They say that you can only connect the dots looking backwards. That message is attributed to one of this era’s greatest entrepreneurs, Steve Jobs. There is a lot of truth to it. Life is about story, and stories are about life. A great story can’t be told until it’s done. Until it has happened and rests solely in the past… or can it?
We all dream of growing up to be someone. One day my pre-school teacher asked the class what they dreamed about growing up to become. My dream was to be a five-star hotel owner. I wanted to greet people from around the world and listen to their exotic travel stories from far off places. My four or five-year old mind figured that would be the best way to bring excitement to my life while being rich. To this day I’m still not quite sure where I got the idea that being rich was important. Other kids in my class wanted to be a firefighter or astronaut who saves the day, wins the key to the city, and gets the girl. These stories of heroes were held up in cartoons, comics, and TV shows as the only right way to live a meaningful life. I grew up alongside a generation that was asked what we wanted to be, we were told that we could be anything.
And we believed it.
Today is no special day. It isn’t the beginning of my journey, nor is it the end. There is no special story to tell or a series of connected dots. Today is simply the day I start writing about a journey, attempting to tell a story while it unfolds. I’m predicting greatness before I’m great or anything great has happened. My friends know me as a man who loves to put probabilities on things. And I put the odds of this landing in the forgotten digital waste of the world at 99.9%.
So why post this at all? Why try when something like dying in a car crash is an order of magnitude more likely? (1 in 103 google check me) Two words.
Asymmetrical upside.
The cost of writing this and releasing this is close to zero. About 20 minutes of time, and a few volts of electricity that I would have otherwise wasted doing something else. But the upside in the 0.1% outcome where what I’m writing reaches someone somewhere in a way that moves them to take action in their own life, that is worth far more than 20 minutes of otherwise wasted time.
I have some ideas of how to get an order of magnitude better returns. I’ve done it several times before. Though never 3 orders of magnitude. And never with my own original content. If this happens, it’s going to be crazy. So follow along, give me a clap. It’s a small cost to you, but a chance that it motivates me to write more, to share more, and has real potential for asymmetric upside to you if something I write changes your life. The earlier you are, the more likely you are to change the future. What do you have to lose?
