Saw this post over on Online MBA today, and it kinda blew me away. I could invent the world’s perfect invention tomorrow, and it still might take me 7 years to strike it rich.
That’s why I stick to services and content stuff. Maybe someday I’ll build something, but for now, I like to be able to directly bring value to the table and see some returns on it sometime this decade.
This TED talk couldn’t have come at a better time. Alain de Botton speaks on a kinder, gentler philosophy of success.
Alain starts off by saying that we live in an age where our lives are punctuated by career crisis. That it’s easy to make a good living, but it’s very difficult to be free of career anxiety. Think about that for a moment. Are you stress free in your career? Good for you if you can answer that, I’m still trying to figure out what my career is supposed to look like.
He goes on to explore the idea of success and what it really means to be successful. Again, take a moment to think about what success means to you. Does it mean free time? Does it mean a nice house, a nice car, a happy family (which is impossible for a family to be happy 100% of the time)? Does it include fame, money or a prestigious job title?
Now think about it in terms of your parents. If you are male, think about your idea of success and compare that to how your dad (or what you think your dad) defines success as. If you are female, same question, just think about your mom. How close is your answer? What is success to YOU?
This got me thinking…or rather stopped me thinking. Over the past eight months, I’ve been trying to nail down what my definition of success is. And it feels like a moving target. On the one hand, I’d love a nice house. Preferably one that I don’t have to spend a ton of time renovating. I also want to have a close and (mostly) happy family. Being brought up in a low emotion, loose knit and broken family, I don’t want my kids to have a similar experience.
On the other hand, I want to be personally successful in my business life. I’m still not sure how much money that takes, and if notoriety is part of the equation. Shit, I don’t even know what field it should be in. I’m still looking for my “calling” and want to make sure that what ever I do, it’s in harmony with my desire to have a wonderful family life. You know, my “work/life” balance.
Thanks to Alain, I’m second guessing the possibility of that coming to fruition. In his talk, he says that you can’t be successful with everything. There’s a sacrifice. Which makes sense. I instantly think of Malcolm Gladwell’s “10,000 hour rule” from his book, Outliers, where he states that the key to success in any field is a matter of practicing a specific task for 10,000 hours. Think pro athletes or musicians. There’s not enough time in a day to master more than one or two things.
It also brings to mind Curly’s Law. It’s from the movie City Slickers, and the dialogue goes like this:
Curly: Do you know what the secret of life is?
Curly: This. [holds up one finger]
Mitch: Your finger?
Curly: One thing. Just one thing. You stick to that and the rest don’t mean shit.
Mitch: But what is the “one thing?”
Curly: [smiles] That’s what you have to find out.
Again, you can’t be successful at more than one thing. You have to make a choice. You have to commit to a decision. And that scares the living shit out of me most days.
The upside to this philosophy is that you can accept being mediocre at everything except that one thing you do. Just focus on being the best in that one thing you’ve chosen to focus on.
Another example that solidifies this concept is a book I read (and loved) called The Art of Learning by Josh Waitzkin. Remember the movie Searching for Bobby Fisher? Well, Josh is/was the kid that the movie was based on. And he was the best in the world in his age group in chess. Not chess and physics, chess and cooking, or chess and checkers. Just chess. And when he grew older, he shifted his focus onto a competitive form of Tai Chi called push hands (I miss my Tai Chi class). Where, you guessed it, he became the best in the world at it. He wasn’t a chess champ at the same time as being a world renowned push hands competitor. Do you think it bothers him if he can’t cook worth a shit?
What am I getting at here? Alain’s talk is a great one, especially if you are feeling depressed or if you have been served up a nice little (or big) failure from life. It’s a tad on the new-agey hippy dippy side, but hey, that’s what I like. And it’s okay to have your own definition of success. And you don’t have to be successful with everything you do. Because you can’t. And it’s cool, baby!
When I was seven, a bolt of lightning ricocheted off a tree in my back yard and struck my house. It entered my parents room and destroyed every electric appliance in the room. The TV screen was black. All the outlets were charred. And there were 20-30 Kleenex sheets stuck to the walls. The glass fuses in the main breaker box had melted together to form a single mass.
I was napping in that bedroom five minutes before the strike. And I think it messed me up a bit.
I used to have recurring nightmares where my dad would be sitting in his ratty orange swivel chair in our den. I would crawl over my dad’s lap to peer over his shoulder out into the back yard where a storm of K-T Extinction Event proportion would be brewing in the distance. As soon as it came remotely close to the house (being a dream, it moved fast) I’d wake in a cold sweat.
