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Goal setting is broken, and Caroline Miller wants to fix it. The author of Getting Grit and Creating Your Best Life, Miller says the problem is that too much of goal setting is based on anecdote-based “magic,” as she calls it, when there is science to back up a more productive way to set, pursue and achieve relevant goals.



Her latest book, <a href="https://biggoalsbook.com/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Big Goals: The Science of Setting Them, Achieving Them, and Creating Your Best Life</a>, has been nominated for the <a href="https://nextbigideaclub.com/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Next Big Idea Club</a>. It lays out her BRIDGE methodology—brainstorming, relationships, investments, decisions, grit and excellence—“to improve your pursuit of goal accomplishment and establish more effective pathways to success.”



Her goal for the book is nothing short of disrupting goal setting to helping readers “make their lives happier and feel more meaningful.”



She spoke with SUCCESS writer Matt Crossman about her book. This interview has been edited for length.



SUCCESS: You’ve read just about everything there is to read on this topic. You’ve written about it a good deal too. What was missing that Big Goals provides?



Caroline Miller: I’ve streamlined the science of goal setting by including <a href="https://med.stanford.edu/content/dam/sm/s-spire/documents/PD.locke-and-latham-retrospective_Paper.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Locke and Latham’s goal-setting theory</a>. Most people don’t know it, and it’s the most unknown but most replicated motivational and psychological theory that’s ever been created. It was voted No. 1 of 73 management theories.







I have not figured out why people don’t know it because everybody <a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/why-is-goal-setting-important/">sets goals</a>. There’s a lot of new research that needed to be added onto the back of goal setting to include the nuances that have to be considered when creating strategy. And that is pretty groundbreaking.



S: What is the biggest mistake people make when setting goals, and how does your book address that?



CM: The biggest mistake people make is thinking a goal is a goal is a goal, and they don’t understand the difference between a learning goal and a performance goal. And when you get that wrong, and you treat everything as an outcome you’ve got to shoot for, you will disengage quite often because you haven’t built in the ability to be curious, become engaged in the process of learning.



S: A question I’m guessing many readers can relate to: In the last several years, the market has been so volatile that I’ve struggled to set numerical goals that don’t seem like a waste of time. I’m not even sure how to set goals in this environment.



CM: That goes right to the heart of why I wrote the book. The world is spinning fast, and we’re not in the same environment we used to be. Everything is changing. You can’t expect to sell to the same clients the way you did at the outset of your career. Nobody can expect to sell a car the way they sold a car five years ago. Which means that you go back to the brainstorming (the B in the BRIDGE formulation), which is, “What’s new?”



Am I pegging my goals so that they reflect the reality of the industry I’m in? What is the meaning behind the work I’m doing? Is it to share information? Is it to learn? Is it to do all of the above? Is it to reach a certain segment?



I’m beginning to use artificial intelligence for a lot of these answers. Boy, does it prompt a different kind of thinking. Let’s say you’re in “perplexity.” You pose a question like, “Magazines are closing at the rate of 25% a year. If you were me, and this was what I’m most interested in writing about, where do you think I could take my talent so that I could have the impact I want to have?”



That’s where artificial intelligence truly has become a co-pilot for reinventing or pivoting in life. Once you have understood that, and you’re clear on the end goal and why it’s <a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/how-to-set-goals/">your goal</a>, I think it’s so much easier to create a strategy that will work with learning and performance goals.



S: As we prepped for this, you told me in an email, “If New Year’s rolls around with the same old formulas like SMART goals, I call them zombie approaches, that won’t die, I’ll lose my mind.” Aside from the fact that cracked me up, it shows your passion. What is it about goal setting that gets you so fired up?



CM: Some of this is personal for me. My three adult children have all lost friends and acquaintances to suicide. And as I was researching my book Getting Grit, what I saw was this generation wasn’t taught how to be granular about how to get where they wanted to go.



They instead thought it would be easy. Because everything before this was like, “If you want it, you can have it,” and right before that was the law of attraction, “If you want it, you’ll attract it.”



I mean, this magical stuff is such BS, I can hardly stand it.



This is a world that requires that we work hard toward the things that matter most to us and that we actually persist in that process with the <a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/goal-setting-theory/">right strategies</a>. And I believe that part of the anxiety and depression that’s been overwhelming the millennial generation, and now Gen Z, is because they have no idea how to have a dream they can accomplish. And so that’s part of the personal piece for me.



The other piece for me is I was introduced to the Locke and Latham goal-setting theory in 2005 in the very first master of applied positive psychology program at Penn. And I remember saying out loud to no one in particular, “There is a theory on goal setting that has real science?”



I raced home and I looked in Brian Tracy, Zig Ziglar, Stephen Covey, and none of them had quotable research or footnotes in them. I want to bring a better approach to the world because the world deserves to have the right tool to accomplish goals. 



For more on Caroline Miller and her views on goal setting and grit, check out her <a href="https://biggoalsbook.com/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">website</a>. Her book Big Goals: The Science of Setting Them, Achieving Them, and Creating Your Best Life is available starting today. <a href="https://biggoalsbook.com/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">More on that here</a>.



Photo by Friends Stock/Shutterstock.com

Goal setting is broken, and Caroline Miller wants to fix it. Find out how the author is reexamining setting and achieving goals in our latest interview.

Goal setting is broken, and Caroline Miller wants to fix it. Find out how the author is reexamining setting and achieving goals in our latest interview. | SUCCESS

Author Caroline Miller Uses Science to Upend Old Formulas on Setting and Achieving Goals

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Author Caroline Miller Uses Science to Redefine Goal Setting | SUCCESS

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Matt Crossman is a writer based in St. Louis. He writes about sports, travel, adventure and professional development. Email him at mcrossman98@gmail.com.

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Matt Crossman

Cyclists riding on a dirt path learning life and business lessons from adventure racing

Business &amp; Branding

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I set my bike down, peeled off my helmet and grabbed a handful of peanut butter M&amp;Ms, my go-to fuel during outdoor adventures.&nbsp;



As I ate in this suburban St. Louis park, I looked to my right toward a hill that sloped down to a wooded area. Two men walked out from the trees. Their body language was unpleasant, their behavior even worse. One yelled at the other, “Would you let me just look at that map for one second?!”



We were only a few hours into the <a href="https://offroadracingleague.com/castlewood-8-hour-adventure-race/?doing_wp_cron=1704729998.1709330081939697265625" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Castlewood 8-hour Adventure Race</a>, and already that team was at odds with each other.&nbsp;



I went into this year’s race expecting to write about business lessons I’ve learned in adventure racing. I did not expect “don’t be a jerk” to be near the top of the list, though maybe I should have as that was the chief lesson I learned this year. Adventure racing, which features canoeing, orienteering and biking, offers ample opportunities for jerks to reveal themselves.&nbsp;



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-business-lessons-from-adventure-racing">Business lessons from adventure racing</h2>



Race directors spread checkpoints all over the woods, or, in this case, all over suburban parks. Competitors have nothing but a map, a compass and their own sense of direction. Whichever team finds all of the points and gets to the finish line first wins.&nbsp;







That simple description leaves out how frustrating it can be and how frustration brings out the worst in us. That’s just one of many lessons I’ve applied in four years of adventure racing to my career. And I’m not alone. “The crossover is enormous,” says Gordon Wright, founder of Outside PR and former adventure racer who founded an underground event.&nbsp;



Wright and countless other adventure racers have gained valuable experience on concepts as wide ranging as plotting your own course versus following the pack, risk versus reward and being a <a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/3-key-qualities-of-a-good-team-player/">member of a team</a>.&nbsp;



In addition to “don’t be a jerk,” here are the three most important life and business lessons from adventure racing I’ve learned.



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-1-have-the-right-gear-tech-and-equipment-and-know-how-to-use-it">1. Have the right gear, tech and equipment—and know how to use it</h2>



I have had more gear issues—good and bad, big and small, serious and silly—this year than the rest of my career combined.&nbsp;



Up until this year, if I was reporting on a long-distance hike and something happened that I wanted to write down, I had to stop, fish my notebook out of my backpack, find a pen and write it down. Then I had to return my notebook to my backpack and my pen to my pocket and resume the hike. My hiking mates would have to either wait for me, which is frustrating for them, or keep going, which is frustrating for me. Either way, I would be wasting a ton of time.



On a hiking assignment in April, I noticed a friend had laced cord through the spiral wires of his notebook, tied the end of the cords together and hung it around his neck like a gaudy yet imminently practical necklace.&nbsp;



This innovation left me gobsmacked.&nbsp;



He was gobsmacked at how gobsmacked I was, but all I could think about was the hours—yes, hours—that little piece of genius would have saved me over the years.



I immediately stole his idea. As silly as it sounds, that simple “technological advancement” has already been extremely helpful on four assignments. During the adventure race in December, I took notes while walking and canoeing and barely slowed us down, if at all.&nbsp;



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-2-view-obstacles-as-opportunities">2. View obstacles as opportunities</h2>



Adventure racing is nothing if not a constant battle against challenges—which is exactly the same as running my own business. It’s only the nature of the challenges that are different.&nbsp;



In any given race, competitors face harrowing bike trails, massive hills to climb and frigid (or soaring) temperatures. One lesson <a href="https://www.instagram.com/marcoamselem/?hl=en" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Marco Amselem</a>, of one of the world’s top-ranked pro adventure racing teams, has learned is that some obstacles aren’t obstacles but opportunities. The key to overcoming them is to reframe how you think of them.&nbsp;



If you view them as opportunities to learn, grow and think differently, you will attack them in a different way. To illustrate his point, he used an example familiar to every adventure racer (and business owner)—what to do when one person slows the team down. It’s frustrating only if you allow it to be. If you instead think of it as an opportunity, it can be a positive.



“If someone is really struggling, sick, it doesn’t mean that the team needs to be affected negatively by that,” Amselem says. “Maybe it’s time for all of us to rest, so we can get stronger and move faster.”



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-3-make-tough-decisions-on-the-fly">3. Make tough decisions on the fly</h2>



Like any <a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/resilience-and-marathon-training/">stressful endeavor</a>, adventure racing magnifies your strengths and weaknesses. You learn a lot about yourself and your teammates when you’re lost deep in the woods. It’s not about avoiding mistakes. They are inevitable. It’s how you react that matters—loudly demanding to see the map, as I overheard in December, is a recipe for more fighting and getting even more lost.&nbsp;



So is not admitting you’re lost.



Wright tells two stories that demonstrate this issue. The first came in a multi-day adventure race in Maine. His team guessed it would take 17 hours to complete a trekking portion of the event.&nbsp;



“After 30 hours, it was increasingly, blindingly clear that we were not only lost, but also our navigator had no point of reference to get us unlost,” he says. “Navigating, like business leadership, is a two-way road of trust. My other teammates and I supported our navigator until it was apparent they were overwhelmed.”



After 46 hours, Wright and the other teammate finally gave up and convinced the navigator to radio for help, which disqualified them from the race. “But it was the right thing to do,” he says. “We got rescued and likely saved our lives in the process.”



Another time, Wright and his team were mountain biking in the dark. They were cold, exhausted and not thinking clearly. “Our navigator, a far more experienced and <a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/the-importance-of-humility-in-leadership-and-how-to-spot-unhealthy-ego-habits/">humble</a> one, gathered the rest of us around him and said, pointing at a map, ‘This is where we are, I think. But I’m wrecked, we’re near a cliff and I’m not 100% sure where to go next. I think we should bust out our space blankets and grab a half-hour nap. It’ll be light enough then to make a better route choice—what do you guys think?’”



That moment of clarity amid confusion helped the team collect their wits, and they ultimately finished second in the race.



“And you can guess which person I’d like to work with,” Wright says.



Photo by TORWAISTUDIO/Shutterstock.com

What can one learn about business outside the office? Evidently a lot: This writer gleaned unexpected business lessons from adventure racing.

What can one learn about business outside the office? Evidently a lot: This writer gleaned unexpected business lessons from adventure racing. | SUCCESS

3 Life and Business Lessons From Adventure Racing

3 Life and Business Lessons From Adventure Racing | SUCCESS

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Mature man riding a mountain bike learning to face his fears

My favorite bike crash came as I hustled to a shift at a fast-food joint. I was 14 or 15 years old and pedaling through a park in suburban Detroit. I stuffed my hands in my jacket pockets to keep them warm and rode hands-free along a dirt path. Then, I hit a rough patch—my front tire twisted perpendicular to the rest of the bike, the bike stopped and I kept going. I sailed over the handlebars, flipped and executed a flawless (and unintentional) rolling landing.



Flat on my back, I looked at the dull sky… and realized my hands were still in my pockets. All of that happened so fast I never had a chance to take them out. I sat up, looked around to see if anybody saw that—NOPE!—laid back down and laughed. Eventually I pulled myself off the dirt, got back on the bike and went to work.



As a boy, I spent every waking hour outside—riding, playing sports, jumping off my friend’s garage into his pool, whatever. As I turned in my bike for a car and a fast-food job for a journalism career, my outside life dwindled. I didn’t have time to ride hands-free through a park, and I started to think flying over the handlebars was frightening, not funny. I <a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/5-truths-about-taking-and-not-taking-risks/">pursued safety and comfort</a>, and neither was to be found outside.



When I lost my job, I lost that safety and comfort. As a newly laid-off magazine writer desperate to land freelance assignments, I wrote a story about hiking. I had a blast, so I wrote another, then another. Suddenly I loved the outdoors again. Hiking turned into long-distance bike riding turned into adventure racing turned into wanting to try everything once—rock climbing, ice climbing, dog mushing, surfing and more.



As much as I loved being outside, I still craved safety and comfort. Fear rode shotgun, whispering to me that I could not, should not, do whatever it was I was about to do: You’ll get hurt. You’ll make a fool of yourself. You will fail and be exposed as a fraud.



Those whispers became shouts this winter as I endured the worst stretch of my career. All at once, clients stiffed me, closed and tore my stories to shreds. When I have no confidence inside, I sure as hell don’t have any outside. For the first time in 30 years, I thought seriously about changing professions.



And then I was invited to attend the Scouting Jamboree at <a href="http://www.summitbsa.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Summit-Programs-Catalog-10.15.15.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Summit Bechtel Reserve</a>, a massive 14,000-plus-acre adventure park in West Virginia. Alongside 15,888 scouts from 50 states and 12 countries, I would have the chance to go mountain biking, rock climbing, rappelling and more. I said yes… and as the summer date approached, I regretted it. I told my wife I wanted to cancel the trip. She (lovingly) pushed me out the door. I arrived at the Jamboree dripping in angst and ready to revert back to a life of safety and comfort inside. There I met adventure-loving kids who showed me how wrong I was.



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The good news: Blood spilled onto that mountain. The better news: It wasn’t mine. A teenager in front of me crashed his mountain bike, leaving one leg caked in mud, the other trickling blood—and his heart full to bursting. As he dusted himself off, his every movement screamed joy.



