Why Try To Get Out Of Your Box, When You Can Use What's In It?
Peculiar vocabulary, owning is.
You can lead a project. You can tag along with one. You can be the pack-mule to one. But owning it establishes an entirely different perspective, a more difficult set of responsibilities.
When was the last time you owned something?
Stay Positive & Are You Waiting For Your Turn? (I hope not)
When researching for a story centered on entrepreneurs under 30, a friend connected me with Ryan Paugh. At the time, Ryan was at Brazen Careerist writing, speaking and preaching about career-management. He was big into entrepreneurship… still is.
Like all the others on the unlocking potential series, Ryan is a linchpin. He is the source, the center of many entrepreneurial circles, providing resources and connecting people just as my friend connected me with him.
Without further ado… welcome, Ryan.
Q: You’re known for building epic communities. What does an epic community look like to you?
Ryan: An epic community is one that can help you unlock any door in your industry or trade. For communities like YEC and FounderSociety, we aspire to help our members gain access to everything they need to grow successful businesses.
Q: How did you get to where you’re at now? What’s your story?
Ryan: This is very geeky, but blogging changed my life. After I graduated college I started a blog with one of my best friends about Gen Y entering the workforce. Through the blog came my first business, Brazen Careerist, which was a free community for Gen Y professionals seeking career happiness.
Q: What’s the best and worst parts of being an entrepreneur?
Ryan: The best part about being an entrepreneur is having control over your own destiny. The worst part about being an entrepreneur is the toll it takes on your personal life and the lack of stability.
Q: What gets you filled up with passion and ready to take on the world, to go the distance, to be in it for the long haul?
Ryan: My family. Now that I’m a father especially, I find that I’m more motivated to be successful than I have ever been. I want my family to live the best life possible. I want them to see me as their hero.
Q: What do you see people regularly failing to do while starting a business? What would you suggest they do differently?
Ryan: Spending too much time on one idea is a common startup killer. Most successful entrepreneurs will tell you that they didn’t get it right on the first try. They had to iterate on their existing idea to make it work.
Q: What are four hacks you can share? They can be about life, relationships, getting a job, starting a business, whatever you would like.
Hack #1. Invest in a virtual assistant and outsource work that takes away from building your business. Challenge yourself to delegate at least one new thing per week to your assistant.
Hack #2. Perfect is stupid. Come up with an idea for a business. Build the minimum viable product (MVP) as quickly as you can and get it to market. Iterate based on feedback from your early customers to get better.
Hack #3. Become an early riser or a night owl and you will get more accomplished than 99 percent of the population.
Hack #4. Take care of yourself. You physical and mental health are strongly linked to your success.
Q: Here’s an open-ended question for you: What are your thoughts on waiting?
Ryan: Don’t.
Q: What about failure?
Ryan: Embrace it.
Q: Would you tell us about a truly challenging time and how you got through it (or didn’t!)?
Ryan: Without going into too much detail, I had a health scare a couple months ago that left me feeling mentally paralyzed. It took weeks for me to feel better and get back to my business. The reason I was able to take the time off that I needed to recover was my amazing team. At some point in the future, you’re going to need to take some time off too and it will go a lot smoother if your company can operate with you missing. Being a great leader means learning how to delegate to your team and trust that they can get the job done. You should spend time early on in your career getting comfortable with this. You’ll thank yourself later.
Q: What are three lessons people should know about building a community?
Q: What makes an idea or a business or a person remarkable?
Ryan: Vulnerability. I’m drawn to people, ideas, and businesses that are not afraid to be what they are even if that might lead to them being criticized.
Q: Any last advice you want to give someone in marketing or someone who is thinking of starting a business?
Ryan: Share your ideas with as many people as possible.
Q: Lastly, where can people find you and the remarkable work you do? (Shamelessly self-promote here.)
