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Finding The Energy To Do The Work On Days When It Just Isn’t There.

Navin R. Johnson: The new phone book’s here! The new phone book’s here!

Harry Hartounian: Boy, I wish I could get that excited about nothing.

Navin R. Johnson: Nothing? Are you kidding? Page 73 — Johnson, Navin R.! I’m somebody now! Millions of people look at this book everyday! This is the kind of spontaneous publicity – your name in print – that makes people. I’m in print! Things are going to start happening to me now.

¶ ¶ ¶

I’m seeing that Navin R. Johnson kind of excitement from my team at Stry.us lately, and it’s a wonderful thing. I can’t remember where I read it first, but it’s true: You can teach skills, but you cannot teach attitude. Right now, we’re at the start of this project, and everyone is excited about everything.

The challenge is in keeping that excitement going. I have to know how my reporters are running — right now, I can see that two of them are slightly overworked, and one of them is a little bored, and the fourth is right about at her maximum output — and when I need to step in and intervene. Because it’s really easy to lose a good employee to burnout, and it’s equally easy to lose a reporter to boredom.

Like Navin, I know how excited my reporters are to see their names appear on the site. But that excitement is fleeting.

So much of building your own thing is about bringing that energy. Many days, you just wake up with it.

Other days, you have to fake it. You have to smile big and try to find energy in those moments when it just doesn’t want to come.

You cannot just show up on the days when you feel like showing up. The work has to be done every single day.

On those slow days, I like to think about the moments when the energy’s there, when the excitement is high, when I’m absolutely giddy about the work I’m doing. On a day when I’m down, I can always remember: Tomorrow could bring that excitement again. Today’s just a bad day.

Until then, I have to find a way to do the work I need to do with the passion I need to have. And I need to teach my team how to do the same.

Otherwise, we’ll wake up one day as that gas station owner, trying to figure when the days of getting excited about the phone book passed us by.

There are so many wonderful things about being young and stupid and excited. I will not let that go to waste.

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To Be Or Not To Be? You’re Overthinking It. Just DO.

Two of my reporters came to me last week with an idea for Stry.us: We should use our Twitter feed to curate a bucket list of Springfield-related things, and then cross those things off as the summer goes on. It’d be a way to engage our audience and to learn more about our new city.

Great! I said. Let’s do it.

And wonderfully, my reporters didn’t freak out at this. They didn’t say, Hey, shouldn’t we talk about this some more? Shouldn’t we have another couple of meetings or something?

I hate meetings. And I hate overthinking, which is pretty much the in-your-head equivalent of a meeting. I hate any unproductive time spent thinking and debating instead of building or creating or doing.

There is certainly a time for contemplation, and there is a time for thought.

But I’d argue that the best time to think about action is after you’ve already started doing. Discussion about action that’s already happened/happening is so much more productive, because once the action begins, you start to learn what truly works.

Action leads to practical solutions. Discussion often merely leads to theory.

I’d take the former every single time.

I’ve wasted so much time talking about what I could do or should do or might do. But the only thing that matters is what I actually do.

So start. Start before you’re ready.

To be or not to be? Nah, that’s too much thinking. Just do.

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Anything I’ve Ever Done Well, I Have Done Wrong First — Many, Many Times.


How about I just put this in the simplest way I can?

Everything I have ever done right in my life is something I’ve done wrong a half-dozen times first.

Every good idea, every well-executed plan, every romance — it’s all the result of complete, total, abject failure. I have never done anything right the first time.

The first time I tried to speak Spanish ended up with me locked in my closet, crying hysterically at the fact that I just didn’t understand the language.

The first time I interviewed a source using a tape recorder, I forgot to press record.

The first time I tried to play guitar, I sounded like an amateur.

The first time I wrote a blog post, the words came out all wrong.

The first time I tried to barbecue ribs, I nearly poisoned my friends.

Everything I have ever done right in my life — anything I have ever learned to do well, and to love — I have done wrong first, and I have done it wrong many, many times.

But what I have learned is that if it really matters to you — if it’s a thing, or a person, or a love, or a project, or a dream — then the first failure is no deterrent. And neither is the second, or the twenty-second.

Most of the people in our world see failure as an excuse to stop trying.

The builders in our world see failure as a chance to learn, and to try again.