That’s what I’m afraid of? That looked like fun! Memories surged back to me. Seven years ago, on my first mountain bike ride, I flew over the handlebars in Colorado and landed on my face and chest. Didn’t hurt. Three years ago, someone stopped in front of me as I crossed a four-lane highway as a semi approached. Unable to unclip from the pedals, I pounded onto the pavement with my shoulder. That bruised only my ego.



It seems like by now I would know I don’t ride fast enough to get seriously hurt in a crash. That boy reminded me. The next time I’m worried about crashing, I’m going to think of the pure delight on his face as blood oozed from his calf.



He was bleeding. I was jealous.



<hr class="wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity"/>



Sabrina Wang shared with&nbsp; me a badass story about the time she backpacked 100 miles in nine days. Every morning she asked herself the same question I ask myself on nearly every adventure: Why am I doing this to myself? And every morning she gave herself the same answer: friendships.



She was not done saying that word before I realized that was my answer too. The faces of a half-dozen men flashed across my mind, men with whom I have powerful, abiding relationships. Those types of relationships form when you endure challenges together. Wang reminded me of that in a way I won’t soon forget.



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I waited for mountain bike lessons alongside James, who’s 17 years old. A few weeks earlier, he rode for the first time and crashed into three trees. “I was still shaking when I got on this bike,” he said. “But if you’re really scared and don’t do something, you might miss out on a lot of fun.”



We circled around our instructor. He told us to keep our eyes on the trail because our bikes would go where our eyes point us. “Don’t look at the trees,” he said.



Brendza looked over his shoulder at me and flashed a smirk that should be bronzed and put in the Smithsonian.



He pedaled down the path toward a scouting official who would assess whether we handled this beginner’s trail well enough to move on to the next level. I followed Brendza, my eyes darting up the trail looking for danger and finding plenty but avoiding all of it.



Here was the fear-facing lesson I needed. I rode past the judge with the biggest, dopiest, bring-on-the-crashiest smile on my face… with both hands gripping the handlebars.



Photo by Dewald Kirsten/Shutterstock.com

In this personal essay, writer Matt Crossman explains the benefits of facing your fears in adventure—and how to enjoy yourself in the process.

In this personal essay, writer Matt Crossman explains the benefits of facing your fears in adventure—and how to enjoy yourself in the process. | SUCCESS

I Left the Comfort of Safety to Face My Fears Head-On—Here’s Why

Why I Left the Comfort of Safety to Face My Fears Head-On | SUCCESS

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skeet thrower and box of targets on a grassy field

The first time I went skeet shooting, I missed so often and by such wide margins that people laughed at me. I deserved it.



I didn’t mind the laughter—or failing, either, even in front of people. It's (almost) enjoyable; it’s how I learn. But I do mind failing without knowing how to get better. That feels pointless. I had not been trained properly in skeet shooting and had no clue what I was doing wrong. For that reason, I never wanted to shoot skeet again, and I had no intention of doing it until I visited Primland Resort—a breathtaking 12,000-acre lodge in the Blue Ridge Mountains that Travel and Leisure called one of the <a href="https://www.travelandleisure.com/best-resorts-in-the-south-7498351" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">best resorts in the South.</a>



Sammy Howell, a Primland shooting instructor, drove us along a mountain road. Grandeur swallowed us as I described my struggles. At least here, high up in the mountains, nobody would see me fail except Howell. But he assured me he encounters guests like me frequently. To teach them, he stands behind them and watches, offering tips, as they follow the target with their unloaded shotgun. After a few minutes, he loads the gun and tells them to fire on his command. “When I say ‘shoot’—boom! They’ll break it—every time,” he says.



I arrived at Primland while researching how to take (and hit) the Big Shot, and skeet shooting provided an opportunity to test what I had learned. After hearing Howell’s instruction, I was 98% sure I would shoot better.



As we walked up to the wooden shooting platform, 98 became 100. We rehearsed like he described. I hit the first six—more than I hit that entire first day—and, all told, shot like a different person. That gave me Big Shot lesson No. 1: Proper coaching and training are crucial.



Here’s what else I have learned.



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-1-first-take-a-bunch-of-small-shots-then-push-yourself">1. First, take a bunch of small shots. Then, push yourself. </h2>



The tech world dumps jobs every day, while nearly 90% of construction companies can’t find enough qualified workers. That volatility pushes some people to want to take the Big Shot. It makes others skittish, because if they miss, they don’t know what they’ll return to.



Statistics (and common sense) show that the younger you are, the more willing you are to take the Big Shot, whether that’s changing jobs or careers. You’re also more likely to miss because you don’t know what you don’t know. As painful as missing is, it’s invaluable. I learned that on the Appalachian Trail during my first overnight backpacking trip.



It rained so hard the trail became an inch-deep creek of running water. My cheap rain gear failed (didn’t-know-better mistake 1), and the clothes on my body and in my backpack were soaked. I also committed what I now consider a comical error of wearing cotton (didn’t-know-better mistake 2), which takes forever to dry. On top of that, the temperature was 10 degrees colder than I was prepared for (didn’t-know-better mistake 3). High 50s and sunny is awesome hiking weather. High 40s and drenched is borderline dangerous. My inexperience put me at risk.



By luck, my group stumbled upon a shelter that protected us from the elements. Without that shelter, I might have never hiked again. With it, I learned valuable lessons—most notably about how failing in one Big Shot prepares me for the next. Since then, I have hiked in Virginia, Alaska, California, New Mexico and many more places, each a little more daring, each one applying what I had learned previously.



This spring, 11 years after that horrible first hike, I planned and executed a three-day, two-night hike in the Ozarks. I led a group of 14 others—a Big Shot I never could have taken without attempting so many smaller shots first.



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-2-don-t-worry-about-what-someone-else-s-big-shot-looks-like">2. Don’t worry about what someone else’s big shot looks like. </h2>



Josh Wise is known in NASCAR as the driver whisperer. An optimization coach, he coaxes stellar performances out of drivers with a holistic approach focusing on craft, fitness, wellness, <a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/4-characteristics-of-people-who-are-mentally-tough/">mental toughness</a> and more. He’s so good that some of his clients won’t talk about him because they don’t want anyone to know what’s fueling their Big Shots.



In May, I embedded with Wise as his clients practiced. He asked them to run what I’ll call Big Shot laps (his term is more colorful) followed by conservative laps (which he calls “no-slip”). A Big Shot lap is aggressive and marked by the tires spinning and the car getting sideways in turns. In a no-slip lap, neither of those things are supposed to happen.



I watched a driver named Sheldon Creed. My takeaway was not what Creed’s Big Shot laps looked like but that even his conservative laps were aggressive—perhaps as aggressive as another driver’s Big Shot laps. That’s because Creed grew up in off-road racing, a style of driving in which the tires spin and the car slides on every lap. That means he’s more comfortable being uncomfortable. While some drivers have to be pushed to be more aggressive, Creed had to be told to be more intentional about taking it easy.



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-3-you-need-to-be-ready-when-your-chance-comes-recognize-when-it-does-and-acknowledge-you-are-not-in-control">3. You need to be ready when your chance comes, recognize when it does and acknowledge you are not in control.</h2>



“A legacy of weirdness” is how J.P. Morgan Chief Global Strategist David Kelly described the <a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/how-3-pastry-chefs-pivoted-during-the-pandemic-and-started-successful-side-hustles/">post-pandemic job market</a>. “A recession is coming!” says one headline. “No, it’s not!” says the next. It’s challenging to <a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/take-that-big-risk-with-frank-oconnell/">take a Big Shot amid uncertainty</a>. The best you can do is make decisions based on the available information, however incomplete it is.



I learned this while taking surfing lessons and conducting research into how artificial intelligence and human experience put surfers on a never-ending quest for perfect waves. At the risk of oversimplifying, AI refines billions of data points to predict what the waves will be like, and then surfers paddle out to enjoy what AI predicted.



But AI forecasts what all waves will be like, not what each wave will be like. My instructor watched the waves as they approached and only let me try to surf those that looked good. I rode the first two almost all the way in. His third choice, while indistinguishable from the first two, immediately crashed on my head as if I opened the attic door in my ceiling and a trunk fell out.



I asked my instructor why that wave crashed while the others rolled. He shrugged. The not knowing is part of the fun. Some waves crash, some roll. The best we can do is pick a wave that looks good, stand up and ride—for however long it lasts.



This article originally appeared in the September/October 2023&nbsp;<a href="https://store.success.com/by-media/success-magazine-sept-oct-2023-kris-carr.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">issue of&nbsp;SUCCESS&nbsp;magazine</a>. Photo by Bennett Walker/Shutterstock.com

An opportunity awaits, bur you're unsure whether you should take your shot for fear of failure. Do it anyway—just keep these 3 tips in mind.

An opportunity awaits, bur you're unsure whether you should take your shot for fear of failure. Do it anyway—just keep these 3 tips in mind. | SUCCESS

3 Lessons on the Art of Knowing When to Take Your Shot

A New Opportunity Awaits—Go Ahead and Take Your Shot | SUCCESS

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parent handing key to teen boy in driver's seat after downloading driving safety apps

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The statistics are indisputable: Teen drivers are dangerous, to themselves and others. Car crashes are among the leading causes of death for teenagers—2,800 in 2020 in addition to about 227,000 injuries, according to the <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/transportationsafety/teen_drivers/teendrivers_factsheet.html#:~:text=Motor%20vehicle%20crashes%20are%20the%20leading%20cause%20of%20death%20for%20U.S.%20teens.&amp;text=Teen%20motor%20vehicle%20crashes%20are,young%20drivers%20on%20the%20road." target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Centers for Disease Control and Prevention</a>. In per-mile deaths, that was nearly triple the rate of drivers 20 and older. Inexperience, distraction and night-time driving are among the major factors contributing to accidents.



Crashes can’t be eliminated, but there are steps parents can take to improve their kids’ safety. Many cars come equipped to slow when you get too close to the car in front of you, correct your path if you drift into another lane and tell you if someone is in your blind spot. Those features work for everybody, not just teens. Several manufacturers have functions specifically targeting teen safety built into some models.&nbsp;



But do most parents know this? That’s doubtful. The <a href="https://www.iihs.org/news/detail/teen-safety-systems-get-little-attention-in-dealer-pitches" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Insurance Institute for Highway Safety</a> (IIHS) found salespeople and manufacturers could improve the way they explain and promote the systems. Chevrolet does a better job than most, the IIHS found. <a href="https://www.chevrolet.com/support/vehicle/driving-safety/driver-assistance/teen-driver" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Chevy’s teen driver safety feature</a>, available in several models, allows parents to program the car to refuse to go into drive until seatbelts are fastened, set a speed maximum and put a limit on how loud the radio or streaming device can be. The feature produces a “teen driver report card,” which the manufacturer says may include “distance driven, maximum speed, overspeed warnings, number of times the accelerator pedal was floored and when certain safety systems were triggered, such as traction control.”



In addition to features within the cars, there are also myriad driving safety apps, or at the very least report teen driving behavior (both safe and unsafe). Like nanny cams, the apps let parents know what’s going on when they’re not there. Some apps produce reports gauging a driver’s performance based on speed, acceleration, braking and more. The parents can use that information as they see fit.&nbsp;



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">4 driving safety apps for you and your teen</h2>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-life360">Life360</h3>



Many of these apps cover the same basic ground. This seems to be the most popular, at least in my peer group. With millions of downloads, it covers more than just driving: It offers crash detection, emergency dispatch, roadside assistance, a family driving summary and individual driving reports.&nbsp;



<h3 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-roadready">RoadReady</h3>



RoadReady promotes its ability to track driving time. We live in Missouri, which requires teen drivers to have their permits for six months and reach time thresholds in total driving time and night driving before getting their licenses. The state doesn’t mandate proof that my daughter reached those limits, but that doesn’t make me want to hit them any less. RoadReady offers a simple way to keep track.



<h3 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-truemotion-family-safe-driving">TrueMotion Family Safe Driving</h3>



This app gives all drivers, not just teens, a score based on how they drive (<a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/why-youre-always-distracted-from-the-task-at-hand/">avoiding distraction</a>, following the speed limit, etc.). When parents use it as well, this gets rid of the teen driver’s lament that it’s not fair that they are scrutinized and nobody else is. This also allows for friendly competition, as parents and teens can compare their scores and strive to improve them. Frankly, in analyzing my own behavior in the context of teaching my daughter to drive, I have learned that I could use a refresher course.



<h3 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-drivesmart">DriveSmart</h3>



This app automatically routes incoming calls to voicemail, mutes notifications about incoming texts and sends a reply that the user is unavailable. Like many other features across these apps, this is geared toward teens but would be valuable for any driver. Does any of this help? In a study of in-car safety features and teen-specific technologies, <a href="https://www.iihs.org/news/detail/driving-technology-promises-large-safety-benefits-for-teens" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">the IIHS concluded</a>, “Assuming those technologies were universally used and completely effective, the researchers concluded that together they could prevent or mitigate 41% of all crashes involving teen drivers and as many as 47% of teen driver injuries and 78% of teen driver deaths.”



Matt Crossman is a 20-year NASCAR writer who recently taught his teenage daughter, Maria, how to drive. Armed with driving tips from such renowned names as Jeff Gordon and Jimmie Johnson, Crossman primed Maria on the rules of the road and found they were also applicable to navigating one’s job. He shares those reflections in his article, “<a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/driving-lessons/">4 Driving Lessons from the Pros that Will Help Your Career</a>”, as well as the driving safety apps mentioned here, to help others stay informed on ways to keep teen drivers safe.



Photo by kuzmaphoto/shutterstock.com

Before your teen gets behind the wheel, look into these four driving safety apps designed to monitor driving habits and mitigate accidents.

Before your teen gets behind the wheel, look into these four driving safety apps designed to monitor driving habits and mitigate accidents. | SUCCESS

Keep Your Teen Safe Behind the Wheel with These 4 Driving Safety Apps

4 Driving Safety Apps to Keep Your Teen Safe | SUCCESS

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car going down the road at sunset for driving lessons

We started off slow, in the church parking lot. From there, we graduated to an elementary school, then a community college and, finally, the open road. Yes, I am giving my 16-year-old daughter driving lessons. She’s doing fine; good, even; great, really. It’s me who’s struggling. It’s not that she’s terrifying me; it’s that she’s not doing anything to terrify me at all, ever, and yet I’m <a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/11-strategies-for-managing-stress/">jammed with fear and anxiety</a> anyway.



I expect her to be herky-jerky on the brakes and put me halfway through the windshield. When I think she should slow down, I mash my right foot into the floorboard, and my right hand just about rips the grab handle off the car ceiling as I tell her as gently as I can, “Brake, BRA-ke, BRAKE BEFORE WE ALL DIE, BRAKE!”



She has never come close to running a red, never come close to rear-ending a car, never done anything remotely justifying my reaction. Every single time, she stops early and gently, and yet I kept flipping out anyway. “I am braking,” she finally said, and I’ll be darned: She was. She is so gentle on the brakes I couldn’t, and still can’t, feel us slowing down. How she learned to do that I have no idea.



