My wife absolutely loves Planet Earth. We were watching a segment the other day that featured dolphins who managed to figure out how to hydroplane into water only a few inches deep, catching fish in the shallow water. Large fish had taken refuge from the dolphins in the shallow water, knowing that dolphins need deeper water to swim.

The really interesting thing was that the Planet Earth cameramen actually managed to capture footage of the dolphins figuring out how to hydroplane. There was footage of the dolphins learning how to pick up speed and zoom on top of the water. During a tense moment, it seemed that one of the ballsier dolphins had built up a bit too much speed and had actually hydroplaned onto shore. Just when it looked like the dolphin was going to be stranded, the narrator (David Attenborough) delivered the perfect latin proverb:

“But fortune favors the bold”.

Cue music! At that exact moment a lucky wave crashed in and freed the stranded dolphin. The rest of the footage showed the dolphins using their new talent to catch unsuspecting fish on the shore.

Does Fortune Favor You?

It’s easy to stick in our comfort zones. If you don’t risk anything, you can’t gain anything. The status quo doesn’t inspire. New, fresh ideas aren’t without some sort of risk or pain. It takes major cajones to actually finish an idea. (See my list of tools that have helped me.)

So here’s the question: What are you doing that’s different than everyone else?

How are you innovating? How are you taking a risk to catch the bigger lazy fish, reseting in the shallow water? Sure, there’s always the risk that you could get bottom out and stuck on the shore. But that’s where the big fish are. The risk is what keeps most everyone else away.

The interesting thing about the footage of the dolphins was that only eight out of the large pack were able to figure out how to hydroplane onto the shore. The rest just watched.

It’s stankin’ easy to come up with ideas. We all have ideas. We all even might have good ideas.

It takes something special to actually execute them. Ideas are hard. And they take risk to actually turn them into something tangible.

So if the risk looks too daunting, just remember:

Fortune favors the bold.

Photo by Cayusa

Photo by pseudothoughts

My brother had an interesting job over the holiday season: selling fireworks. Fireworks are incredibly popular in the South on New Years, and every year a caravan of his friends goes to work a firework tent in Alabama. It gives them a chance to get away and make some quick money over the course of a week.

Thanks to some awful weather, sales were way down in my brother’s tent, selling only around $2,000 worth of fireworks in about a week. But on New Years Eve their tent sold over $11,000 alone. Sure, that sounds pretty normal considering that lots of people buy fireworks just on New Years Eve. Yet my brother had more than doubled every other tent’s sales that day.

And he did it in a really boring way. He hustled.

Move FAST

In the fireworks world (and customer service in general), people hate two things: waiting and waiting. Nobody wants to wait in line. Especially if there are plenty of other options all around you. My brother and his friend quickly learned that if they focused all of their attention on a) quickly restocking and b) moving people through the checkout line lighting fast, they retained more customers and sold more.

While the rest of the competition in other tents were lazily moving boxes and inefficiently stocking, my brother and his friend were busting their humps. So instead of customers waiting in line at other tents, they bought fireworks at the tent that had well-stocked shelves and fast-moving lines (not to mention a full parking lot).

For whatever reason, people seem to think that working more efficiently is the key. Sure, we have finite resources and there’s only 24 hours in a day, etc. etc. etc. But I’ve noticed that we’re becoming increasingly enamored with finding the better or faster solution, and not focusing on the important things in front of us.

And that’s when it becomes really dangerous.

When you’re spending all of your time working on ways to streamline, brainstorm, and all those things that are just sad excuses for action, then you’re not focusing on what’s important.

You’re the fireworks stand with poorly-stocked shelves and slow lines. And all you had to do was focus on the basics of your operation.

Hustle 2.0

Gary Vaynerchuk’s Crush It!:
Why NOW Is the Time to Cash In on Your Passion

Gary Vaynerchuk’s latest book has had a huge impact on me. I initially thought it was going to be your basic, run-of-the-mill “YOU CAN DO IT!” book on creating your own business. But it was so much more than that.

Gary is walking proof that hustle is a gajillion times more important than workflows, pie charts, and a well-groomed business plan. Not to say that he wasn’t incredibly smart in building his empire (because he was). He just did all the little things that other people really don’t want to do to become successful. Gary’s book is great for showing that ultimately, if you’re not passionate and constantly hustling (Gary’s favorite word), then you’re already dead in the water.

We like to spend ways finding the next big thing that will save us an hour a day, or make us a buck more, or give us just a bit more happiness. But really, a simple routine is what powers your business. You can only start worrying about streamlining and saving once you’ve got the system in place.

