The Road Not Taken, Revisited

It's not until we've lost everything that we are free to be anything.

- Tyler Durden, Fight Club

I started 2010 with a promise to myself that I would take the road less traveled in my life. My first ever post on this blog talked about choices that we have when reacting to what life gives us. While I wasn't exactly conscious of this commitment throughout the year, the results that I have produced may provide evidence that I did my part to make the most of the opportunities that I had.

By all means, I had amazing year attending my first TED Conference, being published, launching and closing Dash & Cooper, and contributing the creation of The Foundry.

Yet in the midst of all this, the most significant thing that occurred this year was the slow death of who I thought I was. At the beginning of the year, I was certain of a lot. Certain of who I was in the world, who I was going to be in the world and how the world worked. As the year went on, these assumptions were smashed - every single one of them. This creative destruction was grinding, purifying, painful and enlightening.

Around February or March, I understood that I was going to need to become the person "I was destined to be" in order to taking advantage of the opportunities coming my way. And while I understood that change was necessary, I didn't realize what exactly was going to take place.

What actually did take place was the erosion of the hidden beliefs and commitments that supported a persona that allowed me to "fake it". And by faking it, I mean playing the entrepreneur prodigy that has it "figured out" (Good Will Hunting, anyone?). A character that I had carefully crafted for almost two decades was stripped of me in last 12 months. All of my assumptions about how things work, should work, failed the litmus test of reality (in my case, the experience of trying to build a company). Furthermore, I had many more hidden assumptions that were brought to light and subsequently obliterated. Everything I knew, everything I thought I knew was gone.

I was literally left with nothing.

The experience was like a product of the Red Pill-Blue Pill scene in The Matrix, the burning-acid-on-your-hand scene from Fight Club and the scene where Ellen Page's character in Inception realizes she has access to pure creation.

The beautiful part is that in sacrificing the person that I thought I was, I was given the ability to be anything - thereby eradicating the "who I've been", "who I am" and "who I'm destined to be" notion. I was free of the confines that limited me from doing what I wanted to do; to be who I wanted to be - a blank canvass to create upon.

Reflecting on it now, I found that I paid a small price in exchange for endless possibilities. Not only just the freedom of self-expression but also a mental model to discover and bring to light more assumptions that I hold but are hidden from me. The benefit of doing so allows me the ability to live my life intentionally rather than letting my assumptions-mistaken-as-truth run my life for me.

I wouldn't say that I'm a 100% different person - humans are too complex to enact durable behavior modification in just a single year. Neither would I say that I am a perfect person. In fact, the quite the opposite. I've just been attempting to put a mechanism into play to identify, analyze and be transformed by my flaws, foibles and intra-contradictions. I'm also not (nor will ever claim to be) an 'expert', like anything in life, proficiency takes practice and time.

And as time goes on this regenerative process will resemble a snake shedding its skin - a constant turnover and departure from what I thought I knew as hidden and undeclared assumptions and commitments are brought to light and transformed into the assumptions and commitments that I hold (like a deck of cards).

So thanks for your patience these last 10 years. Thanks for the patience this last year and I look forward to engaging with you in 2011 and beyond.

Claims, Compromises and Indiana Jones

Welcome to resistance

The tension is here, the tension is here

Between who you are and who you could be

Between how it is and how it should be

I dare you to move

I dare you to lift yourself up off the floor

I dare you to move

Like today never happened

- Switchfoot, I Dare You to Move

I've made a lot of claims in my life.

Claims about fame, fortune, power and prestige.

Claims about who I am.

Claims about who I want to be.

Claims to defame others.

Claims to defame myself.

Claims to follow through.

Claims of war.. and claims of peace.

Claims to myself about my intentions.

Claims to be _____________.

I have made many claims about things I thought I knew and many claims about things I knew nothing about.

Some claims were true, some were fake and some were embarrassingly false. But the one common denominator is that I normally don't follow through on as many claims as I make.

