Get Off Your A** And Create Something

The difference between those that do and those that wish

“The world around us today is full of the impossible. Electricity. Flying. Your TV. The computer, tablet, and phone.” — Vincent Hunt

In the past year I’ve been around some cool things created out of nothing. Landon, with the help of some of us, created Miles 2 Give from nothing. There was no user manual on how to create it. It had never been created before. There were no due dates. No one to tell him when the run should start. No one to tell him where to end. It’s a crazy to think that he thought and then made these things into existence.

I remember having initial conversations with sponsors. He had created this backstory and was sellin the story to come. He’s still creating to this day; the document right now. The sponsors we pitched in the beginning would ask us questions like what if we couldn’t make it across the US; if we couldn’t run anymore. He would say “we’ll look into wheelchair sponsors.” We found our RV due to a rare chance of a flight that had to turn around in midflight. We found the 3rd road team member the week of the tour starting. All these things are crazy. But we thought, believed, and made them into existence.

In fact everything around us has been created out of thin air. Buildings. Education system. Laws that govern our actions. You get the point. So where was the manual to create these things? There either wasn’t one or there was one that was once created out of nothing. The fact is that life is a series of creations and experiments.

We create the rules. We make everything. We are creators.

What I’m trying to identify is the secret sauce — what makes things into existence. And to identify what can hinder that process along the way so that we can negate the hindrances — as I’ve been going through this process a lot lately with MASSIVE Academy.

What Makes Things Into Existence?

Looking back at past experiences, anytime I created something or watched people create something the process started with a belief, experience and/or thought, was catalyzed by desire, and then the only other missing ingredient was just doing it.

Landon and Miles2Give: He ran for his friend Ashley Davis who had cancer. He continued to run for her in events and realized that he was most fulfilled when he was doing something for someone else. He then wanted to replicate this feeling and beable to do something awesome for a larger group of people — which led to running to raise money and awareness for Sarcoma Cancer research. And then he the act of doing was creating Miles 2 Give and everything associated with it.

When two friends and I created an award-winning espn-like weekly show for our highschool sports: We loved sports. We loved espn. And we wanted to replicate it for our school. We wanted to make the coolest high school sports morning show there was. That desire drived every action we took. And then we just made it happen. There was no one there to tell us what to do in every episode. We were driving by the desire to create something awesome and fun.

Now that I’m creating MASSIVE Academy from scratch: It started with my frustration on many fronts. That I was not exposed to coding, entrepreneurship, startups, and other emerging trends until I was in my senior year in college. That there was no one else to code with and our learning culture in Tallahassee was behind the times in terms of technology, startups, and self-directed education. That all of those areas should be easy to learn, but that current sources made it more difficult than it should be. So I had a desire to create a place where students came to learn these skills in an effective manner and a place to collaborate and transform the culture of Tallahassee. And since then everything I’ve done has been fueled by my desire.

Since I’m a math guy I represent this in an equation:

Initial Ideation (in form of: belief, thought, or experience) + Desire + Doing = Creation

What Hinders The Creation Process

Simply put, doubts, usually in the form of questions that pop up.

Here are the main questions and how I answer them.

The When: When should I start? Is now a good time?

In everything wedo there is a catalyst. It should be desire, but instead we’re so used to being told what to do — from parents, school, and jobs. So we falsely look for a catalyst of an authoritarian figure.

We are so accustomed to be told what to do in school. We are so accustomed to be given deadlines at work that when we want to create something ourselves we don’t pull the trigger; we don’t know how to pull the trigger. We’re waiting on some ambiguous authority figure to jump out from the closet and say “Go. You have to make this happen by Wednesday.” It doesn’t work this way when you’re creating.

That’s the beautiful thing in it.

And motivators and thought leaders have tried to come up with solutions for this. Actually they constantly try. They hold contests. They give you incentives. Which work can work, but ultimately the truth of the matter is that you’re the creator. So get off your ass and do it.

Am I capable of doing this? Why am I doing this? What makes me the person to do this? Why me? Am I qualified to do this? Shouldn’t someone “better” be doing this?

Instead you should be thinking of the awesome angle that you bring to the table in doing this. That you have this unique perspective and that you’re going to create in a way that no one else can. That you’re the damn man (or woman) and you’re going to make something uniquely awesome. “They’d do it their way, but I’m going to do it my way. And my way, well its bad ass.” Kind of a mushy and a fluff of an answer to you? Read the next answer to see the opposite way of looking at it.

How do I know if I’ve made the right choice at each point along the way? What if I do it wrong?

Test and get feedback. It’s all in the process. It’s all in enjoying the process and one little change takes you down a completely different path. There is no right path. There is just the path you take during creation. And you constantly adapt along with that path and so does your creation. As mushy as it sounds you only do it wrong if you don’t try.

Let’s make these last two answers not mushy and not sugar-coated. You’re weak if you don’t try. You’re scared and you’ve let your fears be stronger than your will. And you’re doing a disservice to yourself. You’re disrespecting yourself and limiting your potential if you don’t try. You’re discounting your future if you don’t try. Is that enough?

Even if you “fail” by some objective metric (say revenue) you learn and try something next time.

We’re always looking for a user’s manual. A past experience to relate to the journey. We’re scared of the unknown. But in fact you’re creating both of those for the next person. You’re creating the measuring stick for the next person to try and top.

