Engage - Getting over presentation nerves!

I used to get nervous about giving presentations, but somewhere along the line that changed and I began to love it. One of the most important things you can do, is engage people. Presenting is a chance to put that into practice. I used to wonder how people manage to go into presentations and confidently free style. I figured they must really know the content inside out, and though i still think that's true, I don't think that's the most important thing. You can't conquer presentation nerves by knowing a lot of content related
stuff.

Heli-Skiing and starting a business ...

I guess starting a business is like heli-skiing. You know the whole … helicopter takes you to the top of a mountain and then you jump out with your ski's on, and you hope that skiing your heart out is enough to get you home safe with a wild story to tell :) I was reading a blogpost about this earlier. What an amazing feeling it must be to start all the way up there, all alone, carving your way down. It comes at a price though: You have to jump, and then there's no turning back.

With a startup, jumping is about investing lots of time, money and soul. Once you're in, there's no turning back. If you stop, you lose, if you don't stop you invest more and the price of failure just keeps increasing. I want to know if I'm ready. Will this idea work? But you never really know if you're ready. I only know that If I don't jump I can keep this dream alive and dreams are risk free … at least for a little while, until I realize I've left it too late…

Working Girl

Today was movie day. I've been recovering from a cold and decided to spend the day in front of the TV enjoying Netflix. Movie number 3 was "Working Girl" starring Melanie Griffiths, Harrison Ford and Sigourney Weaver. My wife hadn't watched this movie so we decided to give it a shot.

The basic plot is there's this smart personal assistant, who's trying to make it in the world of big business but she's finding it tough. As a young women in NYC in the 80's, no one's taking her seriously. It's basically a feel good chick flick with a happy ending, but I also think it makes some important points as Tess (Melanie Griffiths) makes her way to ultimate success:

1. Tess spent a lot of her time mastering her craft (And I mean mastering, and I mean a lot of time and I mean "her craft", i.e. something she loves doing). When she wasn't getting coffee, picking up laundry, carrying luggage, etc, etc for difficult bosses, she was reading about and being exposed to the world she loved (business) and dreaming up deals (mergers and acquisitions).
2. She valued her friendships. She seemed to empathize with her workers, friends, brides on their wedding day, even cheating boyfriends starting their own business. She didn't lose sight of the human factor. And it's funny how her killer business idea also has this empathy at it's core. i.e. She seemed to put herself in the shoes of the company she ultimately helps to succeed.
3. She wasn't afraid to take risks and break the rules (especially when those rules didn't make sense). There's a great line in the movie when she tells her friend, that she's not going to spend her life following bunch of rules designed to hold her back, that she had absolutely no part in creating!
   
   
4. She had a little luck along the way. I can bet she never knew exactly where all the effort she was putting in was going to lead her. Often the way forward isn't clear, but I think there's no denying she focused on what was important and what she loved to do and the rest took care of itself. Sometimes you make your own luck especially when you're spending time making yourself stronger.

So here's a little toast to the weeks and months ahead: May they be filled with friends, mastery, a few risks and a little luck. Have a great week!

 

Just For Money

"The love of money is the root of all evil" or so the saying goes. I learned this lesson when I was a kid. It was taught in schools and television and it was a fairly simple concept to grasp. I mean seriously, did you ever watch an episode of Batman where the bad guys ultimately got away with the cash? I didn't.

That said if we weigh how often we heard "money is important" compared to "money isn't everything" I think most of us would quickly agree on which side the scales would fall.

So why is this an issue? Isn't financial planning a good thing. In short, yes it is. But there's a problem. When you start a business you're often advised to do something you love doing (i.e. don't just do it for the money) and you're also told to plan carefully (i.e. think about all the boring stuff esp. the money!). Quickly the planning turns into obsessing and the next thing you know money has become the most important aspect of your business and your primary measure of success. It's around this time you may start to understand why people say the one sure way to hate doing what you love is to get paid to do it.