Flash forward a few years later. When the skies would open up and thunder was crashing all around, I’d stand in the middle of my street (it was a cul-de-sac in a smallish town). Without a shirt on. And I’d yell to the sky/god/whoever was listening to go ahead and give me their best shot. Strike me down where I stand.
To this day, I’m not exactly sure to whom those acts of defiance were aimed at. I’m also not 100% if I ever vocalized my anger, or if was all in my head. I was never struck, but I was often soaked.
I no longer leave my fate up to Thor and will usually seek shelter when the skies get stormy. But I’ll still turn off all the lights and gaze out the window and watch the show mother nature puts on for me.
Tonight was an exceptionally loud and bright presentation, and all the action seemed to be happening 10 miles south of my house. The local Doppler radar suggested it wasn’t headed my way. So I told my wife I was going for a drive and I’d be back.
I’ve told her half-jokingly on more than one occasion that I was gonna drive out and chase the storm down but never actually done it. Tonight felt different. I have to see this storm. I have to be right in the middle of it.
As I walked out the door, I was temporarily stunned by a huge flash directly overhead followed by a sharp thunder crack. Not the low and rumbly kind, but the kind that lets you know Mother Nature can be a real bitch. And it was awesome.
So I took a left out of my development and drove straight towards the flashes of light. If you’ve never experienced a southern thunderstorm, it’s intense. I’m talking massive bursts every 2-5 seconds. And Charlotte has one of the highest occurrences of cloud-to-ground strikes. And these flares were much larger than average.
The white flickering filled up my car’s windshield as my anticipation grew. I envisioned the middle of the storm feeling like a scene from Saving Private Ryan with thunder crashing all around me and lightning bolts striking down trees as I drove by.
I didn’t hit the rain until 15 minutes into the drive. It was a wall of water blowing sideways. I’m thinking “Ok, here’s the good stuff. Maybe I’ll even see some golf-ball sized hail!” I kept driving straight along the same road another 15 minutes until I was smack dab in the middle of the storm.
It was nothing like the scene I constructed in my head. At all. It was rainy. And it was flashy. But there were no bolts to be seen, and you could hardly hear the thunder. I reached a point in the road where I had to turn either left or right. So I turned the car around and headed back home.
I hate to think that I wasted an hour driving without being dazzled by jagged bolts illuminating the sky. There has to be some kind of life lesson here. So here’s my best shot at pop-philosophy.
Of course, Philip goes WAY beyond anything that I imagined. I find it rings very true.
I tend to be mostly present hedonism with future TP – goal oriented. What category do you spend most of your time in?
This is the logo I did for DigitalRig.com (I also did most of the site). I said,
This is only a test. That’s why there’s so many weird things on this post.
Like block quotes. Sure I could just preview the post and not publish it. But where’s the fun in that?
I searched for a buddy of mine named Ash Berkman. This was like third down on the list.
Ashley lives 20 minutes away from me, and obviously someone is very mad at her. It’s tough to see why, considering her email address is ashleybermanstealspeoplesshit@stealashit.com.
Why did she choose such a long email address? I’d hate type that fucker in every time I logged out of my email.
My friends (yeah, I’m talking to the ONE reader here), this IS cyber bullying. And I feel old. And no one made a Facebook page for me. They just pitted me, the school’s only Jew, against Ataul Ahmad, the school’s only Muslim. In the 7th grade. Lots of penny pinching and flying carpet jokes. Oh, and did I mention we were good friends? But I digress.
Ashley, stay classy. We don’t care either way if you are a slut, we forgive you.
Seriously one of the absolute best books out there for entrepreneurs. This should be required reading before you recieve your C-Corp, S-Corp or LLC status.
And it should be read/listened to every week. Heather and I read it to Cooper every day. Heather’s read it so many times, she has 95% of the book memorized. Amazing.
And this folks, is what happens when people mistake your kindness for weakness. And you reach the boiling point because some self-important asshole (Mike Arrington) takes it a bit too far. RTFO Leo.
….You have to put them somewhere. I was talking to Fabi, and she was telling me her work flow. I was in awe.
Then Fabi said (about her system):
“A poor attempt at….ah….work flow? Cuz it’s not a work flow. It’s a mess, that’s what is is.”
Fabi, 6-7-09
Yeah. We’re making big huge piles of shit. Blog posts, articles, how to’s. And we put them each in it’s own pile. And it takes longer to put it somewhere than to use it.
WTF – i need a computer house cleaner.
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