You Don't Get What You Deserve

Don't go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first. - Mark Twain

Sometimes you have days where you exclaim what a friend of mine puts succinctly as "thank goodness I didn't get what I deserved." Two events reminded that today was one of those days.

First, I had brunch (yes, brunch.. don't judge) with a great friend and former professor who had made a large contribution in functionally saving my life a few years ago when I was (hopefully) a much different person dealing with the consequences of making much worse decisions than I do now.

Though we don't get together as frequently now (my fault), some portion of the conversation are dedicated to updating him on what I am up to. Because these conversations act as snapshots of my current life, we both reflected on where I was when our friendship began and the path to where I am now. I was humbled and reminded of the fact that there were a lot of people from '08-'09 willing to see beyond the scared, angry kid I was and instead focus on my potential and help me move from the former to the latter.

The funny thing about memory is how much of the total situation falls away to the point where you recall only a few fragments (usually the ones that cause the smallest amount of emotional upset). The other funny thing is how all the details come rearing back in vivid detail simply through conversation with the people that were there.

As we wrapped up our conversation and departed from the restaurant, I took stock of where my life is now and what it was just a few years ago. All of my relationships are fantastic (at least they are for me), I am awash with more opportunities than someone my age should be getting and have made enough progress as a human such that there are slightly more people who have nice things to say about me behind my back than those who feel inclined to say otherwise. Considering all the selfish, hurtful things I've done in the past, I am thankful that I have not gotten the full brunt of what I deserve.

This is what I was thinking about when I stumbled upon this:


That's right, a free skateboard with about 8 skateboard decks underneath sitting right in front of my apartment building. Double. Winning.

Life has a funny way placing things into motion such that your life works out the way it does. Sometimes you miss a deadline by a few seconds or make a wrong turn or you decide to have some agency and overcome that fear of making a connection with someone. All the little inches in life put you in place to give you the hand you have today. Everything that didn't work out (both good and bad) is giving you everything that is working out (again, both good and bad). The free skateboard I got today after brunch is a function of a desperate email I sent in November 2008. I didn't deserve it, but I'll took it anyway.

Some people may say that Karma is a bitch but I think that she's a pretty decent gal. I'm sure that if we look over our lives we'll realize that we a got a decent amount of good stuff and avoided at least 10x of the bad stuff we deserved through the same channel: serendipity ...or fate, if you are so inclined.

In either case, be thankful. Life is short. Continuously performing gap-analysis and complaining about how things "should" be is not good stewardship of your life. But if you must do it, then at least acknowledge the negative consequences that could have very well played out to make the life you have now a blessing.

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.

Mark All As Read.

Turn up the lights in here, baby.

Extra bright I want y'all to see this,

Turn up the lights in here, baby.

You know what I need,

Want you to see everything,

Want you to see all of the lights.

- Kanye West + Rihanna

I just logged into my Google Reader account for the last two weeks. The Google informed me that I had 1000+ unread items. After skimming some articles about startup launch announcements on VentureBeat, I hit the 'Mark All as Read' button at the top.

"Yes Google, I am sure that I want to do this."

"No Google, do not ask me again. I'm an adult."

Clean slate. Sometimes it's just better to get a new sheet of paper than dig yourself out of a hole.

To be fair, the hole is self-induced and totally worth the dividends I received by focusing solely on a research project for the U. It was a hard effort. It was terrifying. It stretched me and introduced me to new possibilities cognitively and physiologically. Most importantly it was fun and satisfying.

It's been said that construction workers have the greatest job satisfaction of any profession. I would say that entrepreneurship and academic research are the same. Just like my friends who find satisfaction in pointing to tangible evidence of something they have produced - like driving down a road they paved or past a building they built - I have the same satisfaction in seeing a startup start to find its place in the market or watching someone present some findings that I helped contribute to.

I love the long hours. I love mulling over the floating puzzle pieces to see if they'll come together. I love the uncertainty, the ambiguity, the fear, the failure. I love the fascination, the possibility, the wonder of it all.

I love the act of producing.

Everything else - the accolades, the potential for wealth, the reputation (or something) - they are "nice-to-haves"; catalytic byproducts of doing the work I love and wish to excel at.

But sometimes, I let things go unmaintained for too long. My Google Reader and Gmail Account are certainly lightposts to indicate how well I am managing other areas of my life.

If I have made a commitment to you that I didn't follow through on - a promise to call, or meet or further a task - I appreciate your patience and I ask that we 'Mark All As Read' anything that's incomplete between us a result of my lack of focus. I recommit to complete what I originally said I would do. And I as I work through my email and other communication channels, expect to find a message from me about getting done what needs to get done.

Thanks for your love and patience.

-T

The 2011 Action Plan

Who says I can't get stoned?

Plan a trip to Japan alone.

Doesn't matter if I even go.

- John Mayer

Leading off from my last post about living intentionally and Seth Godin's recent post about how you are your own worst boss I'm going to share about why 2011 is going to be the first year of officially creating and enacting an action plan. I'm going create some of my own language around the use of an action plan (inspired by Seth's blog post):

"You wouldn't go work for a company that made up a yearly plan while hung over, you also wouldn't work for one that would abandon a plan after 2 weeks quoting that they were going to 'figure it out' as they go along.

