Building Houses around Doorknobs

My life is filled with extremely colorful characters. (I’m looking at you, father-of-six that still rocks red jeans and hip-hop icon-turned museum curator.) It was the latter, Danny Boy O’Connor, that gave me one of the best business metaphors I’ve ever heard.

“Man … sounds like you built a house around a doorknob.”

He was accurately describing what I had done—spending a small-fortune of cash—and years of my life—working on a project that simply existed because of a single idea I thought I needed to turn into something special.

This particular “doorknob” isn’t the subject here. It’s the process I want to discuss.

For starters, I’m not talking about a product or service we build companies around. No, I’m referring to those situations every entrepreneurs finds themselves in when they’ve run out of time and money.

“What do we have to work with?”

“Do we have anything we can sell?”

“Oh shit! What about [fill in the blank] … that cool thing we came up with last summer?!”

This is where we get into trouble. Instead of stepping back and taking a big, sweeping view of the situation, we panic and ditch our original calling or idea.

I know … there’s a decent list of great companies that came out of total disasters. We’re not talking about those rare gems. Yes, they happen. And no, this doorknob of yours isn’t like going to be the next gem on that list.

Here’s a few basic questions you can ask yourself to determine if you have a doorknob, a gem, or a fossilized turd in your hand:

1. Why am I thinking about this thing any way?

   If it’s because it’s impossible for you to NOT think about it … it’s not a doorknob. It could be next great project or venture.

2. Is this a distraction from what I really want or need to be doing?

   If your thinking about it because you’ve been criticized, rejected, or you’re simply out-of-gas, it could very well be a doorknob. Quitting to focus on a shiny, new object or less demanding opportunity is how most rookie entrepreneurs stop being entrepreneurs.

3. Have I completely exhausted every possible option on what I’ve been doing?

   If you think you have, you most definitely haven’t. Please listen to me … I’m coming to you from the future: there’s almost always someone or something willing to help you, as long as (a) your idea solves a real problem and has the potential to create tons of customers, (b) you have the courage to talk to people with the experience and resources to help you, (c) you are brutally honest with yourself and these people about your current dilemma, and, (d) you aren’t a complete dick (i.e., you are coachable and are open to honest criticism and feedback.)

Don’t be embarrassed if you realize you have a house (or an entire apartment building) growing around your doorknob. Just don’t spend another minute or dollar on it until you can step back and evaluate whether or not it’s keeping you from pursuing the very thing that you promised yourself or others that you’d do.

First In, Last Out

Cockroach. That’s what my professional mascot would be if I had one.

Being the first-in and last-out at work these days isn’t nearly as cool as it used to be. Whether you work in an office, at home, or at your local pet shop, there’s a Cal Ripken, Jr., in your organization.

Is it you?

My grandparents referred to this characteristic as work ethic. For my parents, it was a non-negotiable. “If you don’t work, you don’t eat,” was the edict that ruled our home when I was growing up.

I’ve had a job-job since I was a kid. From household and gardening chores to putting food on the table, I was expected to be a contributor from the git-go.

Bussing tables, washing dishes, mowing lawns, cleaning windows … it was normal and expected that if you were able, you worked. 

This isn’t the case today. Not where I live.

I know poor kids by name that have $600 smart phones and $150 sneakers. Some of these kids have spent more time at professional sporting events and concerts than cleaning their room.

I would say most kids think Manual Labor is the relief pitcher the Yankees just traded for … but then again, most kids don’t watch baseball so what the hell do I know.

Honestly, my parents, teachers, coaches and professors will tell you I was thick. Nothing — and I mean nothing — came easy for me. I wasn’t trying to be difficult. My brain simply processed information differently and not nearly as efficiently as those around me.

But it didn’t matter. I kept at it. I studied longer. I read and re-read. I got up earlier and stayed up later just to scrape by with a C. But boy, I’m glad I did. Without even knowing it, I was learning to outwork, out hustle, and outlast the competition. And this quality has stayed with me my entire career.

So here’s my challenge for those who still want to do something great:

1. How much time are you committing to practice your craft? Because all the greats out-practice their opponents. All of them.
2. How much time are you putting into doing really great work? It’s awfully tough to produce something amazing between 9–12 a.m., and 1–5 p.m.
3. How much thought and preparation are you putting into your meetings and calls? What are you doing to get better when you’re off the clock?

