Choose Your Friends With Caution

I used the following quote in a previous Medium story on changing your standards to change your life.

“You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.” — Jim Rohn

The problem with averages is math, as in people tend to ignore the math, and the problem with standards is there is rarely enough pleasure in setting them to keep you 100% on course. For those that work better avoiding pain please watch this video:

 

Listen, if you want to catch the flu, what do you do? You hang out with somebody with the flu.

This is the perfect analog for your peer group. It takes one person to spread the flu to an entire group. If you want to raise your standards you need to make sure no one has the flu in your entire peer group. They will either give it to everyone or, more likely, the people with higher standards will wait for that person with the flu to leave before they ever come into the room. This choice, to be forever sick or to be vaccinated for life, is entirely in your hands. Choose your friends with caution.

(Originally posted on Medium)

The Dangers of Goal Setting

Ah, the 1984 Ferrari 308 GTS Quattrovalvole. That was one of the first, and longest lasting, goals that I have ever had. The one pictured just sold for US$ 181,500 at Bonhams and was used on set for Magnum P.I. I may have wanted one since before I could drive — if not, it was pretty close to that kind of timing. Through the years I eventually became ‘successful’ enough to afford one and then thought of needing the garage space for it — which, of course, became another goal to accomplish before buying the car. The exact target model changed through the years and the extra garage space is going to be available soon, however, eventually I discovered one daydreaming day, only about a couple of years ago, that it was not the car I wanted so much as the idea of pursuing the car.

There’s nothing more frightening than having a dream come true. — Hernando Fuentes, Sense8

In The Code of the Extraordinary Mind: 10 Unconventional Laws to Redefine Your Life and Succeed On Your Own Vishen Lakhiani touches on this dilemma from a slightly different angle:

…modern goal setting, as it’s explained in countless college courses or to high-school kids, is really not about teaching you how to pursue what will really help you lead an extraordinary life. Rather, it’s about teaching you to pursue common Brules of the culturescape — Brules that often lead to your chasing things that you’ll ultimately find do not really matter. It’s about safety rather than about truly living.

His term ‘Brules’ is shorthand for ‘bullshit rules’. He suggests replacing means goals with ends goals.

End goals speak to your soul. They bring you joy in and of themselves, not because they confer any outward label, standard, or value attached by society. Nor are end goals undertaken for the purpose of pay or for material reward. They are the experiences that create the best memories in our lives.

About end goals Vishen goes on to further say:

I love this advice from author Joe Vitale: “A good goal should scare you a little and excite you a lot.” Scary and exciting are two beautiful feelings that good end goals often bring out. Scary is a good thing because it means you’re pushing your boundaries — that’s how you take steps toward the extraordinary. Excitement signifies that your goal is genuinely close to your heart — not something you’re doing to please someone else or to conform to society’s Brules.

All of those years wanting the car as an end goal eventually evolved into a life experience that represents all I imagined sitting behind that wheel in a real Ferrari would be. Upon that realization the car disappeared from my mind and was replaced with further joy to grow myself and help others around me do the same.

Means goals usually have an ‘in order to…” after them: I need to get this degree, in order to…get this job, in order to…make this much money, in order to afford… If you focus on the experience (the ends) your desires on the means become flexible. With flexible means, your brain becomes open to other, and possibly more fulfilling opportunities. Without this flexibility be careful what you wish for, you might just get it. To change the Sense8 quote slightly, “There’s nothing more frightening than having a means goal come true that is disconnected from your ends goal.” When this happens achievement is met with emptiness instead of fulfillment. We are all free to waste the time given us. The only question we need to answer for ourselves is if that is an acceptable way to live.

