In my e-book Surviving Uncertainty, one of the tips I offer for getting through challenging times or circumstances is to stop, take a deep breath, and ask yourself, “Am I okay right now?” I wish I could claim credit for that piece of wisdom (which has come in handy on more than one flying or other adventure when things got a bit hairy), but I got it from my mother, who got it from a woman friend of hers who had been through a lot of tough times.
But the reasoning behind that advice is that most of our fears, if it comes down to it, concern the future. In the present, we generally bear down and cope with whatever is thrown at us. But the future looms far scarier. We worry about what might go wrong, or if the money will last, or the storm that seems to be brewing on the horizon. We worry, more than anything else, that we won’t be sufficient for the challenges that may come at us a little further down the road.
The danger to those fears is that if we worry too much about what might be lurking in the future, we can end up paralyzed in the present, unable to think clearly or take helpful steps to avoid or prepare for the storms. So taking a deep breath and asking, “Am I okay right now?” is a way of forcing some perspective on our fears. “Yes,” we usually find ourselves answering, “I’m actually okay right now. I have food, I have clothing. I’m not about to die, and I’m not yet living on a subway grate.” The relief and perspective those realizations offer often calm our fears enough to allow us to think more clearly about how to best navigate whatever rough waters may lie ahead.
So how wonderful a day like Thanksgiving is! For at least one day in the year, no matter what may have gone wrong, or what challenges we face, or how much or how little we may have … we all take a collective deep breath and give thanks for what we have. We acknowledge, on some fundamental level, all the ways in which we really are okay, right now. For at least a moment in time, we don’t worry about next week, or last month. We gather with friends, bow our heads, and give thanks for all the gifts we have, whatever they may be. [click to continue…]
I love epiphanies, and I had a big one a few weeks ago.
I was watching some very insightful videos on time management by Paul Lemberg, one of the most highly-regarded business coaches in the world. Lemberg has worked with hundreds of companies, ranging from solo ventures to Fortune 500 corporations. Along the way, he’s learned a lot about how people can be more productive, and he shares some of his favorite tips in these free videos on his blog (which I highly recommend).
Whereas many business coaches provide their clients with a seemingly infinite stream of tactics to apply, Lemberg’s approach to business growth is about strategy. It’s about making the few changes that will have the highest value. So not surprisingly, his presentation on time management cuts to the chase and focuses on just the highest value strategies, the ones that will have the most effect if you implement them.
If you’ve ever read a book about personal productivity or time management, or have ever taken a course on the subject, you probably walked away with a complete “system” that promised to revolutionize your life. If you never made good on that promise (or never sustained it), it’s not your fault: many of the time management gurus actually do us a great disservice by including far too many tactics in their systems. It’s interesting intellectual entertainment, to be sure, but real life is messy. Real life needs a strategy (and a simple one at that). [click to continue…]
A few weeks ago, I was interviewing K.R. Sridhar, the founder and CEO of Bloom Energy—a company that has developed a solid-oxide fuel cell that it believes can bring reliable, affordable electricity to people around the world, without the need for a power infrastructure. It’s a big dream, but Sridhar is used to dreaming big. The technology for his fuel cells stems, after all, from work he did with NASA developing oxygen generators for a planned mission to Mars.
K.R. made a comment, in the interview, explaining why he’d thought the oxygen generating technology was so exciting and important. “We haven’t really been explorers in space,” he said. “We’ve been backpackers.” When I asked him to explain, he said that in all of our space exploration, we’d brought all the supplies we needed with us. That’s what backpackers do. Explorers, on the other hand, are gone for such a long time, with such an uncertain sense of when they’ll reach civilization again, that they have to live off the land as they go. In order to transition from backpackers to explorers, we had to find a way to live off the “land” in space … hence the importance of oxygen and water-generating technology.
It’s an interesting thought and distinction. I’ve had many physical adventures, but in retrospect, most of them fit into the backpacking category. Not literally. But whether it was kayaking the Na Pali coast of Kauai, hiking in the Himalayan mountains, or flying relief supplies for a month in Africa, I always brought my own supplies with me. If not physically, then through the magic of a credit card. And while there was certainly risk and challenge and uncertainty involved, I also knew when I was returning home again.
But that’s not to say I don’t know anything about the life of an explorer. [click to continue…]
We talk a lot about various kinds of adventure on this site, from entrepreneurial efforts to viewing all of life as a challenging and rewarding hero’s journey. Our writers also often look at physical adventure as a metaphor for lessons that are applicable to many other aspects of life.
