The Art of Living

A person

Who is a master

In the art of living

Makes little distinction

Between their work and their play,

Their labor and their leisure,

Their mind and their body,

Their education and their recreation,

Their love and their religion.

They hardly know which is which

And simply pursue their vision of excellence and grace, whatever they do,

Leaving others to decide whether they are working or playing..

To them they are always doing both.

-A Zen Poet

Living into the Person You Want to Be.

A few weeks ago, I was asked to help Drs. Robert Wuebker and Bill Schulze prepare a discussion on what we know about CVC literature at the Winter Strategy Conference, jointly hosted by the University of Utah and BYU.

It was an intense few weeks - we were attempting to prepare a gargantuan data set of over 500,000 transactions from 1980-2010 and for me, it was an academic baptism by fire. To date, it was the most substantial challenge (opportunity) that I've been lucky enough to encounter. I've never done research, I didn't know anything about the world of academia and had to pick it up on the fly while simultaneously attempting to give the team a data set worth presenting on.

At times I struggled to simply keep up with the cognitive horsepower of the team, compromised of Rob, Bill, Jaime Grant (PhD Candidate) and Ken Krull (Operating Partner, Mercato). It was a whirlwind two weeks and I certainly made forays into new areas of personal cognitive and physiological possibility that I didn't know existed. Even a week later, my body is still craving for more sleep than I anticipate.

Rob, despite sleep-deprivation, gave the most balanced presentation I've seen from him yet and Bill was nice enough to give me a shout out for my contributions at the end of the presentation.

Those who attended the post-presentation dinner at the Canyons were gracious enough to engage with me personally about the data and the presentation (thanks Bill) and I got to meet a lot of really interesting people who were very welcoming for a visiting undergrad diaper-baby like myself.

It was novel, overwhelming, euphoric, entrepreneurial, terrifying and exciting and fun.

The big thing for me was not simply that I was asked to be a data monkey - I would have been satisfied with just that - but that I was treated as a team member. I was up against a nearly vertical learning curve trying to understand the nature of academia, the form and function of excel's functionality and grasping the data set such that we could produce something of merit. In spite of this (or maybe because of it), Rob, Bill, Ken and Jaime were generous enough to help me feel like I actually had something to contribute to the team's thought process and strategy for putting the presentation together. When I spoke, they listened, took me seriously and responded as such. They were patient with my constant blunderings and I always felt like they saw me as a competent value-add to the team.

Going forward it looks like I'll be doing more of the same work for the team on other research projects as it appears that I do a good enough job to be kept around - and it turns out that I actually like doing research.

It's one thing to be handed the opportunity of a lifetime - it's whole other thing entirely when the team chooses to see you as the person that you could become and creates a space for you to live into. This experience, the overwhelming feeling of belonging and confidence is huge gift that I simply cannot put into words.

Thanks to everyone for their encouragement and patience as I slogged through the ups and downs in an attempt to 'get it done.'

Someday.

I hear a lot of kids in my age cohort talk about someday.

Someday they'll be on time to meetings. Someday they'll care. Someday they'll do things differently... when it matters someday.

I believe that they are right. Someday you will care. Someday.. when things matter you'll try to do things differently.

But none of that will matter because you won't have the capacity to survive when that opportunity comes. When you have been spending years practicing the art of 'just getting by', you get crushed by opportunities that require everything you have.

Not that there is anything wrong with mastering the art of getting by, in fact, I think that it speaks to the potential of human beings to get whatever it is they are committed to getting. It takes a highly optimized machine to get exactly the outcomes they are striving for. The implied heuristic here is that humans aren't broken - they are actually finely tuned. Aristotle makes this point best when he says,

"Excellence is an art won by training and habituation. We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have those because we have acted rightly. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit."

I love how eloquently Aristotle states that we don't do things excellently because we are born with an excellence gene - we become excellent (at anything) simply by repetition.

This is good news and bad news.

The good news is that over time (some people say 10,000 hours/625 days/1.71 years) you can become excellent at anything. The bad news is that you can be excellent at anything.

You can be excellent at avoiding conflict. seeking conflict, just getting by, keeping emotional distance from risky endeavors of the heart. Fill in the blank.

So what? What's the next step?

The next step is doing. Simply doing. Again, Aristotle ('cos he's smart) weighs in:

"We become just by performing just actions. Temperate by performing actions. Brave by performing brave actions."

Someday is NOT some state of being that you wake up to one morning somewhere in the future. Someday does not announce itself with you walking in slow motion through smoke. Someday does not arrive after a montage with the latest Kanye West song playing in the background.

Someday is right now. The choice you make every morning to play for keeps or 'do what you can with what you have'. There is a huge difference between playing to win and playing to not lose.

Because when that once-in-a-lifetime opportunities arrives - when you see that wave forming on the horizon- your ability to simply get on and ride is a product of how you chose to ride every other wave in your life prior to that.

And in that moment, when you are put to the ultimate test of doing something you've never done before when it really counts - getting married, building a company, offering forgiveness - how you decided to live your life 'when it didn't matter' is going to be the difference between getting smashed into the rocks or making history in the narrative of your life.

Mark All As Read.

Turn up the lights in here, baby.

Extra bright I want y'all to see this,

Turn up the lights in here, baby.

You know what I need,

Want you to see everything,

Want you to see all of the lights.

- Kanye West + Rihanna

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I love the act of producing.

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

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

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

Thanks for your love and patience.

-T

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.