From personal experience I think this happens because at the beginning of a business (love affair stage) you're doing what you love doing but in many cases you aren't seeing a lot of action from paying customers. After a while the doubts creep in … am I really any good at this? My friends and family seem to think  so … but if I was really good … wouldn't I be making some money? And if you're not careful you may end up thinking about making money more than thinking about ways to take your craft to the next level.

It's necessary to have a balance. Money is important and I'm not advocating giving everything away free of charge. Business plans are good, as is having food on the table and a roof over our heads. But perhaps success cannot or should not be measured by how much money you make. Perhaps a better measure is the people you reach and the lives you might change for the better through genuine interactions. (i.e. come from the heart)

I think it's better to put your craft first, keep doing what you're doing because you love to do it and preserve the passion and inspiration that are at the core of successful businesses. People who can do this are often amongst the most successful, because they're in it for others just as much as themselves. If you must judge your work then don't use money as a measure (often leads to damaging compromises). Keep in mind it's possible you're not making anything because you're still making a name for yourself rather than it having something to do with your potential for success.

If it bleeds ...

In "Kill ideas carefully" I talked about not discarding ideas without thinking about them first. But working out whether an idea is good or not is difficult (at least, I find it difficult). Why is that?

When an idea pops into my head the first thing I see is a spectacular end result. A moment later a lot of "But How!?" questions come raining down and the idea gets lost. (But how do I raise the money?, but how do I market it?, but how do I design it?, etc) I think it's difficult to evaluate an idea because often it's difficult to see it clearly; the "but how" questions compete for precious brain cycles until there's no processing power left to evaluate anything.



What's needed is a "super computer" capable of handling all of these questions without losing sight of the goal. Fortunately we all have one, it's our brain, we just need to help it out with some Visual Thinking.

Recently I found out the most powerful information processing functions of the brain lie in its visual centers. This means we're more likely to understand something when we see a picture of it. The example below shows this idea in action. It compares some typical street directions against a visual equivalent (aka "A Map!") I know which one I prefer!


If we could learn to visualize "problems", we'd have a much better chance of solving them. A book I recently read that does a good job explaining this is "Unfolding The Napkin" by Dan Roam. Dan provides simple frameworks for visualizing problems and presenting solutions. Evaluating ideas is just one of many things you can do with his techniques.

From personal experience, once I can "see" the obstacles they're usually a lot less overwhelming. It's like Arnie said in Predator, "if it bleeds we can kill it", in our case "if we can see it there's a good chance we can understand it". An added bonus is that once problems have been visualized it's easier to engage friends to help with solutions :-)

Getting Started Pt I: Kill ideas carefully

Everything starts with an idea. Starbucks, Apple, Google, Facebook and countless other success stories were, at some point, just an idea. The reason they succeeded is that someone did something about them. Unfortunately most of us kill our ideas too quickly and for reasons that probably aren't that great.

In the past I'd get an idea, sometimes I might have even marveled at how great it was :-) and then, suddenly, with alarming speed, I'd come up with a truck load of reasons why it wouldn't work and I'd bury it. The reasons varied but it boiled down to this feeling of not being qualified to move forward. e.g. didn't have the skills, capital, time, experience, etc etc to "qualify" to take the next step.


And then one day it dawned on me that if someone else asked me to try and move a similar idea forward, perhaps as part of a work or school project, I'd almost certainly give it a shot. Qualified or not I would start moving! How crazy is that?! Throw in some deadlines and a hard to please client and I'm pretty sure I'd be working overtime to do my best. What changed? Why is it easier to act when it's someone else's idea?

In "Linchpin", Godin talks about a small part of our brain (the Amygdala, aka the lizard brain) that is basically obsessed with avoiding failure along with a lot of our other biggest fears. The bottom line is that most of us learn at a young age that failing is one of the worst things that can happen to us. In reality, it's probably not as bad as we think, but good luck trying to convince your Amygdala of that.

Is there a solution? What worked for me was convincing my lizard brain that not doing anything equals massive failure and I quickly noticed myself getting agitated every time I killed an idea without thinking about it first. Today, I give each idea serious consideration before I start wielding the axe. I still kill a lot of ideas, but I kill them carefully, who knows maybe the next one is going to be that winner I'm looking for :-)