The Man Behind the Myth

This is a funny email conversation that I had late last night with fellow Foundry brother, David Oldham, CEO of O-Codes.

Dave: Would be cool to have a Dropbox folder for resumes/bios where people who wanted to join a startup could post their background and skillset for teams to review and then follow up with the individual if it's a good fit.

Me: Noted. I'll talk to Matt and Rob about that possibility and see if we can get something done formally.

Dave: You are the man behind the myth.

Me: Ha ha, indeed. What is the myth?

Dave: The myth: that a brilliant, ambitious young entrepreneur wander the dimly lit, cubicled halls of the Foundry late at night scheming up the world's next great invention; and if you happen to see him, touch his North Face jacket sleeve and you too will be imbued with magical entrepreneurial powers.

***

The funny thing about this is that I was wearing the exact North Face jacket he was referring to when I read the email this morning.

Let it be known though, that the character I play in life: the ambitious young entrepreneur, is in fact a myth. I am not out to create a world-shifting invention for the sake of personal accolades and bragging rights at cocktail parties. In fact, I'm not out to create a world-shifting invention at all. I just like building things that I find fascinating.

I am just a guy, who likes tinkering with machines that look like entrepreneurial endeavors. The ambition is often misinterpreted as "nerd-fervor" for seeing things come together on a spreadsheet. And young is often misinterpreted as... well actually I am young so there's nothing to say about that. As far as the North Face jacket, it probably won't imbue magical entrepreneurial powers, but it will help protect you against the cold.

So feel free to engage with the man (boy). Because that's who I am.. with a few foibles and flaws. Just like every other human being.

The Theory of Competition

You never know who is going to flip the script,
And take a pass on saying 'Uncle' - Unknown

I had a friend post this video on Facebook a few days ago. I've been hooked on it ever since. I tend to be a suckker for these videos because my experience in sports has always been that as the underdog or longshot comeback. None is more true than the "glory days" of my senior season of football at Skyline High School. After going 5-5 in the regular season, we somehow pulled off miraculous upsets week after week in the playoffs to eventually emerge as the 2005 State Champions. This experience taught me a lot of lessons that I draw from today:

• Crucibles - if you survive them, form bonds within teams that are unbreakable.
• The odds and the newscaster commentary mean nothing - when one team shows up to play and the other doesn't, all bets are off.
• Battles are won not on the field in front of a crowd but in practice and preparation.
• You reap what you sow, just in a a different season - squats in January and running track in March means the difference when you're in man-to-man coverage in November.
• Your strategy must evolve - just because you shut down a running offense one week doesn't mean you should do the same prep for the upcoming passing offense.
• Don't rest on your accolades - no one knows (or cares) about what I did in high school 5 years ago, they care about what I'm doing right now to contribute.

So without further ado, here's the video. Enjoy.

Why I Do It.

"I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain." --- Frank Herbert, Dune - Bene Gesserit Litany Against Fear

There is an unanswered question that has and continues to collectively baffle economists, psychologists and career coaches. The question has existed parallel to the economic system that encourages its asking. A question that many have asked since the idea of capitalism was first penned by Adam Smith himself. The answer is hard to produce and succinctly articulate, even for the entrepreneur: Why do people start new ventures? Put another way:

Why do entrepreneurs do what they do?

Why suffer through the ambiguity and inner turmoil? The feeling of constantly walking on the edge of failure? Why put in hours on the laptop at odd hours of the night, on weekends in coffee shops with free wifi and during the holidays? Why strip yourself of the lifestyle trappings that your peers are enjoying at 40k a year so that you can plow every extra dollar into an idea that everyone says won't work anyway? Why engage in the ditch digging that drains away the person you thought you were?

The sexiest answer, of course, is to get rich. But the only people who buy that answer are students because it was sold to them at Barnes & Noble by corporate marketing teams posing as entrepreneurs - telling them to use their strengths to go "take it to the next level".

The truth is, we all know the money is far from guaranteed and that it will be years before we even see a dime of it. Given the 70% failure rate of new businesses, each entrepreneur answers this question in their own way, because each entrepreneur's situation is different and how they come to grips with the daunting odds is individual to them.

For me personally, I don't do it for fame, fortune or personal prestige. I don't do it to impress people, to "stick it to The Man", prove critics wrong, to look smart or because I like being the underdog.

In all the months that I slugged it out for Dash & Cooper, nothing in my life compares to the ecstasy of seeing my first D&C shirt finally come in from one of my manufacturers. The road that lies between your idea and selling your first product is paved with late nights, missed social functions and the constant whir of your mind as you parse through disparate information, groping for some solid ground. The reason why I do it is for the pure elation that occurs when you are briefly reminded that out of nothing, you built something that people value. You are reminded that this is a fact. Something that no one can refute or take away from you. It is then, and only then, that you become present to the meaning of creation and the truth that ownership is not simply a bunch of papers and signatures.

In order to understand what it's like to bathe in the pure experience of ownership and self-reliance - to feel it pierce through to your bones - you must slog it out in the trenches amongst the mud and much of uncertainty and fear. There is no other way.

That's why I do it: to feel alive.

***

This post was written in part for {Branded} Online Magazine. Feel free to go check it out and see some other things that we are saying over there.

Go to the next blog post: The 2011 Action Plan.

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.

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.