She—I’ll call her Maria Andretti Crossman—has also made it clear she doesn’t need me to point out what color stoplights are. “I can see the light is red; you don’t have to tell me,” she said, the tone in her voice overflowing with I’m-not-a-baby-anymore-Dad! exasperation.



Who’s teaching whom, I have thought more than once.



I’m learning—or trying to. I haven’t slammed my foot into the floorboard in weeks, and I graduated from saying, “The light’s red,” to thinking it as loud as I can. Proof that that works: She hasn’t run one yet.



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-professional-driving-lessons-for-the-road-and-life">Professional Driving Lessons for the Road—And Life</h2>



I realized along the way that maybe, just maybe, I’m not the best teacher for this situation. Then a solution as obvious as a Mack Truck barreling toward us on a one-lane road dawned on me: As a NASCAR writer for more than 20 years, I have access to the greatest drivers in the world. I can ask them for advice to pass along to my daughter.



So, I did—and a funny thing happened. In addition to giving Maria driving lessons, I’m learning how I teach, how she learns and how to use that knowledge to get where we’re going, whether it’s in a car, a job or a career. The lessons happen seemingly every time she puts the car in drive, slowly accelerates and comes to a soft, gentle, complete stop.



<h3 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-lesson-no-1-learn-by-doing">Lesson No. 1: Learn by doing.</h3>



When I first started covering NASCAR, I could not understand how drivers could race so close to the wall and each other for hours on end. I still don’t understand, but at least I know they did not start out able to do that. They learned through trial and error. Even the great Jeff Gordon—a four-time champion, one of the most transformative figures in NASCAR history and, like me, the father of a teenage daughter—crashed and wrecked a ton of cars early in his career. He became great because his team owner, Rick Hendrick, had the patience to let Gordon <a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/the-mel-robbins-guide-to-screwing-up/">learn from those mistakes</a>.



A few weeks ago, as Maria drove, some idiot wandered out into the road and just stood there. It was night, the road was poorly lit and a car coming from the other direction was going to arrive at the idiot at the exact time we were. I didn’t know if Maria could process all of that—I barely could—so yelling was my natural reaction. “STOP!” I bellowed.



I regretted it immediately, and not just because I startled her when she was trying to drive, but also because I didn’t give her a chance to deal with the problem herself. When I asked Gordon for advice to give to Maria, I didn't tell him about the idiot in the road, but his answer sounded like I had. “Be aware of your surroundings,” he said. “This comes with time and experience, but it’s never too early to start the process. Knowing what others around you are doing and anticipating their next move can help prevent possible accidents from occurring.”



That applies to work as well. Our surroundings have changed considerably in the last three years. There will be times when yelling “STOP” from the passenger seat is the right call—if a meteor is coming at us or I see Taylor Swift tickets lying in the road. Other than that, I should let her figure it out herself because, after 16 years of being her dad, I know that’s how she learns best.



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">Lesson No. 2: Don’t be in a hurry.</h3>



I haven’t written on deadline much lately, and I’m glad of it. I covered the Daytona 500 many times. The deadline anxiety started when I woke up that morning and kept going as I drove to the track, waited in traffic, walked to the media center, etc. It exploded when the race ended. Every word, sentence and decision about it weighed 10,000 pounds.



Hours later, when I crawled into my hotel room bed, <a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/do-these-11-things-to-get-the-best-sleep-ever/">falling asleep was a challenge</a>—my hands would be clammy, my heart pounding, my breathing shallow. My mind would be racing, out of adrenaline, out of elation that it was over, out of fear that I wet the bed on the story.



When Maria pulled into the driveway recently, my hands were clammy, my heart was pounding, my breathing was shallow and my mind was racing. If I was feeling pressure, I knew she must be, too. For Maria, every turn, brake, acceleration and decision about these actions must weigh 10,000 pounds. It didn’t help that I was watching, piling the anxiety of being scrutinized on top of the anxiety of learning a new skill.



I have years of experience dealing with deadline pressure. This is all new for Maria. The key, in driving, in writing, in work, in life, is not to let the pressure <a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/how-i-stop-a-bad-decision-in-its-tracks/">force you into bad decisions</a>. “Try not to rush any decision when driving,” Gordon told me to tell Maria. “As a new driver, others around you will understand if you take extra time when changing lanes or pulling out of a driveway—so make good decisions, not quick ones.”



This made me think of my first day at Sporting News, a national magazine for which I worked for 13 years (and covered the Daytona 500 many times). I arrived there after spending six years in daily newspapers, going as fast as I could every day. My new boss gave me a project, I told him I’d get it done right away, and he told me not to.



He told me to do it well, not quickly.



It’s a lesson I have to repeat to myself over and over, especially as a freelancer.



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">Lesson No. 3: Pay attention to what you’re doing.</h3>



Jimmie Johnson is arguably the greatest NASCAR driver of his era; only Gordon is in that conversation. Johnson won seven championships (tied for most with Richard Petty and Dale Earnhardt) and 83 races, including two Daytona 500s, one of which I covered. Like me, he has two daughters, though his are several years younger than mine.



When I asked him for driving advice, he sounded like he was imagining riding shotgun to his girls. He offered what he called a “dad layup” by advocating distraction-free driving: phone down, radio volume low, over-caffeinated friends not invited, etc. That’s great advice that carries over into the workplace in the attention economy. <a href="https://mopria.org/Documents/Mopria-Distracted-Working-Survey-2021.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">There are a million things</a> clamoring for our attention. We work best—no, we live best—when we eliminate as many of them as possible.



The only problem: Early on, at least, I was often the distraction, whether it was by encouraging her to brake, telling her the light was red or yelling, “STOP,” when there was an idiot in the road. I have since learned to shut up.



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">Lesson No. 4: Play by the rules—except when you don’t.</h3>



I’ve driven with enough NASCAR stars to know it’s better to listen to their advice than to emulate them. While driving a rental SUV, Carl Edwards sped into the tunnel that goes under the track at Daytona International Speedway. He blasted out of the tunnel’s uphill exit and launched us into the Florida night. We landed about 45 feet later and stopped near a parking attendant. “You again,” the attendant said.



I didn’t realize until I started teaching Maria that I set almost as bad of an example. I treat most traffic laws as suggestions: I don’t come to complete stops, I use my turn signal only when I think of it, which isn’t often, and I don’t drive the speed limit. As Johnson said: “We’re not going to be the one in the fast lane going slow.”



Nobody would argue, except maybe Maria. She is a lifelong, rule-following, black-and-white, oldest-child literalist. Whatever the speed limit sign says, that’s what Maria drives. A road near our house turns slightly, and the speed limit drops from 45 to 35, a completely unnecessary change. Exactly one person—Maria—follows it, and often the car behind her gets so close we could join their conversation. That makes her nervous, and at some point, she’ll make a mistake because of it. So far, I am fighting the urge to tell her to break the speed limit, even though I know I should.



But here’s the thing: I wouldn’t advocate she break the law in any other circumstance. I wouldn’t tell her to disregard her boss’ directive because nobody else followed it. I wouldn’t say it’s OK to blow off her homework because all of her classmates were. “Everybody else is doing it” is an ugly reason to do something, and I’d laugh (lovingly) at her if she used it with me in defense of anything… except breaking the speed limit.



The best thing about parenting is this confusion will continue on a variety of topics until I die.



This article originally appeared in the July/August 2023 <a href="https://store.success.com/by-media/success-magazine-july-august-2023-chance-the-rapper.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">issue of SUCCESS magazine</a>. Photo by sumroeng chinnapan/shutterstock.com.

While teaching his teenager daughter how to drive, a 20-year NASCAR writer applies driving lessons from the pros to work and life.

While teaching his teenager daughter how to drive, a 20-year NASCAR writer applies driving lessons from the pros to work and life. | SUCCESS

4 Driving Lessons from the Pros that Will Help Your Career

4 Driving Lessons that Help You at Work | SUCCESS

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happy man learning new skills to play pickleball

Professional Growth

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Pro tip: Have friends who send you emails that go something like this: I represent the company putting on one of the biggest pickleball tournaments in the country. Would you like to fly out to Atlantic City, New Jersey, get taught to play by an all-time great and enter the tournament the next day?



Though I had never played, I of course said yes. I always say yes. In the past few years, I have tried surfing, rock climbing, ice climbing, a dozen other new-to-me activities and, now, <a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/the-meteoric-rise-of-pickleball/">pickleball</a>. Early in my career, I decided against specializing in writing about one subject. Instead, I chase other people’s passions. I find people who love doing interesting things and ask them to teach me. I do it because it’s fun, because it suits my personality and because it allows me to live a well-rounded life.



I have found there is much more to it than even all that. Being a generalist is a good, albeit unconventional, career-development strategy, though I’d be lying if I said I did it because of that.



In today’s world, we’re <a href="https://hirepaths.com/blog/2021/03/23/five-ways-parents-can-encourage-career-exploration-in-early-childhood" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">bombarded from a young age</a> to pick something to specialize in. We pick a major and then a career and then face admonitions to stay in our figurative lane. <a href="https://www.businessnewsdaily.com/6748-business-niche-characteristics.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Firms</a> and <a href="http://www.thenichemovement.com/blog/2020/7/6/how-to-find-your-niche-as-a-college-student" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">individuals</a> alike are pressured to excel in narrow areas of expertise. The better you are at your niche, the more valuable your work—or so the thinking goes.



<a href="https://www.octanner.com/global-culture-report/2023/rise-of-the-generalist.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">There is growing evidence</a> that suggests that line of thinking is too reductive. All of us would benefit from understanding <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/15/harvard-yale-researcher-future-success-is-not-a-specific-skill-its-a-type-of-thinking.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">a wide range of areas</a> and recognizing how things are interconnected and interdependent, so we can see the big picture when making decisions and bring multifaceted approaches <a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/6-creative-ways-to-solve-a-problem/">when solving problems</a>.



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-the-path-to-becoming-a-generalist">The path to becoming a generalist</h2>



It’s easy to become a specialist. You pick a lane and stay in it. Being a generalist isn’t so simple. How do you pursue that path when there really isn’t one?



One way is to work for a company that allows, encourages or embraces it. Constance Schwartz-Morini, the co-founder and CEO of <a href="https://www.smac-ent.com/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">SMAC Enter­tainment</a>, is a perfect example.



Early in her career, she landed a job with the NFL. Over the years, she danced between “television programming, sponsorship, events, marketing and player engagement,” according to her SMAC Entertainment bio. She watched and learned, especially early on when she was an assistant. “The NFL was my MBA,” she says.



Schwartz-Morini didn’t set out to become a generalist—she half-jokingly says she wishes she could take credit for pursuing it. While she may not have done it on purpose, she says it seems inevitable in retrospect, because she has the characteristics necessary: She’s intensely curious, <a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/3-techniques-to-never-stop-learning/">eager to learn</a> and willing to ask for help.



It may have been accidental at first, but now she pursues a wide-ranging career very much on purpose. Her work at SMAC Entertainment shows she’s still deep in the generalist life. SMAC Entertainment is “a talent management firm, business incubator and Emmy-nominated production company,” according to Schwartz-Morini’s bio. As a manager, Schwartz-Morini represents athletes and entertainers. As a producer, she works on scripted media, unscripted media and even game shows. As an entrepreneur, she has helped launch clothing lines.



That wide-ranging approach has nurtured her already deep passion for being well-rounded. Now, she tries to create fellow generalists. She manages athletes and entertainers with an explicit eye on multifaceted careers. She won’t represent anyone who wants to stay just what they are—i.e., a specialist.



Her three most famous clients—Deion Sanders, Michael Strahan and Erin Andrews—started out in niche markets. Each was initially well known within that niche and less so in the wider world. Now, all three are household names. They came from different fields and emerged out of their lanes in different ways, because no generalist follows a rote pattern. “The only thing they have in common is me,” Schwartz-Morini says.



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-generalists-are-comfortable-seeking-outside-help">Generalists are comfortable seeking outside help</h2>



One of the problems with being a specialist is that it lulls you into a false sense of security. You think because you know so much about your field, you can solve whatever problems arise. And you are right—until you are completely wrong.



In his book <a href="https://amzn.to/41IfigH" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Range: How Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World</a>, David Epstein writes that if you are struggling with a narrow problem in a niche field, somebody who knows nothing about that field might be better at solving the problem than you are. That’s because the more we know about something (“<a href="https://spsp.org/news-center/character-context-blog/planning-fallacy-inside-view" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">the inside view</a>”), the poorer our decisions are about it, especially when it comes to problem-solving. “In a wicked world, relying upon experience from a single domain is not only limiting, it can be disastrous,” Epstein writes.



A company called Wazoku created <a href="https://www.wazoku.com/innovation-360/crowd/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Wazoku Crowd</a>, which gives clients access to crowdsourced problem-solving. A company with a problem pays Wazoku to ask for solutions from its community of solvers, and whoever comes up with the best one gets a reward.



A generalist doesn’t arrive at the top feeling like they need to know everything. They arrive at the top in part because they have been comfortable in new roles in which they didn’t know anything. Schwartz-Morini says she’s good when she knows what she’s doing and even better when she doesn’t, because she is so comfortable seeking outside help.



<h3 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-gaining-the-outside-view">Gaining ‘the outside view’</h3>



What we know puts us in a box that contains only solutions we could reasonably devise from the contents of that box. The answer might be in a different box: “the outside view.” The more boxes we have access to, <a href="https://www.mba.com/business-school-and-careers/why-business-school/generalist" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">the better off we’ll be</a>. “The outside view probes for deep structural similarities to the current problem in different ones,” Epstein writes.



The key phrase there for me is “deep structural similarities.” Just about every time I <a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/how-to-master-new-skills/">acquire a new skill</a>, I learn something that applies to the rest of my life. In surfing, I learned valuable lessons about how I learn. From an ATV guide, <a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/12-habits-of-genuine-people/">I learned about authenticity</a>. In ice climbing, I learned <a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/9-traits-of-trustworthy-people/">valuable lessons about trust</a>.



In pickleball, I learned about covering a lot of ground… or tried to, at least. Going into the tournament, I feared that the very skill I am honing and advocating—increasing my range—would be my weakness in pickleball.



I figured I would lose because I wouldn’t be able to reach shots. But that wasn’t the case. Don’t get me wrong. I lost all four matches I played in the 2022 Dietz &amp; Watson Atlantic City Pickleball Open. But the problem wasn’t that I couldn’t get to balls hit far from me. The problem was balls hit right at me. I couldn’t move my paddle fast enough to return those.



This article originally appeared in the May/June 2023 <a href="https://store.success.com/by-media/success-magazine-may-june-2023-jairek-robbins.html">issue of SUCCESS magazine</a>. Photo by Ahturner/Shutterstock.

While many think being a specialist is key to having success, there can more value in being a generalist and learning new skills.

While many think being a specialist is key to having success, there can more value in being a generalist and learning new skills. | SUCCESS

The Benefits of Being a Generalist & Learning New Skills

The Benefits of Being a Generalist &#038; Learning New Skills

How Being a Generalist Can Benefit Your Career | SUCCESS

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The pitch is called <a href="https://www.mountainproject.com/route/106565026/nurse-jackie" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Nurse Jackie</a>, probably after the TV show of the same name, but who knows? It’s a 50-foot rock climb in Colorado’s Boulder Canyon, and it is, by Maureen (Mo) Beck’s standards, easy.