But David Roberts has a new book out that provides an engrossing and entertaining profile of an adventurer and explorer for whom adventure was far more than just a metaphor. The Last of His Kind: The Life and Adventures of Bradford Washburn, America’s Boldest Mountaineer opens, in fact, with Washburn and a friend, age 27, lost in a literally uncharted section of the upper Yukon Territory. Searching for a way to cross the Donjek River, they have to find their way without a map or guide … or food, as it turns out. That they survived was as much due to luck as skill, and later we discover that it was youthful brashness that got them in that fix in the first place.
But youthful brashness is perhaps a necessary ingredient to great adventurers and explorers. And Washburn was nothing if not one of the greatest of that class. Was he really the “last of his kind”? Hard to say. Perhaps, out there somewhere, there is someone else cut from the same cloth, but Roberts is right that Brad Washburn was a Renaissance man of an order not often found on the earth anymore. [click to continue…]
Contrary to what you might think, the concept “No Map. No Guide. No Limits.” doesn’t mean heading for the summit without preparation or a plan. It means doing so on your own terms. For me, that means finding people who already know how to accomplish what I want to do, and learning from them.
Along those lines, there’s an educational event going on right now that you might be interested in if you’re an entrepreneur (or are thinking about becoming one!). It’s called “The League of Extraordinary Minds.” Two of my mentors, Rich Schefren and Jay Abraham, have brought together 54 of the world’s top business experts to interview on topics of interest to entrepreneurs. The topics include rapid business growth, the “performance enhancement quotient,” leading and leveraging a team, business accelerators, managing change, and getting maximum results from minimum efforts. The discussions are taking place over six weeks on the web, and you can listen in for free.
The first two sessions (on customer acquisition and brain-based marketing) have already happened, and I learned a lot from both of them. The panelists included some big names like Jack Trout, Stephen MR Covey, Bert Decker, Robert Cialdini, Ori Brafman, and Dan Ariely. Future sessions will feature the likes of Jay Conrad Levinson, Michael Gerber, Brian Tracy, and Tony Robbins.
I’ve taken training programs with both Rich and Jay, and I can’t imagine any two people better suited to translate the wisdom of these 54 experts into actionable steps for entrepreneurs. [click to continue…]
Ever since Malcolm Gladwell came out with his bestseller Blink, the idea of relying more heavily on one’s “gut” instincts in business and life has achieved renewed support and prominence. Truth to tell, I’m not a fan of Gladwell’s book. He’s a good vignette-teller, but to say “rely on your gut, except when you shouldn’t,” is exceptionally superficial, in my view. The far more important question is when to rely on your gut, and when it can steer you wrong, and why, and what we can learn from that.
Clearly, there are split opinions on the effectiveness of “going from the gut” as a decision-making strategy. The Customer Insight blog notes an Accenture study that found 40% of senior executives relied on their gut for decision-making—apparently at least in significant part (61%) because the data was either unavailable or hard to sort through.
Accenture clearly thinks this is a bad thing, given that its web site is touting a new book called “Analytics at Work: Smarter Decisions, Better Results.”
In an article for the Harvard Business Review, Eric Bonabeau agrees, saying that we romantically love the idea of being able to make good decisions from our gut, but that it’s a dangerous strategy, resulting in as many disasters as successes.
But is intuition or going from the gut on big decisions a bad thing? [click to continue…]
Uncharted territory, by definition, is not “like” anything you know in your mapped world. As a result, it’s often hard to imagine what it’s really going to feel like to explore. Just ask any woman who’s gone through pregnancy, childbirth, and the first few weeks of parenthood. If it weren’t for the convenient factor that humans don’t remember pain particularly well, no kids would have siblings.
I still remember my friend Rick telling me, before hiking up an 18,000-foot mountain in the Himalayas, that every step above 16,000 feet was going to hurt. I nodded, hearing and comprehending the words. He even repeated them, just to make sure they’d sunk in. Yes, yes. It was going to hurt. But “going to hurt” didn’t begin to describe the desperate sensation of knives cutting through every muscle and every inch of my lungs, as I struggled for air while climbing a slippery, snow-covered ridge at 17,000 feet.
Why was I so surprised at the sensation and difficulty? I’d been warned. Was Rick not clear enough? No, he’d been very clear. Blunt, even. The trouble was, I had no point of reference about oxygen-deprivation pain at high altitudes. I couldn’t conceive of the sensation, because I’d never experienced anything even remotely similar.