So I just create this? But no one is telling me to do this.

There is no right or wrong path you must follow and there is not going to be some mystical authoritarian that jumps out of the shadows and says “this is what you should do. You must do it now.” So quit waiting for it. There is also not going to be some right time to start something. Now isn’t even the right time. It’s the only time. Enjoy now. Experiment now. Create now. That’s what we were made to do. Create something beautiful today.

What if no one else likes what I create?

Make your thought process so that you’re displaced from the outcome of whether it makes money or people like it. You made it to learn more about yourself. To create something. To possibly give a bit of beauty to people. To hell with if people like it. You created it. That’s all that matters. CREATE NOW. Enjoy the experience.

Let’s look at an example from Matt Monahan to give this a concrete figure. (SIDE NOTE: I’ve actually developed a bro crush on his writings and exploits so if you haven’t read his stuff I recommend you do.) He recently did a change of paths, along the way doing a self-analyzation to find that he is good at hacking the system and that he loved the dining experiences, specifically the knowledge obtained from the organically-formed conversations during them.

“When I’d come down from the mountain, I remember craving more of the knowledge I had gained through conversation at the dinner table.

After I settled in Santa Monica in November, I needed to make sure I didn’t lose the magic of meeting new people and sharing knowledge over a meal. I was optimistic. I love to cook, and I’m naturally social, so how hard could it be?”

He ended up realizing it would take too much time out of his schedule to cook for 8 people so he looked at different solutions. He ultimately found a way to test if his friends would pay $50 to have a night of drinks, food from a private chef found on Tastery, and fun, stimulating conversations amongst friends. The result, no prep or clean up, a private chef prepared meal, fun for him and 7 friends, and he fed his “desire to learn around the dinner table from interesting people in my new community.”

What’s to take from this? He created something awesome, which he’s replicating, out of thin air all because it was his desire. Something that made him happy. No one told him to do it. He just did it. And he found a way to make it happen, changing from his initial thought to just doing the cooking himself.

Opposed to someone else. They’d think about the concept. Oh that would be cool. And then for some reason the doubts start coming. How am I going to cook for all those people? Would my friends even pay for this? What if they don’t enjoy it? To that Matt found a private chef for $40 an hour, tested the demand amongst his friends online before he bought the chef, and I doubt he thought much about the last one because he was stoked about it. If the event sucked I’m sure he would’ve found a way to make the next event better.

The point to this story is to just create. Let yourself go and create something now. The more you create and learn the better you get at the process of both. Don’t let those questions stop you, but enjoy that you are able to identify them and answer them. If you think it and have desire in it then create it. Just do and enjoy the journey. Everything is part of the journey. There is no end point till the end. And that’s what I think we have to realize. To let go of fear of failure and displace ourselves from the outcome. There is no concrete path we’re taking. We are making that path daily with every action. So don’t wait on someone to give you a direction or a deadline. You create those deadlines. You create everything.

***Update to post***

ImproveSharing asked “How can you teach this same method to children?” In other words I think what he is asking is that how can we get children in this mindset of constantly creating without external catalysts and overcoming internal objections/fears.

I think you’ll find my answer surprising. I think children are born with that instinct to create. However, two things hinder this. First, in their developmental years they must be protected from certain things for survival. Think “don’t touch the stove” and they touch the stove. Or don’t touch the red button which makes you want to touch the red button. This shows that we have an innate curiosity to explore new things and find them out, yet there are certain things for our own survival that we should avoid. I’ll get back to this in a second.

Second, our education system. Due to the nature of the education we must decided the content of which children learn in order to be competent, functioning members of society. However in its current state I see some areas we can work on: we give very little importance to soft skills (ie. understanding/exploring yourself, developing emotional intelligence, finding out what your true joys are, listening skills, behavioral psychology, and promoting creativity, etc.) instead we hack them into relying on deadlines, and authoritarian figures giving them the “go” signal as well as them worrying about test scores or failure. In the process they are hacked into not taking action because they are accustomed to being told when to “go” and when they do take action on their own they work so hard and spend so much wasted effort on trying to get it perfect before “they launch” (so to speak) because they are used to be graded on completeness of knowledge due to tests and not competency.

I think the answer is to limit the natural hacking that must occur for survival purposes and helping them develop. In other words is there a way for parents to maintain a kid’s chance of survival while also minimizing the limitations they put on their creativity and exploration. Do you notice a difference in the “sheltered kids” creativity and exploration versus those that seem to have no discipline and are considered the rebels? I do. But how do we find that happy medium? Or how do we find the right mix of discipline and “rebelness”?

Also in the schools can we incorporate those soft skills? Can we focus more on project-based learning that measures on competency and quantity versus the current test-based system that measures on subjective knowledge of a subject and solely completeness of quality. Because currently we are pushing out students that tend to be perfectionists (if they are to be successful in school) that are drones waiting on orders. Hey great for the workforce, but not so great for innovation.

The soft spot is creating competent students that have been encouraged to do creative projects. That understand failing is not the end or even a negative thing. To create a culture of trying new things and creating. And I think that happens by rearranging teachings to include projects where students are graded on their competency of the material and encouraged to try new things (minimal, but necessary guidelines or rules) and where students are encouraged to do the hardest thing possible, explore themselves, their desires, develop soft skills, and fail.