I believe that the best things in this life cannot be had without failure — crushing, crippling, head-in-your-hands failure — and without the incredible bit of courage it takes to stand back up and fail again.

If you love something, then you must learn to love failure. It is the only road on which great dreams are made.

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Good Teamwork Starts With Bad Adventures That Go Slightly Wrong.

The full Stry.us team has been down in Springfield for about two weeks. And we’ve been getting along really nicely — as well as I could’ve hoped, actually.

I was worried about this, actually. We’re putting six reporters into a confined space — we’re all living together — and asking them to work together for a summer. The chance of disaster[1. i.e. fighting, conflict, bickering, smashing of Apple laptops, etc.] is high.

But I thought back to three personal experiences where a group of disparate individuals bonded in a strange way:

1. The trip I took with Mizzou to China
2. My Birthright Israel experience
3. My freshman year dorm

In all three, bonding was formed around a single thing: Minor disaster. In China, that meant all-day bus trips to really random places that the Chinese wanted us to see — most notably a sewage treatment plant. With Birthright, that meant the six-hour flight delay we sat through at Newark.

With the dorms, it meant dealing with our ancient, rusting dorm.

What I noticed is that when people are miserable, they come together to share that suffering. In all three experiences, I got much closer to people I’d hardly known days earlier. No matter what happens after that experience, I found, we’d always have that story about the the time we lived through (insert miserable experience here).

I wanted our team at Stry.us to get along, too. So here’s what I did: The day after the last member of the team arrived, we all drove 90 minutes north to Ha Ha Tonka, this beautiful state park in Missouri. It was about 90 degrees. There were lots of mosquitos. And the park is super hilly.

I hiked my team up and down that park for 2.5 hours — at the end of which everyone got a little grumpy and a lot sweaty.

And then they started talking.

Then we grabbed some beer and went to an epic bluegrass concert.

And by the end of the night, our team was exhausted, tired and maybe a little confused at what they’d seen. But they were also talking. They finally had something in common.[2. Besides the fact that they work for Stry.us and like stories.]

There are a few things we’ve done right with this project. But making our team hike in excessive heat and then listen to two hours of bluegrass was maybe the single best thing. It brought us together in a very real way.

The beer also probably didn’t hurt.

———

That photo of Ha Ha Tonka State Park comes via Darin House, and is used here thanks to a Creative Commons license.

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There Is No Set Path From A->B. There Are Only Steps. Take The First One.

Run, Forrest, Run.

When I first started Stry.us, I had this notion that I was going to create a company that was going to disrupt the Associated Press. It was going to do a lot of things — most especially, it would tell great stories — but it would be funded by news organizations who would rip up their contracts with AP and give me their money instead. All I needed was 100 news organizations who’d give me $10,000 each.

This was the very definition of cluelessness.

I got excited, and I got ahead of myself. Way, WAY ahead of myself. It was going to take way more than three months of reporting from Biloxi for me to raise money for Stry.us.[1. And a million dollars! I thought I could get a million dollars! Lordy lordy was I dreaming big.]

The road from here to there — and for the record, the road has since changed, and I’m on a totally different path with Stry.us [2. And that’s totally okay!] — takes time. It takes a thousand tiny steps. There are no big leaps.

Think of it this way: Forrest Gump didn’t wake up and say, I’m going to run across the country four times.

No! He said: Maybe I’ll run down to the end of the block. And then to the end of town. And then to the end of the county.

And then you know what happens next:

My goal of getting people on board with Stry.us was one that was going to take time. It was going to take a certain amount of crazy before I got to that first follower, that first client.

It was going to take many tiny steps.

People quit too soon. If there’s one thing that I’ve done right, it’s that I haven’t quit on Stry.us. I’ve kept it going, and just by inching it forward, I’ve gotten it to Springfield.

It takes a thousand small steps to get to where you want to go. The first steps are slow. They are painful.

But if you really want to get somewhere good, you have to take the first one.

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I Can’t Fucking Believe I Left My Windows Open Again.

yours truly, the idiot

I took my team up to Ha Ha Tonka last weekend. Ha Ha Tonka is a mid-Missouri park, and I could tell you about its rolling hills, or its castles, or its sinkholes, but all you’re going to remember is its name:

Ha Ha Tonka.

It has a funny name.

