Day 30

According to my calculations, I’ve spent at least a year of my life sleeping outside.

When I look back on the years, memories of majestic mountain and fern filled forests rush to the front of my mind.

It’s intriguing how in retrospect, my favorite moments were excruciatingly simple yet overflowing with feelings of “pleasure and contentment” which is how the dictionary describes being happy.

In paradox, a majority of my time is now spent so that I might one day have the financial freedom to pursue more of these endeavors. It seems as if we as humans get a taste of what we enjoy, then spend a large part of our lives doing something else, to then possibly return to the source of our joy.

I’m not sure if happiness should be an accepted state of mind regardless of our situation and circumstances or if it should be understanding of what brings you joy and committing to make long term sacrifices to bring that dream to fruition.

However, it is clear that successful people love what they do. They don’t seem to have a disconnect between their daily activities and their source of happiness.

While the concept of true happiness remains somewhat of a mystery to me, I can see how the first clue to the puzzle is hinting that my thoughts, intentions, and actions need to align.

Who knows what will happen from there.

Day 29

The best ideas are crazy until they are not.

Let's use words as an example in place of ideas.

When does a word become a word? All words were invented at one point in time.

Does it become a word the first time someone says or writes it?

Is it when two or more people agree that it is a word?

Or does over half the population have to agree it's a word?

Generally words don't end up in dictionaries until they are commonly accepted across a society.

You can't really identify the moment a word becomes a word because that moment is different for each person. Some warm up to it fairly quickly and others will protest its legitimacy until their death.

Just like the best words, what will become a popular idea often starts as the famed ugly ducking. You can't be ashamed of it.

Day 28

Finding good ideas is hard because you're concentrating on finding ideas.

The structure of that sentence is intentional. People assume a good idea has many components. Pressing need. Clear customer. Large market. No competition. The list goes on and on.

Each "idea" that enters your head quickly gets put through an extremely biased checklist and most are discarded. Often, the ones that are kept should also be discarded.

To find a good idea, stop looking for one.

Find a problem that a lot of people would pay to make go away. Once the problem is clear and value can be derived from the extinguishment of said problem, the number of possible ideas to solve this problem will likely be very narrow and the initial direction will be clear.

Sometimes what feels like going backwards catapults into furiously fast forward progress.

Day 27

"Many men go fishing all of their lives without knowing it is not fish they are after." Henry David Thoreau

People think they know what they want but the active conscious often deceives them. That is, the part of their mind that holds a conversation with yourself.

Motivated people, those that seek to accomplish extraordinary feats, seem bothered. Not bothered in the sense that they are slightly annoyed but that there is something internally that is off center.

They describe it to other people as "I'm trying to do this.." but often the topic at hand is a feeble attempt to give words to something the subconscious has taken captive.

I believe that as people decipher the encoded message over time, when they learn by feeling and not by logic what motivates them (through trial and error), it will allow them to make progress on their true objective. With that, happiness and contentment will come.

Day 26

The more you know, the less you need.

Knowledge empowers us. It takes what was a constraint and burden and turns it into a valuable opportunity.

I often use the initial phrase when helping people understand what to take backpacking. Their instinct is that an enormous backpack heavily filled to the brim with "the essentials" is a must.

The irony is that they do not need most of the items they voluntarily carry and it actually makes their hiking miserable because of unnecessary weight.

Learn to examine your end goal. Then, scrutinize what it actually needed to accomplish that and only that.

You'll find that you leave things behind, in a good way.

Day 25

In the mid nineteen hundreds, a man named Joseph Campbell outlined a concept called the Hero's Journey. 

Google it to see an illustration. 

Essentially it is the explanation of why certain stories persist far beyond the original civilization that circulated it. 

Think Homer's Odyssey. Hercules. Harry Potter in a couple hundred years. 

It's very simple to understand and clear to see how all of these stories, along with many others, contain the same core elements. 

I believe the most valuable startups also follow the Hero's Journey. It has become one of the most valuable tools I have used when presenting my team's work or ideas to others. 

It allows an audience to connect with my customer and empathize with them. Regardless of whether the listener agrees with or supports my cause, they have a hard time forgetting the story because it feels familiar. 

Be memorable. 

 

Day 24

"It's not an adventure until something goes wrong"

The quote above is an all time favorite for me.

Set out to do something. Recognize that when things don't go as planned, the adventure is simply beginning.

Navigating unforeseen circumstances will be challenging, especially when all of your planning now seems like it was a waste of time.

If everything were to happen as you expected, you would learn nothing.

Allow the experience to become remarkable.