Making it to the NFL

I was reading an article in Sports Illustrated awhile ago about Jim Harbaugh (the head football coach at Stanford) and his brother who coaches in the NFL.  This was my favorite quote from the entire article:


Once in a while, Jim Harbaugh asks his Stanford players to name the one thing you have to do to make an NFL team. The answers come quickly: You have to be talented. You have to work hard. Nope, Jim says. A lot of guys are talented and work hard and never make it. "The one thing you have to do to make an NFL team," he says, "is take another man's job away from him. And those men really like those jobs."

I think this principle applies in a number of other careers and situations that are competitive by their nature.

Deeper waters

My wife's aunt NG sent this to me via email.  It was written by Mitt Romney.

I don't remember when it was exactly that I finally went past the sandbar. My family had a summer cottage on the shores of one of the Great Lakes.  For the first forty or so feet, the lake is shallow, warm, and protected from big waves by the sandbar.  That's where I spent most of the  hot summer days as a boy.  I liked it there.  One day, my brother got me up on water skis.

Perhaps fearing that a turn would make me fall, he drove the boat, and me, straight out into the deep.  By the way, this lake is over 100 miles wide.

I screamed at him the whole terrifying ride.  He took me about a half mile out.  But ever after, the deep water was where I wanted to be: surfing in the breakers, water skiing, diving.  I got out of the shallow water for good.  Over the years, I have watched a good number of people live out their lives in the shallows.  In the shallows, life is all about yourself, your job, your money, your house, your rights, your needs, your opinions, your ideas, and your comfort.

In the deeper waters, life is about others: family, friends, faith, community, country, caring, commitment.   In the deeper waters, there are challenging ideas, opposing opinions, and uncomfortable battles. Almost every dimension of your life can be held to the shallows or taken into the deeper water.  Your career, your involvement with others, your spouse and your children, your politics, each can be lived with you comfortably at the center.  Or, they can draw you out of yourself, into service and sacrifice, into selflessness.

At some point in your life, a few of you may be presented with the opportunity to step off your career path, to give yourself fully to some kind of service. When I was asked to leave my investment company to run the Olympics in Salt Lake City, I dismissed the idea out of hand.  I was making too much money, I didn't know bupkes about running a sports event.  The job would pay me nothing.  The organization was in the worst condition of any I had ever seen.  And, after the Games were over, the position would lead nowhere.  It was a dead end.

I took it.  It was the highlight of my professional life.  I gave more of myself than I ever had before.  I came to know and respect remarkable people.  There are currencies more lasting than money.  It can be enormously rewarding to take the unobvious course, to jump into the deep water.  Bias is shallow thinking and shallow water.  Read widely, particularly from people who disagree with you.  Argue to learn rather than to win.  If you don't respect, I mean really respect, the views of people who disagree with you, then you don't understand them yet.  There are smart people on both sides of almost every important issue.  Learn from them all.  If you have life all figured out in neat little packages, you're in Neverland, not the real world.  And it's boring there.  There's one more thing I've seen in the people who swim in the deep waters of life.  They don't fashion their values and principles to suit their self-interest; they live instead by enduring principles that are fundamental to society and to successful, great lives.

I learned important lessons about those principles from some of the Olympians I saw in Salt Lake City, like bobsledder Vonetta Flowers. Vonetta was brakeman on USA sled two.  All the attention, however, was on sled one, the sled that had taken the World Cup and was a lock for the Olympic Gold.

But just before the Olympics, the pilot of sled one dropped her partner and invited Vonetta Flowers to join her.  Vonetta had a tough decision.  On sled one, she'd get a gold medal for sure; the first Olympic gold to be won by an African American in the Olympic Winter Games.  Those of us rooting for US medals hoped she would jump to sled one.  She didn't.  She decided that friendship and loyalty to her longtime teammate on sled two was more important than winning the gold. Of course, sled one did well.  But when sled two beat them all, coming in first, the crowd went nuts.   And tears dripped off Vonetta's cheeks.

Friendship and loyalty above gold.

You live one time only. Don't spend it in safe, shallow water.  Launch out into the deep.  Give yourself to your family, to your career, to your community.   Open your mind to diverging viewpoints.  And live, not by what suits the moment, but by the principles that endure  for a lifetime.

Jump in, the water's fine!

Over the last couple of years, I've certainly been trying to launch out into the deep.  The process continues.

Adam Smith turns green

I just read an essay in VentureBeat that accurately describes my rationale for moving into the cleantech world. Thought I'd quickly share it in case others are interested.