If you’re tripping over the fact that you’re not where you want to be at this stage in your career, or like many, believe you’re not earning what you’re worth, I hate to break it to, but here’s the gospel truth:

We design and build our own realities. And unless you’re the guy born on Third Base who thought he hit a triple, if you want a great life, you are going to have to earn it.

Step One: Be the first one in and last one out. Work you ass off in-between.

Step Two: Accept the fact your financial future is completely up to you.

Step Three: Don’t expect to get paid until you create serious value for others.

Outhustle. Outserve. Outperform. First in, last out.

Get the Hell Out! (Don't Quit)

I'm an idiot. This was a terrible mistake. It’s over. Three lies that slip past the ears of every entrepreneur as they approach failure … and success.

If these words haven’t played in your head before, you’re not taking big enough risks. For the rest of us, all I can say is you’re not nuts. Well, maybe you are nuts but not because of the negative self-talk looping in your head.

Anyone who has striven to do something great has heard this voice. The difference is entrepreneurs that eventually succeed tend to have advocates that refuse to put up with the negative bullshit we tell ourselves.

Don’t take my word for it. Read Jonathan Haidt’s fascinating book, The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom. You’ll soon learn it’s perfectly normal to have these feelings of loss, sadness and isolation in life as you ride along on your elephant. (Read the book.)

For me, I had to learn to stop taking myself and my ideas so seriously. The world will go on without me. And if our dreams aren’t something that can be realized in months or years or even within our lifetime, we still get to choose to find happiness both within ourselves and with others.

So before you nuke your project and jump into Dante’s outermost ring of pain, take a deep breath, drink a large glass of water, and force yourself to take an eight-hour nap. When you wake up, the world will still be here. It may not be as good as the one you imagined but it’ll still be here. And guess what? It needs you. That’s right. The world needs you.

Have a little faith, friend. Yesterday wasn’t your day. Today may not be either. But trust me: in the not-too-distant future, you will get another chance to do something great if you don’t quit.

I’m just hoping the person you were born to be shows up and not the weirdo talking all of that end-of-the-world nonsense that’s wracking your brain.

You’ve got what it takes. You’ve put in your 10,000 hours. You’ve mastered your craft. Get back on your horse and get the heck out of Hades.

Giddy’up!

Angel Funding 101: How committed are you?

Stick with me. This is good stuff.

As a greying entrepreneur, I get hit up for advice and funding. (Mostly funding.) The truth is, I hit up my share of veteran entrepreneurs when I was striking out. When rookies hit me up now, I try to make myself available but with one caveat.

If you want my advice on your career or a venture you’re working on, you have to tolerate a parable first and then answer a few questions. The parable is from the gospel of Saint Matthew and it goes like this:

“The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field. When a man found it, he hid it again, and then in his joy went and sold all he had and bought that field.”

Alright. Let’s break it down.

The treasure was obviously hidden. What was this guy doing digging around on someone else’s property? The fact he chose to hide it “again” means the treasure wasn’t in plain sight.

The guy scores a few points considering he decided against stealing it.

Maybe he was honest. Maybe he knew he couldn’t keep or sell it without getting busted.

He definitely had an idea of what the treasure was worth.

And why did he hide it again? My guess: if he found it, it’s likely someone else would, too.

To me, the most valuable phrase in this parable is, “in his joy”.

Joy is a powerful word. It seems this dude had a genuine sense of satisfaction and personal fulfillment in whatever it was he found. And to top it off, he knew what his possessions were worth.

Assuming this guy may have been married, he would have had to talk the missus into selling her stuff, too.

Listen, it’s one thing to be excited about an opportunity. It’s another to persuade others to buy into your vision and mutually commit. This leaves us with two big questions:

What did the treasure consist of?

When I ask entrepreneurs this question, I get a version of one of the following answers:

“Financial independence!”

“Market share!”

“Being admired as an industry leader by my peers!”

Wrong, wrong, and wrong.

I’m skipping ahead here but here’s how I address these kinds of responses.

It’s you that is hidden in the box. YOU.

This always triggers a response like, “How can I be in the box? I found the box!”

I remind them we cannot be discovered until we first discover ourselves. If you ask anyone who has achieved success, you learn there are no big breaks. These folks believed in themselves when few others did and they refused to quit until they found their joy.

Now, if they are asking for funding, I ask them one more question: 

Are you asking me to sell my stuff to buy your field?

While they’re letting that question sink in, I kindly convey the following:

1. Discover yourself FIRST.

2. Prepared to make serious sacrifices to achieve what it is you seek.

3. Get used to putting in tons of ass-breaking work.

Only then, can we begin to understand the cost of being fully committed.