I'm changing that. See, it's a powerful thing when you make claims about who you want to be and what you want to do - and someone takes you seriously enough to give you a chance to live up to them.

First reaction? .. Holy &$%*!

When someone gives you the opportunity to go do what you said you were going to do and be who you said you wanted to be, the elation is quickly replaced with the reality that you are left facing the dark, heavy chasm of actually having to go do it.

I was lucky enough to be given that opportunity this summer. It wasn't exactly pleasant, but thankfully I wasn't alone. I had 24 others facing exactly the same thing and we all had to step out into the apparent abyss. It's kind of like Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade when he comes to the deep chasm with no obvious way across. Before he steps out, he must decide between risking his own life in order to follow through on his promise to save his father or turning back.

For those that have seen the movie (should be all of us, if you haven't seen the movie it's un-American), we all know that he takes a step to find footing on solid rock, disguised as an optical illusion. But I reflect on the moment that he pauses before taking that step.

It looks like certain death. He looks at his book to find some sort of clue, nothing obvious. He stares into the blackness below. There's a moment of panic, a reconsideration. Indiana hears the cries of his dying father and you see the internal struggle, the fear and yet the sense of duty to uphold his promise by taking the next step on the journey. Finally, he clutches his book tight closes his eyes and even though he's not ready and the situation isn't perfect he decides to step anyway. From the ledge of rock-solid certainty into the black unknown.

Beautiful.

Most of us have had to take that step a couple of times in our past and I know that I used to doing everything in my power to avoid those situations. Most of the time that step was taken in a time of great peril and pain.

But what about the ones that are taken for a great adventure? What about the steps that lead you to the triumph and glory you seek, ones where your dreams come true, ones that are presented when people aren't, in fact, dying?

It's an intriguing fear when you are offered a chance to have everything you want. I don't want to speak for any one else, but I was terrified when I realized that my dreams were coming true. This is due mainly because I really had no idea what I was asking for until I got it. I was just making some half-baked claims and selling them really well. And like good ol' Indy, I thought about turning back.

We all create external reasons why we shouldn't take that step; too many disappointments have jaded us to need the chains of mediocrity that have become so comfortable. Luke-warm is still warm right?

What if Indiana Jones had looked at the abyss and turned back? What if he would rather watch his father take his last breath than momentarily step into the unkown?

Nothing. Someone else would likely step up, step out, save the day and earn the glory - live the life that was meant for me.

Every compromise we make between who we are and who we could be is essentially equivalent to death. Except this time the body dies decades later.

I am in no means perfect at this, I'm just committed to upping the percentage of times that I step from the ledge of certainty - to give the unknown a shot. For every time I do, I get closer to being the person that I need to be in order to live the life that's in front of me. And every time I don't, every time I compromise (which happens more than I want it to) I keep my relationship with all of you from really living because I'm offering a Travis Corrigan knock-off, not the real thing.

Do what you should to do, be who you could be. Or not. You have nothing to lose.

Really.

A Lack of Abject Cynicism

There's a lot I've been thinking about when it comes to my experience of being an entrepreneur. It's been a hellish few months and I'm just getting started. Despite my imagined ability to artfully articulate what it's like to be a "real entrepreneur", I keep finding (and collecting) snippets of articles that strike the chord deep within.

See, I thought I knew a lot. But the more I know, the more I realize that there's a lot I don't know that I don't know. However, if I had to say something about what I've learned, it's these two things:

1. There's a lot I don't know. Even if I think that I know it, someone else seeing the same thing as me and I don't know how they are viewing it.
2. It's not about knowing more but developing a way to learn smarter. A method of learning the all the unknown in life as you travel along and acquire the information that progesses you further along than every other piece of information bombarding you - a method for identifying the different between what's urgent vs what's important and choosing accordingly.