But I digress: I took the team hiking there last weekend. And in the Devil’s Kitchen, a giant sinkhole on the southern side of the park, in this majestic ampitheather, I gathered the Stry.us team and laid out the rules for the summer:

Let’s be builders.

Let’s be patient, but let’s also be persistent.

And of course: Let’s make mistakes. They’ll be mistakes, but they’ll be our mistakes, and we’ll learn from them.

At least, I hope we will.

See, here’s the thing: It’s 2:47 a.m. right now, and I’m typing this. Which means that something’s gone wrong.

Again.[1. See: Self-pic, at top, for proof.]

It happened once in Biloxi, when I couldn’t afford to make a mistake.[2. I mean that literally — I didn’t have any money.] Biloxi was hot — there’s a photo on the Stry.us Facebook page of Weather.com showing a “real feel” of 119 degrees, to give you an idea of what July was like — and my car tended to heat up like a toaster oven most afternoons. I kept my windows open a lot.

I kept my windows open until that one night where it rained like all hell, and then I walked downstairs and found a small monsoon on my driver’s side floormat. The control panel on the left side of the car shorted out. Every other window I could make go up — but not that driver’s side window.

I took it to my mechanic there — the heat had made my engine fan go kaput, so I’d already found a mechanic — and Big Joe had to call up a dealer in Alabama to find the part. It cost me a few hundred dollars, and when I called my parents, my dad told me the thing that dads say:

It happens once, alright. It happens twice….

And he didn’t need to finish the sentence.

Which is where tonight comes in. There was a thunderstorm, and I knew it was coming — my laptop had forewarned me of it. But it was hot again, and I kept the windows open a crack. I’d expected to go out again at night for groceries. I came in, did some work, passed on groceries and went to sleep at the start of the first OT between Boston and Miami.

I woke up to thunder. And it woke me up, straight up, and I knew already. I went to my window and looked out.

I thought I saw a crack in the window.

I grabbed my raincoat and a small towel. The rain was blowing more in a sideways/upwards direction than down. The thunder hit every couple of seconds. The lightning looked like a strobe on full blast, or a lighthouse light spinning at triple time.

I looked at my car, and I fully realized what I’d already suspected: I’d left every window open an inch.

I ran. I hit the remote entry, and the lights came on. I went to the driver’s side door.

Nothing.

I tried again.

Nope.

And then, the ah-ha moment — the panel’s already busted. This door won’t open automatically.

Fuck.

The driver’s side rear door opened. The inside of my car was soaked.

I managed to get every window up — every window except the driver’s side.

So now I started running back into the house — more towels, all that I can find — and then back out into the storm. I started stuffing them into the cracks. I started toweling off the inside of the car.

It is 3:13 a.m. now, and there are several hours of thunderstorms left tonight.[3. Again: My computer is telling me this.] My driver’s side door is being guarded by five hand towels stuffed into a one-inch window opening. This window will not go up, and it cannot be fixed tonight. The nearest garage — or covered parking area — is 20 minutes away.

We’ll make mistakes, I keep hearing myself say, looking out at my team at Ha Ha Tonka. But they’ll be our mistakes, and we’ll learn from them.

And now I am sitting here writing this note to myself, hoping that this time — the second time around — I actually do.

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We May Look Silly For Trying To Predict The Future. But We’ll Look Like Morons If We Don’t Try To Build It Anyway.

I just finished Michael Eisner’s autobiography, “Work in Progress.” It’s an excellent read, but I couldn’t help but laugh at the final chapter. It’s 1997, and Eisner — CEO of Disney — starts predicting the future of his corporation.

Hindsight makes a book that’s only 15 years old seem like an absolute relic. Eisner offers his predictions for the future, but the stuff that matters most in today’s media — the Internet, Google, streaming video, HDTV — is barely touched upon. He mentions that Disney is expanding on the web, but only by mentioning Go.com.

And if you go to Go.com right now, you’ll see… a web portal that hasn’t been updated in five years.

The point is: We cannot see very far into the future. We are going forward, semi-cluelessly. We have ideas. We have dreams. We have leaders.

We have no idea what happens next. And we have no idea how the things that come next will affect the things we believe in now.

To quote a Florence & the Machine song that’s been in my head for a few weeks now:

A revelation in the light of day
You can’t choose what stays and what fades away

We do not know what is next. We are all out here making it up as we go along.

