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?

I read an article a while ago about Barry Weatherall in Impact Magazine. Barry lost his eyesight in a chemical spill and from that time forward jumped in to sports like rock climbing and white water rafting.

I’ve just become far more adventurous and dar more wanting to live life and enjoy life to the fullest. You’ve got to realize there’s nothing you can’t do, you just have to do it differently… life is brilliant.

by Dirk Hoag

This story is just amazing, and will certainly give us all something to think about and be thankful for this Christmas season. Brent Peterson’s journey with Parkinson’s Disease has been a courageously public one, as he has taken every opportunity to help raise awareness and funds to help battle this illness. Over the last few weeks he has undergone a series of procedures at Vanderbilt as part of a therapy called Deep Brain Stimulation, which is designed to help alleviate the symptoms of Parkinson’s and other tremor or movement disorders.

Courtesy of WKRN (and a tip o’ the hat for Jessica’s Twitter tip), we can see how quickly and effectively this treatment can change a person’s life. Follow after the jump for a before & after video which will blow you away.

Some very wise words from Seth Godin.

 

I read a great post by Lisa de Speville this morning and she quoted a post on Seth Godin’s blog.

The other day, after a talk to some graduate students at the Julliard School, one asked, “In The Dip, you talk about the advantage of mastery vs. being a mediocre jack of all trades. So does it make sense for me to continue focusing on mastering the violin?”
Without fear of error, I think it’s easy to say that this woman will never become the best violinist in the world. That’s because it’s essentially impossible to be the one and only best violinist in the world. There might be 5,000 or 10,000 people who are so technically good at it as to be indistinguishable to all but a handful of orchestra listeners. This is true for many competitive fields–we might want to fool ourselves into thinking that we have become the one and only best at a technical skill, but it’s extremely unlikely.
The quest for technical best is a form of hiding. You can hide from the marketplace because you’re still practicing your technique. And you can hide from the hard work of real art and real connection because you decide that success lies in being the best technically, at getting a 99 instead of a 98 on an exam.
What we can become the best at is being an idiosyncratic exception to the standard. Joshua Bell is often mentioned (when violinists are mentioned at all) not because he is technically better than every other violinst, but because of his charisma and willingness to cross categories. He’s the best in the world at being Josh Bell, not the best in the world at playing the violin.

The very simple moral to this story is that it’s okay to not be THE best, but as long as you’re being YOUR best you will have a happy and successful life.

This truly is an inspirational story. It goes to prove you can do anything if you set your mind to it. I love how he shows his gratitude for running as “it’s keeping him alive”.

A 100-year-old man has made headlines around the world after completing a weekend marathon in Toronto and setting a world record in the process.

Fauja Singh of India — nicknamed “The Turbaned Tornado” — took eight hours Sunday to run Scotiabank Toronto Waterfront Marathon.

In doing so, he became the world’s oldest marathon runner. The centenarian’s feat will go down in the Guinness Book of World Records.

The marathon was 42.2 kilometres.

Singh took up running at the age of 89, according to the marathon’s website.

“‘I have said it before that I will carry on running as it is keeping me alive,’” Singh was quoted as saying.

He reportedly trains each day, jogging and walking an average of 12 to 16 kilometres.

© Copyright (c) Postmedia News

FEAT Canada (Fascinating Expedition Adventure Talks) has been confirmed and will be taking place on November 15th.  Already we have 5 confirmed speakers, 2 tentative and many other hopefuls.  The night expects to be full of dynamic speakers taking through the Ultimate Airmchair Experience.

This video features highlights and funnies from the talks at FEAT Cape Town, held at the Artscape Theatre on Saturday, 12 February 2011.

I’m reposting a great post from Donald Miller, posted on his website here.

I received an email last night from a courageous friend named Paul. He’s one of those tough guys but his toughness isn’t covering anything. He’s tough on the outside and tough on the inside, too. What I mean by tough on the outside is he’s actually training to run one-hundred miles in a single go only two weeks from now. No kidding, he’ll run the Chicago marathon as the last quarter of his personal challenge. He’s insane. He’s doing it to help some children he loves. I’ll give you more information below.

And yet, whenever I exchange stories with my friend he’s got more to talk about on the inside journey than he does about his athletic accomplishments. He talks about very hard emotional stuff as though it’s a challenge equal to the physical. Whether it’s addressing a father wound, or addressing his desire to love people more deeply, they’re all challenges, they’re all mountains to climb and he does it with both fear and enthusiasm.

Still, there’s times when it’s hard to be that kind of guy. I think one of the reasons it’s hard is because facing challenges head on is a lonely business. I truly believe most people in the world avoid conflict. We either numb ourselves by getting validation somewhere or numb ourselves by drinking or eating or so many other coping mechanisms.

I reminded my friend in an e-mail this morning that sometimes leading just means being out front, going to the places very few people are willing to go. But the cool thing about leaders is they show the rest of us that the path is scary but ultimately safe.

As I e-mailed him, I thought about the few times I’ve gone through haunted houses with friends. For whatever reason, I sometimes feel like I need to be the guy out front. You know, the guy turning the corners first, feeling the walls, trying to find my way through the maze in the dark. But I assure you, I’m not feeling all that brave up there. I’m feeling terrified, to tell you the truth.

Leading is like that sometimes. You’ve got a gaggle of screaming, giggling friends behind you, afraid of their demons, afraid of addressing their wounds, afraid of getting real about their coping mechanisms, and they’re looking for a shirt to cling to, somebody to bump into when the line suddenly stops because a guy just jumped out of a closet with a chain saw. They’re looking for somebody to scream with and to grab them and keep them from falling down. They’re looking for somebody to move them quickly through the room they’re in into the next room, the one that holds yet another challenge.

To those of you who lead, I’ll tell you what I’m telling myself these days, and it’s the same thing I told my friend.

The trick to leading a group through a haunted house is knowing the scary stuff can’t actually kill you. The management won’t let them.

It’s the same with all the scary stuff we have to deal with, all the fear of abandonment and loneliness and wounds we have to address. They aren’t allowed to kill us. Sure we might feel some fear, and a lot of it. But in the end (even if it kills our earthly bodies) we don’t die. We just come through the other side with a knowledge we faced our fears, and we got out of that haunted house alive, our screaming and giggling friends in tow.

If you’re a leader, just know you’re supposed to be a little afraid. And you’re supposed to be taking some people with you. And nobody can actually kill you in this thing. All they can do is yell boo. Be brave.

* You can read more about my friend Paul Jansen VanRensburg and what three of his friends are doing, and why they’re doing it here. Go Paul, Michael, Hannah and Rusty!