When she climbed off of that pitch one glorious Monday morning in July, Beck, one of the 2019 National Geographic “<a href="https://nationalgeographicpartners.com/2019/03/announces-2019-adventurers-of-the-year/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Adventurers of the Year</a>,” was glowing with excitement. I asked about the joy splattered across her face.



“Climb it,” she said. “And then ask me again.”&nbsp;



I stepped up to the wall. The first 8 feet were close to straight up, difficult for a beginner like me, even with obvious handholds. After that, the wall turned in a few degrees, still too steep to climb without ropes but not by much. I threw my right hand out, then my left foot, then left hand, then right foot, feeling like I imagine Spider-Man feels when he scales skyscrapers. I immediately understood Beck’s joy.&nbsp;



In rock climbing, a sport sometimes defined by ambition driving out fear, Beck is always looking to finish the next pitch, add the next skill, conquer the next challenge. But she finds happiness, too, in climbing for the pure fun of it.



For Beck, climbing and <a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/how-to-be-a-successful-solopreneur/">the solopreneur life</a> are both <a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/finding-balance-a-year-after-covid-19-turned-life-upside-down/">about finding balance</a>. In climbing, that means pushing herself, <a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/want-to-reach-your-potential-then-be-a-learner/">adding more skills</a>—and living to tell about it. In the work world, that means finding time for her variety of gigs, a list that has included <a href="http://www.moinmountains.com/speaking-engagements" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">speaking engagements</a>, sponsor appearances and marketing for her former full-time employer. <a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/take-control-of-your-relationships/">On top of that</a>, she also has to climb, see her husband, take care of her animals, etc.



“I’m not one of those who [say] climbing makes me feel alive,” she says. “It reminds me of why I want to be alive.”&nbsp;



<h2 id="h-maureen-beck-a-competitive-paraclimbing-athlete">Maureen Beck, a competitive paraclimbing athlete</h2>



In the opening to <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Stumped-Maureen-Beck/dp/B07BHFJWFB" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Stumped</a>, a documentary about Beck’s ascent of <a href="https://www.summitpost.org/days-of-future-passed-5-10r-4-pitches/1009703" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Days of Future Passed</a>, a climb rated as 5.12 (the stage at which <a href="https://www.rei.com/learn/expert-advice/climbing-bouldering-rating.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">good climbers become great</a>), Beck attempts to look serious as she explains why she has only one hand (her left arm ends at her forearm). “Someone took the guard off the wood chipper,” she says, nodding solemnly. 



But she can’t maintain the ruse. She grins as she launches into a series of explanations, each more absurd than the last—meeting an alligator at a petting zoo and waving goodbye to a helicopter pilot among them.



<figure class="wp-block-image size-large"><img src="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/MoBeck-1024x682.png" alt="Maureen Beck, a competitive paraclimbing athlete" class="wp-image-59621"/></figure>



The truth is, she was born that way. When she was a young girl, slights real and imagined drove her. She traces her beginning in rock climbing to a guide at a camp suggesting she sit out that activity. That pissed her off. Soon she was shimmying up every crag in Maine. She climbed passionately while in college, then set it aside somewhat to pursue a “normal” career.



That bored her. She moved to Colorado in 2012 and dived into the climbing scene there. Beck started working with Paradox sports as an instructor for adaptive athletes and entering paraclimbing competitions. <a href="http://www.moinmountains.com/about-mo" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">She has won</a> nine national titles and two gold medals at international competitions.



<h3>Many praise her, but she feels the adulation is misplaced.</h3>



With her growing presence in the climbing community has come adulation, much of it misplaced, she says. She feels “icky” when fans laud her for being inspiring because she is a one-handed rock climber. Being a one-handed rock climber does not make her inspiring, she says, it just makes her active, and simply being active is not inspiring. “Who wants to live their life on the couch?” she asks.



If she does something inspiring—such as when she climbed Days of Future Passed—she will accept the praise, though perhaps grudgingly. To get to the top of Days of Future Passed, she returned to it roughly 20 times over five months and climbed it three to 15 times per visit. She fell at the same point (<a href="https://rappellingequipment.com/what-is-crux-in-climbing/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">called a crux</a>) over and over again. When she finally reached the top, she looked half stunned, half relieved. She was sick of that wall and glad to be done with it.



I tried to ask <a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/7-daily-habits-to-build-your-resilience/">about the resilience</a> necessary <a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/4-ways-to-build-grit-when-you-need-it-most/">to keep trying</a> after failing more than 60 times. She brushed off the question. “That gives me way too much credit for having intent,” she says. “Maybe that’s what it is. Or I’m just too dumb to quit.”



<h2>For Maureen Beck, it’s about balance</h2>



Even now, with years of experience, Beck still has to convince her “monkey brain,” as she calls the intrinsic desire to stay alive, to climb.&nbsp;



She keeps two ideas in tension. One is that the best climbing stories are about difficult and challenging pitches. Stumped would not have been worth watching (or making) if she climbed Days of Future Passed on the first try. The other is that an obsession with a can-do attitude can be mentally and emotionally toxic, to say nothing of being physically dangerous.&nbsp;



Her rational brain tells her the ropes, carabiners and belay system are safe. Her monkey brain tells her that falling will hurt—maybe a lot—and why do we want to do this, anyway? “From the bottom, they all look scary,” she says.



This article originally appeared in the March/April 2021 <a href="https://store.success.com/by-media/success-magazine-mar-apr-2021-daymond-john.html">issue of SUCCESS magazine</a> and has been updated. Photos by © Daniel Gajda.

For Maureen Beck, climbing and solopreneur life are about finding balance. That means pushing herself and living to tell about it.

For Maureen Beck, climbing and solopreneur life are about finding balance. That means pushing herself and living to tell about it. | SUCCESS

Adventure Climber Mo Beck Doesn’t Believe in Excuses

Climber Maureen Beck Doesn't Believe in Excuses | SUCCESS

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I woke up early one morning last summer to turn in a story. I was camping in a trailer in rural Wisconsin, and I intended to connect my laptop to the internet by using my phone as a hot spot. But my phone had no service. No phone, no hot spot, no way to turn in the story.



“Turn in the story” is the single most important task I have as a freelance journalist. If I can’t turn in stories, my business ceases to exist, which made this a problem I needed to solve, immediately.



As my wife and kids slept, I exited the trailer and paced a rut in the dirt as I thought through solutions. I could drive to a local coffee shop and file from there. For that, I’d have to wait more than an hour for it to open. Until then, I decided I might as well take a walk and hope I found cell service. I was pretty sure I was in one of those very small, unpredictable and massively annoying blank spots in coverage. How small, I soon found out. I walked with my phone in my right hand and my laptop in my left. After 60 steps, the phone found coverage, the hot spot fired up and the internet on my laptop sprang to life.



I froze, worried if I took one more step I’d lose coverage again. I found out later I was right. But for now, I had full connectivity. I sat on the gravel road and crafted an email. I heard the pitter-patter of woodland creatures hustling across the forest floor. Somewhere in the distance, a woodpecker hammered its face into a tree. I grinned at this unique setting, attached the story and hit send.



It sounds funny now, but it was a pain in my gravel-covered butt then—not so much because I had to take 60 steps to file a story, but because the lack of connectivity in the trailer meant my wife and I wouldn’t be able to work.



We had planned an eight-day jaunt to Wisconsin and Michigan as a “bleisure trip”—a way to mix work and fun. I planned to write. She’s a lawyer and planned to spend several hours each day researching and writing in the RV and the rest of the time with me and our kids hiking and kayaking and taste-testing gelato across Door County, Wisconsin.



Our best-laid plans fizzled out on the first morning, and the lack of connectivity turned out to be only the beginning of our “troubles.” In Crossman family lore, this eight-day bleisure trip will go down as The Vacation of Whiplash.



I’ll get to that in a second. First, I need to answer a question you’re surely asking: What in the hell is <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/blakemorgan/2022/06/27/what-is-bleisure-travel-and-how-is-it-transforming-the-hospitality-industry/?sh=e66ce9d72315" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">a bleisure trip</a>?



Bleisure is a made-up word smushing together business and leisure. Now that we’re in the middle of this trend, it seems inevitable: More and more people are realizing working remotely gives them the freedom to <a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/digital-nomad-what-you-need-to-know/">work wherever they want</a>, whether it’s their office, <a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/the-new-normal-finding-routine-and-perspective-in-coffee-shops/">a coffee shop</a> at the bottom of a ski slope or a gravel road in Wisconsin.



Think of it like becoming a short-term digital nomad—you adopt a more “YOLO” way of living and working, while retaining the comforts of a home to return to. This is #VanLife for people who don’t want to <a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/tips-for-a-successful-life-on-the-go/">spend their whole lives</a> on the road… yet.



Bleisure trips have been growing since the pandemic, while business travel has simultaneously decreased. In its <a href="https://www2.deloitte.com/content/dam/Deloitte/us/Documents/consumer-business/us-2022-travel-outlook.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">2022 travel outlook</a>, Deloitte said it expects both trends to continue: “They should be treated as new but lasting components of travel’s structural reality.”



I used two apps to make our bleisure trip to Wisconsin easier to arrange. One is called Outdoorsy, through which you can rent someone’s camper, trailer, motor home, etc. (Outdoorsy comped my RV alongside the gravel road in Wisconsin and another at an alpaca farm in Michigan.) The other is Harvest Hosts, a membership-based network of unique campsites such as museums, wineries, farms, etc. I paid a yearly fee and now can camp at more than 4,000 locations for free. That number is nearly quadruple what it was when I first discovered the app in mid-2020 (1,046).



Jennifer Young, co-founder and CMO of Outdoorsy, said reservations slowed to zero at the beginning of the pandemic and exploded as the world reopened. Their reservations grew for many reasons. The emergence of bleisure trips is one of them, as more people recognize RV travel as a way to take advantage of <a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/you-can-now-find-community-abroad-in-thanks-to-digital-nomad-villages/">the freedom of remote work</a> while also exploring the outdoors. “What we’re seeing is a more blended approach for how they might relocate for a month at a time or plan their life on the road and figure out how they work in that period of time,” Young says.



I’ve been taking bleisure trips since before the word existed, including to Columbus, Ohio (twice); Branson, Missouri (also twice); Des Moines, Iowa; Colorado; and Michigan (many times). All of those trips went fine, many of them went great.



Our trip to Wisconsin did not.



We kept laughing: Every time we left the trailer to explore Door County, we had a blast—kayaking in Lake Michigan, skipping rocks in it, hiking alongside it, visiting a lighthouse on its banks—and every time we returned to the trailer, something went wrong.



In addition to the internet problems, water backed up into the shower (my fault; it’s easy to drain, but I didn’t check the level). I shattered the glass cover on a stove (my fault again; I didn’t know I was supposed to lift the cover before I turned on the stove, and the glass exploded because of the heat). And a dog pissed on my backpack.



Right in front of me!



He just lifted his leg and let loose!



I’m just relieved I wasn’t wearing it at the time.



One morning, I exited the trailer to go for a “problem-solving” run along an isolated road lined by green fields. I planned to spend that time thinking through what to tell you about The Vacation of Whiplash. How would I write about the challenges of bleisure trips without understating them and making it seem easy—or overstating them and talking you out of trying it? As I worked to solve that problem, a greater truth about bleisure trips revealed itself.



My feet pounded the soft grass as I noodled on a paragraph that started like this: You’ll have the same problems as you would during a regular workday or a regular vacation, and <a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/4-ways-to-turn-obstacles-into-opportunities/">it’s how you overcome them</a> that determines how…



A fluff of brown movement grabbed my attention. I stopped running, looked to my right and watched four deer play their version of leapfrog. I’ve seen thousands of deer, but I’ve never seen them do that. By the time they scampered into the forest, I had forgotten about the internet, the shower, the dog.



Anyway, what was I talking about before I got distracted? Oh, yeah: Problems are inevitable on bleisure trips. Your phone won’t work, the museum will be closed, traffic jams will make you miss your reservations.



But magic and inspiration will arise when you least expect them, too. Young made a stirring case for toggling between a recreational adventure life and work life, and that the former will make the latter better, even if—especially if—a dog pisses on your backpack.



“You’re really leveling up your life, because you’re realizing the benefits that Mother Nature affords you that there’s no way any office—whether it’s your home office or work office—could ever provide,” Young says. “Your productivity is better, your anxiety is low, you’re inspired by life. You’re grateful for the opportunity to be able to flex a little bit in and out of it. Not to mention the cumulative benefits of just being more active.”



My family treasures these Whiplash memories; even as they were annoying us, we knew they made the trip special in a way it wouldn’t be without them.



If given a choice, I’d rather file a story sitting on my butt on a gravel road then sitting at my desk in my home office. Having said that, if a dog never pissed on my backpack again, I’d be good with it.&nbsp;



This article originally appeared in the January/February 2023 Issue of SUCCESS magazine.

In Crossman family lore, this eight-day bleisure trip will go down as The Vacation of Whiplash.

In Crossman family lore, this eight-day bleisure trip will go down as The Vacation of Whiplash. | SUCCESS

At Least There’s Adventure

At Least There’s Adventure | SUCCESS

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3 Tips for Solopreneurs to Stay Ahead in a Constantly Changing World

Sodan Selva was on the fast track early in his career. He went to grad school, studied economic development and landed a job in investment banking.



But his dream wasn’t to be an investment banker. His dream, from the time he was 9, was to be a musician. So he saved up his money as an investment banker, then quit his job and struck out on his own. It’s the stuff legends are made of—the young and passionate dreamer turning his back on the cushy and safe but also stuffy and boring desk job to <a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/be-loud-and-be-proud-luvvie-ajayi-jones-on-forging-your-own-path-and-owning-your-successes/">carve his own path</a>, to follow the road less traveled, to chase the muse that had grown in his heart since he was a young boy.&nbsp;&nbsp;



Two decades later, Selva’s analysis of this first bold move of his career is succinct: “That was my first majorly failed entrepreneurial adventure. It was all passion, no product market fit.”



The problem was not the music he made; he and his bandmates were talented. The problem was not effort or ignorance. He applied techniques any solopreneur would recognize: He diligently worked the system the way it’s supposed to be worked, meeting with music executives during the day and playing clubs at night. The problem, he says, was the market wouldn’t buy what he was selling: At that time and place, the market did not want music from a pop jazz funk band fronted by a South Asian man. (He’s Sri Lankan.)



“The business model needs to work, the channels need to be there. At that time, even if 1,000 people like you, there’s no model. If 10,000 people like you, there’s no model. You need to sell out stadiums,” he says. “In today’s world, it would have found its audience. The miss was, the market’s got to be ready.”



He calls his music sojourn “accidental brilliance,” because even though he failed, he failed at the right time, in the right place and in front of the right people. “At that time, I was devastated,” he says. “It took me three months to get out of this funk. But the dots do connect. I look back and say, ‘That was the most pivotal decision I made in my life.’”



