Life Is Short!

I was saddened today to hear of the death of rock climbing legend, Todd Skinner who was killed on October 23, 2006. I did not know Todd personally but felt like I knew him well from reading his book, Beyond The Summit. I first received this book over a year ago as a gift from a friend, Jim Juergens. Today I consider the book to be one of my Top 10 favorites. I have probably given out over 100 copies of this book during the last year to friends.

Todd was killed descending fixed ropes on the Leaning Tower of Yosemite. It appears that he and his partner Jim Hewitt were working on a free route on the 1,200-foot monolith. Todd and Jim were rappelling the route, “Jesus Built My Hot Rod” and were about 500 hundred feet above the base when the accident occurred. Apparently, Todd went first and suddenly fell; his rappel device and locking carabiner remained on the rope. Todd lived in Lander, Wyoming and is survived by his wife Amy, son Jake, and daughters Hannah and Sarah.

I discovered he had died today when my partner was attempting to call his office and schedule Todd to speak to our Coaching Seminar. What a shock to find out he had died at only 48 years old. Then my partner said something that made sense. Wow — he died doing what he loved and was passionate about it. He lived a passionate and fulfilling life doing what he loved. What a thought —- How passionate are we about what we are doing?

What Do You Notice?

Looking straight ahead can make you miss things. When you do your life, do you take notice of the things peripherally? Do you see them in a different perspective? The route to work. What opportunities do you see?

Knowledge helps you take notice. The more you know, the more you are attuned. When you are in a conversation, do you see the opportunities? Can you capitalize on them? Do you know how to take a conversation to the next step? How will you do it? If you are not growing, your perspective will not either.

Brute Honesty

I am with clients all day who are learning what it means to win and build their own business. This is almost impossible if two ingredients are missing: Passion and Honesty. It is hard to find both in people. The world is a funny place. I have not met anyone who has told me, “Don, I am lazy.” or “Don, I just don’t want to win.” What we have been conditioned to do is package our phrasings with sensitivity, pride and a bit of lying. Lying is a strong word, but think about it. Do you really get the real answer when you ask a question like, “Do you want to be successful?” What person is going to tell you “No?” As a business coach, I have to watch and see. I look for alignment. Are a person’s words and behaviors aligned? That journey sometimes may not necessarily be about success. It may be about honesty.

I read a neat article by Robert Kiyosaki, Author of Rich Dad, Poor Dad. I think Mr. Kiyosaki has been around the block a few times and he comments on his observations as a person who has made the journey towards his personal success. He contrasts the straight talk he experienced in the military to his civilian life. His message is clear to audiences across the world, but he knows something - many people are not honest with themselves.

Dare to be honest. It’s the best place to start your personal journey.

Learn and Improve

Do you have lofty ambitions? I’m on that never ending mission to learn and improve. This means I fail a lot! My ambitions in life are not to merely get by or survive but to make a difference, to create a company that builds a future where customers, employees, and our partnerships win. Lofty goals nonetheless! It is not easy, but I believe it is worthwhile.

The easy part for me is the dream. The hard part is the execution of the dream. We are all constantly bombarded by negative messages. Messages that confine us, restrict us, or make us stay within acceptable boundaries. Boundaries that limit risk and for that matter failure. Not that boundaries aren’t necessary in most cases they are. But the kind of boundaries that make you like everyone else. So I’m sitting here early Wednesday morning thinking about those subtle messages we all hear. You know what I mean? Those messages that say stay where you are, don’t take risk, live comfortably, think within the box, status quo is not always bad, etc.

Then I recall what W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne said in Blue Ocean Strategies. If we are to win in the future, we must stop competing with each other and the only way to beat the competition in the future is to stop trying. In essence we must go beyond competing. We must seize the moment! We must make new rules for the game! We must go beyond competing. In my industry you see it as clear as day. The market space gets crowded and profits and growth are reduced which turns into cutthroat competition. So how do you change that?

We do it by re-creating existing boundaries — set new rules! If you look like everyone else, you probably are! If you are similar to everyone else and it is perceived that way people will only select you based on PRICE! You see it in many industries such as real estate, insurance, mortgages, cell phones, health care, express package delivery, home videos, personal computers, discount retail, etc.

So what do you do it about it personally? You decommoditize your offering! You don’t think in the box, in fact you don’t even see a box. Get in a quiet space and dream. What would you change to re-create what you do? This can be a fun exercise but it takes thought.

I Have to Win!

Many people search for success trying to find it in a system, a book, a tape of the month club, or even by attaining that coveted degree. Is that where you find success?

 Then I thought of Steve Prefontaine. Does that name ring a bell? Steve was the record holder of every American distance-running record (click the link for a short clip of one of his runs) from 2,000 to 10,000 meters. He died a tragic death in 1975 but here are some things Steve Prefontaine said:

“Some people create with words or with music or with a brush and paints. I like to make something beautiful when I run. I like to make people stop and say, ‘I’ve never seen anyone run like that before.’ It’s more than just a race, it’s a style. It’s doing something better than anyone else. It’s being creative.”