As with mountain-climbing, so with entrepreneurship. Paul Graham, whose essays are listed in our Resources section on Entrepreneurship and Innovation, just published an essay called “What Startups Are Really Like.” Graham asked graduates of his “Startup School” to say what surprised them most when they got out in the real world to do a startup. The list the graduates provided wasn’t surprising to me … after three years of entrepreneurial effort, I agree thoroughly with all the points listed, from the importance of a good partner to it taking longer than you ever thought possible, to the fact that a startup effort, like a college thesis, insidiously but surely takes over your life. [click to continue…]
A few weeks ago, my friend Jerry kidnapped me and took me sea kayaking in the San Juan Islands for a few days. I say “kidnapped” because that’s what it felt like … at least to my “busy” self.
“Kayaking?!” I protested. “But it’s October. And I’m really busy.“
I had just returned to Seattle from a week vacationing in New England, and really had to buckle down and get to work. So many people waiting for projects to be finished. So many projects waiting for next actions to be started. So many commitments … to others and to myself. Kayaking? In October?
Indeed. That first night on Lopez Island (after a challenging four-mile open-water paddle from Anacortes, after setting up the tent just before it started to rain, and after realizing that my iPhone got no cell signal at all) I lay in my sleeping bag and had a thought: “I have nothing to do.”
Actually , it was a series of thoughts. “I have nothing to do” was followed by “I can’t do anything except sleep, eat, pack, paddle, unpack, sleep, and repeat as necessary until we’re back on the mainland and I have cell coverage again.”
That night I had a dream in which things just didn’t feel right. I discovered (in a terrifying moment of dream horror) that things didn’t feel right because I wasn’t “on,” because I wasn’t getting any power. Because I was … literally … unplugged.
I woke up and things got worse. I tried checking my email again, to no avail. The rain pitter-pattered on the tent, my thoughts raced around my skull, and finally (in a moment of self-induced claustrophobic panic) … as if opening an airlock onto another world … I unzipped the tent door, climbed out, and gazed out across the water at the rising sun.
A different thought: “So this is what emptiness feels like.” [click to continue…]
Back in February, I wrote about a quiz published in the Washington Post that purported to gauge whether someone had what it took to be a successful entrepreneur. At the time, I noted that I wasn’t sure the authors of the Post quiz had their criteria right for who would make a good entrepreneur.
But in researching a “Question of the Day” yesterday, I stumbled across another worksheet that I think really could be useful for anyone contemplating going out on their own—either in a small way or a big way. It was compiled and released by the Canadians … the provincial government of Alberta, to be exact. Who knew Alberta was such a Silicon Valley-like hotbed of entrepreneurism? But the questionnaire covers some really pertinent areas, from “what are your motivations” to “what is your management knowledge?” It also has a detailed worksheet for figuring out whether you have a solid financial plan for self-employment or a new business, including a way to figure out such potentially confusing numbers as “debt ratios” that will determine a bank’s willingness to loan you money.
There’s even a summary quiz at the end that asks “Do You Have The Stuff To Be An Entrepreneur?” that I think covers some very important personal qualities any entrepreneur needs to have, from persistence and the ability to bounce back from failure … to curiosity and the ability to adapt, focus, and learn from mistakes. If you’re even thinking about another career path, or a new business venture, it’s worth checking out. (The references are in French, but the body copy is all in English.) [click to continue…]
Tim Ferris, author of The Four-Hour Work Week, posted an interesting piece on his web site recently that talked about the “myth of entrepreneur as risk-taker.”
I think what he means by that is the idea that entrepreneurs are wild cowboy risk-takers, leaping boldly off cliffs in search of a dream. Ferris includes a fairly long excerpt from Rick Smith’s new book called The Leap that argues … as if it’s a new thought … that entrepreneurs typically make small, calculated steps that lead them in a particular direction, instead of bold, rash leaps. From Ferris’s review of the book, I gather that its author uses that point to encourage people to change their career paths by showing them that there isn’t such great, scary risk involved in the process.
I haven’t read the book. But I had several reactions as I read Ferris’s piece. First, I found myself wondering if people really see entrepreneurs as cowboy risk takers. Like Ferris, I don’t know a single entrepreneur who approaches their ventures with the cavalier attitude of a bungee jumping “cowabunga, dude!” wild man (or woman). Every entrepreneur I know thinks hard about each choice and directional shift, balancing strengths and desires against cost and potential downsides. They may be overly optimistic in terms of market reaction or product popularity, or the time frame or work involved in getting their idea to market, but few get very far without a good plan.
I also agree with Ferris that few entrepreneurs I know are “double-down, bet-everything-on-a-single-strategy,” high-stakes gamblers. [click to continue…]