After a stint in the corporate world, Selva became an entrepreneur (again!), teacher and coach. His latest venture is called<a href="https://movementmaker.io/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener"> Movement Makers</a>, through which he teaches “business leaders and operators to immediately set the foundations to ‘escape the competition’ through repeatable techniques, as well as transform themselves to lead during uncertain times.”



Through Movement Makers and his book<a href="https://amzn.to/3nuW3T1" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener"> When Followers Become Leaders: Re-wiring Established and Non-Tech Companies in An Age of Accelerating Disruption</a>, he shares lessons learned in his music venture and other more conventional (and also equally formative) entrepreneurial efforts.



The joy of hard-earned lessons like the ones he learned is applying what you learned to become a better version of yourself. After failing as a musician, Selva leveraged the relationships he had built in that space to become a music executive. He arrived in that industry as it went through a massive reconstruction based on the rise of digital music. Later he worked as a Disney executive, where he learned about maintaining a singular focus from chairman Bob Iger.



“You’ve got to<a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/why-you-need-clarity-to-achieve-your-goals/"> be super clear</a> on what you’re trying to solve and not waver based on all the feeds that are coming into your face,” Selva said in an interview. “You’ve got to know who you are personally and who you have around you as a team and what you need to meet that problem. And somewhere deep inside, there needs to be an imprint that says, as hard as this is, this is my journey.”



For solopreneurs wrestling with their journeys, he offers several tips:



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-1-following-the-herd-is-one-of-the-worst-things-you-can-do">1. Following the herd is one of the worst things you can do.</h2>



But everybody is doing it. Why? Because one of our primary motivators is fear. “Fear is good when you’re running away from a lion and jump up into a tree,” he says. “But playing your long game on fear doesn’t necessarily lead to good things.”



Selva foresees the need for companies to “weave repeatable transformation into (their) DNA.” Companies need to be “revolutionary, not incremental and slowly evolutionary,” he writes.



Many companies had to be dragged into the digital revolution in the late 1990s, and they are still making decisions as if the revolution is still going on instead of complete. The old way of doing things won’t fix new problems. The result, in part, is a drastic reduction in companies’ staying power. According to <a href="https://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/McKinsey/Industries/Electric%20Power%20and%20Natural%20Gas/Our%20Insights/Traditional%20company%20new%20businesses%20The%20pairing%20that%20can%20ensure%20an%20incumbents%20survival/Traditional-company-new-businesses-VF.ashx" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">a 2019 McKinsey report</a>, “In the late 1970s, the organizations in the S&amp;P 500 index had been on that list for an average of approximately 35 years. [In 2018], the average tenure is closer to 20 years.”



Solopreneurs face similar challenges <a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/fighting-above-your-companys-weight-class/">to stay on top</a>. Instead of a “follow the herd” mentality, Selva advocates a “black swan offense” approach to reinvention. Black swan refers to events that are a surprise, make a huge impact and are unpredictable. He cites as examples Disney’s move from animated movies to theme parks and Apple’s move into consumer electronics and entertainment ecosystems.



He started his Movement Makers program and wrote When Followers Become Leaders to help people find black swans—seemingly “invisible” <a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/how-to-spot-a-business-opportunity/">openings in the marketplace</a> that become visible once they are tapped.



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-2-get-self-awareness">2. Get self-awareness.</h2>



“If you’re not self-aware, then you’re programmed by everything around you. If you’re programmed by everything around you, you can’t see clearly. Once you <a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/why-self-awareness-is-important-and-how-to-develop-it/">get that self-awareness</a>, ask yourself, ‘What’s my wiring?’” says Selva. By that, he means solopreneurs should figure out the best combination of what they love and what the market needs.



“How do you get paid in the world?” he says. “You get paid because you bring value to people. What are the ways that I can bring value to people, and how do I experiment with that in a way that I learn more and more about how I can apply it?”



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-3-incredible-idealism-has-to-be-coupled-with-tenacious-pragmatism">3. Incredible idealism has to be coupled with tenacious pragmatism.</h2>



All the passion in the world isn’t going to sell a product with no market. And if you have a great product with a built-in market demand but no love for what you’re doing, you’ll burn out.



“Everything is appropriate to time and place,” he says. When he launched—or tried to launch—his music career, he was in his 20s and had plenty of money in the bank and few of the burdens of responsibility of adulthood. Not only did he see himself as having nothing to lose, that which he could lose he had assigned to that very purpose, so he wasn’t really losing it. As he puts it, “What was I going to do with all those banking bonuses?”



If he did that now, in his 40s and married with two daughters, “That is the most colossally stupid thing I [could] do. There’s a way to experiment at my age. I’m not in my 20s anymore. There’s a very pragmatic way to do that while still meeting your mission,” Selva says.



This article was published in November 2020 and has been updated. Photo by MesquitaFMS/IStock

Sodan Selva, the founder of Movement Makers, on music, black swans and advice for solopreneurs wrestling with their journeys

Sodan Selva, the founder of Movement Makers, on music, black swans and advice for solopreneurs wrestling with their journeys | SUCCESS

Stay Ahead: 3 Tips for Solopreneurs in a Changing World

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<h2 id="h-day-1">Day 1</h2>



The two emails come before noon on a Monday. One confirms interest in a story I’ll write about a trip to North Dakota. The other offers me an unsolicited assignment to write about the relationships that formed after a retired soldier suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder sent his Purple Heart to a NASCAR driver.



Sold in 2 hours, 14 minutes, those two deals represent more than half a month’s typical pay for a freelance writer like me. After I tell my editor at SUCCESS about the great morning, he wonders what my best month ever was. He asks if I want to use today as a springboard to try to beat it and write about the ups and downs along the way.



The most lucrative month of my solopreneur career was September 2015. I made $14,772. I haven’t come within sniffing distance of that since. I look at my story idea list and tumbleweeds blow by. I don’t see a path to reaching my big goal of $14,772.01.



I tell the editor I accept his challenge anyway.



<h2 id="h-day-2">Day 2</h2>



It’s 4:40 a.m., and I can’t sleep. I’m going to fail, which I don’t mind so much, but I do mind that I’ll fail doing something I hate. I feel like I agreed to go to the dentist every day for a month. I love writing stories, but I hate selling them.



<hr class="wp-block-separator"/>



“To have my best month ever, I have to see myself not as the helpless man on a wire but as the pilot.”



<hr class="wp-block-separator"/>



Wait. Scratch that. I love selling. I hate trying to sell.



I vow that I will not work 80 hours a week or pitch 600 stories. I don’t want to do those things long term, so I won’t do them short term. I want whatever success I find pursuing my goal this month to be repeatable. I want to still be me, only better. The only way to $14,772.01 is to force myself to be intentional, to swallow doubts, to take chances I don’t normally take and to break rules I normally follow.



I open my story <a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/the-case-for-brainstorming/">ideas list and brainstorm</a>.



<h2 id="h-day-3">Day 3</h2>



I call Pat, a salesman friend who has been an invaluable mentor to me. I tell him about this quest, and he tells me to use it to fill my pipeline, a variation of advice he has given me 57 billion times.



When he uses the word pipeline, I think of the movie Air Force One. At the end, Harrison Ford (playing the president) dangles from a metal cord behind a jet as it flies through the air. He has no control as wind and the speed of the plane throw him across the sky. That’s how I often feel as a solopreneur—connected, but prone to the forces around me.



To have my best month ever, I have to see myself not as the helpless man on a wire but as the pilot.



Like a pilot, I look to the distance. It’s only April, but I think about when my pipeline always runs empty—from mid-December to mid-January. What could I write then? The answer: A story for a baseball season preview magazine for which I have written occasionally. I had an idea last year, but the pitch deadline was far away, I had other stuff to do and I put it off. When I finally got around to pitching, it was too late.



I won’t repeat that mistake. I send the pitch. Whether the editor buys the story is almost beside the point. The intentionality is the point. That thought hits me like a thunderclap, the first of three I’ll have over these 30 days: Intentional selling gives me control.



<h2 id="h-day-8">Day 8</h2>



So far, so good. No answer on the baseball story yet, but I agree to terms on four others. I had two of them all but sold and a third was an apple waiting to be picked. In the spirit of intentionality, I <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbescommunicationscouncil/2021/03/04/12-best-kept-email-writing-secrets-of-communication-pros/?sh=56788886658e" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">wrote direct and purposeful emails</a> to finalize them. At $11,500 already, I start to think this could happen easily, and I wonder how much further I can push my milestone.



<h2 id="h-day-17">Day 17</h2>



I don’t know what the heck is going on right now, but everybody is saying yes to everything. Three days in a row I sold stories worth $2,000 each, including the baseball story. <a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/3-tips-to-sell-like-a-pro/">To sell each</a>, I broke or bent rules I normally follow.



A piece I sold about a Green Beret who was shot four times in Afghanistan, spent three years recovering and discovered that driving his Porsche on racetracks helps with his PTSD deserves attention. The sale violated three guidelines I typically follow:



<ol><li>Except in rare circumstances, <a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/how-to-get-a-yes-to-your-next-sales-pitch/">pitching new clients</a> is rarely worth the effort. A decent idea with an established client is better than a great idea with an unknown client.</li><li>Don’t pitch the same client more than one story at a time. Two “yes”s is unlikely, and it’s better to save the second idea for later. This is especially true for a new client.</li><li>Don’t pitch more than one publication the same idea at the same time. The first publication acknowledged receipt of the pitch but never expressed interest in it. After two weeks, I sold it to someone else. An hour after I closed that deal, the first editor said he wanted to buy it. I had long worried this scenario would make me look foolish. Instead it showed my work was desired. That editor told me to keep pitching him because he wanted to work with me.</li></ol>



The sale of the Green Beret story pushes me to $17,800—well past my goal. I decide that counting the two stories that prompted my goal plus the one you are reading made things too easy. So I add the total from those three to my previous high-water mark and come up with a new goal: $20,272.01. Eighteen days ago, I would have laughed at this as impossible.



Today I think, why not?



<h2 id="h-day-24">Day 24</h2>



I’m playing with house money, so I will try anything, even addressing <a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/why-you-should-face-your-fears/">one of my biggest fears</a> about sales: Being seen as too annoying, too aggressive or maybe even desperate.



I have lunch once a month with my friend Matt, a salesman who has been crushing it lately. He tells me about tactics he uses that I never would. He showed me a picture he sends to clients who cut off communication. It’s of a man and woman holding a giant log against a door to knock it in. The text says, “I know you’re in there.”



I would never send that, not even now. When I ask him where the line is between aggressive and annoying, he responds like he has been waiting for me to ask. “Don’t think of it as annoying,” he says. “We call it ‘professional persistence,’ and there’s a big difference.”



This is thunderclap No. 2. I’m aggressive as a reporter, and I should be at least as aggressive trying to sell stories as I am reporting them. For reasons I can’t explain, I have long considered selling a story and creating a story as separate. Now I’m moving toward a more holistic approach.



I concoct a way to apply Matt’s prodding. I’ve often wanted for clients to put me on contract—X amount of stories per year for X amount of dollars. Nobody has agreed to do so, so I stopped asking. Would a client meet me halfway—agree to give me another assignment without knowing what that assignment is?



Prior to this month, I would have chickened out on the idea for fear of being told no. Now I’m excited about the possibility of a yes.



The target client is Southwest Airlines’ employee magazine. Southwest became the largest carrier in America by embracing bold ideas, which I reference in my proposal. Odd outcome: Southwest said no, but another client commits to an unknown next assignment without me even asking.



<div class="wp-block-image"><figure class="aligncenter"><img src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/GhGMhL5YEafegZDgZFUe4VmZFBmgqRqtg_KdSRnVR1iYZkrmFHDCGNocp_wvv9dCMBLbJkhrytF5uCQRfuZ5SPIBi9RVKjQE1d-VLfid1Kdi4LCfrZgnZz1CSrQ9-obAiIUqRfrTQ82nzVB1tdTAQ3A" alt="Best Month Ever Side Bar" title="The Best Month Ever"/></figure></div>



<hr class="wp-block-separator"/>



<h2 id="h-day-25">Day 25</h2>



It’s 4:22 a.m., and I can’t sleep again, albeit for a good reason: I’ve been running through the different sales techniques I’ve tried and all the others I haven’t had a chance to try yet.



I never thought I’d say this, but this is fun. Whether I will sustain that attitude beyond this month, I can’t say. For six years, I have viewed trying to sell as an unhappy consequence of being in the Gig Economy. Now I see it as <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesbusinesscouncil/2020/08/31/the-art-of-selling-yourself-six-ways-to-maximize-sales-with-ease/?sh=498cb6ee4d9f" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">a skill to be mastered</a>.



I’m at $20,100. One more story will push me past the new goal.



<h2 id="h-day-30">Day 30</h2>



Oh, gosh. I can’t believe I’m going to tell this part.



“Avoid distractions” is not on the list of changes that occurred to me this month. It probably should be, but ideas often come to me when I’m distracting myself. Last week, I surfed around to see if there was anything new about my favorite band, Rush. It was an incredible waste of time—they broke up a year ago, so there’s still no news to be had.



I stumbled across Rush Camp, a weekend at a resort in Pennsylvania for fans to get together to talk about how much they love the great philosophers from the great white north—Geddy Lee, Alex Lifeson and Neil Peart.



I felt like a bear finding out about Honey Camp. I started daydreaming about going to Rush Camp and writing a story. I’m a sucker for a good subculture story, and I know an editor who is looking for something like this. But it’s far easier to pitch a subculture I am an observer of rather than a member, in the same way I can say whatever I want about my family but you can’t.



Before I could type the first sentence of a pitch, doubt kicked in—real, legitimate, 1,000-pound-weight-on-my-chest doubt. My No. 1 inviolate rule for pitching is “don’t pitch anything that makes me look like a fool.” And “send me to Rush Camp” sounds… well, it sounds ridiculous. I can’t pitch that can I?



Last year, I wanted to write about falconry. I crafted a pitch, worried I’d look foolish pitching it, and wavered on sending it. When I finally did, the editor said he had just commissioned someone else to write about falconry. Later, another publication I thought about pitching but didn’t ran a story about falconry, too.



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“This became thunderclap No.3: I am no longer afraid of hearing the word no.”



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Early in this month-long process, I called Michael Robert Moore, my coach when I first became a solopreneur, to ask for advice. He suggested the next time I had a falconry-esque idea that I use my misgivings in the pitch. I didn’t want to. “Don’t give editors a reason to say no, they’ll come up with enough on their own,” is another of my “rules.”



But this has all been about doing things differently. I sent my target editor a borderline unnecessary email so I could (casually) mention I had a nerdy pitch. Her response: “Ha! I like nerdy pitches. Bring it on.”



I ventured as far <a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/3-tips-for-learning-to-sell-beyond-your-comfort-zone/">outside my comfort zone</a> as I’ve ever been with that pitch. I was proud that I swallowed multiple reasons against sending it and embraced the singular reason in its favor—the editor might say yes. This became thunderclap No. 3: I am no longer afraid of hearing the word no.