(Originally posted on Medium)

Pain, change, and business growth

I shared a little bit of my own story about a family business turnaround in a previous story here on Medium. In the end, few of the people in the top level management positions survived that turn around yet none of them were simply fired. Most left on their own accord as new, and fair, expectations were placed on the leadership of the business that they themselves realized they did not have the capacity to fulfill. I always looked back in my mind seeing this a case where the world was changing around a business that refused to keep up. In other words, the problem was a management team that was disconnected from the changing needs and expectations of the world around it. That is until I heard Clate Mask, the CEO of Infusionsoft, speak at a Genius Network office meeting…

Clate talked about his observed fact that companies go through very specific stages of scale. If the people, process, and systems of a business were staying stagnant the growth of the company would not push through these stages. On the path from zero to $10 million in annual sales a company would hit these stages — from 0 to 300k, from 300k to 1M, from 1M to 3M, and then from 3M to 10M. As a general rule there would be two stages to go through for every 10x increase in sales. So to get to $100M you would have the same challenge getting through $30M in between before reaching the final challenge of $100M. What Clate found seeing his customers go through the same pains as he made him realize that this was beyond coincidence or otherwise applicable to only a small subset of industries — this seemed to be a law of business growth.

Vision, people, and personal growth are the three areas of focus that must be addressed to get past these stages of growth. For our family business we hit the $30M barrier and blew past it with pure momentum all the way to $45M but then faced bankruptcy because those areas of focus were ignored. Yes, the world changed around us. However, looking back that was always true and the overriding reason we could not get to the next stage in growth was exactly what Clate was describing. Coincidentally the solution we found, 20 years before hearing Clate talk, was exactly what he described as well. The company tuned and communicated its vision to become an acquirer in a consolidating industry, I started the people equation from the top down by hiring a COO the business could grow into, and for myself it was the beginning of making a deep commitment in my own personal growth which still continues today.

On vision Clate recommends reading Beyond Entrepreneurship: Turning Your Business into an Enduring Great Company.

On people Clate commented for your leadership team: good people can grow with you for one stage (3x bigger than where you are now), great people can grow with you for two stages (10x bigger than where you are now), and almost nobody can grow with you for more than two stages. You can take time to grow your leadership into new levels of competence but that means pausing your business for years before moving onto the next stage of growth. The nearly fatal mistake our family business made was to move onto the next stage of growth without pausing nor upgrading our leadership team to keep going.

On yourself as the owner, personal growth is the only way keep going. For me personally, with zero previous experience, I saw the business grow 10x from the start of the turnaround to the time I sold it. Coincidentally, or more likely realizing one of the laws of growth Clate has now defined, I felt I could no longer see it go further after that 10x increase. It reached a stage where selling the success was far more comfortable than trying to take it further. In the end, your success will never exceed your personal growth and though I have continued to grow over the years that have followed that sale I have chosen to focus on areas that started over in new places for me rather than continuing on a path that I truly felt was not in my destiny for life.

Life is not a race to 10x your business, it is an art to 10x your life. — Joe Foley

Knowing these laws of business will not completely remove the pain of growth. It will, however, make you more prepared to handle the cost of that success when you find it. Only 3% of businesses ever make it to the $1M level. With odds that are so much against success to begin with you need use everything in your toolbox to keep going and make it further.

(Originally posted on Medium)

Advice to 2017(±) High School Graduates

Our education system is broken for the world as it is today and unfortunately you are a product of that broken system. The good news is you made it through, the bad news is most important things you need to know were never found in the classroom and are most likely not in your academic years ahead.

Learning needs to be less like memorization, and more like… Angry Birds. Half of school dropouts name boredom as the №1 reason they left. How do we get our kids to want to learn? In the traditional education system, you start at an “A.” And every time you get something wrong, your score gets lower and lower. In the gaming world, it’s just the opposite. — Peter Diamandis

Though it is too late for you, keep this in mind going forward — especially if you are thinking of entering education as a “career” or if you someday have children of your own. Cracks are starting to form and education will become yet another example of the taxi cabs most people thought would be the way of the world forever.

Take the following five points not as a complete list but rather as a starting point. As obvious some may seem, mastery is for the few that use this knowledge to navigate a future that others will simply miss.

#1 Moore’s Law may be known for the Transistor but Exponential Growth is everywhere around us

Ray Kurzweil is great at predicting. So great he has hit a number of major advances in the world to not only the year that they would happen but down to the month in the year that they would happen. How does he do this? For the most part he understands one thing better than most. That the human intuition of “local and linear” no longer approximates reality. We are living in an exponential world.

