Apologies for the long delay in writing, have been busy. However, I wanted to share a concept that I have been reading about, called Fanatic Discipline, from the book Great By Choice. It is not new or revolutionary, but is an awesome reminder for all of us.

What Is “Fanatic Discipline”? 

It’s almost January, that time when we all make our resolutions for the new year. We want to eat better, lose weight, spend more time with family, grow our careers, get better grades in school, etc… Yet by February most of us have done nothing towards these goals, with no intention to do so. Why? The easy answer: it’s hard.

Let’s take working out as an example. On January 1, you say that you want to spend more time in the gym. So on January 2, you are up bright and early to go for a run. It’s a beautiful day outside, so you don’t mind running 5km. However, on January 3, it’s cold and it’s rainy. So you decide to take today off, and double your amount tomorrow. Tomorrow comes, and it’s rainy again. Who wants to run in the rain? So you wait until it gets nice out – and you run 10km. Still pretty good, right? After a month of up and down, you slowly stop running altogether. After all, life is busy and running isn’t that important.

On the other hand, you could approach the problem as: “I want to run 730km this year”. What does that mean? Simple – you run 2km a day, no matter what. It’s raining? Too bad. It’s sunny? Reign yourself in. This is the definition of discipline, doing something consistent for a long period of time.

20 Mile March

Jim Collins calls this tactic the “20 Mile March”. It means you march 20 miles, no more and no less, every single day, no matter the excuses or conditions. When it comes to business, it means that you have absolute focus on one task that you execute on. No “chasing shiny objects” or “taking a day off” or “trying something else”. The mark of a great leader is to be consistent in whatever task you undertake. It’s extremely hard – but then so is being successful.

In our personal lives, we have a hard time getting to where we want to go. We want to achieve success and be happy, yet that seems so far off for most of us. The truth is, most of us lack the abililty to discipline ourselves into a routine in order to get us there. Most of us are inconsistent.

Inconsistency Kills

In business, most companies die not because of lack of money, or bad economic climate, or poor products (although all of those help). Rather, they die due to inconsistency. It’s very hard for a CEO to say to her troops “we are going in this direction with absolute focus, and we will adjust small details along the way”. It seems simple, but most CEO’s instead find themselves weaving all over the place, going from idea to idea, person to person, etc… 

Being inconsistent is the cause of most failed resolutions and personal goals. Flipping from object to object in our lives is a surefire way to never be really good at anything. Being “good at a lot of things” is often worse than “being great at one thing”, especially when it comes to our personal lives. But combating inconsistency is often harder than it seems.

“Fantatic”

Fanatic discipline is the thing that separates great people & companies from average ones. The ability to have laser focus on one goal, break it down into a 20 mile march, and be consistent is the definition of being “fantatically disciplined”. And those of us who are able to never lose sight of the goal, and keep pushing forward are the ones who will succeed.

So, for yourself, your family and your team – try to create this “zone of focus” in your every day life. Take an hour every night to read about the new career you are trying to get into. Make a goal to take one successful person in your field out for coffee each week. Set a goal of how much weight you want to lose, and break that goal down into “20 Mile” segments. Life is a long journey, but we are always able to break it into manageable chunks. And in each of those chunks, we should be disciplined enough to let nothing get in our way of achieving our goal. Practice consistency in both your personal and professional life. 

–

I want to leave you all with an article that you should read. It’s about Clayton Christensen, a professor at Harvard and a very famous author. This article goes through his struggle to find his “purpose” in life, and how he used fanatic discipline to find it. I recommend it to anyone who is going through a period of transition in their life. http://hbr.org/2010/07/how-will-you-measure-your-life/ar/1

Jobs At Sokanu

Sokanu is the place to find your passion in life. Our mission is to connect every single person with the career they are meant to be in.  We believe that the way the world approaches career discovery needs to be fundamentally changed. At Sokanu – we care about two things; building a great company, and helping every single user find what they are meant to do. 

We’re looking for people to help us achieve our vision. We are committed to building a cutting-edge technology company where people love to work and can be as productive as possible. After all, if we are helping people find what they love to do – shouldn’t we be intensely passionate about the work we are doing? We have a culture of optimizing for learning and growth as we strive to continually improve as individuals and as a team.

We are located in downtown Vancouver, British Columbia – and are working with some of the smartest people in the field of career discovery. We work very, very hard each day to achieve our mission – and will stop at nothing to achieve it. If you are interested in fundamentally changing the way humans approach career development; using neuroscience, psychology, technology and design – please contact us! We are currently hiring engineers and product designers.

–

Engineering

We are focused on building a culture with strong engineering values and goals because we believe that it is the key to building a great company and product. We use continuous deployment that gets checked in goes live to production within minutes, no matter what time it is. As a web developer at Sokanu, you will be responsible for building, optimizing and maintaining the platform, as well as laying the foundation for a scalable, flexible, data-driven platform. 