That alone would make this whole ordeal a success.



A few days went by with no response. I assumed the editor hated Rush (concerts are 99% men) and thought the idea was so foolish she was going to revoke the other assignments I owed her.



Finally she responds. Not only does she buy the pitch, she hints it might be worth twice as much as I was hoping. We agree to revisit the fee after I attend Rush Camp and set a “placeholder” price at $500 more than what I hoped for.



The agreement comes on the last day, two hours before the deadline. It pushes my total to $22,600. Even if I take out the running start—the two stories on Day 1 that prompted the quest, plus the fee for this story—I still set a new personal record. My longtime friends will think it’s absolutely hilarious that Rush Camp pushed me over the edge.



I started the quest for my Best Month Ever with low expectations. I thought I’d have a good month and learn new tricks. I wasn’t expecting to have my entire worldview of selling blown up. I had no idea how much I held to rules that now seem contrived at best and counterproductive at worst. I had no idea how liberating ignoring those rules would be.



And here’s the weird thing: I will never break any of them again.



Because they aren’t my rules anymore.



<div class="wp-block-image"><figure class="aligncenter"><img src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/7YUV0phG4XozfziHlDcy5EPi0rQ5viZA9_gkmxeordAZZh5SZlk7GqQeVrRACGONM8W9uOZ_gKKTkKd-KvbHTHg1er5VCImNkkcBCCbMIwdgcCiG7KcS4Ckyv67aEsvKbHlaKmgCLhs8wGF0XIsFl2E" alt="" title="The Best Month Ever"/></figure></div>



This article originally appeared in the <a href="https://store.success.com/shop-all/success-magazine-sept-oct-2019-kathy-ireland.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">September/October 2019 issue of SUCCESS magazine</a> and has been updated. Photo by mavo/Shutterstock &nbsp;

Can a freelancer simply will his way to record sales and profits? Our writer sets a goal to push the limits and gains a new perspective on selling.

The most lucrative month of my solopreneur career was September 2015. I made $14,772. I haven’t come within sniffing distance of that since. I look at my story idea list and tumbleweeds blow by. I don’t see a path to reaching my big goal of $14,772.01. | SUCCESS

The Quest for My Best Sales Month Ever

The Quest for My Best Sales Month Ever | SUCCESS

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The handwritten check arrived in a plain envelope. I signed and deposited it right away. Normally I would have then shredded it. But not this one. I’m saving this one.



It’s from my friend Fred “Honey Pot” Williams, a 61-year-old gastroenterologist and beekeeper, and it’s the first revenue from a side hustle I started with another friend, the first check I’ve gotten since graduating college for producing anything other than words. It feels like the first check of the rest of my life.



That’s certainly an overstatement. But I’m excited to stretch out into something new and for conceiving, planning and executing the first product: an adventure I dreamed up called 50-50-50 in which Honey Pot, eight others and I hiked 50 miles, biked 50 miles and canoed 50 miles, all in one five-day weekend. The 50s were a hook to celebrate my 50th birthday and just happened to form a great marketing shtick for an adventure trip.&nbsp;



I’ve had a thousand half-baked side hustle ideas; this is the first one I’ve allowed to cook until it was edible. The difference between all those half-baked ideas and this delicious one is simple: passion. I wanted, needed, had to try this one.&nbsp;



Life’s too short to pursue things you don’t love. If you’ve got that idea—that challenging, exciting, can’t-get-it-out-of-your-head-idea—I urge you to stop thinking about it, stop daydreaming about it, and <a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/3-steps-to-take-before-you-turn-your-side-hustle-into-a-full-time-business/">start doing it</a>.&nbsp;



Maybe you can learn from my journey. Here’s how it went.



<div class="wp-block-image"><figure class="aligncenter size-full"><img src="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/505050-WEB-3.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-62999"/></figure></div>



<h2 id="h-121-days-to-launch-an-idea-starts-to-form">121 Days to Launch: An idea starts to form.</h2>



This side hustle was borne of a cup of coffee. I drank it in the Linville Gorge alongside the Linville River in North Carolina. Although it was “just” an instant cup of coffee, it tasted like a magical elixir. The setting made it taste better—the Linville Gorge is one of my favorite places on Earth. So did the friends with me—Ryan and Andy and I have chased adventure all over the country together.



I have spent much of my adult life pursuing moments like we shared as I drank that coffee. Relationships like that can be formed in any number of ways; it could be over books or wine or musicals. Mine happen to come via adventure with friends. I could tell a dozen other priceless stories like the one about that morning from a dozen other trips with a dozen other friends.&nbsp;



In the past few years, I’ve organized three 250-mile bike rides, four paddling and/or fishing trips, a half dozen camping trips, and more besides. My life is better, and I humbly submit that my friends’ lives are better, because of the bonds we have formed on those trips. Taken as a whole, they have made us stronger physically, mentally and emotionally.&nbsp;



On the day I get back from one of those bike rides, I conclude I want to share what I get out of these trips with a larger group of friends. Take that three-person trip to the Linville Gorge that yielded the coffee. What if there had been, say, 10 people there?&nbsp;



I have enough adventure-minded friends to fill that many spots. But to organize a trip for that many people would take time, which, frankly, I can’t afford to spend. What if I made the trips slightly professional, made all the reservations, cooked/bought the food, etc., and charged a nominal fee for the effort?



The value proposition is simple: The customers get an all-inclusive adventure vacation with their friends. So do I, and I get a little scratch on the side for the time it takes me to organize everything.



I throw the idea at a few friends who have been on the trips with me. They all like it and encourage me to pursue it. I talk to friends in the travel industry. They encourage me, too.



The idea grows from a daydream into a goal. But there it sits, unpursued. I lack the necessary detail-oriented skills to turn it into a reality. I have a long history of coming up with ideas like “let’s celebrate my 50th birthday by hiking 50 miles, biking 50 miles and canoeing 50 miles.” I often convince people to go with me.&nbsp;



But there’s a big difference between that and having a budget, a packing list and an hour-by-hour breakdown of where we will be in the course of such a trip, all of which I need to make it <a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/5-questions-to-help-turn-your-passion-into-profit/">executable as a side hustle</a>.&nbsp;



Because of my inability to manage such finer points, the side hustle seems doomed to die unconsummated.



<h2>97 Days to Launch: When passion meets opportunity.</h2>



Have you ever had one of those light bulb moments where a solution to a problem pops into your head, and it’s so obvious, you wonder, why didn’t I think of this before? That happens today.



Of those trips I mentioned above, my friend John Urhahn has been with me and helped me plan all but two of them. Broadly speaking, I concocted the ideas and he figured out how to make them happen.&nbsp;



Of course he should be my partner. I send him a text. He says he has also daydreamed about the same basic idea. A few hours later, we agree to be partners and that our first trip will be 50-50-50.&nbsp;



We have passion, customers and an idea for a product they will love.



Now comes the hard part: <a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/side-hustles-simplified-from-idea-to-profit/">making it happen</a>.



<h2>88 Days to Launch: Vision over details.</h2>



I wake up at 2:30 a.m. with my brain whirring with ideas and excitement. I barely get back to sleep. The next day, John tells me he had a dream about being on one of our trips and setting up tents in tall prairie grass.



It’s worth noting that none of our excitement focuses on important details such as LLC or corporate structure or insurance. All we talk about is the trips we will plan, and how those trips will change our friends’ lives. Right now, vision is more important than finer points.&nbsp;



<div class="wp-block-image"><figure class="aligncenter size-full"><img src="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/505050-WEB-2.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-63000"/></figure></div>



<h2>87 Days to Launch: Make room for it.</h2>



<a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/14-effective-ways-to-make-time-for-your-side-gig/">To find time for this</a> in my schedule, I shed some responsibility. I have wanted to revamp my social media plan for years. Now with 50-50-50 requiring hours of work, I hire Chris Iott, a social media solopreneur who was the best man at my wedding, to manage my accounts for me.



<h2>85 Days to Launch: At some point, you just have to go.&nbsp;</h2>



I’ve learned over the years that if I wait until everything is perfect to try something new, I’ll never do it. I apply that now. With three months until the dates we chose for the trip, we are mostly, but not entirely, ready to announce this. John has worked tirelessly to draw up an itinerary; it’s close, but plenty of unknowns remain. We announce it anyway because our customers need lead time for the five-day trip.&nbsp;



Initial conversation to action took only 12 days. Considering my history of having ideas and not acting on them, I’m proud of that.&nbsp;



We have modest goals for the first trip. We hope to have eight to 10 paying customers and make enough to pay for both of us to go on the trip. I expect most or all of the customers for the first trip, maybe even the first couple trips, maybe even all the trips, to be friends or friends of friends.



<a href="https://www.inc.com/guides/price-your-products.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">To set the price</a>, we make assumptions about costs. In other words, we guess. Pro tip: It’s not a great idea to set a price for your product before you know how much it costs to make it. It all works out OK, but what we think it will cost changes about 100 times between now and the trip, and it keeps changing until after we return home, when we decide the trip was so great we have to buy T-shirts for everyone to commemorate it.



<h2>76 Days to Launch: Your product needs an identity; it will all but certainly evolve.</h2>



I went to an Indian restaurant a few years ago and I ordered, apparently, a plate of molten lava. I told an Indian friend I never wanted to eat there again, and he shrugged. He told me he considered that restaurant’s spice level to be mild, at worst. I think of that meal when I hear from potential customers who are intimidated by a trip that features 50 miles of hiking, 50 miles of biking and 50 miles of canoeing.&nbsp;



My response: It’s supposed to be intimidating. The point of doing this side hustle is the point of the 50-50-50 trip: John and I want customers to wonder if they can do it. We want them to aspire to it. We want fear of failure baked in.



This will likely be true to some degree for all of our trips. But I know already we will wrestle with balance. Neither John nor I want to organize cake-walk adventures. But we don’t want to build trips so hard we have an extremely small customer pool.&nbsp;



<h2>32 Days to Launch: By side hustle, I mean time-consuming hustle.</h2>



I graduated from college on a Saturday and started my new job on Monday covering a city council meeting. After it ended, I rushed to my office to work on my story. It took me 3 1/2 hours to write. Three years later, when I covered my final city council meeting, if it took me 3 1/2 hours to write the story, it was because I took a three-hour nap.



I tell this little story as much for me as for you. EVERYTHING in <a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/what-to-do-when-your-side-hustle-overtakes-your-day-job/">this side hustle takes FOREVER</a>. I have had to remind myself it won’t always be this way. I’ll learn efficiency by doing it, just like I learned to write more efficiently. But right now, every decision weighs 1,000 pounds and takes forever to make. Hotels, Airbnbs, canoes, routes, costs, what to feed them, what to give them to drink—it’s never-ending.&nbsp;



<h2>1 Day to Launch: “If it doesn’t challenge you, it doesn’t change you.”</h2>



I first heard that bromide from Julia Dujmovits, a gold-medal winning Austrian snowboarder I profiled for ESPN. I’ve been thinking about it through the last dash to get ready for the trip while still working my regular job.&nbsp;



We leave tomorrow. Finally. I have been pushed to my limits. It’s only been three months, but it feels much longer. In addition to physically training for the trip, I also sell two stories other than this one about it; cook a pot of spaghetti, three pots of chili and five breakfast casseroles; and make nine combined trips to Costco, grocery stores, 7-Eleven and sporting goods stores. I subcontract brownies to my 15-year-old daughter. I teach her not to negotiate against herself and shell out $20 to her. Meanwhile, John has drawn and redrawn our itinerary, packing list and various other pre-trip details so many times I’ve lost count.



My anxiety about whether we can pull it off and excitement to do so are marbled in a delicious stew.&nbsp;



<h2>7 Days After Launch: Know your why.</h2>



I saved this for last on purpose. The adventure ended in the wee hours of the morning two days ago. It was excellent, exhilarating, exhausting. I barely slept before, I barely slept during, and now days later I’m still recovering.&nbsp;



We learned a ton about what to do and, more importantly, what not to do. I know we got one thing right: <a href="https://www.inc.com/terence-mauri/how-the-best-entrepreneurs-find-power-in-their-purpose.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">We nailed our why</a>.&nbsp;



We sold time in a canoe, miles on a bike, hours on a trail, meals cooked on the side of a river, a cold beer after a long day. But those are not the product. They are the means to the product.&nbsp;



The product we really sold is strong relationships forged through shared transcendent experiences. We provided the foundation to build and strengthen friendships that yield moments like the one Andy, Ryan and I shared over that amazing cup of coffee.



In the days since our adventure ended, the text exchange among the 10 participants has hummed along unabated, with funny notes about our adventure, links to a podcast, a poem a participant wrote, and excited chatter about what our next trip should be.



This article originally appeared in the March/April 2022 Issue of SUCCESS magazine. Photo by Tõnu Tunnel/Stocksy United.

I’ve had a thousand half-baked side hustle ideas; this is the first one I’ve allowed to cook until it was edible. The difference between all those half-baked ideas and this delicious one is simple: passion. I wanted, needed, had to try this one. 

I’ve had a thousand half-baked side hustle ideas; this is the first one I’ve allowed to cook until it was edible. The difference between all those half-baked ideas and this delicious one is simple: passion. I wanted, needed, had to try this one.  | SUCCESS

Ready or Not: My Experience Launching a Side Hustle in 121 Days

Ready or Not: My Experience Launching a Side Hustle in 121 Days | SUCCESS

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5 Endurance Lessons for Succeeding at the Solopreneur Life

Future of Work

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The footprints in the snow stopped. I kept going. I could still see the trail just enough to be reasonably certain I would not get lost deep in Nevada’s Lamoille Canyon.



But I wasn’t 100% sure I was making the right decision by continuing the hike. This was not a place to slip and fall and crack my head on a rock. I was alone and miles and miles from civilization/cell service.&nbsp;



I had reached the edge of my comfort zone, maybe even exceeded it, and that was the point of this hike. It was part of my training for an adventure race, and I was working on getting comfortable being uncomfortable because I knew that was a necessary ability for the race.



A few hundred yards after the footprints stopped, I arrived at what I’ll call a footbridge but was really just pieces of wood strewn across a creek with big rocks to step on in gaps between the wood. Ice covered both the wood and rocks. If I attempted to cross and slipped into the icy water, I would risk frostbite. If I fell into the water, it would be much worse.&nbsp;



The mountains ahead of me, on the other side of the creek, called to me. But so did the mountains behind me, and I didn’t have to cross a dangerous creek to get to them. I turned around, hiked back to the parking lot and found another trail.



The hike was part of my preparation for the <a href="https://offroadracingleague.com/castlewood-8-hour-adventure-race/?doing_wp_cron=1639004691.5119171142578125000000">Castlewood 8-hour Adventure Race</a>, which comprises canoeing, orienteering/hiking/trail running, road biking, and mountain biking. Part of the challenge of the event is you don’t know where it will be, how long it will be, or because it’s outside in December in St. Louis, what the weather will be. I trained in the snow and ran several times in the rain to be ready for either… and it turned out to be an unseasonably warm and sun-kissed day.&nbsp;



The irony is that while the “endure the weather” part of my training turned out to be irrelevant, it still taught me an important lesson, one of many I learned from training for endurance events that will help you in your solopreneur life.