Here’s another way to think about it: imagine you are going to walk down a road taking steps a meter in length. You take 6 steps, and you’ve progressed six meters (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6). After 24 more steps, you’re 30 meters from where you began. It’s easy to predict where 30 more steps will get you — that’s the simplicity of linear growth.

However, setting anatomy aside, imagine you could double the length of your stride. Now when you take six steps, you’ve actually progressed 32 meters (1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32), which is significantly more than the 6 meters you’d move with equal steps. Amazingly, by step number 30, doubling your stride will put you a billion meters from where you started, a distance equal to twenty-six trips around the world.

In other words, do not be fooled by looking at the linear approximation to the short term past and assume the future will continue that rate of change. Few seem to believe self driving cars will be here any time soon. Look back think of the things that have been added — maybe some over your memories of a life time — tire pressure monitoring, on-board diagnostics II, the smart key, backup cameras, electric cars, bluetooth, GPS, and more. A linear future will just see more things being added over the years to come. An exponential future, however, will bring things into question that linear thinking cannot. Imagine a world where car ownership is no longer needed. (If you have access to a self driving vehicle why would you own one?) What are people going to do with the garage space at their homes? How about parking garages? Parking lots? The extra space on streets with no need for street parking? How is real estate going to change? What about productivity in a world where you no longer need to pay attention to the road? All of this with less accidents, less traffic, less pollution, and amazingly less cost.

 

As a recent graduate moving into further education or directly entering the job market the question you need to ask yourself is how will exponential change effect my assumption of where my interests will intersect with future realities?

#2 Asymmetric Risk (and probability in general)

When you see a headline like this, “You’re more likely to be fatally crushed by furniture than killed by a terrorist,” you should immediately understand that it is written by someone who has no mathematical skills whatsoever.

You need to think of risk in terms of optionality. In other words, you do not want to be in place where you need to be 100% correct to have a huge payoff. You instead need to be in places where taking small risks might lead to a huge payoff. Think of the possible combinations of a penny or a gold bar on one side, and a train or tricycle on the other. Trying to pickup a gold bar in front of a train might get you killed, whereas picking up a penny in front of a train is just plain dumb. Picking up a penny in front of a tricycle will probably make you at least a little more rich, however, getting the gold bar from in front of the tricycle is where you really want to be. Though it might be okay to not know ahead of time if it is a penny or a gold bar in front of the tricycle you never want to be picking up an unknown in front of a train. Optionality gives you a chance to invest as if it is a penny and then figure out if it is gold and further if it is worth the risk to pursue. For example, spend as little as possible to test a new business idea in a specific market. If the response and margins are huge then go all in building the business out rather than the other way around as so many others do only to lose everything. (Oh, just in case you were thinking that market data, demographic studies, and competition research equate to actual testing — the answer is no!)

Going back to where this story started think about the problem of higher education at the moment. You have a huge investment in both time and, most likely, money in the form of student loans. At the other end, in an exponential world, you do not really know if there is a train or tricycle that is coming between you and your dreams. What if there was an alternate option where you could get a focused degree over the course of a year and only have to pay for it if you succeed in a career? MissionU is one such example of possible massive change coming to a broken and misaligned system of education. As a recent high school graduate you are not going to be able to take advantage of the change starting to break through in education at the moment but you will be able to approach the world with more open eyes to see ways to take advantage of the change rather than being a victim of it.

#3 The drive towards democratization and demonetization

There are two counter intuitive forces pushing forward very rapidly, however, both seem to get little attention if you listen to mainstream news.

Prices always go up — right? That is called inflation and people say that is why you need to make a certain return on the money you save just so you can not lose the value the money is able to buy over time. There may be times of deflation in between but for the most part those are just small bumps on the road ever increasing upward.

That is until exponential technologies (especially AI and robotics) started to significantly change this equation. The cost of living itself is now being demonetized and it has only just started.