As we enter this new decade, hustle is going to become more and more crucial to becoming successful. The internet has matured enough so that nearly every vertical is saturated. If you’re going to start a venture, odds are there will already be players in your field. They already have the marketshare so you’ll have to steal it. How?

Hustle, baby.

Photo by the half-blood prince

There’s a Chinese restaurant called the Panda Garden that my family used to frequent every Sunday. I recently read in a paper that it had been voted one of the best Chinese restaurants in Lawrence annually. That’s pretty impressive, considering there are a slew of Chinese restaurants in the college town.

The annual award might be because of the cuisine, but I have a different theory. I believe the Panda Garden is consistently voted best Chinese restaurant because of the owner.

The owner is one of the most personable people you’ll ever meet. Without fail every day, you can see the owner walking around and chatting with every single table, asking how the food is and getting to know her customers.

She isn’t friendly because she believes she’ll get more business from repeat customers (which she does). You can tell from the moment the owner approaches the table that she’s truly interested in how the food tastes and how your day has been. She’s genuinely interested in your life.

It might sound like I’m a regular at the restaurant, but the reality is that I haven’t eaten there in 15 years. That’s how much of an impact the owner has on my opinion of the establishment. I can remember our conversations and how she laughed and chatted with our family nearly every week.

So how does one go about being that genuine of a person? So genuine that they can take a commercial venture and add a couple dashes of character and personality, without feeling forced?

Blending your true personality with business isn’t an easy thing to do, if you’re doing it for business purposes.

But that’s just the rub: If you’re only being genuine because you think people like it when you’re sincere, then you’re really not being genuine, are you?

Hrm.

So how do you know if you’re being truly genuine?

Knowing if you’re being genuine is one of the easiest things in the world because it will feel natural. In fact, you’ll feel wrong/forced/weird/uncomfortable if you’re not being genuine.

Have you ever slept on your arm and then woken up with a numb arm? I do this every now and again, and it’s one of the weirdest feelings in the world. I can swing my arm around and not feel a single thing. The arm could be somebody else’s, for all my nerve endings are telling me.

This is what being insincere feels like: You’re wearing somebody else’s personality, and it just doesn’t quite fit.

Make a List!

I love Jason Teitelman’s method for maintaining your genuine self: Make a list of truths about yourself, and display it publicly, where you can see it every day.

(In the event that you’re a compulsive nose-picker, it might be prudent to be a little disingenuous and hold off putting “nose picker” on the list. At least the public list.)

Your Roots

Constantly reminding yourself about who you really are helps you stay true to your core self. Your core self is comprised of all the things that have shaped you:

• your upbringing
• your location
• your likes
• your dislikes
• your temperament
• etc., etc., etc….

Being Genuine Like a Politician

Politicians have exploited their background to gain more votes. Maybe they’ll bring out an unnatural dialect, or a sudden interest in the local sports team, or anything else they think they can play off of to win more votes.

The problem with this route is that many people see through this and eventually figure out the smarmy, under-handed tactics. Nobody likes having smoke blown up you-know-where. The same can happen if you try too hard to win affection by being insincere.

Think of the stressful lives those people who have built their entire careers around being artificial.

So, in all things.. be yourself, and people will respect you more than if you tried to be someone you weren’t.

Other Tips to Being More Genuine

Show emotion

Being genuine is one of the hardest things because it requires you to be vulnerable. Every person has a “face” that they can put on to hide their true emotions. But the fact is, we’ve come to accept that emotions are weak.

Not to turn into the macho-guy, but think about the movie Gladiator. The main character, (played by Russel Crowe), is purely driven by emotion, and he doesn’t try to hide them. It’s one of the most endearing qualities about him. It’s ok to show how you’re feeling. It’s healthy.

Note: There are some of you, (don’t worry, you know who you are), that might show enough emotion on a given day for five people. There’s something to be said for not being too dramatic on occasion.

Show vulnerability

Being vulnerable doesn’t mean that you put on a turtleneck, and start weeping and strum a guitar. All it means is that you allow other people to see what you’re really thinking and feeling.

Being vulnerable gives others a way to look into your life, to become closer to you because of your openness about some aspect of your life.

And the True Indicator to Being Genuine…

The owner of the Panda Garden could stay at home and manage the “business” side of things remotely. Paying bills, paying employees, marketing, and many other things. But instead she comes every day to the restaurant and chats with everyone. Why? It’s because that’s what she loves to do. It fills her, and it would feel foreign and awkward if she weren’t doing that every day.