My experience is only shared by my Foundry cohort. Other young entrepreneur CEO's who are so openly embracing the path that they've taken. They are the only people that I can truly connect with. They understand the constant gnawing of which step to take next. The static that we receive about not wanting to go get "real jobs". The frustrations of being told what we should do with our company by people who don't really understand what we're doing. The limbo between being revenue-ready and seeking financing so you can quit your job. The look that we get when we tell people we are CEOs and they don't believe us. The balancing act between the near-broke startup we have now and the billion dollar company that we have in our heads. Our fixation on things like excel, Management Reports, this tiny thing called margins and the art of being scrappy. I know this sounds elitist (that's not my intention) but unless you're in it, daily living it, it's just hard to connect over these things.

I stumbled across another article from Harvard Business Review about Misfit Entrepreneurs. Dan Pallotta writes an article that is so far from the traditional perspective of the entrepreneur that it's probably why I connected with it so much. The article, like what most entrepreneurs like to do, takes the stereotypical perception of what an entrepreneur is and flips it upside down. Dan provides an obscure and almost enlightened perspective on where most great entrepreneurs operate from.

Don't get me wrong, there are a lot of people that talk the game (like I did for a long time) but only a few actually strike out to do it. I am in no way implying that you must be an entrepreneur in order to be someone of worth or that people who are tackling the corporate world are the antithesis of what's described below. Being human is not mutually exclusive to the path that we take in life. We all share the common thread of the human experience, we all express it in different outlets and some nurture and foster it more than others. All I am providing is a humble and unorthodox insight (one of many) about the core of what happens behind the scenes in my mind and heart on a daily basis. Here's what Dan says about it:

Someone interviewed me a few months back for an entrepreneurship project, and he mentioned that in his conversations the thing that stood out the most was the willingness of great entrepreneurs to be vulnerable.

It's not the first association you'd make with an entrepreneur. Words like "driven", "ambitious", and "persistent" usually come to mind. But the moment he said it I knew that he'd hit the nail on the head.

Vulnerability. It is the most poignant quality in every entrepreneur I know.

To embrace the misfit in oneself is to be vulnerable. It is to forsake the easy acceptance that comes with fitting in and to instead be fortified by a kind of love, really. A love of life, a love of wonder, and, ultimately a sustaining love for oneself. Far from egoism, that love for oneself is a measure of one's love for others, for humanity. And it only from that love that great ideas can be born.

This kind of love cannot be taught in business school. It has to be felt. It has to be given sanctuary away from the noise and relentless assault of information. And then it has to be nutured. It must be embraced, in the light of day, for all to see, for people to ridicule, to criticize, to laugh at. And the entrepreneur has to be willing to feel the pain of ridicule and suffer the risk of the dream being stolen, or crushed by the meanness of this world. But the misfit doesn't worry about that. The misfit has a higher calling: to bring the unmanifest into being, no matter who is saying what.

Vulnerability is the absence of cynicism. And the absence of cynicism is love.

As that interviewer uttered the word, I thought of my entrepreneur friends. And I realized that what separates them from others is their abject lack of cynicism. Their willingness to be vulnerable.

Their love.

Confident, but not really sure.

I recently read this thought-prodding article from Harvard Business Review.

It is part of a blog series that I am following call 12 Things Good Bosses Believe. This particular entry rings pretty true to my experience with Dash & Cooper over the last few months and my life experience since starting my senior year in high school: we all live in uncertainty, which becomes somewhat more certain as time goes on. In my personal experience, mainly in football and entrepreneurship, you don't have very long to try to analyze all the details and different contingencies before you make a decision. You have to make decisions with what you know and what senses you have about where you are going. And then be ready to change your mind.

In the article, the author details a small excerpt from an interview with Andy Grove, longtime CEO of Intel. Something so simple about dealing with complexity that it shifts the way you think a little:

None of us have a real understanding of where we are heading. I don't. I have senses about it. But decisions don't wait, investment decisions or personal decisions and prioritization don't wait, for that picture to be clarified. You have to make them when you have to make them. So you take your shots and clean up the bad ones later. I think it is very important for you to do two things: act on your temporary conviction as if it was a real conviction; and when you realize that you are wrong, correct course very quickly.