What We Look For:

• Experience with a range or both back-end and front-end technologies. This includes, but is not limited to Python (and the Django framework), MySQL. You should know these technologies backwards and forward.
• A strong team member. You should be familiar with some form of revision control, like git, hg, or subversion. You should also strive to write clean, maintainable, and reliable code.
• Strong working knowledge in creating, optimizing, and maintaining a scalable, fast-growing, data-heavy web application. Bear in mind that you will be building a web application — not a search engine or rocket ship.
• Extraordinary software engineering talent
• Experience with web applications, databases, distributed systems, algorithm design, and machine learning a plus
• Passion for learning and a curiosity that leads you to discover and share new things
• Ability to think beyond the code alone, have big ideas and the courage to voice them

Send examples of your work, code samples or resume (or your Github profile) to jobs@sokanu.com

–

Product Design

At Sokanu, we believe that design drives emotion. And we can only succeed if we manage to deliver an environment that is conducive to learning, discovering and growing. People need to emotionally resonate with the product – wanting to share it with their friends and spend a lot of time exploring the content we offer. We are a design-focused company, from the psychology of UX work all the way to pixel perfect code. You will help shape and drive the product every single day.

What We Look For: 

• Strong portfolio including self-started projects
• Extraordinary product, interaction, and visual design talent
• Curiosity and passion for crafting amazing, beautiful experiences
• Excellent communication skills and ability to explain your design decisions
• Substantial experience designing interactive online products
• Ability to build what you design (familiarity with Python a plus)
• You should be ready to make Sokanu the primary focus of your life

You should be comfortable with autonomy and ownership of large areas of the product but open to and interested in gathering feedback. An ideal candidate will have the potential to grow into a strong leadership role over time. 

Send examples of your work, code samples or resume (or your Dribbble, Github, Forrst, etc… profile) to jobs@sokanu.com
]]> http://futurephilanthropreneur.wordpress.com/2011/10/26/sokanu-is-hiring/feed/ 0 sthomps http://futurephilanthropreneur.wordpress.com/2011/10/19/amazing-quote-2/ http://futurephilanthropreneur.wordpress.com/2011/10/19/amazing-quote-2/#comments Thu, 20 Oct 2011 04:41:52 +0000 sthomps http://futurephilanthropreneur.wordpress.com/2011/10/19/amazing-quote-2/ ]]>

“You can only become truly accomplished at something you love. Don’t make money your goal. Instead pursue the things you love doing and then do them so well that people can’t take their eyes off of you.” 

― Maya Angelou

I was watching the video below last night and was inspired to write a post about it. The video is of Facebook COO and power woman Sheryl Sandberg interviewing Oprah Winfrey. Either take the time to watch the video now, or return to it later, but make sure you watch it. 

http://cdn.livestream.com/embed/facebookguests?layout=4&clip=pla_7a8c2dfe-44a4-42db-99f3-f01273c76a2a&height=340&width=560&autoplay=false

While there are a number of gems in the interview, one point really struck a cord. Sheryl was asking about Oprah’s mission – which is to help every single person find their “true self”. She asked “Oprah, do you really believe that every person can be successful?”

When you think of circumstances around the world, and the abilities that people are born with, the easy answer is “no”. But it all depends on how you define success. As Oprah said, “Not everyone can be the COO of Facebook, or a talk show host, but they can be successful as the person they are meant to be.

Obvious? Yes. But I think it’s a really important point. Not everyone can be the COO of a massive company or a talk show host, but that’s okay. None of us are Oprah or Sheryl either. You are you, so you can only be what you are meant to be, nothing else. What if you think you aren’t meant to be anything? You haven’t found that something yet, because we here at Sokanu also share the belief that every person is meant to do something amazing.

I have written about this before, but the reality is that almost every single one of us lives our life through someone else’s lense. We all “want to be like XYZ” when we grow up, but of course everything about that person makes them unique. Should we look up to people as role models? Absolutely. But we shouldn’t dictate our lives through their past actions. Ask any successful people why they are successful, and they will probably say “it’s because I’ve made 1000000 mistakes”. I’m betting if they had the chance to redo some of their life, they wouldn’t choose the exact same path.

Every person is born with a unique set of genes that define who we are. We are then brought up in a certain type of environment that molds and shapes those genes. Based on that, by the time we reach a certain age, we can begin to understand “what makes us tick”. Our only goal should then be to define what we are meant to do, and how to go about accomplishing that. No, you can’t plan your life out from day one, but you can have an understanding of what direction you need to go in.

Every single person can be successful, in their own capacity. We have to continue to remember that success is relative. But if you are not waking up every day knowing you are meant to do something great, then you need to set out to discover that feeling within yourself. Oprah talks about meditating and getting in touch with “your inner self”, and while you can call it whatever you choose, it’s about understanding who you are at a deep level.