Goal setting

I'm reading a new book by Michael Neill called You Can Have What You Want. Here is one interesting excerpt regarding goal setting:

I once asked one of my most financially successful clients, a multimillionaire "super salesman," whether or not he set goals. He told me that he did, and in fact always had, but not in the way that most people do. Traditional goal setting encourages us to think big and reach for the stars, but also to keep our target constant while we do whatever it takes to achieve it. My client didn't do any of that. He would sit down once or twice a year over a good meal and a nice glass of wine and ask himself, "What would be fun and exciting to make my life about over the next year?" He would then take as long as he wanted to write down his ideas until he had a list that totally inspired him. As the year unfolded, he would check in with his "goals" every now and then and adjust them up or down depending on how things were going in his life.

When he saw how horrified I looked (didn't anyone ever tell him you're not allowed to change your goals once you've written them down?), he told me something I have never forgotten: "The only real purpose of a goal is to inspire you to fall more deeply in love with your life."

There's another good quote regarding goal setting at the beginning of that section of the book. Michelangelo said, "The great danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that it is too low and we reach it."

Borat

I went to see the new Borat movie yesterday afternoon. I thought I'd take advantage of the brief time off before I officially start my new job. Everyone who had seen the movie described it as both (a) "extremely funny" and (b) "very offensive" and/or "very disturbing" . I can confirm that's all true. I think I found the most interesting about the movie is how willing Sacha Baron Cohen (Borat) is to put himself out there and do ridiculous stuff. Sometimes I wish I was more like that. I was a bit during the talent show that I mc'd awhile ago. But not nearly to Borat's level. When I first started in marketing five years ago, my manager would always encourage us to be in "the bozo zone" when we presented. The idea was that you should push yourself way out of your comfort zone ("the bozo zone") because, to the audience, it would only appear that you were being energetic or passionate about what you were saying. Having seen this movie, perhaps I'll rename that being in "the Borat zone".

Speaking of putting yourself out there and overcoming fear, Michael Neill has a new book out called You Can Have What You Want. In a newsletter that I subscribe to, Neill suggests that people try the following experiment:

For the next week, live as if fear is completely unnecessary. Don't worry about it if you feel it - a lifetime of conditioning tends not to disappear overnight. Just notice when you are about to do something if it is coming from fear or 'not-fear', and if it's from fear, don't do it. Any time you aren't sure what to do, ask yourself what you would do if you were not afraid and do that.

Be kind to yourself along the way - the path of not-fear is not always easy, especially at first. But after you've been on it for awhile, you may find it difficult to go back to living the other kind of life.

If that's a scary thought for you, ponder these words of Aung San Suu Kyi, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize and the president of Burma who has lived under house arrest for many years:

"Fear is a habit. I am not afraid."

Between presenting at a board meeting on Friday and starting my new job officially on Monday (see post regarding how much I need to learn), I'll have plenty of opportunities to conduct this experiment over the next week or so.

Lose Yourself

I was going through old papers this afternoon and came across a sign I created for myself when I did fat2phat originally. It contained an excerpt by an Eninem song called "Lose Yourself" (from the movie 8 Mile):

If you had one shot, one opportunity, to seize everything you ever wanted in one moment, would you capture it or just let it slip?
...
Success is my only option, failure is not.

Seems oddly appropriate given my jump into the biofuels space (see previous post).

The Cutting Edge Of Ambition

I was reading an article in Men's Health magazine the other day called "The Cutting Edge Of Ambition" (see online version). The article is about what modern brain science can tell us about questions such as "what level of personal drive is most likely to produce true success? what level will kill you? or ruin the rest of your life?". I was only lukewarm on the article as a whole. But there was one call-out box that I found very useful (not in the online version). It was called "beat your coworkers to the punch (before they even arrive)" and said:

Start your workday bathed in the sickly glow of a gossip blog and you'll sabotage your productivity all day, says Julie Morgenstern, author of Never Check Your E-mail in the Morning. "When you accomplish a high-level task first thing in the morning, that sense of productivity feeds into the rest of your day," she says. These three quick fixed will optimize your first 60 minutes at your desk.

LAY THE GROUDWORK
Your workday really began in the last hour of the day before, when you contemplated the disaster zone known as your desk. "Never leave your office without knowing exactly what you're going to do with the first hour of the next day," says Morgenstern.

HIT A LEADOFF HOME RUN
"Use your brain's prime time for prime-time work," says Ronni Eisenberg, author of The Overwhelmed Person's Guide to Time Management. So target one major project in your first hour on the job: Knocking it off early amplifies your efficiency once you start multitasking again. The brain is better at multitasking later in the day, after you've had a chance to wake up.

TUNE OUT OUTLOOK
"E-mail has created an instant response culture," says Morgenstern. "It turns you into a reactive slave to Outlook." So turn off that "alert" noise, steal a "Do Not Disturb" hotel tag and post it prominently, and punch the "hold all calls" button on the phone. Now you're cooking.