Think about it. Read the article. Give me some feedback as to how this applies to your life.

Everything Matters

Every man's life ends the same way. It is only the details of how he lived and how he died that distinguish one man from another. - Ernest Hemingway

I was once honored with a most inspiring lecture early last semester in one of my entrepreneurship classes. We were discussing the practice of skill development over time and were told how paying attention to the details of developing skills, framing certain thinking-patterns and hardwiring your personal decision-making model can, over time, allow you to do powerful things when the opportunity presents itself.

Since we were also discussing idea generation, a few of us mentioned how we had thoughts for products that very common today many many years before their time. The reason why we weren't able to act on those ideas was due to the fact that we just didn't have the skills and knowledge to make it a reality. What my professor said next, will stay with me forever:

"Laird Hamilton, as you may know, is a professional big wave surfer. He got to be that way because his biological father left him at the age of four, which caused his mother to move them both to Hawaii. Wandering the beach at a young age, he had a chance meeting with the man who would eventually become his adoptive father, pro-surfer Bill Hamilton. In wanting to please his would-be adoptive father, he took up surfing and continued surfing nearly every waking moment of his life. To the point that he was surfing in amateur competitions before the age of ten and pro competitions in his teens - later setting his sights on big wave surfing. After a lifetime commitment to skill development within surfing he went on to conquer a wave that was never considered possible to ride.

According to Moore's Law, technology will double every seven years. Subsequently, every seven years, a sinlge product will enter the market that significant shifts the paradigm in which society operates within. Shifts it to the point that the very discourse of society through history is altered permanently because the rules about what is possible have been rewritten.


I tell you all this because some time in your life you will come across one, if you are truly gifted maybe two, paradigm-shifting ideas that have the potential to rewrite the rules and shift the historical discourse of society. Often, that wave has formed before you even know that you are on it. To ride that wave, to make that impossible idea a reality, will require you to do something that could never be taught, something that could never have known to prepare for. Whether or not you succeed a combination of a few things: which skills you decide to develop, a lifetime commitment to developing those skills and your ability to come up with the perfect answer to a problem that no one ever thought possible."


Needless to say, my mind was blown. Shortly before walking out of that class room, wondering how I was going to possibly focus on my job at work, my professor showed us this video of Laird Hamilton surfing the impossible Teahupoo to further drill the lesson into us.

Go watch the video, think about what Laird says at the end of the clip about risking his life, and then think about what skills you are developing (whether you intend to or not). Are you knowingly committing yourself to skills that will prepare you for project that may very well define you? Or are you unknowingly developing a skill set that negatively alters your life (shifting blame to circumstances/others, avoiding anything unpleasant, not doing work and then complaining about why you shouldn't be held accountable)?

Think about it. Post your thoughts below.

20/20

Hindsight is 20/20 because the past is always easiest to see. - Bleeding Through

If I've learned anything since my last post. It's that execution of your commitments is the only thing that separates the exceptional from the mediocre.

I've made a lot of claims. I have not followed through on all of those claims. The differentiating variable between what I say I'm going to do and what I actually do is simply the clash between reality and my perception of reality.

Every week I know exactly what my completion rate is. As of writing this, I am at 16% for the week. I have only hit 100% a few times. The reason behind the discrepancies is that when I write out my management reports on Friday, my perception of what reality on that particular day hasn't factored in the things that I have yet to find out. By Monday, only half the list is relevant, by Wednesday, half of that is relevant. The Travis Corrigan that wrote the management report on Friday is different than the Travis Corrigan the following Wednesday. The reality of the space that you are operating in changes quickly in highly chaotic, complex situations. Priorities change as the environment changes, if you can't adapt your organization dies.

So why make a plan if it's going to change? Because over time you get better at calling your own shots, knowing that there are a lot of cognitive blindspots built into your plan. You learn to execute better, you become disciplined and start recognizing work avoidance tactics (like writing blog posts). The practice of executing on a plan makes you become better at planning. It's cyclical: after a while you learn that it's hard to execute a soft, head-in-the-clouds plan. And you learn that you won't accomplish anything of merit with low-standard plans.

