AOM 2011: Parting Shots

Did you know that San Antonio loves God, Country and Free Enterprise?

Neither did I until a massive billboard with this message on the side of the freeway at 3:58 AM this morning on my taxi ride to the airport caught my attention.

Here's some more things I learned on the trip:

1. The temperature difference when you go in/outside a building is about 30 degrees. The experience is like a punch to the gut.
2. Gary spends almost as much time playing Angry Birds on his iPad as he does fixing his hair to make it look like he didn't fix it.
3. Rob compulsively hides things behind the TV... like the iron.
   
4. He's also got the best presentation skills of anyone in the Academy. Seriously, it's like Shaq dunking on midgets... like Gary.
   
5. When it comes to partying, academics beat fraternities hands down. They are PRO and have a system when it comes to effective (and long-lasting) partying. They are happy to share this information at will.
   
6. We have a list of great inside jokes and stories. My favorite is from the first day when I gave someone a Dash & Cooper business card and they thought it was a dog-walking business. Classic.
   
7. I'm convinced Howard Haines is a retired ninja. There wasn't a morning, regardless of hour, that I heard him get ready or leave the room for the day.
8. I'm addicted to the hot sandwiches from The Filling Station. So much so that I'm talking to the owner about franchising with another location in Salt Lake. So if anyone wants to help me start that company, let me know.
9. I sat next to a senior researcher from Harvard in one of my neuroscience workshops. Nothing really interesting came out of that but I thought it was cool.
   

After all the great stuff at AOM, I am undecided on whether or not I will get a PhD. Everything that I hoped for came to fruition: people think my paper idea is a big contribution, my line of work would be very effective for economic development and updating the entrepreneurship theory, there are a number of people who would like me to consider their schools when I send out my application, etc, etc.

But I learned a lot about academics that I didn't know was there. Once you go into academics, there's no "going-and-coming-as-you-please" with the professional world. You often have to make a choice between scholarship and teaching and that affects school choice since brand equity and reputation is all you have in academics. On the flip side, I might be better off putting all my eggs into my professional career and then going after a PhD later in life. There are a number of things that I need to consider about what I really want to do to make a contribution to the world. As my friend Gary put it: "If I wanted to make a contribution to the social entrepreneurship realm, I wouldn't write a paper that adds to the literature, I would just fly to Africa and start a social enterprise that changes lives."

I'm very lucky. Truth be told, I shouldn't be where I'm at given what I deserve. At 24, I have a slew of opportunities to choose from. For me the quagmire is trying to decide which opportunity would best accomplish my commitment to making a dent in the trash can that is the world. This week in San Antonio helped me realized that I am lucky to have the choices that I do but attempting to live an intentional life doesn't make finding the road less taken any easier. Especially when it's a 51-49 kind of choice.

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.

Regarding Discipline and Precision Execution

Right discipline consists, not in external combustion, but in the habits of mind which lead spontaneously to desirable rather than undesirable activities. -Bertrand Russell

Whenever someone asks what skills I bring to the table I do not return with something that is broad and craft-based. I don't say that I have sales or marketing skeelz. Nor do I try to inflate any position held to somehow convey leadership, management or operations expertise. I think that all of that stuff is important and I harbor deep respect for the titans of these various disciplines, but I view expertise in a particular field as the product of task-dependent learning.

Colin Camerer's seminal 2005 paper on how neuroscience can inform economics included an A/B comparison of brain activity images taken when a subject was playing tetris (Gameboy, natch). In the paper, one image shows a large portion of the brain lit up when first playing the game while the other image shows little activity after weeks of playing the game. The (admittedly) simplistic heuristic here is that when you spend enough time in a space that you start understanding and mastering all the nuances and not-so-obvious *why* behind many of the quirky behaviors. It's the 30,000 ft perspective of what we know about how humans learn and it drives a lot of what we do - whether we do it consciously, subconsciously or unconsciously.

While I don't make any claims towards field-specific expertise (marketing, sales or operations), I do attempt to convey that I know something about executing. It's a *small* something, but still a something. I think that it's the fundamental difference from anything that works versus anything that doesn't work. I personally believe that precision execution is the source of any forward progress. It applies to any industry, any business discipline and at all stages of the venture, government and military process.