Why do it: It declares the future that you want to live into. When you say that you are going to do something, what you are really creating is a new life that will be coming at you full on: one that you want to live. It provides the large things that you want to get done and allows you, through an action plan, to work backwards from that reality to today. I personally try to make mine as measurable as possible so that at the end of the year I can see what happened vs what I said was going to happen.

Most importantly I look at why? Was it not as important as I thought it was? Did something catastrophic happen? What? The reason for looking at 'why' is not so much whether or not the reason was valid but who I was in the face of that reason. What the data shows me is me. And I learn something about myself that I didn't see before.

Why no one actually does it: Because it looks like busywork or some homework assignment. They make themselves feel guilty when they break their diet once or forget to go to the gym. And rather than get back on the horse (what's 1 or 2 days, or even a week lost in the context of a year?), they would rather ignore the discomfort of sticking to behavior change than actually feeling the joy of the results they have gotten for themselves. By the way no one is holding you to the commitments you make except you. So if you quit nothing happens, literally.

Wait, one thing does happen: you learn that you are someone who can't be self-directed when no one is watching you.

In other words, you find out that you are person that can't follow through on their own commitments. Don't like how that feels or sounds? Then do the plan. Don't like how that feels or sounds? Well then good luck amounting to anything more than the rat race, my friend. Because the exceptional professionals I know are the ones that can show up and deliver especially when they don't feel like it.

Why I like it: It helps me offload the mental power necessary to remember, find motivation for and actually enact the behavior change. I simply declare what I'm going to get done, create an action plan, input the time into my Google Calendar to do it and then let my calendar dictate what I should be doing. I just follow the plan without thinking and happen to get the results that I want. It's not rocket science. Over time (say 5-10 years) I'll probably think less about the planning (because I'll get better at it) which means that think even less about the "doing", which in turn can allow me to start dabbling in tremendous things before the age of 35. Things in the ilk of Laird Hamilton and Shai Agassi. Why? Because that's what I chose for my life.

My challenge to you is to go check out Chris Guillebeau's blog about How To Conduct Your Own Annual Review. In the comments, let me know some things that you are thinking about working on this year - I might borrow some to try on as I roll out the first draft of my 2011 Action Plan.

Cheers,

Travis

Living Intentionally

No, No, No, No

I will never forget

No, No

I will never regret

I will live my life

Closer to the edge. - 30 Seconds to Mars

December for me has always been a time of reflection. I guess the holidays serve as a convenient mile-marker on the highway of my life; a time to take stock of everything and see how it compares with last year. Up until this year it was simply something I did in my head, unintentionally and it typically centered on trivial things like whether or not I had a girlfriend.

But since I have been introduced to some new management technology this year, I have a mechanism to be intentional with my review and the planning for 2011.

Why do I do this? Because I want to live as intentionally as possible. I don't to waste valuable effort and time thrashing about hoping one day that a miracle will happen and I'll 'make' it. This concern is something Seth Godin lays out perfectly in his blog post here. He says:

"Even if you're not self-employed, your boss is you. You manage your career, your day, your responses. You manage how you sell your services and your education and the way you talk to yourself.

Odds are, you're doing it poorly.

If you had a manager that talked to you the way you talked to you, you'd quit. If you had a boss that wasted as much as your time as you do, they'd fire her. If an organization developed its employees as poorly as you are developing yourself, it would soon go under."

I think that this is a pretty accurate depiction of people trying to make their way through the human experience: survive. It's actually a pretty reasonable way to go through life. With what's going in the world today, it gets pretty easy to slip into the mode of letting one's reasons run their life. With divorce, kids, work demands, car maintenance, sickness, death, etc it's totally reasonable to be in survival mode. In fact self-protection is an honorable act on behalf of self-respect.

So be unreasonable. Follow through on your commitments in the face of all of that. Because that's what being a professional human being. That what living intentionally is: being unreasonable. Doing the hardwork in the off season, when no one is watching, making tough choices and sticking to them longer than anyone else would. Seth goes on to develop this a little further:

"We are surprised when someone self-directed arrives on the scene. Someone who figures out a way to work from home and then turns that into a two-year journey, laptop in hand, as they explore the world while doing their job. We are shocked that someone uses evenings and weekends to get a second education or start a useful new side business. And we're envious when we encounter someone who has managed to bootstrap themselves into happiness, as if that's rare or even uncalled for."

Again, the question for all this is 'why'? Why try to live intentionally? Because if you aren't living intentionally, it's hard to say that you are doing anything other than coping. Coping means that you don't have a choice, that you are given a set consequences that you must manage the best you can. To me that's not living, I know because I did it for most of my memorable life.

Living for me is choosing to do what I want and following through on the commitments in the face of the things that I have no control over. The first cop out I hear around commitment is that something catastrophic happened. Look, if you knew that you would get a million dollars to follow through on one thing you said you would do, nothing - absolutely nothing - would stop you. Those 'reasons' and perfectly explainable barriers that stand in your way wouldn't look so hard to overcome, would they?

As I roll out what's next for me in 2011, my challenge to you is to think about what commitments you have that you keep derailing. And when you identify what you do to derail that, start thinking about what you unknowingly committed to (hint: it has to do with self-protection).

For more information about how this process works, I highly recommend checking out a book by Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey on how to start looking at your natural immune system to change called How The Way We Talk Can Change The Way We Work. Good luck. Have fun.