Eye contact with a bull in the crowded, stony streets of Spain. The smell of coffee outside a small café in Brazil. Watching the liquid from my nose freeze before it hits the ground at the top of Mt. Kilimanjaro.
By the seat of my pants, I’ve been able to run a business and travel the world over the past year or so. The result… a working philosophy of how they’ve worked together to make me a better business dude, and human.
Call me Plato, or maybe more accurately, Play-Dough.
Books & Theory
There are countless YouTube videos and blogs where you can spend days of your life studying any destination on the planet. Is the food that good? The streets that clean? The people that pretty?
The answer: there’s no way of knowing until you’re there.
I’ve learned the same lesson during my time running my own business. When I’m reading the books, taking the courses, and networking my butt off, I get excited about my ideas. Yet, all of these activities are useless until I take a risk and execute on them.
Maybe the best vacations are the ones that we take on a whim and the best businesses the ones that we start on a napkin.
The Individuality Factor
A few years ago, I had a friend tell me that California was paradise.
He sold me on the dream and I made the move. Over the course of two years, I met three people worth knowing. I aged four years. And I had five too many encounters with thriving liberals turned mangy homeless person.
In my eyes he couldn’t have been more wrong.
Funny thing is, he lived the same life as me for those same two years, and he still loves the place.
I walked away from this experience knowing that it’s impossible for the same two people to have the same experience with any one thing.
Business is no different. While two people can be in the same industry, use the same systems, and buy the same software, the profit, the peace of mind, and the happiness that they both experience can be totally different.
This is why picking the right business for YOU is so critical to its success.
I guess everyone looks at the world through their own lens.
Who Am I Doing This For?
I have a bad habit of confusing my excitement for visiting a place with my excitement for telling people that I visited a place. From personal experience, I can say that we travel just as much for ourselves as we do for others.
My journey in business has followed the same course.
Something that started as a way to leave my nine-to-five grew and swelled until it became what it is today… Something that I’m proud to talk about at parties and holidays. Shit, I’ve even started thinking about the stories that I’ll be able to tell my grandkids someday.
Let’s call it a sign of the times.
The Point Being
Therein lies my working philosophy…
As long as we pour ourselves into something without any biases or assumptions, through a lens that is truly our own, and for a reason that actually means something, we’ll end up exactly where we’re supposed to be.
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