Truth be told, I totally lucked into this. Learning to execute with precision is a fundamental core Principle (with a capital P) taught at the Foundry and I happen to have been around when it got started. Ergo, I got imprinted (for better or for worse) with the nuances of precision execution. Nevertheless, it's power and efficacy supercedes the needs for resources, permanent space and mentors. It is the refining fire that transforms cookie-dough diaper babies (like me) into capable and effective individuals who know something about the difference between motion and progress.

We don't need software, fancy flowcharts, books or consulting services to help augment the Precision Execution Principle - it's so hardwired into the architectural and cultural design of the program that the participants hardly notice it... except for the discomfort you feel when you subtly (or not) realize that you aren't as good of a manager as you thought. I personally remember what it felt like to realize that I wasn't as disciplined as I pretended to be. Getting present to the reality that I had much difficulty accomplishing a meaningful chunk of the things I committed to doing sucks and it's not fun. But focusing on just completing the things that I said I would do turned out to be the very thing that started churning out businesses or helping me realize (quickly) when to kill one.

Just the other day, I reviewed one of the early documents that Dr. Robert Wuebker wrote in the early days of the Foundry. The document (coupled with the Foundry experience) will likely serve as the most influential touch points in my professional career. Here's an excerpt:

Foundry management practices teach you precision execution—the capability (forged through practice and reflection) of individuals, teams and companies to predictably achieve the outcomes they want. Curiously, if your company can begin to deliver predictably, we have found that this capability also happens to enable breakthrough outcomes for teams. Thus discipline, incremental learning, and breakthrough innovation are a part of one continuous “management strategy” that full participation at the Foundry teaches you.

So if I believe that much in the power of the Foundry process and its core principles then why do we have nearly 50% wash out in the first six weeks? I'm not sure but I have a few conjectures:

• It's not fun giving up the perspective of being "right", "having it all figured out" and being an "expert."
  
• People choose to engage with the Foundry like do with most of their life: at half speed.
• They simply do not understand that becoming resourceful is more powerful than having resources handed to them.
  
• It's really REALLY uncomfortable to thrash about in front of your peers.
• Fill in the ________________.
  

Foundry is not for everyone. We are just as selective as other "elite" programs, we just don't know who will select out and who will double-down. I've seen entrepreneurs come in with companies pulling in 7-figure revenues opt out within two weeks. I've also seen dopey, non-business-type kids with super simple, non-"high growth" businesses take on the notion of "Full Participation" and will breakthrough after breakthrough into existence.

I personally struggled (and still struggle, if I'm not cognizant) with all of the above bullet points. Every participant faces it. Some push through to the other side. Some don't. But the irrefutable observable that Foundry demonstrates is that anyone starting any business, regardless of socioeconomic status, background or expertise who participates fully and musters the necessary discipline to do what they say they will do (even if they have no idea where to start) WILL discover a durable business hardwired with operational rigor and integrity OR they will quickly kill one that will not work. It's irrefutable because we've been measuring outcomes since day one.

For the 30%-50% who stick around I am lucky to be considered part of the small (and slowly growing) community of individuals who are imprinted with the natural inclination to contribute to others and the capability to coalesce the disparate and ambiguous into increasingly predictable (and scalable) results. It's a growing crew of quiet professionals... and I'll take them over anyone else any day of the week.

If any of this sounds interesting to you or you are an entrepreneur that has no idea where to begin and are looking for a community to help see you through. Drop me a line and we'll talk about how to get you plugged in.

An Ode to Non-Technical Entrepreneurs

I'm a non-technical startup guy. When selecting my major, I was given the choice between an engineering path and a business path. I opted for business because I like the thrill of hustling and as a kid I was always figuring out how to put extra money in my pocket in addition to my weekly allowance.

I'll admit that I have some irrational fear of programming. After a weekend spent on w3schools.com learning HTML and CSS, I pathetically bumbled my way through setting up and editing a wordpress site. And along each step of the way, I could hear the proverbial ghost of every programming nerd who had their lunch money stolen in high school sneering at me. Like the IT guy from the SNL skits, I felt that no matter what I was doing someone, somewhere was having a vindicated laugh at my expense. Again, irrational. But admitting you have a problem is the first step, right?

