Battle Ready.

At heights which great men reached and kept,

Were not attained by sudden flight;

They whilst their companions slept,

Were toiling upwards in the night.

- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

It's been a little more than 5 years since I last had the privilege of playing a competitive sport regularly. And while I am tempted to delve into my Championship Glory Days(TM), you'll be spared it's mentioning.

Last year I picked up cycling and dabbled a little into cyclocross. I was fortunate to have a friend who is a far more experienced cyclist than I, be my riding partner and pseudo-coach. I thoroughly enjoyed the experience of being on my bike in a different contexts: punishing mountain climbs, clandestine back roads in the heart of panoramic landscapes, the tense poise of being surrounded by the peloton during a criterium race adn the unique feeling that happens when agony gives way to a combination of masochism and long-lost boyish joy during the muddy 3rd lap of a sleeting cyclocross race through trees and rocks and sand.

It was like a whole new world opened up to me last year, and I loved every frightening surprise of doing something new and realizing that, with a little practice, I might be decent at this stuff.

And practice I have: skate skiing at altitude in Park City, hours upon hours on the stationary trainer at Gold's Gym or my apartment and recently I've been incorporating leg strength and speed exercises borrowed from the Glory Days(TM). For my second season I have put myself into action, pursing some aggressive goals: move from Category D to Category C in RMR crit series (April-May), complete LOTOJA (September) and start slaughtering people during cyclocross season (October) with a stretch goal of placing top 10 at the state championships in November.

I have happily rediscovered the experience of being physically disciplined. There is something about preparing for battle that annunciates some transcendent principles that seem elementary: the value of preparation, the virtue of discipline, that you reap only what you sow and never in the same season.

I love the rhythmic pace of life that occurs when I am training constantly. But like any other human being, I waver. I question why I put myself in pain and agony during the dark of mid-January. And without fail, the answer presents itself as clearly as the cortisol surging through my brain: I'm doing it precisely because a majority of the peloton I'll be racing against in March ISN'T doing what I'm doing.

But some are.

I begin to wonder if they are doing more than me right now or are churning out better performance metrics than me. And I as I think about them, I wonder if they are in the middle of their workout, thinking about me. Thinking about me in the way that I think about them. Right now. Wondering if they will have prepared well enough to put me in the hurt locker in the final laps of a criterium race.

And it's this combination of respect for your opponents in a way that only gladiators have for each other before they meet in battle. I think that the bond you have with your competition is special in that it is twofold: you are the only ones who know the reality of what you do and you want to kill each other.

The feeling that you are living beyond yourself, that there is something transcendent, something larger than yourself at play is a catalytic byproduct of being devoted to constantly preparing for and engaging in competition.

And then there's the battle itself.

The tenuous release of a wound-up spring. The "gallows-focus" of being inches away from 30 other nervous, motivated riders in a peloton moving at 50 kilometers/hour. Understanding the danger and potential for substantial bodily harm if someone crashes at this speed. Yet despite my nervousness, my adrenaline, the heightened sense of nano-changes in my environment, there is a faint seed of hope.

Hope, that in the midst of the chaos, I get a chance to know what it's like to attack the field. The hope that I get to feel the benefit of off-season preparation when I drop a gear to pass someone in the agonizing last third of the race. The terrified excitement at the possibility of putting my competition in the hurt locker in the service of being the first across the finish line. That feeling of being able to push through the suffering with 3 laps to go, to suffer harder and longer than the rest of the field. This is what I look forward to when I am putting time on the trainer in December, January and February.

It's an odd combination of masochism and curiosity of "how far can I push this?", "how far can my opponent push this?". And of course, the uncertainty. I don't know which people in the field have been preparing like I have, who are thinking the same thoughts I am. I don't know if someone else is going to put me in the hurt locker or if I'm are going to be the one doling out the punishment.

It's no longer about how many squats, sprints or hours, but simply how much I have prepared to suffer. Aside from the technique and the strength, the emotional and mental conditioning to have fortitude in the face of my legs being on fire and battery acid pumping through my veins. How much have I trained your psyche to respond to these conditions is something that's only evident when you are launching your attack on the peloton.

Training, for me is nothing more than suffering sessions. I work to have perfect form and manage my fight-or-flight response in the face of every part of me screaming "stop". When I am practicing well, my competitions are a step down. There's a huge difference between playing to *not lose* and playing to win -I aim to be in latter category.

By the way there's 24 days left to crit season :)

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.

Business Planning v. Business Discovery

He never risked sh#!,

He hoped and he wished it,

But it didn't fall in his lap,

So he ain't even here, he pretends

That airplanes in the night sky

Are like shooting stars.

- Eminem

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

La Professionale

The amount of resources, time and money that go into solving a small problem is pretty comparable to the amount of resources that go into solving a big problem.

Why not solve a large problem?

-Randy Komisar, General Partner, Kleiner-Perkins

Every morning I take the bus up 3rd Avenue to the David Eccles School of Business. A colleague and I get on the first bus that comes out of SL Central Station: 5:55 am and stroll into the student-run Template Cafe at the school of business to manage the coffee service.

