventually forced me to fight anyway.

This is not to be mistaken as some morbid approach to life, where you suffer and then you die. It's endurance-training. John Maxwell said in his book The Difference Maker that you can judge the strength and character of someone by witnessing how much strife one can take before they start to become unraveled. I feel that each time I choose to "fight", that decision becomes easier to make as problems (opportunities in disguise) present themselves.

As I close this post, I offer a challenge. For a challenge will be offered at the end of each post, something to carry with you into your daily tasks and duties. My challenge to you is this:

View every problem, every situation in which your decision requires you to choose one path among many as an opportunity. Rely on your strengths and talents to influence the outcome of your chosen path, even though you may not know where it leads. Take the road less traveled, opt for an opportunity to trully grow- to take a step (or two) closer to who you were designed to be. It will be uncomfortable. It will be uncertain. But adventures are not lived out in a snuggie or at the bottom of a bottle. They are lived out on the rocky paths less traveled by. Your decisions at the various tailheads of your life will make all the difference.


Arp & Johnson. Perrine's Sound and Sense. 10th Edition. 2002. United States of America. pg 88-89.