A collection of disparate events seamlessly intertwined—the lesson of stories.
As I write this email, I can feel the glaring eyes of Ms. Button Nose as she stares at my ass… at least I can pretend that’s the case as the radiant smile that greets me when I turn to look is equally wondrous inspiration. She’s made her typical Saturday encampment in the same cafe where we met to prep for the week ahead. When she first approached to greet me, the conversation’s direction reminded me of an article Tim Ferriss published on his blog regarding the meteoric rise of Harry’s, the shaving brand. While I loved the content, I had forgotten my appreciation for the structure of the post — 226 word introduction by Tim followed by a 3,577 word case study written by the founder and his team. Tim had leveraged his platform to make way for the voice of others and, in doing so, expanded his platform and helped the others.
History, both our own and that of the world, provides an endless menagerie of education for the future. As the American colonel William Prescott once said, “Some people learn from by the mistakes of others, but most of us are the others.” When you help someone else share their story, you are able to better absorb their lessons.
In response to the ‘Focus Ain’t Fluff‘ email that’s been continually (and flatteringly) referenced as the seed of great progress for many of you who read it, Madi shared that one of her goals for 2016 was to “get fired from her day job.” She’s (currently) a content marketer trapped in a non-creative company and eager to travel the world. In the conversation that followed, I recommended she take a look at Sean Ogle, who teaches people the three step process to: 1) identify / develop skills leverageable online, 2) generate income online through contract work and 3) create a product with those skills to establish passive income (all while traveling and enjoying life).
Madi jumped on Sean’s list and, a few weeks later, saw that he’d be in her neck of the woods and was looking for a skiing partner. Complete strangers with only me—another stranger—as the common link, the two spent the day in the snow together (you’ve gotta love the endlessly entertaining connection of the internet) Madi responded to yesterday’s ‘Expanding Your Reach‘ email to speak of the adventure:
There are two kinds of successful people; those who are shrouded by stress all the time and those who glow when they walk into a room. To tell a story that sums it up,
I had with a 25 year old friend when I was 22. She said she knew four different couples that were all getting married that summer and I asked her if they were getting married because they’d found the one or because they were scared of something. She looked at me and said, “You know, it’s half and half. Two of the couples have absolutely found the love of their life. When they’re together they are better and more wonderful than when they’re apart; together they light up a room. It’s the most amazing thing to be around them. And then there are the other two couples. There’s nothing blatantly wrong there, but there’s this underlying stress to their relationships that you can feel when you’re around them.”
There are two kinds of career-successful people too. Those who are driven by something other than their hearts… it might be a need to compensate for something, or to please their family, or to get revenge on an ex wife, or to fit in, or maybe they’re scared that they have no control over anything else in their lives so they pour themselves into their work (I’m sure there are a zillion different reasons). Either way, there might not be anything obviously wrong with them or their choices but when you’re around them you can actually feel their stress. And then there are those who chose their work without anyone else telling them to, who chose it because their heart wanted it. I’ve met a total of five of those kinds of people in the last six months, and I swear if I turned off the lights, I could see them glowing. Sean is one of those people. I bet you are too!
Madi had actively sought, uncovered, and applied the lesson encapsulated within the mistakes of others — with a simple, yet equally poignant, question. You can easily hear the mistakes of others, but it takes a unique (what I believe to be learnable) skill to identify the trail head of their path when you happen upon it and know to plot an alternate course accordingly. Madi has expressed interest in developing a personal brand and I have a hunch that’s the first editorial she’s going to want to write.
Explore the stories of those around you and see what lessons their mistakes have to teach. Push past the ‘advice’ people often give as a result of their experiences and dig into the story, and life, that developed it. Understand that you might leverage their story now, or some time in the future, but the more stories you investigate and catalog in the library of your mind — the more tools you have at your disposal.
In essence, you’re able to annex the experience of failure and still retain the lesson.
Remember the grade school assignment to interview a grandparent? That’s your homework for today. Find someone with an interesting story and explore its lessons.
A lesson without the context of a story will never be truly learned.