“A lot of people run a race to see who is fastest. I run to see who has the most guts, who can punish himself into exhausting pace, and then at the end, punish himself even more. Nobody is going to win a 5,000 meter race after running an easy 2 miles. Not with me. If I lose forcing the pace all the way, well, at least I can live with myself.”

“To give anything less than your best is to sacrifice the Gift.”

“What I want is to be number one.”

“Somebody may beat me, but they are going to have to bleed to do it.”

“I’m going to work so that it’s a pure guts race at the end, and if it is, I am the only one who can win it.”

“How does a kid from Coos Bay, with one leg longer than the other win races? All my life people have been telling me, ‘You’re too small Pre’, ‘You’re not fast enough Pre’, ‘Give up your foolish dream Steve’. But they forgot something, I HAVE TO WIN.”

So you really want success? Then don’t let anyone stop you. Don’t make any excuses. There is a price to pay for success. It will involve pain and guts. Do you really have it in you? Are you fooling yourself? Are you really paying a price? I have to win! Therefore, for me I must work harder than my competitor, I must think about it day and night, I must give my all, I must study and study some more, I must change — not for change sake but because I am growing and it requires it.

What about you? Are you waiting for that special system that poof makes you a success? Or are you saying that no matter what it takes I HAVE TO WIN? Many people give lip service to the idea of attaining higher levels of success but you see it in their actions that they are not serious.

(Note: There is a good movie about the life of Steve Prefontaine called, Without Limits.)

Benchmarking Top Performers

Peter Drucker coined the term “knowledge work.” It is what most of us do. We do not produce anything. We process, integrate and transfer information. In knowledge work, Drucker says, “The task is not given; it has to be determined.” I love what Donald Trump says in The Art of the Deal: “Deals are my art form.” I feel the same way. I love to work, and I have found my own groove. Work, life, fun - these are all integrated. Life is life. In the new economy, embracing this without mental boundaries adds fun to life.

In the blog, Life 2.0, I found some fantastic articles of high-running CEO’s and how they use time - the same amount you and I have. They pack more density into their day and are worthy of benchmark. Perhaps it will inspire you to take your game to the next level. It certainly did for me.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

My friend, Tom Tiernan, sent me this powerful and beautiful speech from Steve Jobs as he was addressing Stanford graduates. Tom is a guy who wants to settle for nothing less than living fully into his passion. Thanks, Tom.

Text of the Commencement address by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, delivered on June 12, 2005.

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I’ve ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That’s it. No big deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: “We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?” They said: “Of course.” My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents’ savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn’t see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn’t all romantic. I didn’t have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends’ rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something - your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss.

I was lucky - I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation - the Macintosh - a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn’t know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me - I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I retuned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple’s current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.

My third story is about death.

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything - all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn’t even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor’s code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you’d have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I’m fine now.

This was the closest I’ve been to facing death, and I hope its the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of other’s opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960’s, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Thank you all very much.

Motivated vs. Capable

I met Thomas Campbell today, an investment advisor with Intersecurities. He taught me something interesting. He works with people by giving his valuable advice. I like his model. For those of us who are in the advice business, it matters. Is a person motivated and capable? Are they one or the other? Or both? It’s an important question. We see it all the time. There are athletes that are capable but not motivated. What a tragedy. Sometimes coaching works. Sometimes not. Others are highly motivated, but not capable. We cheer for the underdog. They are worth giving our life to. The motivated and capable? We see the results. The world moves aside for such people. They seek mastery.

Someone said that the only sure thing is change. Who will you be in 10 years? Why? How did you become that person? Are you frozen in time because you limited yourself by capability and motivation? If you don’t change what happens? The world does not move aside. The world leaves you behind. Surround yourself with people that will travel the journey of change and watch yourself grow. It’s the difference between living and existing.

Defining Moments

It was fun watching an old movie the other night, Tin Cup. I loved seeing Costner’s character, Ron McAvoy, the anti-hero in the movie. Though he appears slovenly and unmotivated, he is quite the opposite. He lives for the defining moment. He is challenged by the conventional wisdom of his golf peers constantly. There are certain shots to play in certain situations and Ron McAvoy chooses the risky way often times. It’s not a matter of the result, it is the matter of what the moment does. Here’s a response he had to one doubter on why he takes the shot:

“Because that shot was a defining moment. When a defining moment comes along, you define the moment…or the moment defines you. I did not shrink from the challenge, I rose to it.”

I love it. It is funny, it happens every day to us. These defining moments do define us and we often choose to take the path of less risk. What would happen when we succeed and conquer fear? Or overcome challenges? Or do the nonconventional? We are redefined. That is the path to greatness.

Burning the Boats

“Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back. Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth that ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves, too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred…Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power , and magic in it. Begin it now.” - Johann Wolfang von Goethe

Wow. Can you feel the intensity of those words? They are encouragement to go after what you dream you can do. One guy said that people make decisions by goals or by fear. If we do not have our goals in mind clearly, then we default to fear. Most of us are just real good at hiding that fact and embroider the lesser decision. We don’t go after what we really want then. Don’t compromise. Get clear on what you want. Then go after it. If you don’t have fortitude inside, be sure to hang out with friends who will encourage you in the way of your dreams, not reinforce your fears.

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