Grandma's Porn Problem

Food Porn, Travel Porn, Adventure Porn, Porn Porn: These are the drugs of choice that slowly crush our souls and steal our joy.

In the latest issue of The New Yorker, now on newsstands everywhere, they cover the state of modern pornography.

"In 2014, Pornhub alone had seventy-eight billion page views, and XVideos is the fifty-sixth most popular Web site in the world. Some porn sites get more traffic than news sites like CNN, and less only than platforms such as Google, Facebook, Amazon, and PayPal."

Whether your fingerprints are on one or more of those 78 billion page views, the truth is, we all have a serious porn problem. Even grandma.

Pornography, as defined in most dictionaries, means printed or visual material containing the explicit description or display of sexual organs or activity, intended to stimulate erotic rather than aesthetic or emotional feelings.

"Rather than aesthetic or emotional feelings." That got me thinking.

Think about how much time we waste looking at explicit displays of ... everything. Games and movies. Cooking shows. Travel magazines. Adventure catalogues. Foodie blogs and news feeds.

All of these ancillary forms of "porn" are eating up large amounts of our time and resources.

Recently, one of my heroes was ranting that Red Bull was nothing more than a seller of Snuff. A friend of mine pointed out that if that is true, and I believe it is, than this icon of mine (I'm looking at you, Yvon Chouinard), is guilty of being a purveyor of Adventure Porn. Ouch. (Let's just say my friend completely ruined my habit of reading Patagonia catalogues cover-to-cover.)

Whatever it is in the virtual world that's sucking the reality out of our lives and relationships, let's knock it off. 

Let's go outside and do something. Spend time with another living being.

Let's go somewhere we've never been. Let's talk to the people we meet along the way.

Make something. Start a new business. Start a new school. 

Trade information for experiences.

The point is this: stop fantasizing and start doing.

Who farted? When business honeymoons end.

Remember when the love of your life let it rip for the first time?

Dad was painting his house when he heard JFK had been shot.

I was waiting for the bus on a dark December morning when I learned John Lennon was gone forever.

How strange that our brains index certain memories this way.

Do you remember where you were when that special someone — that gorgeous, intelligent person that seemed too good to be true — let one rip right in front of you for the very first time?

I grew up in a conservative, religious home. In a house full of kids, including adopted kids, neighborhood kids and foreign exchange kids. We were reared (pun intended) to be respectful. Especially when it came to containing bodily noises.

I had to attend Etiquette Class as a kid. Under no circumstance were you to fart in public … or as my mom called it, “passing wind”.

I made it through High School without ever hearing a member of the opposition sex cut the cheese. Stack of Bibles. And when I departed for college, I was under the impression this just wasn’t something girls did.

And then it happened.

If you have ever truly and completely loved someone, and then, for whatever reason, they pinch one off within earshot for the first time, it can be fairly traumatic.

Whether it sounded like a mouse squeak or a violent clap of thunder, it can be quite an unsettling experience for all involved.

Where am I going with this nonsense? Well, people do this metaphorically in business every day.

We work so hard to create new customers and develop meaningful working relationships. We go to extreme measures to impress others in order to convey our profound level of commitment, dedication and professionalism. And then, when everything appears to have reached unprecedented levels of goodness, the apple of your eye does the unthinkable. Or worse, you do. And nothing will ever be the same. But that’s OK. Because it isn’t natural for us to sustain this kind of unrealistic expectations in the first place.

The truth is, everybody farts. Literally and figuratively. Get over it.

The next time you catch yourself either trying to produce completely unrealistic results in order to impress a client or colleague, or worse, the next time you embarrass yourself by nearly sharting yourself in a collaborative situation, do yourself a favor. Follow these three simple steps:

1. Offer a simple apology. Then go for a really long walk.
2. After the walk, using 100 words or less, write down what you learned from the situation and what you can do to avoid doing it again.
3. If you can’t get face-to-face, call the person and talk through the situation. Whatever you do, find a way to inject some humor.

Here’s what I’ve experienced after most post-fart standoffs:

It doesn’t take long for everyone to see the situation as a shared experience. A gift, really … a kind of unique breakthrough that can lead to new levels of honesty, mutual respect and collaboration.

Oprah and the F Bomb

I love Oprah. I want to be her friend. I want my dog to be her dog’s friend. But she’s wrong.

Speaking to a graduating class at Harvard, Gayle King’s best friend sought to inspire a few brilliant, budding humans with these words of encouragement:

“There is no such thing as failure; failure is just life trying to move us in another direction.”