Ryan: The communities I’m currently building are YEC and FounderSociety. We also run a great startup advice website for early-stage entrepreneurs. Follow me on Twitter. I try to blog semi frequently at ryanpaugh.com.
Stay Positive & Go Share Your Ideas, Be A Hero, Start Something
A friend of mine is in love with a particular line I want to share with you:
Those who wait, always will.
Don’t wait to tell people you’re thankful for them, don’t wait to figure out how your business can give, don’t wait to start doing things others can say they are grateful for.
Go make a difference in the world.
Stay Positive & Success Starts When You Do
Can anyone relate, that as kids, you were impatient? You couldn’t quite understand why you had to wait in the grocery line so long, or wait in the car while your parents went into a store, or wait for your sibling to get out of basketball practice, or wait for this, or wait for that.
No need to raise your hands with this question, how many have you have been told to have patience? Or that patience is a virtue? Or to just be patient?
We grew up being told over and over to be patient, to wait, to not rush. I’m actually happy to break the news to you … we were taught wrong. Patience is not a virtue – yes, from time to time we can benefit from it but that is simply because as we are being patient, as we wait, our expectations of the result slowly lower so that by the time what we were being patient about happens, we’re just happy it finally happened!
Let’s start with a story. I recently went on a tour of different public relations industries in Chicago with the Public Relations Student Society of America. We all want to be public relations specialists and journalists. I’ve been in the writing industry for quite some time and have some strong contacts here in Madison. While on the trip I got to talking with a girl who is a senior at UW Madison, getting her degree in Journalism. She wants to work in the magazine industry. We talked a lot about it and I mentioned to her that I knew a couple people in Madison in the magazine industry that I could connect her with. We talked it over and I said if she emailed me some examples of her writing, I would review them and then if they met my standards, I would recommend her to the contacts I know. I figured that weekend she would email me. She didn’t. Being forgiving, I sent her a message reminding her I was willing to help her out any way I could and to send me a piece of content. She never did.
This is how I see it. She had patience. She figured if I was willing to help her then she didn’t need to get me an example of her writing right away. Then, as she put it off fear sank in. That’s what happens when you’re patient: fear sinks in, always.
As she waited, taking her time to respond to me, her mind gave her dozens of reasons why she shouldn’t ship me her writing, her art. She began to doubt me because I’m a student too. Maybe her ego told her she wanted to do this on her own. Regardless, if she had reacted immediately, sent me her writing, she could be making progress. But she didn’t. Inaction always proceeds patience.
One last note on the pitfalls of patience. Many people use patience to think things over, to ask better questions, to contemplate the situation, to work their brain. To that I have one thing to say, doing so sparks more fear than certainty. Instead of being patient and letting that happen, that’s why we have what is called an “experience”, that’s why we have evaluations, that’s why we have feedback. If we always do the checking before finishing, we will never finish, never follow through, and never send that email.
Let’s take a different look at impatience, specifically, the benefits of it. In my writing, I always end with saying a reminder to Stay Positive & something else that relates to what I wrote about. Being impatient is one of the greatest actions you can take to stay positive. When you are impatient, you always expect the positive, the best case scenario. You don’t have time for road bumps, detours, or anything else getting in your way. In other words, when you are impatient, you never focus on what you don’t want. And in the case that something problematic does arise, there is no sulking in it, you fix it fast and move on. Impatience will get you places more often than it will prevent you from reaching them. When you’re focused and positive, those are traits of someone unstoppable.
“We must always work, and a self-respecting artist must not fold his hands on the pretext that he is not in the mood. If we wait for the mood, without endeavoring to meet it half-way, we easily become indolent and apathetic … sometimes you just get in there and just force yourself to work, and maybe something good will come out.” – Russian orchestrator, Peter Tchaikovsky
Stay Positive & Impatience Credits You To Choose Conventionality
Garth E. Beyer
Photo credit
We want what when we want it. The real trouble is that it’s extremely hard to convince ourselves that we really want it now when it’s so easy (and illusively harmless) to put it off till later.
