The high dive

You may or may not know this about me, but I was a springboard diver for about 10 years - from about the age of 12 until I graduated from the University of Iowa. I've been thinking lately about the sport and some of the lessons it taught me, most likely because my parents recently moved out of their house of 25 years and have steadily been giving me pictures and other things I left in the house.

In particular though, I've been thinking about how when we push ourselves to another level, it almost immediately makes us better at what we're currently doing. Obvious right? Maybe.

In the sport of diving, there are three levels of competition: the one meter springboard, the three meter springboard, and then the ten meter platform. I was almost exclusively a springboard diver, with an occasional exercise happening on the platform. One thing I recall very clearly is how much easier the one meter seemed once I started practicing on the three meter. Maybe easier isn't exactly the right word, but less scary for sure.

Smashing face first into the water or waxing out on your back isn't a joy on the one meter, but once you encounter that on the three meter it's really no big deal. Most importantly though you begin to overcome a lot of your fear, which in turn gives you a lot of confidence. And once you have less fear and more confidence, good things are bound to happen.

The problem I think we run into sometimes is that we mistakenly believe we shouldn't go to the next level - whatever that level may be - until we master what we're currently doing. Thinking things such as "I'm not going to write that novel until I've perfected my short stories", or "I'm not going to talk in front of 100 people until I've mastered speaking in front of ten", or "I'm not going to start my own business until I have another year of experience."

Here's the secret: you don't master any level until you push yourself at the next level.

Any great artist, great athlete, great thinker, or great worker is great at what they do now, because they found a way to push themselves at whatever their next level was.

DJ Phillips may not love every song he's writing in a 30 day period, and Cheryl Sterling may not like every self portrait she took for 30 days, but I guarantee that a year from now when they go to create something, it'll feel easier.

So whatever it is that you're working on, if you want to become better at it, look for the next level. It's okay if you don't master it. Just by practicing in that next space, you'll become much better at what you're already working on.

Go on, jump off the high dive!

Seth Godin is coming to Chicago

If you read this blog regularly, you know how much I think of Seth Godin. Well, he's coming to Chicago on September 16th. All the details are here: http://squidoo.com/sethroadtrip.

I went to a similar event in New York last year and wrote about it here. Not much else to say. You should go.

Finding comfort in contradiction

When you run a small business, it's easy to get caught up in other people's opinions. There are countless blogs, videos, books, podcasts and other things that entrepreneurs publish about what's worked for them, what ideas they think are good, and what they think is terrible.

But you don't need to look very far before you can find two people you respect that disagree with one another and have conflicting points of view. Seth Godin writes about the importance of failing often while Jason Fried says learning from failure is over rated.

Some people argue that you should focus on learning a skill while others believe that in an age of Mechanical Turk and off shore development that you should have others build your ideas.

My favorite contradiction is where 37signals contradicts themselves regarding what you should think about your competition. Here's what they wrote in Getting Real in 2006:

Keep Up With the Joneses

Subscribe to news feeds about your competitors.
Subscribe to news feeds about both your product and your competitors (it's always wise to know the ways of one's enemy). Use services like PubSub, Technorati, Feedster, and others to stay up to date (for keywords, use company names and product names). With RSS, this constantly changing info will be delivered right to you so you're always up to speed.

Now here's how they open an essay on competition in their latest book REWORK, which was just published in March:

Who cares what they're doing?

"In the end, it's not worth paying much attention to the competition anyway. Why not? Because worrying about your competition quickly turns into an obsession. What are they doing right now? Where are they going next? How should we react?"

And then later...

Focus on yourself instead. What's going on in here is way more important than what's going on out there. When you spend time worrying about someone else, you can't spend that time improving yourself.

They both sound like good pieces of advice to me.

Both of these books are fantastic by the way, and even if you don't work in technology you should get REWORK, because it will inspire you.

It doesn't bother me in the least bit that there's contradictory advice here, and that's the point. It's comforting. Because the truth is that pretty much anyone writing anything is doing so based on their unique perspective at that moment in time.

Things change us, and they change our perspectives, and we learn and we grow. Sometimes we change our mind. And sometimes both things can be true.

Read what other people have to say, let them inspire you, take the good advice. But remember, it might be wrong and it might change.