However, I will be starting to learn Ruby on Rails with a group of other non-technicals at school so I am relieved that misery will have company. I must admit that not knowing a programming language is the equivalent to not knowing Word or Excel a decade ago. I feel that in order stay relevant, I'm going to need to just get over my childish fears and start being able to have some basic programming skills so that I can have an intelligent conversation with my future engineering guys when.. you know.. I'm COO of a 50M startup.. someday.

With all that being said, here are my thoughts about the unsung heroes of startup world: the operators. The VP-of-get-shit-done guys (and gals). I also have something to get off my chest:

I am sick and tired of hearing about someone farting a new Web 2.0 company every 30 seconds and presenting it at some overblown conference where everyone's tweeting and retweeting the same crap like it's the next Facebook or Groupon or totally pushing the edge of augmented reality. Creating a new way to send a text message is not interesting. We have text messaging. And stop calling is a mobile communications platform.

I love reading VC blogs as much as the next guy but just once I want to hear someone say, "I'm investing in the social layer because anything that requires hard goods and inventory makes me sick to my stomach."

Don't get me wrong, I would love to get investment from Mark Suster or Ben Horowitz, but it seems like unless you are an internet-based company or green-tech startup you have a snowball's chance in hell of getting any attention.

Last time I checked, the water bottle I drink out of isn't composed of C++. My jeans aren't written in Java and the individual apple I ate this morning came from a tree, delivered by truck, sold by a real person and did not have a "post to Facebook" function on it.

The point I'm making is that there are a number of things that the twitterverse takes for granted that gets a little more difficult once you step away from your screen:

1. Try getting the door slammed in your face - getting to product to market-feedback is easy when you are shielded behind a username and have a delete key at your disposal. It's a lot harder when you are in the person's office, having the conversation in real-time, looking for non-verbal cues to gauge what you should say next and personal rejection to stomach (coz they aren't buying the product, they are buying you - ask any salesperson what I'm talking about). I would love for Eric Ries or Steve Blank to try and talk as flippantly about "sell, design, build" after attempting it in the real world: cold-calling for three weeks and then going on a 1 week sales meeting bender. Month in and month out.

2. A new product is not necessarily innovative - I am thankful for the tech industry, the innovations in business models over the last decade are pretty novel. And while they might be saturating the industry, they have yet to be implemented in existing industries. Want to see a highly disruptive opportunity that will make VCs craploads of money? Find a team that is employing the freemium model with hard goods (it's the future). I personally know a team (pair of undergrads) that is tinkering to find a way to give road bikes (quality ones) away for free and still have the firm make money.

3. "Hard" entrepreneurs are operational gladiators - going "lean" is a lot harder when you are dealing with inventory and not a lot of cash. You have to be more intentional about your actions and you aren't afforded the privilege of being completely at the beck-and-call of the market, sometimes you got to move product and hustle. That being said, any freedom that the firm has to pivot is the result of operational prowess. Striking a balance between organizational agility and efficiency when working with hard goods, takes a REALLY smart person (Google: "G Score") with the cahones to even attempt it in the first place.

I'm not advocating that "hard" entrepreneurs are better than technical, "soft" entrepreneurs or that the Web 2.0 surge hasn't benefited the nation. I'm simply attempting to shed light on the fact that there are number of entrepreneurs who are quietly hacking away at innovative non-technical problems in "mature" industries. It requires someone with well-rounded knowledge and competency in areas that are "boring" and "non-sexy": accounting, operations management, and sales. And it will be these entrepreneurs who will take the learnings from the tech industry and apply them to the rest of the world (yes, there is a world outside of Stanford's walls).

And here's my strong claim: while we spent our endowment on Facebook and Twitter, China doubled down on it's clean tech investment. China is working on gaining mastery of a hard problem, cheaply producing things that tend to be expensive. The US is mastering the art of coding an app over the course of a weekend.