But future is ours, and we’re the ones who’ll be shaping it, in our own haphazard way. We may look silly for trying to predict the future, but we’ll look like morons if we don’t try to build it anyway — each of us — today.

Thanks to Instagram user @jpcherry for the excellent photo of Tomorrowland.

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There Is No Such Thing As Bad Work. George Carlin Taught Me That.

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When I was in 9th grade, my family roadtripped down to Florida over winter break. My parents had always found interesting things to play in the car on long drives. My parents were big fans of D.C. parody group The Capital Steps,[1. I still can’t hear Billy Joel’s “The Longest Time” without singing, “Boris Yeltsin is the hardest rhyme.”] and we listened to their cassettes in the car. We listened to the hysterical stories of Bill Harley, and the random baseball rantings of Danny Kaye.[2. “Oh, I say D! I say D-O! D-O-D! D-O-D-G! D-O-D-G-E-R-S! Team, team, team, team ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!”]

But on that trip to Florida, my mother decided — and I do not know why — to bring along some George Carlin for the drive.

That was the first time I’d ever heard Carlin’s famed “The Seven Words You Can’t Say on Television” routine.[3. No need to Google it — the seven are shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker and tits.] I’d never heard anything quite like it before. I’d never heard anyone use words — simple, clear, decisive words — to prove such a powerful point.

Things would never be the same after that.

One line in the routine hit me especially hard. There was this idea that certain words were inherently “bad.” Carlin said that was total crap.

“There are no bad words,” he said. “Bad thoughts. Bad intentions. And words.”

I’d like to say the same is true with your work. Again, it doesn’t matter what your work is — playing basketball, writing the Great American Novel, building a better mousetrap. All that matters is that there is no such thing as bad work.

The results aren’t what you want sometimes. But the work itself is always good. Always.

There are bad results, sure. But work? Passionate, driven, goal-oriented work never fails. It’s never bad. Through it, regardless of results, you’ll learn how to do better work.

There will always be people who tell you that your work isn’t any good, just like there will always people who tell you that you can’t say certain words, or that you can’t try certain things.

But I know what Carlin would say about those people:

Fuck ’em.

Go do the work instead.

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How You Hug Is How You Do Everything In This World.

I am a large human, and as a large human, I tend to give out really big hugs. They come in many forms: Bear hugs, bro hugs and — best of all — lift-you-off-the-ground-and-swing-you-around hugs.

I have a friend who loves the latter type of hugs almost as much as I do. She’s amazing in every sense of the word. When we go to concerts, she’s the one dancing as though nobody else is watching. When she was at college, she was an athlete, and the football team bought this new accelerometer machine to measure how much impact a defensive lineman could make on impact. She was the only female athlete crazy enough to line up opposite this machine and run full speed at it.[1. She almost dislocated her shoulder in the process.]

And her hugs — oh, the hugs! When she hugs, she does so arms extended, feet completely leaving the ground. She does not hug as much as she leaps into your waiting arms.

This is how she does everything.

It’s really an incredible way to face the challenges of this life. Embrace the world — and all its magic — with everything you have. Leave nothing behind.

Jump into the things you love best, and know that when you need it most, you’ll find amazing people waiting there to catch you.

Thanks to Instagram user @jimmyjoephoto for the amazing photo at top.

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Why ‘Just Be Yourself’ Is Lousy Advice When You’re Young.

Here’s a piece of advice I don’t much care for, especially when it’s directed towards young people: Just be yourself.

You’re giving a talk? Just be yourself.
You’re writing a paper? Just be yourself.
You’re going on a date with Cindy Crawford? Just be yourself.

But the problem is, What if you’re not really sure who you are yet?

To the confused souls among us — and yeah, I’d put myself in that category some days — “Just be yourself” is lousy advice. Before you can be yourself, you have to find yourself.

That takes time. We find ourselves through trying new things, through experimenting, through stepping out beyond our boundaries and seeing what we like and what we don’t.

And we never really stop searching for who we are. There will come a time when you find a version of yourself that you really like. That’s fantastic.

But it’s only the 1.0 version. You cant stop there. You can’t stop growing. You can’t stop trying new things.

I’d like to do away with “just be yourself.” I’d rather tell someone, “Do something that scares you.” Action leads to discovery.

Don’t settle for being someone you’re not totally sure of. Do the work, and through that, you’ll find yourself.

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