Your business model is imaginary. You have no idea how you’re going to make money. You’ll never be able to sell enough ads to keep up with your burn rate. No one cares about your “vision” except for you. Odds are 5 to 1 that six months down the road you’re going to be boarding up the doors to your new office, and you know what — on top of all of this, you can’t remember the last time you understood a word coming out of a normal person’s mouth.

So what?

You’re an entrepreneur, you’re an engineer, you’re an artist, you’re a builder — whatever. The point is that you create, it’s all that you know how to do. Every cell in your body screams out to do something extraordinary, to be able to look back on your life and see a world that you helped to forge.


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It’s time to wake up.

Think of your heroes. What separates you from them? There is no meaningful difference in skill, no barrier of talent, no distance at all between you except for the one thing, the 10k pound Gorilla smirking in the corner. What is it? You live to be like them, they live to be more like themselves. They live by a path that they created.

Create a path.

Stop taking shortcuts. Every derivative product, every trite design, every client or contract that was just “good enough” is a failure. Whether you admit it or not, you know it. When you’re done you laugh and ask yourself what you really could do. What would have happened if you spent one more night, took a little more care, tried just a little harder? You wonder what you could you produce if you really cut loose. Most people will never know the answer because they just keep asking the question. They’re afraid that in the final measurement they will come up shorter than they expected.


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Risk everything on something.

If you aren’t taking a risk, you aren’t doing anything. The longer you allow yourself to wallow in safety, the less practice you have surviving risk, the harder it will be to drag yourself out of complacency when you have the opportunity to be great. Give yourself the opportunity.

How?

Stop sabotaging yourself with projects you simple cannot do. Build something manageable and build off of it. Big ideas are prisons when all they produce is a chronic case of the “if only’s.”

Embrace your fears, they’re your only proof that you’re doing something hard — the only clear sign that you’re operating without a safety net.


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Remember that we live in a world of people, not of brands or synergies or use cases. What you create is only as good as how well it ignites the passions of others. Being good isn’t enough, being great only gets you passing marks, you must be perfect — beautiful. What you build, whether it’s copper pipe or a cathedral must be radiant, flawless. If people don’t see your creation as the example that they should follow, the high mark that they must surpass, then it’s not good enough. Olympians understand this, great leaders do, you must as well.

Break the spell that tells you that you can’t do it.

What’s stopping you?

You don’t have the time? You have other obligations? You don’t know where to start? Then stop wasting your breath. You are only as good as believe you are, and if you begin creating knowing full well that you’re shooting for mediocrity, what’s the point? You’ve already failed. You might as well grab your towel and hit the showers because no one is going to feel bad when you get your wish.

Whether you succeed or not isn’t the point.


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You will fail over and over and over again — anyone who says that trying really hard is all you need for success is a liar. Luck, skill, talent, timing, the flapping wings of butterflies in Sudan — anything and everything can work for or against you at any moment. It’s not whether you succeed but whether you know that you could that matters. Whether at the end of every day, no matter if you are building a business or playing with your family that you know full well that you’ve done everything in your power to live that moment as best as you could — that you regret nothing and that you are proud to be living in your skin.

So where does that leave you today?

Today look at where you are, what you’re doing , how you’re doing it and ask yourself whether the person you see is the person that you want to be. If so, you’re one of the lucky few and I thank you for your patience. If not, ask yourself what you can do to change it.

P.S. If you got this far, I wanted to take this first opportunity to tell you that I’m writing a book and it will be “free for now.” That’s all I am going to tell you right this second but if you want to know more, leave a comment here or drop me a line.

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