<h2 id="h-it-s-not-about-the-fitness-or-the-event-or-the-distance">It’s not about the fitness or the event or the distance.</h2>



“Fitness is almost like an accidental nicety,” says Taylor Thomas, the founder and head coach of Thomas Endurance Coaching and endurance athlete with two decades of experience. He’s passionate not just about his sport but how he and his clients apply what they learn from it in the rest of their lives. “It sets you up for success in all areas of your life, and it allows you to see, to gain clarity. It almost forces you to create time for yourself. That’s huge. We really struggle to do that in the modern world.”



Punit Dhillon is an athlete, entrepreneur and the author of Catapult, in which he writes about how executives can leverage athletic events to find success in business. He calls endurance races “personal-drive” or “self-drive” sports, and the connection between the motivation to compete in them and the motivation to be self-employed is obvious. “How often do you come across somebody that says they’re running a marathon for recreation?” he says. “There’s not really a recreational story attached to marathon running.”



The solopreneur life requires the same intentionality. “In order for anyone to succeed, they have to recognize the importance of endurance and discipline and have the confidence that it takes for anything that they want to put their mind to,” he says.&nbsp;



<h2>Training for events teaches the value of setting goals and drawing up and executing plans to reach them.</h2>



Following a training plan requires discipline and focus. “This is one of my tools for structure in many ways. It allows me to have that routine on a daily basis,” Dhillon says.



In preparing for a half IRONMAN, Dhillon followed “95-99%” of what his coach drew up for him, far more than usual. The result: He set a personal best in all three disciplines, beat his overall record by a whopping 40 minutes and cried at the finish line.



His next big fitness goal is a long trip across open ocean on a paddleboard, a daunting task he knows he can’t do without following a well-drawn out plan, which includes meeting qualifications crafted by organizers of the event.&nbsp;



“The same thing applies on work,” he says. “We’re setting all our objectives and milestones for the following year. There’s a clear set of milestones. There’s the budget, and then there’s the operational plan that follows that. Some of those things are lofty, some of those are stretch. Some of those are very clear to be able to get done, but if you don’t have a plan, then as the saying goes, you plan to fail.”



<h2>It teaches us about our weaknesses.</h2>



My prep for the adventure race lacked “specificity” in one area: I did not practice/train for the mountain-biking section. I don’t own a mountain bike and borrowed one for the race. I knew going in it would be my weak spot. I trained for the road-riding part of the event and hoped that would be good enough.



It was better than nothing. But my slowness bottlenecked the course as faster riders piled up behind me. I only crashed once, and it wasn’t painful, but as I picked myself up in front of other competitors, I was humbled, even a little embarrassed.



My struggles on the mountain bike helped me understand one of my biggest professional disappointments this year. It came when I applied for a freelance writing gig for a medical website. The editor gave me a “test” assignment with the assurance that many more assignments would follow if I passed it.&nbsp;



I worked hard on the test, and while it did not contain majestic prose—the topic was nasal irrigation, nobody can make copy about that sing—I was confident it was good enough.



It wasn’t. I failed the test. The editor refused to give me any assignments.&nbsp;



This wasn’t as public as my bike crash, but still, I was humbled and embarrassed in much the same way. I didn’t ask for an explanation (which I regret), but I see now a parallel between that struggle and my struggles on the mountain bike.&nbsp;



I know what I’m doing when I ride my bike on gravel and pavement. I know what I’m doing with narrative stories and essays. But just as my gravel and pavement experience didn’t translate perfectly to mountain biking, neither did my narrative and essay skills translate perfectly to what the medical website wanted.



The key, as Thomas put it, is “patience over time yields results,” and if I don’t exhibit patience or spend time honing skills, I should not expect results. “Any time we think about our goals, we want to try and understand the specificity, then ensure our process aligns with what’s needed to prepare, and also align our expectations with our process,” Thomas says.



<h2>Good habits in fitness lead to the same in work, and vice versa.</h2>



U.S. Army Major Jay Tiegs was exhausted, alone, drifting through a swarm of gnats so thick he pulled out a plastic bag, cut eye holes in it, and put it on his head. “I cried a little bit, and I had my talk with God—I'll do anything to get through this,” he says, with “this” being the MR 340, a kayak race that runs the length of the Missouri River across the state of Missouri.&nbsp;



The experience fit right in with his mantra/the name of his podcast: Do Hard Things. When he faces tough challenges, he reminds himself of those hours on the Missouri River… or any of the other dozens of challenging situations he has put himself in to build grit. He knows, if he endured the MR 340, he can endure whatever comes up at work. “If I just show up and do the work and push through this uncomfortable situation, if I can see it through, I’ll have success. And that’s enabled me to get through so many other things in my life.”



A team led by Tiegs, a high-performance coach and leadership speaker, finished one spot ahead of my team in the adventure race. We yo-yoed all day; they ran by us for good with 200 yards to go.



Says Thomas: “If you’re a high performer in one area of your life, you’re going to be a high performer in other areas of your life. And I’m not talking about whether you’re fast or slow or have specific types of fitness. If you carve out time for yourself to execute towards your fitness goals, that’s going to help you take more concerted steps in other areas of your life.”



The reverse is true, too. If you already have those attributes at work, they will translate into physical training.



<h2>You get to choose your own adventure.</h2>



Just as in your solopreneur life you get to choose (to a degree) what you work on, the same is true in your event life. “The sum total of the effort is what matters, so it’s not about a particular distance or disciplines,” Thomas says. “Do what’s going to keep you excited.”



I’m not going to enter a long run because I just don’t want to. I prefer group- and/or team-based <a href="https://expmag.com/2019/11/forget-trust-falls-i-got-team-building-lessons-from-special-forces-vets/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">endurance events </a>that <a href="https://hub.jhu.edu/magazine/2020/spring/honey-pot-williams-holistic-lifestyle/">have variety</a>. I enjoy <a href="https://www.deseret.com/2021/10/29/22751403/surviving-a-midlife-crisis-in-50-mile-increments-insomnia-losing-a-parent-covid-19">adventures</a> of my own design more than formal races and events, though I’m open to all of them.



When picking an event, find a balance between pushing yourself and being realistic. “Some of your greatest lessons come when you just kind of throw yourself in the arena and learn,” Tiegs says.



Think: scary but doable. “You don’t want it to be such a stretch goal that if you don’t reach that goal, it’s damaging to your athletic pursuits or your identity as an athlete,” Thomas says.



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote">Read next: <a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/why-you-need-to-pace-yourself/">Why You Need to Pace Yourself</a></blockquote>



Photo by Maridav / Shutterstock

The footprints in the snow stopped. I kept going. I could still see the trail just enough to be reasonably certain I would not get lost deep in Nevada’s

The footprints in the snow stopped. I kept going. I could still see the trail just enough to be reasonably certain I would not get lost deep in Nevada’s | SUCCESS

5 Endurance Lessons for Succeeding at the Solopreneur Life | SUCCESS

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Overwhelmed By Your Side Hustle To-Do List? We Asked the Experts to Weigh In

Success

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Success | SUCCESS | What Achievers Read

My head is about to explode.



In the past few weeks of my work as a <a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/5-lessons-i-learned-freelancing/">freelance writer</a>, I’ve penned a feature story about retired NASCAR driver Dale Earnhardt Jr., done a ton of research on wearable technology for my next piece, rode my bike 250 miles across Missouri for another project, overhauled my social media strategy, hired someone to manage it, and laid the groundwork to launch an entirely new part of my career.



My to-do list is so long I’m having a hard time keeping it all straight, staying focused, figuring out what to work on, when and for how long. It’s the natural reward of working hard to create a career as a solopreneur, and I don’t think I’m alone.



I imagine many other people working for themselves face this exact conundrum. It’s a good problem to have, or at the very least it’s better than having nothing to do. The first takeaway from this has to be learning to say no, of course. That’s a way to avoid the problem in the first place, and I’ll remember it the next time things start to get crazy.



For now, I’ve got to dig into this pile of work, make sense of what’s in front of me and formulate a plan of how to get it all done. I asked experts for help in how to keep my focus, make priorities and find order amid this chaos.



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Be intentional. </h2>



“It’s remarkable how long we spend working and how little time we spent choosing what to work on in the first place,” says Chris Bailey, author of three books on productivity and co-host of a podcast called Becoming Better. “What lies at the heart of <a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/13-best-productivity-apps/">productivity is intentionality</a>. Productivity is not about doing more and more and more, faster, faster, faster. It’s about doing the right things, deliberately, and with intention.”



Bailey builds intentionality using the rule of three. On a weekly and daily basis, he picks the three most important tasks he has to do and focuses on them. “You fast forward to the end of the day in your head. Ask yourself, By the time this day is done, what three main things will I want to accomplish?”



Perhaps the toughest part of deciding what to work on is deciding what not to work on. The other 10, 12 or 15 items on my to-do list will have to wait. “This really sharpens that focus and allows you to laser in on a few things,” Bailey says.



Focusing on a narrow set of tasks and setting the rest aside gives him peace. “The path to productivity runs straight through calm,” he says.



I’ve long known that getting distracted is a major problem for me. The rule of three should help with that. One benefit of deciding which three things are most important is that when the proverbial fire breaks out in the middle of your day, you are better prepared to ascertain how crucial it is to put it out.



“It’s sometimes difficult to tell when you’re right next to it whether a fire is the size of postage stamp or the size of a bonfire,” he says. “But when you step back, you can figure out whether you need to blow it out or get a bucket of water.”



Even from a visual standpoint, a to-do list with three bullet points appears manageable. A to-do list with 20 does not. I’d much rather have the satisfaction of finishing three things than working on a dozen and completing none. As Bailey puts it: “It’s possible to be very, very busy but not really accomplish anything.”



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Get clarity. </h2>



I talked to Peter Bregman, author, speaker and CEO of executive coaching company Bregman Partners, and described my struggles. As he peppered me with clarifying questions, it became obvious that one reason I couldn’t decide what to work on was that I didn’t understand how to get done what needed to be done. It was like I had all of the ingredients needed for a recipe, and had a list of instructions, but the steps weren’t in order and I didn’t know how much of each ingredient to use.



The key word was structure. As soon as Bregman said it, I knew that’s what I lacked. As a writer for three decades, I’m so accustomed to how to structure my work that I don’t even think about it. But launching my new project required a focus on structure that I didn’t realize I was missing.



To <a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/true-productivity/">build a solid structure</a>, Bregman suggested writing out the recipe, so to speak. At the top of a piece of paper, I should write the name of the project I wanted to start. Underneath would be the various categories I needed to work on to create that project—product, customer, sales, marketing and so on. Under each of those, I would write the tasks needed to accomplish them. “And now you have some structure to what you’re doing. It’s not just a whole bunch of things,” he says.



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-know-the-difference-between-chaos-and-crisis">Know the difference between chaos and crisis. </h2>



Sometimes I get so deep inside my own head that I get lost trying to get out. I allow anxiety about the mountain ahead of me to replace the excitement I should have had for the view I would have once I climbed it.



I talked to MK Kim about this. She’s an author and motivational speaker in Korea. The pandemic forced her to shutter lucrative work giving lectures. A career she spent 30 years building disappeared when in-person events ended. “I was doomed,” says Kim, who brands herself in the U.S. as the Korean Oprah. “I was so afraid of not being able to <a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/the-complete-guide-to-money-how-to-create-wealth/">make money</a>, terrified of not being able to give lectures.”



She kept telling herself, I can’t give lectures. She didn’t like the sound of that; it was as if she was the bad example in one of those lectures she could no longer give. “My job is encouraging people. So if I face hardship, I have to encourage myself first,” she said. “Then I can encourage other people.”



She changed I can’t give lectures to I will not give lectures because it’s not safe. That gave her agency. She was no longer the victim. Then she told herself, I will not give lectures offline, but I will give lectures in a different way.



Her advice in navigating tumultuous times like what she just came through is to understand the difference between chaos and a crisis. If all you see in chaos is the negative—I can’t give lectures—it will seem like a crisis. But if you find the positive in it and/or look for solutions, it will become an opportunity.



She tells a story in her latest book, <a href="https://amzn.to/32HjsMg" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Reboot</a>, about finding order amid the chaos by connecting dots of information that weren’t previously connected. The first dot was the no-contact rules across the world. The second dot was the rise in the value of online video content. The third dot was advances in artificial intelligence that broke down language barriers.



Although she could no longer give in-person lectures, the rise in video and language technology meant she easily could reach customers around the world. She launched MK University to reach non-traditional students. It has grown from 5,000 to 60,000 students. Her YouTube channel has 1.6 million subscribers. “You can make your own order in this chaos,” she says.



* * *



After I had these conversations, the chaos that prompted them continued for weeks. I actually <a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/the-side-hustle-handbook/">launched the side hustle</a>, and launching it was far more daunting than laying the groundwork to launch it.



I came home from one assignment feeling almost overwhelmed. I had to apply all three lessons—and so precisely it was almost creepy—especially knowing the difference between chaos and crisis.



For now, at least, the mountain of work remains ahead of me. I still need to be intentional, get clarity, and know the difference between chaos and crisis. But I better understand what I’m facing and how best to summit it. 



This article originally appeared in the January/February 2022 Issue of SUCCESS magazine. Photo by @peilunchen/Twenty20

Here's how to streamline your hectic (but fulfilling) career

Here's how to streamline your hectic (but fulfilling) career | SUCCESS

Expert Tips: Managing an Overwhelming Side Hustle To-Do List

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50 Things I Know at 50: Reflections on a Half-Century of Life

I’m turning 50 this month. As in 50 years old. As in I have finished five decades and am starting my sixth. It’s just like every other birthday except it’s halfway to 100, so it’s not like any other birthday. At all.&nbsp;



I thought by now I would be a) creakier b) balder c) grayer and most of all d) smarter. I thought for sure I would <a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/what-is-my-purpose-in-life/">know what life was about</a> at this age, but ha, no, I have only marginally more of a clue now than I did 20 years ago. Young people, don’t tell anybody I said this, but all us geezers are winging it nearly as much as you are.



My parents, teachers, professors, mentors, bosses—all the “old” people I looked up to because I thought they had life figured out—had me completely snowed. I believed they knew what they were doing, why they were doing it, what they were talking about. I thought <a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/5-attitudes-for-aging-gracefully/">with age came wisdom</a>. 



Nope… unless you think these 50 lessons from a 50-year-old contain wisdom.