What about you? Do you wake up with someone else’s personality between you? Or are you being yourself? It might be fun to list a few traits that you find original to yourself below, just to see what you come up with.

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Photo by Zevotron

On most days there is blind woman that goes to the coffee shop I frequent. Karen’s one of the sweetest and most genuine people you’ll ever meet.

What’s most amazing about Karen is her complete trust in her guide dog, Comet. Comet leads her everywhere she needs to go, and allows Karen to do nearly everything that those of us blessed with two eyes can do. Comet leads Karen to the register, around tables, and waits patiently while Karen types away on her braille keyboard and sips coffee. Karen has given over control to something that she trusts completely. Comet senses this and never lets Karen down.

I’ve noticed that creative workers (ie. artists, writers, bloggers, musicians, etc.), sometimes fall prey to not letting their passion lead them. Instead of letting the fire in their gut create wonderful masterpieces, they let money or other forces control their output, and it changes things.

Sometimes you have to give up control of what you want, and let your passion lead you.

In 1995 bestselling author Steven Pressfield had the idea for The Legend of Bagger Vance, and almost didn’t work on it. Traditionally there isn’t much of a market for golf fiction, and he knew that if he wrote the novel it probably wouldn’t be read by many. Still, he had been given the idea, and he knew that he wouldn’t feel good about himself until he finished the work. The Legend of Bagger Vance is now an international bestseller, and touts a major motion picture based on the movie. Only because Pressfield followed his passion.

We humans are attracted to passion, and we can sense it immediately. It’s contagious. We thrive on it, and we thrive on others who have it. It’s a quality we all possess, but it’s not something we all use. In fact, many of us ignore what we’re really supposed to be doing, because it’s much “safer”. If we fail at what we really want to do, then it would devastate us, right?

Following our passion makes us vulnerable, as it exposes us for what we really are. It opens us up to critics, to people who wish they could find their own passion and ride it into the sunset. But they would rather scrutinize those who do what they love. We can’t be afraid of critics.

When it comes down to it, there really isn’t much of an option to being happy if we don’t follow our passion. Whether it’s writing, blogging, creating web sites, directing films, writing music… all of these things have to be directed by what’s in our gut and what’s in our heart. There can’t be any nagging thoughts about small market share, or competition, or public reaction. Those are just distractions to keep us from doing the real work that needs to be done, the work worth doing.

Nobody really follows an artist with a potentially great business plan. We follow passion. The business plan comes later.

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This guest post was written by Derek Ralston of Life Evolver.

Imagine this- you are a highly successful, innovative entrepreneur, and one day, a raging fire burns six of your factory buildings two the ground, and guts seven others, costing you $106 million dollars. Insurance will only cover 30% of the damages. What would you do? This is exactly what happened to Thomas Edison in 1914 (dollars of damage adjusted to today’s value).

Edison responded to the fire by proclaiming he would resume manufacturing within ten days and began mapping out his rebuilding campaign immediately. While others saw the fire as a huge devastation, Edison saw it as an opportunity and saw the possibility of new direction and improvements in his factory design. He even used it to take advantage of the new factory design developed by Henry Ford. Edison’s life is a perfect example of living optimistically.

The Case for Optimism

Dr. Martin Seligman, the director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Positive Psychology Center, and author of Learned Optimism, has studied optimists and pessimists for 25 years. His research has found:

Optimists

• Less depression than pessimists
• Better results than pessimists in most areas of life
• Longer lifespan
• Healthier than pessimists
• Better than pessimists at work and in school
• More friends and better social lives

Pessimists

• More depression than optimists
• Inertia rather than activity in the face of setbacks
• Feels bad subjectively–blue, down worried, anxious
• Poor physical health
• Self-fulfilling; pessimists don’t persist in the face of challenges and thus fail more frequently, even when success is attainable
• Even when pessimists turn out to be right, they still feel worse than deluded optimists

Seligman’s research also determined that optimism is something that can be learned, so if you are currently living pessimistically, the good news is that you can change!

Now that you see some of the benefits of living optimistically, here are three tips from Edison on living optimistically:

Tips from Edison on Living Optimistically

1) There is no such thing as a failure- there are only unexpected outcomes which will provide valuable guidance for future work

Our greatest weakness lies in giving up. The most certain way to succeed is always to try just one more time. -Thomas Edison

Edison believed that most people gave up to soon and walked away from success, accepting failure. He viewed negative events as temporary setbacks on his inevitable path to success. To live like Edison, coach yourself to not take setbacks personally, and instead think of them as temporary glitches on your way to success.