So how do we go about “finding ourselves”? Of course this is the ultimate question, and is different for every person. But I’d like to try and offer at least some concrete advice to get started. I’ll break it down into two main categories.

1. Self-discovery

This is really, really hard and time consuming. This is where you a) have the time and b) have the resources available to spend the time looking at who you really are. This is in the form of books, seminars, tapes, shows, courses, school, etc… Every action you take gives your brain an indication as to what is wrong/right for it. 

I always suggest reading these two books to get started:

• Think And Grow Rich - http://www.amazon.com/Think-Grow-Rich-Napoleon-Hill/dp/1612930298/ref=sr_1_1?…
• The Magic of Thinking Big - http://www.amazon.com/Magic-Thinking-Big-David-Schwartz/dp/0671646788/ref=sr_…

*Note: both of these books were written quite a while ago and you should be able to find them for free online

2. (Accidental) Activation

The second method is what I think everyone should be aiming for, but it’s much more of an art than a science. I believe that we all have “activation genes” that are awakened based on certain experiences that we have in our life. These genes can be “awakened” by reading something in a book or magazine, watching a video, talking to someone over coffee, or any other number of things. 

You don’t have full control over this, since we have so many random events that happen to us day to day. Maybe you will become an opera singer after watching a performance on TV, or maybe a physicist after seeing an picture of an equation on a blackboard. But you can try to have as many experiences as you can within the realm of things that you enjoy, in order to try and activate those genes. Some products and experiences are trying to create these experiences for you (Sokanu is one of them)

–

Overall, please take the time to watch the video above. No matter where you are from, how you were raised or what you think of yourself, every person is put on this earth to do something amazing. You need to look deep inside yourself in order to discover what that something amazing is. Yes, we all can be successful – it just needs to be in our own way. 

The internet is one of greatest (if not the greatest) inventions in history. It has given us unparalled access to things we couldn’t dream of 40 years ago. Want to compare Toronto to Vancouver. Simply by typing “Vancouver vs Toronto”, we get http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=vancouver+vs+toronto. Want to know who is talking about Roger Federer, at this very moment? http://twitter.com/#!/search/federer will tell you, up to the second. The amount of information we are able to consume is incredible.

Because of this, people are becoming more knowledgeable offline. Even if you didn’t read the entire Wall Street Journal article, you probably know that RIM is having a bad day in the stock market today. You probably have an opinion on the 2012 Presidential election. You knew many days in advance that Hurricane Irene was coming. We are seeing a general knowledge rise because of the internet.

Is this a good thing? At first glance it would appear so. More knowledge = a smarter overall society = happier people, right? Unfortunately, this is not the case. This is because of something called signal vs noise ratio. 

Signal is good information that you want to take in. When it comes to career information, this is the information that is specifically relevant to you, based on who you are as a person. Examples of this would be your best friend or parent encouraging you to pursue your passion for music, even though your teacher told you there would be no money in it. 

Noise is the opposite. Noise is, well, noise. This is information that is not relevant to you. These can be opinions of people who mean little to you, or something you heard as a rumour.

Obviously signals are more powerful than noise. If your mom tells you to stop smoking, you are probably going to listen to her more than the random guy on the street.  The problem is that there is MUCH more noise in the world than there is signal. It is your job to separate the two.

Sound easy? It’s not. With every piece of information we hear, it gets lodged in our subconscious mind. And because noise is everywhere, we are constantly storing that information, even though we know that it is junk. Sometimes, if we let it build up enough, it can sway us from what we know is right.

So our task then becomes keeping the ratio of signal to noise at a very healthy level. Once again, this is much easier said than done. When we are young, we are constantly trying to learn. We are like sponges, absorbing everything that people tell us. We don’t yet have a filter for separating filter from noise.

–

I have a simple test which I use to filter, even though it does not work all the time. If the information is coming from someone I know and trust immensely, I will consider that information very carefully, even if I don’t agree with it. If the information is coming from someone I don’t know at all, such as a random blogger, I will take it with a grain of salt. If the information is “linkbait” or just “cool” for the day, I’ll completely ignore it. I’m constantly trying to create a filter in my head between what is relevant for my life and what is useless.

It’s the reason I read more books than I do blogs. Books contain very little noise (for the most part), mostly because they were written around one, well researched topic, and took a long length of time. To be an author usually means you have have passed a certain filter or borometer. Blogs can be written by anyone (like this one) and are just the author’s opinion. Those opinions change with the wind direction, and should not be your guiding beacon in life, unless you absolutely 100% align with what the person is writing. Then the blog can give you validation about the way you think.

