The 90′s

I spent the first half of the 90′s afraid and searching for myself. You can consider those years Junior and Senior high. I was small, I was smart, I fought my battles with words. I had no real friends. In the second half of the 90′s I found myself. I found the outgoing, creative, leader. I found this person by joining a club in University which gave me people to look up to and learn from; a few years later I was the president. I was still young. I liked the power, I didn’t take the opportunity, as much as I should have, to teach those who were coming up the ranks. In the late 90′s I discovered a sport called Adventure Racing.

The 2000′s

I spent the first half of 2000 living the life of a dream student. I had a full scholarship and I was part of a program that we were able to travel the world for robotics competition. I could sleep in every day, I had minimal work to do, yet I was essentially being paid to go to school and play with robots. I followed my robotics life to Medicine Hat, where I’d meet my future wife, and where I’d perform robotics research for 5 years. I hated Medicine Hat and my job and begun looking for new financial adventures. I began investing in real estate, we have properties now all over Alberta. I realized in the end it was necessarily for me, but lesson learned. Eventually the unhappiness in Medicine Hat took me back to Edmonton to work in SR&ED with the CRA. Also kind of dull but at least I was out of Medicine Hat. Little did I know how much I didn’t exactly like Edmonton either. After 2 years in Edmonton we were off to North Vancouver to begin the 2010′s. What a difference this has made!

In 2002 I raced in my first adventure race, by the end of the 2000′s I had raced across the world, won a world championship in endurance mountain biking, put together teams, took teams apart, etc. I have raced with amazing people and met so many incredible athletes. Just recently I have realized it’s not the racing that drives me, it’s the people, it’s the relationships.

What did you do the past 20 years?  More importantly what do the 2010′s hold for you?

So the past 20 years have contained more than a life time of experiences, and things are just getting started in my mind. More adventures to come, more experiences to have, more relationships to build. I’m very excited for what the 2010′s bring.

The reason I’m sharing all of this with you is because of a blog written by Seth Godin this morning, basically asking the question, What have you been up to and more importantly what are you doing next?

Seth Godin wrote this on the subject:

Hindsight is 20/20. People are already looking back on the 1990s and wishing that they had had more courage. When you look back on the 2000s, what will you have to say for yourself? [The following is reprinted from 9 years ago].

Here’s a question that you should clip out and tape to your bathroom mirror. It might save you some angst 15 years from now. The question is, What did you do back when interest rates were at their lowest in 50 years, crime was close to zero, great employees were looking for good jobs, computers made product development and marketing easier than ever, and there was almost no competition for good news about great ideas?

Many people will have to answer that question by saying, “I spent my time waiting, whining, worrying, and wishing.” Because that’s what seems to be going around these days. Fortunately, though, not everyone will have to confess to having made such a bad choice.

While your company has been waiting for the economy to rebound, Reebok has launched Travel Trainers, a very cool-looking lightweight sneaker for travelers. They are selling out in Japan — from vending machines in airports!

While Detroit’s car companies have been whining about gas prices and bad publicity for SUVs (SUVs are among their most profitable products), Honda has been busy building cars that look like SUVs but get twice the gas mileage. The Honda Pilot was so popular, it had a waiting list.

While Africa’s economic plight gets a fair amount of worry, a little startup called ApproTEC is actually doing something about it. The new income that its products generate accounts for 0.5% of the entire GDP of Kenya. How? It manufactures a $75 device that looks a lot like a StairMaster. But it’s not for exercise. Instead, ApproTEC sells the machine to subsistence farmers, who use its stair-stepping feature to irrigate their land. People who buy it can move from subsistence farming to selling the additional produce that their land yields — and triple their annual income in the first year of using the product.

While you’ve been wishing for the inspiration to start something great, thousands of entrepreneurs have used the prevailing sense of uncertainty to start truly remarkable companies. Lucrative Web businesses, successful tool catalogs, fast-growing PR firms — all have started on a shoestring, and all have been profitable ahead of schedule. The Web is dead, right? Well, try telling that to Meetup.com, a new Web site that helps organize meetings anywhere and on any topic. It has 200,000 registered users — and counting.

Maybe you already have a clipping on your mirror that asks you what you did during the 1990s. What’s your biggest regret about that decade? Do you wish that you had started, joined, invested in, or built something? Are you left wishing that you’d at least had the courage to try? In hindsight, the 1990s were the good old days. Yet so many people missed out. Why? Because it’s always possible to find a reason to stay put, to skip an opportunity, or to decline an offer. And yet, in retrospect, it’s hard to remember why we said no and easy to wish that we had said yes.

The thing is, we still live in a world that’s filled with opportunity. In fact, we have more than an opportunity — we have an obligation. An obligation to spend our time doing great things. To find ideas that matter and to share them. To push ourselves and the people around us to demonstrate gratitude, insight, and inspiration. To take risks and to make the world better by being amazing.

Are these crazy times? You bet they are. But so were the days when we were doing duck-and-cover air-raid drills in school, or going through the scares of Three Mile Island and Love Canal. There will always be crazy times.

So stop thinking about how crazy the times are, and start thinking about what the crazy times demand. There has never been a worse time for business as usual. Business as usual is sure to fail, sure to disappoint, sure to numb our dreams. That’s why there has never been a better time for the new. Your competitors are too afraid to spend money on new productivity tools. Your bankers have no idea where they can safely invest. Your potential employees are desperately looking for something exciting, something they feel passionate about, something they can genuinely engage in and engage with.

You get to make a choice. You can remake that choice every day, in fact. It’s never too late to choose optimism, to choose action, to choose excellence. The best thing is that it only takes a moment — just one second — to decide.

Before you finish this paragraph, you have the power to change everything that’s to come. And you can do that by asking yourself (and your colleagues) the one question that every organization and every individual needs to ask today: Why not be great?