Something I wish I learned earlier in my life is what I now come to call Earn, Learn, or Burn.
It’s a very simple concept.
What it means is that you will find yourself in one of those three camps when it comes to employment:
I spent some time counseling a startup founder this past week who drove 150 or so miles to hang out with me for a few hours – I’m quite thankful for that and I believe it was time well-spent for both of us, probably more for him than for me but I’m glad to have created so much value in such a short period of time. Spend it well my friend!
You know, it’s amazing how just a few pieces of information (not even showcased as “advice”) can change someone’s entire world from end-to-end. How many times has that happened in your life? I know that it’s happened in mine. A quick word of wisdom and the world tilts in my internal axis.
One thing I helped him do during our time together was craft a bit more of a compelling story around not only his product but his industry as a whole, which was email and email marketing. The industry is a tired one full of boring services and products and snake oil salesmen in 3 piece suits. Unfortunately, customers and consumers are just as bored and very tired of all the fluff and no fill.
So we decided to change that, allow the customer’s mind to imagine for a moment what it would be like to have a bit of excitement re-introduced. This is useful for not only the customer but also when he goes and raises more capital for continued survival.
It’s hard to imagine that WordPress is 10 years old. I can’t believe it. I’ll be honest, it hasn’t been all rainbows and sunshine though – WordPress has gone through some big changes from nearly every angle.
I was asked the other day by Seth via Twitter if I had ever written anything specifically on how one can recover emotionally from project failure.
My assumption is that his question was a personal one and that he was looking for advice on how to move on to the next big thing. A quick scan reveals that I’ve shared a few things here and there about “failure”:
- More Bloggers Need to Fail
- A Positive Attitude as Strategy
- Get Fired
- Fighting Irrational Fears
- Worth the Price of Admission
- Broken Promises
- You are Not Your Blog
- How the Mighty Fall
- My 2012 Year in Review
Those are just a few that have elements of me mentioning failure – but I do not believe that I’ve tackled the topic head-on so I’ll do my best Seth to answer what I believe is your explicit question and then any underlying questions as well.
I bet my calendar is prettier than yours. I bet that I have a “lighter” and “more clear” weekly calendar than most of you.
And therein lies one of my secret weapons of productivity. You see, I hate meetings. I. Fucking. Hate. Meetings.
People ask me how I get so much done and although there may be a few tricks here and there the “magic” is pretty simple – I don’t waste time all my time talking to people.
I shared this gem of an idea at a conference keynote last week (I’m not sure I’ll be invited back) which was counter-intuitive and a bit contrarian, especially since the event’s theme was collaboration and connecting with others to get stuff done:
Just like the fact that there appears to be an app for everything these days there’s also a timing for everything as well.
Not all apps will be wildly successful; sometimes it’s more of a timing issue than functional one.
It’s tough being a parent and it’s getting more difficult every single year.
The biggest challenge right now is trying to identify the numerous interests that both of our girls have and being able to match those with activities that will engage and challenge them without imposing the dreaded your-parents-love-this-and-you-should-do-it-too syndrome.
Like all parents we want to give our children everything that we can to provide a solid foundation of learning that consistency feeds their curiosity that may eventually become part of their long-term vocation. At times it seems impossible to know which interests are worth pursuing and which ones are worth investing in (financially) for camps, after-school programs, and such.
The pressure, on a bad day, feels like we’re trying to help create life-plans for them and if we fail then our childs’ life is ruined!
Entrepreneurship is so meta – you can call yourself an entrepreneur and never actually have to do anything with it. Being an entrepreneur is as easy as adding it to you LinkedIn bio and listing it as a “skill” or hashtagging yourself on Twitter.
Then there are those that say you aren’t a real entrepreneur until someone else calls you that. I don’t get that either because that doesn’t really matter much more than self-referencing yourself for anything you’d like.
Personally, call yourself whatever you want – the only titles that will last longer than your own life are probably going to be the ones on your tombstone – think about that for a moment if you will. Can you imagine that?