–

When it comes to career, relationship, and in general, life decisions, we should tread very carefully before we let noise influence us. Do not go into a career just because “you’ve read” that it’s the right thing to do.  Don’t date a person just because “she’s hip”. Make decisions based on the filters that apply to you in life. The only person that knows your filter is you, so always listen to it. It’s not easy, but the more you work on knowing what is right for you, the more your signal vs noise ratio will become more healthy.

I’ve recently had a number of conversations with entrepreneurs or young overachievers who are having a “quarter-life crisis”. Instead of having the problem that Sokanu is trying to solve (what am I supposed to do with my life?) these individuals have a different problem. They are more concerned with: “I should be further ahead at this point in my life”.

This is the equivalent to a “first world problem” when it comes to careers. These people are incredibly brilliant, able to do anything, and yet are stalled. They are constantly questioning what the best path is for them to take in order to get the “furthest ahead”. Where does their problem come from? The short answer is the media.

Magazines like Inc, Fast Company, Forbes (check out this month’s cover – the world’s youngest VC – congrats Ernestine!) are constantly promoting the youngest, fastest moving people. Do you have a degree at 23? Well there are people who got their degree before they were 20. Did you start a company when you were 16? 13 year olds are developing iPhone apps. When did you raise VC money? Anytime after 19 and you aren’t that young anymore.

Sound ridiculous? It is. The problem is that many of these young achievers know each other. And when you have a friend who is the same age as you getting way further “ahead” according to your standards, you begin to question your own ability. 

So who do we blame, and how do we fix this problem? While it seems like a very small problem (it only applies to a small subset of people) the thoughts behind it can apply to anyone. Let’s start by dissecting the problem.

Make Your Measuring Stick Malleable

Most people are under the impression that faster is better. I am most certainly in this camp. The faster you build something, the better you must be at it, right? The problem is that the word “fast” is relative, just like anything else in life. Same with “success”. So why on earth are you comparing yourself to someone else’s life when their “fast” might be different than yours? What success is for one person (graduating from college), might be totally different than success for another person (selling a company for one billion dollars). 

Think about how you were raised. Many of the people that have achieved amazing things at an early age have already been doing their craft for 10 years. Have you? Did your parents push you towards something before you could walk? Were you homeschooled so that you could bypass the traditional educational system? Are your parents succesful entrepreneurs? No? Then you need to adjust your measuring stick a bit. 

Every person on this planet has a different perspective and a set of biases that carries them throughout their life. If we accept that everyone is unique, then you need to stop comparing yourself to someone else’s path. Your path is your path. You can use others as inspiration, but not as a “I should be here” measurement.

Stop Sprinting, Start Training

Not everything that is faster is better. This is hard for me to accept, but it’s true. A simple example. Who makes more money per year? A hedge fund or Berkshire Hathaway? Obviously hedge funds, seeing as they have nearly unlimited upside potential. However, last time I checked, Warren Buffett is the most successful trader/wealth generator of our time. Why?

Warren has been training his mind for an incredibly long time. Was he a billionaire at age 30? No – but he was doing fine. Was he the richest person in the world at age 40? No. Each and every day he would accumulate more knowledge, get smarter than the guy next to him. Now, banks go to him first when they want investment. Did you notice what happened to Bank of America when he invested last week? His “vote of confidence” made the stock go up more than 10%.

Everyone I know (myself included) is always trying to sprint. We are trying to blow by the people next to us, get further ahead, just to make ourselves feel better. We think if we can grow faster than everyone else, we must be successful. Being in magazines, on TV and written about makes us successful, right?

Go back to the measuring stick. Is this important to you? Do you need the external recognition in your life? Are other people’s opinions important to you? Do you want to be perceived as an “expert”?

Start training (whatever it may be; your mind, your sport, your instrument) and focus intently on that. Success will follow.

Marathons Take A Long Time, And Sometimes You Throw Up

I have a friend who just competed in an Iron Man. He has been training intently for a while, is in incredible shape, and knows more about the sport than 99.9% of people. Did he finish the race? Absolutely. Did he throw up? Yep. Was he hurting? Majorly – it was way harder than he thought.

This applies to life. Marathons take a long time to complete, and sometimes we just want to get to the finish line. Imagine if we knew how tough everything was before we started it! We would never start! 

Life is a long term game, start playing like it. It doesn’t mean that you can’t succeed in the short term, it just means that you can’t always compare yourself to people who are the first mile of their life. They still have 25.2 miles to go.

–

In conclusion:

• What is success to you? Figure that out (it’s not easy, it comes down to the core of who you are)
• Adjust your measuring stick to match that success
• Take into account your biases and perspective on the world
• Stop looking at other people’s measuring sticks, it doesn’t apply to you.
• Play life like a long term game,
• Put your head down and start training
• Celebrate the short-term successes in life (the sprints) while constantly reminding yourself you have many miles to go

Always remember, this is your life. You need to make yourself happy, not anyone else.