In the coming years, "hard" entrepreneurs are going to be more critical if the US wants to remain an economic player in the world. Maybe we should start thinking about providing them with the support mechanisms that technical entrepreneurs have been enjoying for the last decade. Places like the Foundry are a good start and we'll be reporting AUTM numbers for our first year soon. Hopefully, it will serve as an example of what is necessary to support entrepreneurial development in a non-technical realm (hint: it doesn't involve money or resources).

How to Get Good at Making Money

Hear them haters talk

but there ain't nothin you can tell em

just made a million..

got another million on my schedule.

-Wiz Khalifa, Black and Yellow

I just finished reading a really, REALLY good article from Jason Fried, CEO of 37Signals. His article on Inc.com titled How to Get Good at Making Money follows his innocent and curious exploration of sales and enterprise during his childhood. Here's some of my favorite quotes:

...people are happy to pay for things that work well. Never be afraid to put a price on something. If you pour your heart into something and make it great, sell it. For real money. Even if there are free options, even if the market is flooded with free. People will pay for things they love.

.. charging for something makes you want to make it better... after all, paying for something is one of the most intimate things that can occur between two people. One person is offering something for sale, and the other person is spending hard-earned cash to buy it. Both have worked hard to be able to offer the other something he or she wants. That's trust-and, dare I say, intimacy. For customers, paying for something sets a high expectation.

When you put a price on something, you get really honest feedback from customers. When entrepreneurs ask me how to get customers to tell us what they really think, I respond with two words: charge them. They'll tell you what they think, demand excellence, and take the product seriously in a way they never would if they were just using it for free.

This article was very insightful and endearing to me as it helped crystallize some "forgotten" lessons from my childhood. As a youngster, I loved making money and was always knocking on doors to shovel people's walk or rake their leaves. The feeling of money in my pocket was great - especially because it signified that I had earned something.

Later on, I had moved into trading cards - first with Pokemon and later on with Star Wars, as the franchise reboot happened when I was in fifth grade. I liked the competition of playing the games (yes there were games to be played) and acquired a large enough collection to let people borrow the minimum required deck size to play and would teach them.

I remember going to Scout summer camp and teaching other boys in my troop (we had about 100 enrolled any given time) and other kids from out of state at the commons area. I picked them because everyone in my neighborhood was already playing Star Wars and the likelihood that they would be interested in buying from me was low. Plus, when you are camping somewhere in Idaho or Wyoming, scout camp provides very little non-scout-related entertainment, thus there was little to do but play card games.

As kids learned the game, I started selling them at a premium since there wasn't any trading card shops immediately available. I could also upsell "foil cards" that were strategic game-makers at multiples of the price of a pack of 10 cards (each pack contained at least one *surprise* foil card).

My parents would marvel at the fact that I would come home with more money after camp than they gave me.

I echo Jason's insight that you have to sell the things that you love yourself - because otherwise nothing gets sold. Even then, you aren't even having a sales conversation as it is traditionally known.

Here are entrepreneurial lessons from my childhood that still show up today:

1. Go where the ground is fertile. - I knew I couldn't sell in my neighborhood because everyone was doing it and there was a card shop nearby so there was little that I could offer them. I had to go someplace where people would be open to a new kind of card game and could easily catch the fever. Scout camp was great because card games were a great way to pass the time when you decided to skip out of your merit badge classes.

2. Enroll, entertain, teach. - I think it's important to find way to get people's attention for just long enough and then you have to do everything possible to make sure that they enjoyed their time with you. You've got to give them the dopamine charge - the "happy-feel-good" experience that leaves them wanting more. When you get permission to have more of their time - that's the perfect opportunity a great opportunity to introduce some of the dry "learning" that is necessary for them to be pleasantly hooked on what you are up to. It's important to love what you are selling because your natural passion is what people are playing off of when you are teaching them about your product.

3. Let the value proposition present itself. - After playing the game a few times, I would typically offer a "premade" deck for sale - mentioning it would take more time and money to construct themselves. By allowing them to participate for free, they could easily see the benefit of having their own deck to curate - rather than some fixed deck that I constructed.