The nice thing about taking the bus is that it, in large part, adds some structure to my life. I have to wake up at 5am every weekday, which means that I have to go to be no later than 10pm, which means that I have to be on task with everything. Overall, more is getting done because I sleep in no later than 7am on weekends and waking up early is getting easier and easier.

Of course, there are some frustrations and variability dealing with late busses but it's not unmanageable.

Anyone who has taken public transportation semi-regularly knows that after a while it becomes routinized because you've experienced it enough to account for any event that occurs within two standard deviations of what "normally" happens.

And then there is the people who take the same routes that you do. Though you never actually talk to them, you get to know them by being around them in the context of taking a bus. These are what I call 'perfect strangers'. They know a certain aspect about you that few others in your life do simply because the experience of taking public transportation imparts a certain discipline.

One such perfect stranger fascinates me in particular. My colleague and I have aptly named him 'La Professionale'. La Professionale is a gentleman who stands about 50m away from the bus stop, down on the corner of South Temple and E St. smoking his cigarette and watching for the bus to come down the street. He does this because the bus stop is in poor line of sight for the approaching bus and makes it difficult to maximize the full potential of a cigarette when waiting for the bus to come. it's evident that this method was discovered and born out of a long period of trial and error wasting cigarettes waiting for the bus.

We call him 'La Professionale' because he has taken a simple task like waiting for the bus, maximized it's potential utility (keeping yourself entertained during the 'standard 7 minute waiting for the bus window' by smoking a cigarette) and optimized the process to be repeatable every time it happens.

What's professional about it is that he has found the activity that delivers the highest possible value for him and has made it trivial. He just does it, no thinking, no effort.

Entrepreneurs, myself included (especially), could take a lesson from La Professionale in regards to building their companies. A recent lecture I heard by Dr. Robert Wuebker is that entrepreneurship is about business discovery, not business planning. In the process of developing the potential of an idea, there is a lot of trial and error until you find out which configuration works: wide customer acceptance/satisfaction, high profit.

What determines whether or not the business has long term success is a function of the entrepreneur's ability to get that configuration to run, generate repeatable results and do so automatically.

Like La Professionale

My Plans for 2011

It's not how you start, it's how you finish,

And it's not where you're from, it's where you're at.

- The Hours

About a month ago, I wrote about putting a 2011 Action Plan together with the caveat that I'd share what I'd be up to this year. Below is my list for this year. I plan to accomplish everything, though if this year is anything like last year, it's likely to dish up a lot more than I could have planned. I share it because I am learning that it takes a village to make a warrior and in the spirit of what I learned at The Foundry and my last blog post, I am opening up the details of my strategy so that you can assist in creating the life that is possible for me. If you have experience or connections in any of the areas that I lay out below, feel free to email me (travis.corrigan@gmail.com).

Objectives:

1. High leverage employment - Generate the best possible experience-based learning from my work. Be intentional about the choices I make at Discover, The Foundry and the companies that I am starting. Be a contribution in my various positions and add value to the institutions that I am in service of. Build a community that imprints me with precision-execution management practices while coaching in me in the learning process of growing, developing and interacting with colleagues, subordinates and superiors so that I can begin to distinguish the contexts that enable me to act and lead powerfully and transformatively.

2. Own the stewardship of my financial house - Learn and implement new technology to manage my finances such that I have knowledge and control over my spending and saving. Create and establish a context that accelerates getting out of credit card and student loan debt, allows me to fully contribute to my retirement accounts without impacting monthly cash flow and teaches me financial discipline.

3. Become a finely tune piece of fitness machinery - Generate and follow a training regimen that tracks my gains in strength, endurance and flexibility to achieve new levels of performance in events and competitions.

4. Expand the breadth and depth of my relationships - Make time to have meaningful relationships with the people in my life in order to learn more about them, learn from them and reap the benefits of having relationships founded on resonant bonds.

Key Results:

1. Financial Fitness

• Utilize Quicken to create and live from a realistic budget.
• Reduce revolving debt by at least 25%.
• Complete "Your Money or Your Life", including all the exercises.
• Currate wish list for big ticket items and set savings plans for them.
• Be in a position to max out 401(k) in 2012.

2. Fitness Machine

• Establish Vo2 Max and Lactate Threshold metrics as a baseline for 2011.
• Complete the "300" workout in less than 41 minutes
• Win 2 Cyclocross races
• Move up a criterium class.
• Complete the Wasatch Death Ride.
• Complete LOTOJA.
• 40 mile average ride by July

3. Expand relationships

• Reach out and create the possibility of regularly occurring "dates".
• Schedule and complete dates that have workable contexts for both parties.
• Track insights and learning in journal.

