Category Archives: Life

Am I ambitious? I’d like to think so.

But when I talk to many young people, especially entrepreneur types, I often think to myself, “Whoa, these people are way more ambitious than me.” I’ve come to learn, however, that these people are not exactly more ambitious than me, they simply craft and articulate their ambitions in a different way.

See, I’ve never said to myself, “I want to be the president” or “I want to be a Fortune 100 CEO” or “I want to make a million dollars by age X” or whatever. My parents have never said to me, “Ben, you can do or be anything you want, shoot for the sky!”

Rather, I’ve just lived year by year, slowly but surely ratcheting up my activities. I never said, “I want to be a CEO one day!” I just started building a company. I never said, “I want to publish a book by the time I’m 18!” I simply started writing a book and, sure enough, one day it got signed by a publisher.

It seems I often skip the “dreaming” phase. Maybe this is a good thing? One of the most brilliant business quotes of all-time is the Southwest Airlines Chairman Herb Kelleher: “We have a ‘strategic plan’. It’s called doing things.” I could adapt it: “I have a life plan and strategy. It’s called doing things.” The nice thing about not having too long-term a plan or living your life in pursuit of “a dream” is that it provides enormous flexibility for taking advantage of whatever life throws at you.

Although I do have some kind of larger vision — mostly around impacting on the world — in general I take life day by day, week by week, month by month. The only thing for certain is that tomorrow I have six hours of meetings, Thursday I have a coffee, two lunches, and a call, etc. Each day life pulls you in various directions and, like it or not, we’re often reacting. We have to do our best to make the most of the circumstances and try to do stuff doing that time instead of simply talking about what we’d like to do.

As much as I believe in “goal setting,” aiming high, and being open about your ambitions for sucking the marrow out of life, for me, the path of “wandering where opportunity tugs without a map” works splendidly, too.

I talked to my good friend Howard last night, who’s started at the University of Michigan, and it struck me that those of us who were happy in high school and happy about life have stayed happy in college (or in gap years). Those who were unhappy have gone to college and stayed in a funk. There are exceptions, of course, but it’s remarkable how "happy people" just seem to find the bright side of a new situation.

This is more evidence for the "genetic baseline" theory of happiness which says even extraordinary events like winning the lottery or losing a loved one will not have an enduring impact on our day-to-day happiness.

“People who get stuff done maintain a high commitment to themselves…”

It was a young woman in Mumbai reading from her private journal. She journals every day and decided to share an entry with me. She had quoted one of my blog posts in her journal.

I was deeply moved.

There I was, sitting on a bench in Mumbai, India, with a total stranger who’s been reading my posts for months. No, not another white guy from America. An Indian woman who will have an arranged marriage, who’s never left India, who’s working hard to find her way in her vastly different world. And words I thought would fall victim the ephemeral nature of the web — read and forgotten a day later! — actually became memorialized in the form of her paper journal.

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A couple months ago I emailed a teacher from my middle school out of the blue and concluded by saying, “One of the benefits of teaching, it seems to me, is you really don’t know how many people you are touching.” Great teachers always get teary eyed when a former student returns, 10 years later, and says, “Mr. Johnson, you have no idea how frequently I think back to your advice offered in 6th grade history.”

Similarly, when you publish something on the web you have no idea who it will touch. Sometimes you’ll never know. It makes those rare moments when you do find out all the more special.

But it’s more special not to know how far your words may carry. It lets your mind run wild. This is probably the spirit which drives movements like the Random Acts of Kindness Foundation — your random nicety could have made someone’s day, and it makes your day to know that possibility merely exists.

I’m a big fan of “Flow” — the “mental state of operation in which the person is fully immersed in what he or she is doing, characterized by a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and success in the process of the activity.”

One of the main ways to identify whether you’re in a flow state is if time flies. If you start on a task at 2 PM, and suddenly you look at the clock and it’s 5:30 PM already and it felt like just a minute.

I was talking the other day to a workaholic. She said, “The past five years have just flown right by.”

It got me thinking. Does the distorted time criterion indicate a flow state for large chunks of time — five years — as much as for short periods of time? I’m not so sure. Although we all process and remember time differently, my sense is people who have rich memories and specific guideposts when asked to consider the last five years probably were more immersed in life than those for whom the time “just flew by”.

Three housekeeping items.

1. I’m looking for a web designer to build a simple web site for my book and re-design this blog in a matching color scheme. Please email me if you know of anyone who is suited for the task (or if you want to suggest well-designed book web sites) and I can email the spec.

2. I have a friend who’s developed some awesome video ring tones. Not just sounds / music, but animated video that will play on the phone. This is the future of this market. If you have any contacts in the ring tone industry / mobile phone world, please let me know.

3. I’ll unexpectedly be in New Delhi, India and Vancouver, British Columbia in a week. If you live there and want to meet, email me. Thanks.