It's hard, it requires integritous accountability and dedicate time of reflection to review what you have done and what you have not.

Try it: Write down (yes, write it down) 10 things that you plan to do in a week. Then add 2 stretch goals (mark them with an "s" at the end). Put the document someplace that you can get to easily, preferably someplace that you pass regularly. At the end of the week calculate the following:

Commitments Completed/Commitments Made = % Completion Rate

The exercise isn't about getting 100%, it's about looking at WHY you didn't do what you said you were going to do. Were they not as important as you originally thought that they were? Did some unforeseeable hing that wasn't on your list pop up that took precedent? Are they worth carrying over to next week or should you drop them?

Do this exercise weekly for the next 4 weeks. Tell me your completion rates and any insights that you have about.

Letters

In the spirit of spring cleaning, I am in the process of purging my bloated closet. Chucking things that I thought I couldn't live without in a blitzkrieg, an activity that's surprising easier than I anticipated. I've run into a snag though..

I've stumbled upon an old wooden box, a gift from my grandfather, full of handwritten memories.

Old journals, notebooks with sketchings and thoughts, and manila envelopes stuffed with pictures of times I forgot that I ever experience. It's an odd assortment of mixed-emotions: warm nostalgia, a reawakening to the emotions as I'm transported back to the moments captured by the item in my hand juxtaposed with the knowledge of the less-than-perfect memories that separate the man I am today from the boy was then.

Then there are the letters. They are soft, a sign that a significant amount of time has passed since their inceptions. Letters that my parents wrote the night before my State Championship football game and graduation. Correspondence between old high-school flames that I was convinced I loved at the time. Letters from sisters professing their love just before I moved to California. Small notes I received from friends and family that despite their shortness carry an impact because of their thoughtfulness. Letters from former loves (the real ones), some I remember discovering on my windshield after I finished a work shift, some are printed emails, many I thought I had thrown away during the normal purging that occurs during the painful breakup. Correspondence, either handwritten or printed email, with almost-lovers, their words dancing on the line of deep friendship and wistful thinking.

Then there are the letters that I wrote. The ones which were never delivered. The ones that carry my heart, either in the moments of it's breaking or the heaviness just before breaking another's. Nostalgia takes a twisted turn, traced with a form of regret. An entire library of thoughts cram my head as I walk through those experiences as well as the alternate experiences that I wish would have happened or could have made happen but didn't have the foresight in the actual midst of it all. Oh wait, it was those experiences that taught me foresight.

Then I think about whether or not I should toss them, save them, or even.. send them. Seems like a good idea considering I'm in a state of purge right now. So I think about their effect: they may change the recipient's retrospect of my reality or how I felt during that time but it wouldn't change what happened. Some the recipients I talk to (kinda), some I don't, some I make a point to avoid. I wouldn't even know how to go about finding the addresses to send them along.

As all of this swirls and grows, I find myself taking one last look, a deep breath and listening to the sound as I rip them apart and toss them in the trash can. I don't throw all the letters away, just the ones I shouldn't be hanging on to anymore.

The point is this: That was then, I'm in now. Many of those experiences are buried in pine, six feet under time. My life is much different now than it was then. I'm a much different person too. Who I was when I wrote those letters is dead and gone. The pedagogy of trial by fire has burned the naivety and fear of the unknown. I've lived a little, experienced some and learned what is and is not love and loss. As such, the letters are like takeaway memos of a long meeting that I didn't want to be in. In the scheme of everything I deal with on a daily basis they are just trivial pieces of paper. The lessons are burned on my heart, and I am thankful for them because they came at such a great cost. Throwing them away is just the physical action of hammering the last mental nail to the coffin I began building long ago.

Challenge: Burn it all. Let it go. Don't wish for what should have been or could have been. You can't bring them back, they are chapters that have already been written. Take those lessons and write new ones to look back on, this time with a smile.