I could definitely put the first hour of my workday to better use. Recently, I've been getting into work by 9am or 9:30am. By then, a lot of people are well into their day and it's hard to get stuff done since I immediately get pulled into things before I can even get settled. Wish I could get onto an earlier schedule. A co-worker of mine gets into the office every morning at 7:00am or so and is the only one there for about an hour to an hour and a half. That's the way to go. But that would also mean I'd need to get to bed earlier and also be out of the house before the kids are up. Hard call - especially since sometimes I'm the most productive from 10pm to 2am.

The Rock

Dwayne Douglas Johnson a.k.a The Rock is an interesting guy. I've seen a couple of interviews with him and he seems quite down-to-earth in real life. There was an article about him in the September 2006 issue of Men's Health's magazine entitled "The Rock's Rules for Reinvention". Some of my favorite excerpts were:

"Always improve. Always evolve. Never give up."

"Clarity is king: being very clear on what your intention is, on what your goal is ... When you have that, the truth shall set you free ... those are the most powerful tools we have in life: truth and knowledge. A lot of times the truth can hurt, the truth sucks, it can crush your ego. But it's freeing just to know it. Make sure that everyone is very, very clear on things."

"My director once quoted a basketball player who said, 'When you are not practicing, remember, someone somewhere is practicing, and when you meet him, he will win.' I think I jumped up and threw my table across the restaurant, it connected so well with me. But a lot of times you have to dial it down a bit ... Going without sleep is counterproductive. At some point, you just have to get off that treadmill."

There was also a good swiss-ball exercise I'll need to keep in mind for the future:

Get into pushup position, resting your shins on a Swiss ball. Raise your hips as high as you can as you roll the ball toward your body. This is the starting position. From here, bend your elbows to lower your chest toward the floor, pause, then push yourself back up. "You can do so many variations," says Johnson. "Lift one leg, come down slow, isometrically hold the pushup, with your face 6 inches off the ground. It works your core, shoulders, triceps, chest, balance, everything."

Interesting that I'm taking life advice from a former pro wrestler but it's important not to judge a book by the cover. I'm learning that everyone has something to share with us if we're willing to really listen.

Winners & Losers

For Father's Day, my sister-in-law HG gave me a book called winner & losers by Sydney Harris. Published in 1973, the book is a collection of observations regarding the contrast between winner and losers. Examples include:

A winner
makes commitments;
a loser
makes promises.

A winner
isn't nearly as afraid
of losing
as a loser
is secretly
afraid of winning.

A winner listens;
a loser just waits
until it's his turn
to talk.

You get the point. It's a quick, interesting read but hard to turn the sayings into action. But the book could be a good source of quotes and/or inspiration in the future. Thanks, HG, for the gift.

Al Gore

The more I read or hear about Al Gore, the more I like him. The latest thing was a brief interview in Men's Health magazine (PDF version here). I wonder how things would have played out differently if Gore had been elected President. Then again, perhaps the reason behind his close defeat was allowing him to focus exclusively on global warming. In the article, he offers four basic guidelines:

• When a direction feels right, go that way to find out why. Fulfillment usually follows.
• Solve one problem. You may find you're inspired to solve more.
• There are a lot of us on the planet, and we do a lot of damage. We can also fix a lot of things, if we choose.
• Everyone needs a purpose in life. Even puppies.

On the third point, Gore makes an interesting observation: "Look, in the long run the earth is going to be fine. It's humans who are at risk." On the last point, he offers this story about puppies and purpose:

When I was in my 20s, my wife and I got a little puppy at the pound. We asked a dog trainer to give us some pointers. She said, "Okay, step one: What is this puppy going to do?" I said, "What do you mean? He's going to be a puppy!" She said, "No, no, no: Is he going to get the newspaper? Be a watchdog? Herd sheep?" And she said something very simple, but to me it came off as profound: "A puppy has to have a purpose." A lot of men out there don't feel like they have a purpose.

The last interesting thing in his article is a quote from scripture that Gore says often: "Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with all thy might."

Our deepest fear

A friend of mine just started working at AK Designs. While looking through their web site, I found this quote on their vision page:

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate.
Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.
It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us.
We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?
Actually, who are you not to be?

- Nelson Mandela (orig. quote Marianne Williamson)

It's funny. Sometimes you find inspiration where you least expect it.

The Star and Crescent

I'm a member of the Kappa Sigma Fraternity. Our badge (membership pin) is referred to as the Star and Crescent. By chance (looking at the back of a Kappa Sigma desk calendar), I was reminded of our ideals. Specifically:

The Star and Crescent shall not be worn by every man, but only by him who is worthy to wear it. He must be a gentleman ... a man of honor and courage ... a man of zeal, yet humble ... an intelligent man ... a man of truth ... one who tempers action with wisdom and, above all else, one who walks in the light of God.

I can't think of a more succinct statement of the type of man I'm trying to become.