Reading List:

• How the Way We Talk Can Change the Way We Work
• High Output Management
• Why You Do The Things You Do
• How To Write A Lot
• Your Money or Your Life
• When the Game is Over It All Goes Back in the Box
• Decoded
• The Great Reset
• This Time It's Different
• Where Good Ideas Come From
• Mind Wide Open
• The Mind's Past
• The Wave
• The Devil's Teeth
• The Great Divergence
• Dumbing Down America
• Future Shock
• Science of The Brain (research paper)
• The Lesson of Entrepreneurial Experience (research paper)
• The Entrepreneur Next Door (research paper)
• The Nature of Man (research paper)
• The Role of Team Composition (research paper)
• Web 2.0 - Design Patterns for Business Models (research paper)
• Creating Leaders - An Ontological Model (research paper)
• A Quantitative Approach to Tactical Asset Allocation (research paper)
• Integrity, Without it Nothing Works (research paper)
• Introductory Reading for Being an Effective Leader (research paper)
• Procrastination and Impatience (research paper)

Movie Queue:

• How I Met Your Mother -Season 5
• The Big Lebowski
• Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse
• The Fighter
• The Hurt Locker
• Memento
• The Social Network

Course Queue:

• MIT OpenCourseware 21F.301 - French I
• MIT OpenCourseware 21F.301 - French II
• MIT OpenCourseware 15.615 - Law for the Entrepreneur and Manager
• MIT OpenCourseware 15.301 - Managerial Psychology
• MIT OpenCourseware 15.316 - Building and Leading Effective Teams
• MIT OpenCourseware 6.090 - Building Programming Experience
• MIT OpenCourseware 6.00 - Introduction to Computer Science and Programming
• MIT OpenCourseware 6.001 - Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs
• MIT OpenCourseware 15.975 - Special Seminar in Management - Business Plans
• MIT OpenCourseware 15.060 - Data, Models and Decisions

So there you are. That's my entire year. Again if you have any insight as to how I could be doing something easier, quicker or cheaper, I'd love to hear from you. If you want to get together for the sake of getting together, let me know and we can schedule something. Looking forward to hearing from you.

-Travis

Work Hard and Be Nice To People

Well there's always time

On the telephone line

To talk about things to come

Sweet dreams and fine machines

In pieces on the ground.

- James Taylor

I've been talking a lot about living intentionally. Like anything in life, it's pretty easy to talk about. It's a lot harder to actually do. The thing about life is that no plan survives reality. In the first few weeks of the year, my time has been taken up by a lot of unforeseen, but important and joyous, work. Some progress has been made on the goals, but there are some things that I find are dropping off.

I have found that having a theme for the year helps me fixate on the ultimately important thing that you want to be accomplishing this year in the face of everything that comes up in your life. My theme for 2011 is the title of this post: Work Hard and Be Nice to People.

I plan on acquiring and framing this poster and placing it above the head board of my bed. In the meantime I have it on my DAYTUM tracker, along with everything else that I'm tracking for my life this year.

This is not an original theme and it is borrowed from one of my mentors but I find it highly impactful for me this year. Why? Because it's hard to do. Working hard requires focus and lots of calories to keep up with the mental and physical pace. Being nice requires that you be emotionally and mentally flexible in the face of approaching deadlines that competing demands that run counter to your plans.

I'm fairly decent at working hard. I'm fairly decent at being a decent human (I haven't always been) with the caveat that I'm well rested and not focused on fulfilling the sometimes complex web of my commitments. It's no secret that I have a lot of opportunity to improve my ability to have both of those present in the same space.

As this will be another year of transition, renewal, hard work and growth I must remember that anyone can work hard and that it doesn't take much work to be a rigid personality. The goal is to have fun, build beautiful things and contribute positively to the people and institutions around me. People aren't seemingly bureaucratic, opaque or difficult for the sake of being those things but rather simply they are being humans in the face of what's going on in their lives.

No one is perfect at this and I am not implying that this new commitment is some unrealistic notion of a perfect behavior around this commitment. Sometimes I'm not going to as work hard as I could or should. I'm also not going to be as nice I'd hope to be. But it would be a direct contradiction if I stated a commitment to contributing to others and go off working hard without being nice to people. It's my opinion that working hard and neglecting being generative in my engagement with others would be akin to riding a cycling criterium race and never moving out of my granny gear: I'm definitely working hard but I'm also not getting to the finish line any time soon.

The point is this: no amount of working hard can overcome being a constantly unpleasant person.

I know people who are missing out on some very beneficial personal and professional relationships because they are unaware that they occur as cruel individuals. The sad thing is that people get confused about why their efforts don't yield the results they expect. It'd be like me riding in my granny gear and making up some story about how the rest of the cyclists are dropping me from the peloton because they are bureaucratic, opaque, difficult or stupid. Even sadder is that sometimes some people are more committed to being right about the story they make up rather than come to grips that they are a jackass. It sucks, but it happens.

So in closing: I'm committed to working hard in service of building beautiful, durable institutions that, by definition, leave people inspired and enlivened and keep in mind that everyone is fighting their own uphill battle, not trying to prevent me from accomplishing the possibilities that I see in the world. Easier said than done. But that doesn't mean it isn't worth committing to. Also, feel free to tell me when I'm dropping down to my granny gear - I don't want to get dropped.

Your challenge, should you choose to accept it:

The Man in the Arena

"It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat."

- Theodore Roosevelt