2) Decide with full commitment to accomplish something

Nearly every man who develops an idea works it up to the point when it looks impossible, and gets discouraged. That’s not the place to become discouraged. Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up. -Thomas Edison

After trying 10,000 times to develop an electric lamp, Edison proclaimed, “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” Without Edison’s full commitment and optimistic attitude to develop an electric lamp, the solution may not have discovered until much later. When you are fully committed, providence moves in. William H. Murray wrote about this in The Scottish Himalayan Expedition:

The moment one definitely commits oneself, then providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would not otherwise have occurred. Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it! Boldness has genius, magic, and power in it.

3) Look on the bright side of everything

Every adversity, every failure, every heartache carries with it the seed of an equal or greater benefit. -Napoleon Hill

Imagine how Edison’s family, employees, and investors would have felt if he responded negatively to the devastating factory fire mentioned earlier in this post. When you look on the bright side of everything, as Edison did, you and those around you are better able to persist through many of life’s challenges. You can make the conscious choice to focus on the bright side or the dark side of anything in life- and your focus will often become self-fulfilling.

Derek Ralston’s blog Life Evolver (feed) to snag more helpful insights into making positive, sustainable changes in your life.

photo credit: Jimee, Jackie, Tom & Asha

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photo credit: The Rocketeer

Whenever I think of rejection, I associate it with Mr. Sweaty-Nervous guy asking out Ms. Popular and getting laughed at. But rejection comes in many forms, and isn’t just limited to the stereotypical snubbed prom invitation. You can be rejected in other areas like work, friendship, and even rejection of ideas.

Nobody likes being shot down for any reason. But unfortunately, it’s a fact of life. Just like failure is an incredible learning tool, rejection can be a great way to really see our flaws. Just not a very fun way. Here are some ways to deal with being rejected, and how to actually use the experience as a learning tool so that next time it won’t happen.

Learn from your mistakes. This is the best part of being rejected (if there is such a thing). There is no education like a little crash ‘n burn. If you can pinpoint what went wrong, you’ll know what not to do next time. Teddy Roosevelt sums this up nicely: “There is no effort without error and shortcoming”. You’re going to fail. You’re going to be rejected. It’s what you do next that’s important.

Develop some thick skin. There is no better time to develop some thick skin than after a rejection. Instead of curling up into the fetal position, sucking your thumb and vowing to never go outside again, put a little swagger in your step and lift your head high. While rejection is an incredibly personal thing, making it as impersonal as possible is sometimes the best solution.

Learn how to laugh it off. Laughter is the best medicine (just ask Patch Adams). It’s inevitable that at some point you’ll have a rejection for the smallest, most obscure reason (ie. someone didn’t like the collar on your shirt, so you weren’t hired). At this point the only thing we can do is to laugh it off. An easy way to do this is to visualize the situation as a spoof on Saturday Night Live. Works like a charm.

Think of it as a trial run. There’s no need to think of it as rejection, but rather a trial run. There’s going to be more opportunities. And who knows, it may work out better that the rejection came now, instead of down the road. Don’t ever take the mindset that this was your last chance. Plenty more will come.

Ask why. How can you learn if you don’t know what you’re doing wrong? Just ask politely what could have been different about the way you presented yourself, and take note. If the other party is truly honest with you, they’re essentially giving you golden nuggets.

Now, don’t confuse this step with emotionally hounding someone for the reason why they broke up with you. Not a good idea.

Look for trends. If you’re starting to see similarities in the way you’re being rejected, look for some trends that might explain why. These will lead you to valuable clues that can turn your rejection into future successes.

Give it some time. It’s common after a rejection to want to make changes and fix whatever it was that was turned down. We turn frantic, and want to quickly make the embarrassment and pain go away. Just take a long breath, and let your thoughts marinate for a bit. Remember, time heals all wounds. Nothing cures a good snubbing like a few months time.

Reflect without obsessing. While reflection is crucial to understanding what went wrong and how to fix it, it’s important not to get consumed by the event. Try (yeah, it’s hard) to be as detached from the event as possible, and view it as analytically as possible.

Give yourself kudos for trying. You put your neck out there. At least you made the effort and tried, which is plenty more than most people can say. It takes a lot of courage to put your ego on the line and shoot for something, knowing full well it might get the thumbs down.

Try, try again. Once you know what you were doing wrong, fix it and try again. If your sales pitch was a bit pushy, dial it down and try it on another party. The only way rejection is truly bad is if you don’t learn from the mistake and try again. And again. And again, if necessary. Need an example?

Also: ZenHabits has a great post on how to flip karma to your favor. Great stuff.