4. Let the users interact. - After I had sold about 8 decks of cards, I organized tournaments with a "heavily stacked" deck as the prize for the winner. This would usually draw small crowd of curious boys who would watch, ask questions and then would want to purchase a deck from me. Because I removed myself from the equation and let kids from different troops battle it out, the players would have their friends show up and I could easily offer the same access to the fun to those who showed up - this saved me a lot of time and effort by letting my customers do most of the work for me.

All in all, I agree with Jason Fried that the skills we build can start at anytime but that we are always practicing them. This has certainly been the case for me. I think that our childhood lessons should be taken at face value simply because they capture the essence of doing business and human interaction. As adults we have a nasty habit of over-complicating things - which can be detrimental when you are leading an early-stage startup with limited resources to use in the quest to find product-market fit.

Thanks Jason for the article. I recommend that you all go check it out and see what shows up for you.

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.

Internships vs. Starting a Small Business

***This is an article that I wrote for {Branded} Online Magazine. Feel free to cruise on over and check out the great writers contributing to the publication (there will be another link at the bottom of this post).

Today’s job market is fierce and in order to be competitive I find a lot of people my age are looking into internships as an experience-based stepping stone into their post-college job. Adding some “real world” experience to your resume as you are exiting college is great – which is why I am suggesting that you take that same six months and start a small business instead.

Most people initially get soft about this kind of possibility because they have some notion of entrepreneurs as swashbuckling risk-takers. Not only is this gravely inaccurate, it also prevents a lot of capable people from exploring the beauty of creating and being at risk to learn something about themselves. Starting and running a small business poses no more risk than an internship while delivering an experience that is an order of magnitude greater than working for free at CorporateAmerica.com.

Internship	Small Business
Conduct an internet search to find companies that might want to hire your skill set.	Conduct an internet search to find people/businesses that might want your product or service (coffee, cupcakes, car-detailing, etc.)
Reach to your personal network to find connections within potential companies that you want to intern at. Often you are cold-calling companies, asking for interviews.	Reach out to your personal network to find connections with potential customers that would find your product valuable. Often you are cold-calling sales leads out of the phone book, asking for meetings.
Face a lot of rejection, get a couple of interviews, face more rejection – maybe you get some offers.	Face a lot of rejection, get a couple of sales meetings, face more rejection – maybe you get offers for a second meeting.
Land a position (maybe).	Get a sale (eventually).
Work long hours for minimal or no pay.	Work long hours for minimal or no pay…at first.
You are the office bitch. No one cares about your feelings, just your ability to get coffee and bagels and occasionally be a spreadsheet jockey.	You are your customers’ bitch. No one cares about your feelings, just your ability to deliver a quality product on time and make things right when mistakes happen.
Build skills necessary to be a peon in a corporate machine and that the only way to be successful is to be politically astute enough to place your name on winning projects and subtly shift blame when things go wrong.	Build skills necessary to be a manager by applying all your “boring” undergrad classes that are now critical components to make the whole business work. If you don’t you will run out of money...fast.
Learn to appeal to authority and pull a lever.	Learn that you are more self-reliant than you originally thought. You experience ownership, working smart and creative problem solving on-demand.
Maybe you get offered a position at the end of the internship.	Maybe your company shuts down, maybe it succeeds, or maybe it sits somewhere in the middle. – the cool part is that you have much more say about the enterprise’s outcome.
Repeat. Try to explain to new employers why you didn’t get offered a position at the end of the internship.	Repeat. This time it’s easier because you avoid all the mistakes you made last time.

See? There’s not much difference in the effort required to start and run a small business over interning at a company. From a learning perspective they are the same except that they are on opposite ends of the continuum. Both put you at risk to learn something about yourself. What you want to be at risk to learn is entirely up to you.

If you plan on getting a job in Corporate America, there is (seriously) nothing wrong with that. In fact, I recommend that you still start a small business instead of interning. The reasoning behind this suggestion is rather simple: everyone you are competing with has been interning at or has been laid off from Corporate America. Think of how easy it will be to stand out from the bland crowd and get a job when you roll in with some hard-earned entrepreneurial experience.

If you want to create your own internship and want some tips for the next steps, feel free to check out my other article on {Branded}: Start Up in a Box.

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.