When I read this story, I was immediately reminded of the expression repeated by kind-hearted teachers, instructors and workshop facilitators everywhere: “There are no bad ideas!”

I hate to break it to you, kid, but there are tons of bad ideas. Tons. And we can’t get to a good idea until we mow through all of the shitty ones first.

So, too, it is with failure. Which leads us to today’s four-letter F-word.

At some point between the Vietnam War and Barney & Friends, American society began to disassociate itself from the idea of failure. I’m not suggesting losing was once a cardinal virtue; I just think there has been a deliberate attempt to deemphasize what it means for kids to experience failure.

As a young entrepreneur, I was fortunate to grow up in a home that not only acknowledged failure, we embraced it.

In my early days of launching and managing fledgling start-ups, I was lucky to be surrounded by older, wiser advisors who would teach me how to fail quickly and inexpensively. They would say things like, “Noah, that’s the worst idea I’ve ever heard … if you do this, you’re going to lose your ass.” Every once in a while, they would also say, “Drop everything else you’re working on and make this idea happen.”

At each company I’ve helped, I’ve tried to create a fun and safe environment where talented people have the freedom to screw up. I would create “Best Idea Wins” contests to solve simple and sometimes intractable problems.

Many times, the best ideas came from summer interns like Veronique Valcu. Vero was a sophomore at Penn. Over a six-week internship, she helped us put together an idea that would land our little upstart on the stage of TEDGlobal.

Vero later told me that she was “this” close to accepting an internship in New York where she would have been a glorified coffee girl. You know what the golden rule is for coffee girls and boys? DON’T SCREW UP. The exact opposite of what I’m talking about.

Whether you’re striking out on your own or running a billion-dollar enterprise, don’t rob yourself and your teammates by ignoring the important role failure plays in human progress and development.

I’m reminded of what FDR said while sitting fireside during the darkest days of World War II: “There’s nothing to fear but fear itself.” 

For entrepreneurs, we need to conquer our fear of looking or sounding stupid. We need to master our fear of being wrong.

Entrepreneurish? I hope not.

No disrespect to my friends at Alcoholics Anonymous but I’m thinking it’s time people like me had their own support group.

Hello. My name is David Noah and I’m an entrepreneur.

A friend of a friend recently asked me what I did for a living. I told her what I tell everyone: I’m an entrepreneur. “So you're in-between jobs?,” she asked without blinking.

I wasn’t offended in the least bit. That’s because I am an entrepreneur. We get rejected and discounted all the time.

This beautiful word that has been around for nearly a thousand years has somehow devolved.

It’s obvious the word is overused and misused. Like crazy. But so are words like “Christian” and “Muslim”. We use these words because, well ... they still have meaning.

You can’t be kind of pregnant and you can't be kind of entrepreneurial either. You are an entrepreneur, or you're not.

There’s nothing entrepreneurial about being entrepreneurish. Entrepreneurish people dabble. They pose. They like the idea of being an entrepreneur but shudder at the idea of covering payroll on their credit card.

Entrepreneurish people exploit the ideas of others while using other people’s money. Which clearly isn't entrepreneurship; it is opportunism at its worst.

Back in the 13th century, the root-word for entrepreneur surfaced as a verb. The word “entreprendre” meant the act of doing something. Not a bad start.

Three hundred years later, the word evolved into a noun and became commonly associated with people known for undertaking new business ventures.

By the 18th century, economists had a very specific idea of what it meant to be an entrepreneur.

The essence of the word became inextricably linked with two characteristics: (1) taking calculated risks of new, unproven ventures — without any assurances of ever deriving profits; and (2) creating value for others — by envisioning new forms of human progress through the repurposing of underutilized resources.

When I think of what it means to be an entrepreneur, I gravitate towards a few undeniable traits found in people that have built things from scratch with their own money and often without the moral, political or financial support of society.

Real entrepreneurs possess:

• A clear vision of what’s possible

• An intense passion for seeing their vision become reality

• A willingness to sacrifice their financial gain and social standing

• A track record for seeing the things they envisioned become reality

• A body of work that inspires other people to become entrepreneurs

Being an entrepreneur has been a bitter-sweet journey for me. I’m not sure I even had a choice.

Whether you’re an entrepreneur or not, leave a comment if you think I’ve missed the mark. If you agree with me, be nice to the next entrepreneur you meet. These folks are up there with school teachers and coaches in my book and we tend to leave the world better than we found it.

That’s doing something.