Democratization is coming rapidly too, however, in ways that might not be completely obvious if your mind only thinks about politics when hearing this phrase. The idea of what an “expert” is, and what expertise they delivered to the people, will largely go away and that power will be given back into to the hands of the people.

One of the most obvious areas of massive change will be the elimination of the general practitioner in the medical sector. Diagnosis and, in many cases, treatment will go into the home and on the body as sensor technology continues to evolve and links are found to what is within our own abilities to change in order to achieve continued wellness.

From medicine, to clothes, to education, and beyond — customization and control will return to the people and the result will be better, faster, cheaper, and more robust than centralized expertise and production.

#4 Happiness

You need to become unfuckwithable.

Unfuckwithable — (adj.) When you are truly at peace and in touch with yourself, and nothing anyone says or does bothers you, and no negativity or drama can touch you.

The single most troubling side effect of social media is the increased need to compare oneself to others. Life is a single player game and though that might sound depressing it is not:

I’ve noticed that the happiest people I know have opted out of many of the multi-player games. They use internal metrics. There is no competition with anyone to be happy. They don’t compare themselves to others or experience jealousy. They treat success as a byproduct of happiness, not as an addictive drug like most of us do. Happy people think single player. — TheHappyPhilosopher

The secret to world peace is a happy childhood. The good news is that it is never too late to have a happy childhood and it is even easier to do so in a single player game. (If you can change your perception of the past then you can change the past as it relates to you) This is not to say that it is generally easy. The world can be a hard place and unfortunately, probably more often than not, parents are a source of the problems rather than the solution to overcome them. This truth leads me to my last point…

#5 The best investment you can ever make

If you are thinking money here, think again. The single best investment you can make is in yourself. Read, listen, watch, attend. Formal education is a part of this journey and in the end it is going to be a very small foundation of your life ahead at the very best. The rest is 100% up to you.

Like compounding interest for money, knowledge is compounding interest for your mind. The idea is to not make a massive change over a short period of time but rather small changes over long periods of time to reach destinations that are simply unimaginable from who you are today. When I read a book, listen to a podcast, attend a seminar, spend time in a mastermind group, I look for one or two things I can bring back to my life today and implement well. Don’t worry about all of the things you are not doing right, or all of the things you could change for the better — instead just focus on tomorrow being one step better than today and let the compounding work its own magic.

(Originally posted on Medium)

Find your passion through taking action

ou may have seen the pie charts that show the realm of what you know, vs what you know you don’t know, vs (the largest area) of what you don’t know you don’t know. For most of us our passions are an itch within ourselves waiting to find a home. The problem is that this itch has a higher degree of probability resting within the space of what you don’t know you don’t know.

 

Personal finance expert Stefanie O’Connell explains in her 19th lesson of 30 Lessons Learned by 30:

The prevailing myth of passion suggests that it arrives in some magical burst of inspiration, but in reality, passion is uncovered through action, exploration and work.

Bottom line is passion more about something discovered than simply being known. Thus, if you sit around wondering why you are not passionate about what you are doing in life — that is the problem, stop sitting around! It also means you do not need to quit your day job to find your passion. Quit it when your passion becomes obvious and the road ahead opens in such a way that you have no choice but to travel forward.

Be aggressive in private, be robust in your public work. You will sleep well at night. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

In my random walkings I have been a probie for a day FDNY Academy Randalls Island, New York. I was a roadie for a day for The Who. I have also done a few walk-on roles for TV series. All of these were exploring things I knew very little to nothing about thus there was no way to connect the dots going forward that would bring me to being a partner in a rapidly growing film business that I now love dearly being a part of. Without that exploration the life I have today simply would not exist and, for me, that is a sad and scary thought to have because I am so happy and grateful for where I am in my life and the people I work with.

If you are not in that happy place, or perhaps still want more out of life, look under the rocks you find in places you never explored before to start finding the possibilities of a new life. Passion is the place where the word ‘work’ goes away and is replaced with wanting to get up everyday to do more because of the fulfillment it brings.

(Originally posted on Medium)