Or, it's coming from an expert and you should really pay attention to what they're saying.

Introducing ThirtyDayProject.org

The first thing I'll say is that if I've done my work correctly, most of what I'm about to write here is more clearly and accurately described by visiting www.thirtydayproject.org.

With that out of the way, on February 19th, in response to this post by Andrew Dubber, I committed to making an idea real by May 1st. All I knew at the time was that a man I had never met was going to publish one idea a day on his blog for thirty days starting on March 3rd.

As someone that works on a lot of projects, I pride myself on being able to get things done. I didn't know what the ideas would be, or what I would have to do to make one real, but I figured that there would be at least one that I could run with.

I'm very happy to announce today the launch of ThirtyDayProject.org, an implementation of Andrew Dubber's 5th idea in his series of 30 ideas in 30 days, the numberless calendar.

I really loved this idea because of the simple, but powerful idea that doing something every day for 30 days seems achievable at the outset, yet still requires enough of a commitment that it can have a lasting impact.

In order to implement the idea, I learned enough Ruby/Ruby on Rails and CSS so that I could build and design the application, and enough git so that I could share my code and so that I could deploy the application.

By no means am I an expert programmer. But I sure know a hell of a lot more than I did two months ago.

The end result is this: a simple web application where people can start their own thirty day projects and view the projects of others. I took Andrew's idea and added to it the inspiration from Seth Godin that I talked about in this post - that shipping things and sharing your work, your art, is vital.

So the site I built allows people to start a project, mark each day off as "done", and if they choose to do so, they can ship whatever it was they did that day. "Shipping" something is as simple as giving a day a title, and providing a link to whatever you did.

When someone provides a link to their work, I chose not to keep a viewer of that work inside the site I built, but instead just take them directly to whatever link was provided. The reason for this is simple. There was no point in me trying to make a website that stores photos better than flickr, or videos better than Vimeo, or music better than Bandcamp. Plus, there are too many sites in the world that are trying to confiscate people's creativity. I wanted to project it.

So the site I built is about the idea of what can be done in thirty days. If you want to take photos for 30 days, you should get a flickr account. If you want to write something every day, you should have a blog. And if you don't have one you should make one. I didn't want to fight that reality, I wanted to preach it.

I tried as best I could to tell the story of how this project got started, infuse some inspiration that I've received along the way, and encourage people to make something and share it with other people.

My hope is that people will be creative with the site. Maybe some people will ship something every day, while others may build a reputation for only shipping one thing at the end of thirty days. Most of all, I hope people use the site because I truly want to follow people that decide to do something every day for thirty days.

I want to see what they share. I want to see what they make. And my hope is that this website, and the story that it is a part of, will continue to inspire people in the same way that it inspired me.

I'm not trying to sound dramatic, but deciding to work on this project, and being a part of this little dance, has been really wonderful for me. I'm able to do things now that I couldn't just a couple months ago. And so my real desire is that maybe, someone will end up doing something positive that they wouldn't otherwise have done because of something I made.

That would truly make me feel pretty good, so I hope you check out www.thirtydayproject.org and think about whether there's a project you've been wanting to work on.

I'm really happy with the site, but I know it's not perfect. So let me know what you think I did well, and tell me what I need to change. I would sincerely love to hear your feedback.

Airplane mode

I was at the Shedd Aquarium with my family over the weekend, and I realized that I've been occasionally doing something with my phone that some others might find useful. Or, maybe you do this already.

If you're anything like me, you have some sort of smart phone that gets your email, twitter feed, RSS reader, and a few other things that command your attention. I've even caught myself taking out my phone to take a picture of my kids, seen that I had an email, and then started to read the email!

How terrible is that? A few times lately I've just put my phone into Airplane mode.

I figure, when I get on an airplane I'm not worried that I'm out of touch for a few hours. So why not do the same thing if I want to hang out with my kids? I'm all for being connected, but if it starts disconnecting us from the people closest to us then that's not a very winning proposition.

I was just talking to another small business owner tonight and I think doing the same thing can help us with anything we know is important. If you need to be working on a design or recording a podcast, forget about just turning off email - why not unhook from the internet completely for three hours?

Next time you're feeling like you should be focused on something, maybe the best thing you can do is pretend you're getting on a plane and go into airplane mode.