People think the problem is choosing what you want. It’s not. We can always find somethign we want. The real insight and issue lies in that there’s never as much risk in wanting something than in wanting it now.
Which is supposed to be a good enough reason to want it at a later time.
It’s not.
Stay Positive & Hold Yourself To The Now, Not The Later, Soon, Or Sometime
Garth E. Beyer
Start now.
There are millions of people around the world, right now, that are thinking about the new years resolutions they will write for themselves at the end of December. Are you one of them? Are you thinking how you are going to finish that book next year, ship that art piece next year, finish your project next year, make a change in your life next year? There are 744 hours left of this year. Have you any clue how much you can do with 744 hours? That new years resolution list you have been thinking about? Make it now.
Then do it before the end of this year.
“The great majority of artists are throwing themselves in with life-preservers around their necks, and more often than not it is the life-preserver which sinks them. Nobody can drown in the ocean of reality who voluntarily gives himself up to the experience.” Henry Miller
Quit holding on to things and ship them. Ship yourself. Strive to make next year a fresh slate. Write a new book next year, build a new non-profit next year, but for right now, finish what you started. Create a blog, finish (not perfectly) all of your next year goals this year, and throw them on your blog. Get them out there. Start again. This next year, is about showing that you can follow through with good ideas and you have so many more on the way that they can’t wait.
By the way, have you ever thought that if you can hold back from sharing something of yours with the world, that it just may not be worth sharing. Or are you telling me that you have held out on something I’ve wanted for more than a year?
The next 744 hours are about delivering everything you thought would be your one-hit-wonder, your zipline to stardom. You’re better than that, the world (and myself) want more from you than one perfect project that’ll be old news in a week.
Make that new years resolution list now.
Complete it by new years.
Stay Positive & Start New
Garth E. Beyer
As much as we Public Relations Specialists pride ourselves with always being busy, there is a fair amount of waiting involved in every project.
It may be waiting for your source to tell you to come into her office, it may be waiting for the elevator to open for you (or the ride on the elevator), it may be a phone call that you absolutely can not miss, so you wait right next to it. The moments of waiting come in all sorts of variations of time, place, circumstance, and so on.
These moments of waiting are vital to your firm, agency, company, or organization you are representing. It’s in these moments of waiting that you are stripped of your title, any recognition people may have of you, and authority. To everyone passing by you, riding in that elevator, or wondering why you are hovering over your phone, you are just another normal blob in their world. You’re just another human being with nothing special to offer them. Or are you?
I just got home from the coffee shop. Waiting at the door of the apartment complex was a delivery person from a restaurant called Burrito (how original, but that’s not the point). We exchanged only a few sentences, but in those sentences, I could tell he made the most of his job, that he remained positive, that he was grateful for me even noticing him. He was sociable and wished me a great night.
You may be reading this and think that it’s normal. Is it though? When was the last time you actually talked to someone else’s delivery boy and left with a smile? It’s not normal, but it’s memorable.
Let’s jump back. What was the delivery boy doing again? Waiting. And no, I’m not going to order from the restaurant, simply because of the fact that I’m not fond of burritos, but what I will do (am doing) is talk about this experience.
Ask anyone in business which profits them more, one person buying a burrito, or one person writing and speaking to a thousand people about someone who works at the restaurant, basically promoting it? You obviously already know the answer, word of mouth is what makes businesses the most successful.
The delivery persons success could possibly be the same as anyone’s in PR. We all have to wait, but in that waiting, we can make a hundred little ruckus’, we can get people to talk about who we represent, we can very simply, provide an experience for them to remember – and of course the name of the company we are representing.
Next time when you tell someone you are waiting, don’t feel bad. Don’t feel that you’re not making any progress because you’re not working. Clearly, sometimes profits come more from waiting than they do working. It’s all a matter of you making it so.