<ol><li>Everyone wants to know if 50 feels different. Physically, no. Mentally, yes, not least because everybody and their brother keeps asking me. This is a big number, so of course I’m thinking big thoughts. What have I done with my life so far is healthy only as long as it turns into, what can I do with the rest of my life.</li><li>I <a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/how-to-overcome-regret/">struggle with regret</a>. I know it’s a waste of time to look back and wish I had/had not done this or that, but sometimes I can’t help it. On my better days, I try instead to pre-engineer a lack of regret. I try to imagine future me. What kind of life does he want to look back on? That’s the kind of life I want to lead. Twenty-year-old me did nothing intentionally to create 30-year-old me. Thirty-year-old me did marginally better, and 40-year-old me did better still. Forty-five-year-old me started to figure it out, and now 50-year-old me is going to try to fill 60-, 70-, 80-, 90-, 100-year-old me with joy, wisdom, strength and perseverance. I’m trying to create a me in the future who will look back at the me of now and say, “Thanks, brother. I’m worn out, but it was worth it. Thanks for occasionally having pie for breakfast, especially.”</li><li>I know more now than I used to, but I am also more aware of <a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/6-steps-to-discover-your-true-self/">how much I don’t know</a>. The more questions I ask, the more I realize there are even more questions to ask that I don’t even know of yet. When I think about it that way, I come to the incongruent conclusion that my knowledge related to available knowledge is actually decreasing and will continue doing so forever.</li><li>Related: I am never as right as I think I am.</li><li> This is not to say I’m regressing. I suppose because of experience I won’t stick my honey-covered face into a nest full of murder hornets again. That’s not so much progress as it is stopping screwing up, and thank heaven for small victories. But I also know there’s always a chance my face will be covered with the equivalent of honey while I stick it into a metaphorical nest full of murder hornets and I’ll be whatever that version of stung is 100 times before I even know I’m in there.</li><li><a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/letter-from-my-future-self-the-first-step-is-the-hardest/">Life would be boring if it was easy</a>.</li><li>When I die and give my body back to God, I want Him to say, what did you do to this thing?</li><li>I want to bring to Him a soul full to overflowing because of the relationships and experiences I have had. I want joy to be spilling over the side of my soul bucket like ice cream melting over the side of a cone.</li><li>There are a million things I wish I knew when I was younger. Maybe No. 1 is that pursuing hard things brings joy. No. 26: Shrimp and grits should be eaten as frequently as possible.</li><li>If you tell me you’re not ready for Hard Thing X I say do it anyway because if you wait until you’re ready you’ll never do it.</li><li>I spent far too much of my life chasing easy and avoiding hard. No more.</li><li>This I know to be true: Enduring one trial gives me more strength and perseverance when the next one arises.</li><li>Please don’t interpret this as an <a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/why-quitting-doesnt-mean-youve-failed/">unhealthy obsession with never quitting</a>. It’s not that. It’s about enduring. There’s a difference. “Never quit” as an unyielding life motto is unsustainable.</li><li>I wrestle with my ambition because it can be dangerous. If I slavishly follow my heart, it will take me places I’ll regret. But I can say this: my midlife crisis is ambitious as can be. I want to be a better and nicer version of me. That’s a never-ending cycle, too, but it’s not vicious.</li><li>I don’t want better and/or nicer things. They’ll break, or get worn out, or my neighbor will get something even better or nicer and I’ll long for that instead. That’s a never-ending and vicious cycle.</li><li>I love my friend Andy for many reasons. Among them is the fact he doesn’t think like I do. Twice on the morning of long hikes we took together, we went out to breakfast before hitting the trail, and he ordered pie. PIE FOR BREAKFAST. I was jealous both times.</li><li>Next time we go out to breakfast before a hike, I’m ordering pie.</li><li>It’s going to be chocolate, because if I’m going to eat pie for breakfast I need to love it.</li><li>Corollary: Cherry pie for breakfast would completely miss the point of having pie for breakfast. (Don’t @ me, I just don’t like cherry pie.)</li><li>Drive to a state you’ve never been to, find a small-town diner and tell the server, “bring me the most (name of state) item on your menu.” Eat it no matter what it is.</li><li>Better yet, do that in a country you’ve never been to.</li><li> Anyone who tells you age is just a number is either young, lying, or so old they forgot how old they are.</li><li> Sandals paired with socks will never become cool, neither will what passes for your hairstyle, or really your overall aesthetic. You will just stop caring, or at least care less. Age is not an excuse to dress like a dork, but it often explains it.</li><li> Just because not caring about your aesthetic is you <a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/the-art-of-true-confidence/">being authentically you</a>, you not caring what the world thinks, you not succumbing to the changing vagaries of style and culture, your spouse will not find it attractive.</li><li> Everything in moderation.</li><li> Except love.</li><li> And generosity.</li><li> And laughter.</li><li> And especially <a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/why-conditioning-isnt-just-for-your-body/">practice moderation</a> in having pie for breakfast.</li><li> You have better things to do with your life than learning how to fold fitted sheets.</li><li>Call your parents, not because they’ll be gone one day and you’ll wish you had more time with them. Well, not JUST because of that. Call them because they are your parents and they love you and want to hear from you. Hold up, calling my dad now.</li><li> Get sweaty outside as often as you can, bare minimum once a week.</li><li> There’s <a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/work-life-balance-doesnt-exist-make-time-to-follow-your-passion-with-seasons-of-focus/">no such thing as work-life balance</a>. There is just life, and work is part of it.</li><li> Nobody looks back from the end of their life and wishes they worked more. Smarter, maybe, or more efficiently. But not more.</li><li> <a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/6-tips-to-rule-the-art-of-conversation/">Embrace hard conversations</a>. You will be stronger for it, and so will the people you have the conversations with.</li><li> I am not going to get bigger, faster, stronger, more flexible. In fact, to whatever extent I have any abilities in those areas, they are deteriorating even as I type this. But I can become kinder, more empathetic and more helpful.</li><li>Be vulnerable.</li><li> Be the kind of person other people feel comfortable being vulnerable with. Eventually one of you will say, “you too?!? I thought I was the only one!” and that’s when relationship magic happens.</li><li>I love the song “Time Stand Still,” by Rush. The lyricist laments he’s moving so fast he’s not enjoying what’s important in life. The line that sticks with me, now more than ever, is “freeze this moment a little bit longer.” I want my life to be full of moments worth freezing. C.S. Lewis called those moments joy, elusive glimpses that show there is more going on in the world than what our five senses tell us.</li><li>Those moments almost never happen when I’m alone, and they sure as hell never happen when I’m alone in front of a screen.</li><li>This is universal. Everyone wants their lives to be full of meaningful and freezable moments, transcendent experiences. Others might catch those moments through art or music or food or animals. My vehicle happens to be adventure. I feel most alive when my heart is racing, my body is covered in sweat, and my mind is wondering what I’ve gotten myself into.</li><li>I can hear objections now—I’m talking about slowing down and using adventure to illustrate my point. That’s a fair critique. But if I’m hiking, biking, canoeing, running, I’m never alone, and I never go faster than 15 miles per hour. We spend most of our time in conversation or absorbing the beauty of creation or, in the best of times, both.</li><li>I sometimes worry that in chasing adventure I’m running away from my problems, that I’m going out into the woods and hiding under the guise of <a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/what-is-success/">pursuing a vibrant life</a>. Maybe I’m fooling myself, but I prefer to think that I’m preparing for whatever problems life throws at me. I’m going to keep telling myself that, at least.</li><li>Work less, so you can sleep more, so you can play more.</li><li>Be careful about the false masks you wear. Eventually you’re going to get confused about which one you wear in what setting. Try leaving them at home.</li><li>Eight years ago I concluded I needed to be tougher. When life got difficult, I got scared and curled up into a little ball afraid of what the world would throw at me next. I needed to improve my perseverance. One way I have done that is continuously walking right up to the edge my comfort zone, taking a deep breath, and taking a few more steps. As my friends have taught me to do that, so do I try to pass that along to others—my kids especially.</li><li>Being a journalist has been a tremendous blessing on my life. I get paid to ask people questions about their lives, listen to their answers, and then write the story. The most important skill—the one all of us need, without exception—is listening.</li><li>Never be afraid to <a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/how-asking-for-help-is-a-sign-of-strength-and-humility/">ask for help</a>.</li><li>Carry someone who needs it.</li><li>Let someone carry you when you need it.</li></ol>

No. 11: I spent far too much of my life chasing easy and avoiding hard. No more.

No. 11: I spent far too much of my life chasing easy and avoiding hard. No more. | SUCCESS

50 Things I Know at 50: Reflections on a Half-Century of Life | SUCCESS

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5 Ways to Get Outside (and Why You Should)

One day about 10 years ago, I saw on my calendar a rare Saturday with nothing to do. My wife and kids would be gone and I was caught up on work. I asked a friend of mine, a co-worker at Sporting News named <a href="https://twitter.com/ryanfagan" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Ryan Fagan</a>, who was always telling amazing stories of his <a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/6-stress-reducing-activities-to-get-you-outside/">outdoor adventures</a>, to take me on a day trip.



He agreed, and that day changed my life.



He picked me up before dawn, and we spent the day hiking and fishing in North Carolina’s Linville Gorge, which I know now is one of the most rugged places on the East Coast. I might not have gone had I known how rugged it was. A half dozen times, I almost fell and broke myself to pieces. But I survived.



Fagan pushed and pulled me so far out of my <a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/10-ways-to-overcome-fear-and-break-out-of-your-comfort-zone/">comfort zone</a> that I was high on endorphins all day. We stopped at a gas station on the way home. I reached in the cooler to grab a Coke, and it occurred to me that I had not thought about work all day, which was incredible because we were co-workers and usually talked about either office politics or our stories all the time.&nbsp;



But on this day, our <a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/mindful-mindset/">focus shifted to what was around us</a>. To paraphrase Scott M. O’Neil’s book title, we were where our feet were. I grabbed the Coke, closed the cooler, turned around and told Ryan I had not thought about work all day.&nbsp;



“Now do you understand why I do this so much?” he said.



I did. Since then, he has become my outdoor mentor. With him at first and later on my own, I have pursued outdoor fun as often as I can. I have become an avid hiker and bicycler and an advocate of trying every outdoor adventure at least once.



Just as Fagan wanted to share his love of the outdoors with me, I want to share mine with you. I want you to get out of the outdoors what I have, even if it’s only a small taste.



I could write 100 stories about how good I feel at the end of a hike or long bike ride or talk for hours about how many great ideas I get deep in the woods. But that’s just my own personal experience. It’s the science behind health and the outdoors that should make you shut off your computer, go outside and let the sun bathe you in its glory or the rain wash you of your anxiety.



The health benefits are wide-ranging. Being exposed to the <a href="https://www.webmd.com/a-to-z-guides/ss/slideshow-sunlight-health-effects" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">sun increases your vitamin D</a>, which is important for bones, blood cells and the immune system. WebMD says as little as five to 15 minutes, two or three times a week, is enough to gain the benefits.



According to Bicycling, a new study shows “<a href="https://www.bicycling.com/news/a37091722/outdoor-riding-benefits-your-brain-study/#:~:text=That's%20right%2C%20being%20outside%20actually,%2C%20planning%2C%20and%20selective%20attention." target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">being outside actually increases the grey matter volume</a> in the right dorsolateral–prefrontal cortex (DLPFC), which is a part of the brain associated with executive functions like working memory, planning and selective attention.”



A study by researchers at Cornell found that <a href="https://www.vet.cornell.edu/news/20200225/spending-time-nature-reduces-stress-and-anxiety#:~:text=New%20research%20from%20an%20interdisciplinary%20Cornell%20team%20has%20found%20that,stress%20both%20physically%20and%20mentally.">as few as 10 minutes</a> in a natural setting helped decrease physical and mental stress in college students. The benefits came even if the students merely sat on a park bench. A study published in <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09603123.2019.1577368" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">International Journal of Environmental Health Research</a> drew similar conclusions about the wider population.



There are as many paths to finding a passion for the outdoors as there are people with that passion. How can you get started if you don’t have a friend like Ryan to guide you? I asked experts for tips.



<h2 id="h-take-a-walk">Take a walk.</h2>



“That might be a hike at a nearby nature preserve, a walk around the block, or a stroll through the city,” says Ginny Yurich, who runs <a href="https://www.1000hoursoutside.com/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">1000 Hours Outside</a> with her husband. Their effort to get us away from screens and under the sun has been featured on The Today Show, OutsideOnline.com and others. “Nature is everywhere, ‘coming up through the cracks in the sidewalk’ as Scott Sampson says in <a href="https://amzn.to/38LuYWp" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">How to Raise a Wild Child</a>. No matter where you are, if you just step outside, the sights, sounds, smells and textures of nature will greet you.”



<h2 id="h-find-like-minded-locals">Find like-minded locals.</h2>



Just about every city will have groups full of people who want to share their passion. They’re easy to find. Check Facebook, online message boards, even old school paper-and-tack message boards at coffee shops. “<a href="https://www.meetup.com/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Meetup.com</a> and other social network sites have local groups who organize hikes and outdoor activities,” says Jason Bocarro, a professor in the Department of Parks, Recreation and Tourism Management at North Carolina State University. “They can also be specialized (based on gender, age, beginner). This can also afford you the opportunity to <a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/the-science-of-friendship/">meet new friends</a> as well as get outside, and often the hikes are set, so no need to plan.” 



<h2 id="h-get-to-know-the-places-in-your-community">Get to know the places in your community.&nbsp;</h2>



“No matter where you live, your community likely has parks, trails, beaches or other outdoor amenities,” says Kyle Rich, assistant professor in the Department of Recreation and Leisure Studies at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ontario. “Unfortunately, we tend to overlook these places if they aren’t involved in our day-to-day routines. Look for local recreation amenities and resources (e.g., websites, leisure guides, community organization directories, etc.). These are often designed to connect people to all sorts of local opportunities. Then, make a point to <a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/20-ways-to-try-something-new/">visit a new place</a> or connect with a new group—even if it involves going a little out of your way. You never know where you will find your new routine, spark a new interest or find a place you fall in love with.”&nbsp;



<h2 id="h-do-inside-tasks-outside">Do inside tasks outside.</h2>



“Asking oneself throughout the day if what you are currently doing indoors could be done outdoors is a good start,” says Rich Christiana, associate professor in the department of health and exercise science at Appalachian State University. “There are so many great ways to spend more time outdoors even while working, such as attending <a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/zoom-etiquette-101-8-tips-to-put-your-best-face-forward-during-virtual-meetings/">Zoom meetings</a> outdoors, having in-person ‘walking meetings’ on the local greenway or outdoor track, or having lunch or a snack break outdoors. And of course, many exercises that a person may do indoors can be done outdoors.”&nbsp;



<h2 id="h-try-outdoor-photography">Try outdoor photography.&nbsp;</h2>



This comes from Tara Schatz, a blogger at Back Road Ramblers whose “goal is to help people connect with the world and each other by stepping out of their front doors and embarking on journeys big and small.”&nbsp;



You’ll take your phone with you regardless, right? “During the pandemic, I challenged myself to take a different type of outdoor photograph every day and then share it with my friends and family, just for fun,” Schatz says. “I photographed flowers in my garden, beautiful sunsets and waterfalls. At the end of a month of taking photos, my images had improved dramatically and I had a new appreciation for the beauty of the natural world. Photography is also a great way to <a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/6-ways-to-tap-into-your-creative-self/">channel your creativity</a> and explore new places.”  



Photo by @leggybirdphotos

It’s the science behind health and the outdoors that should make you shut off your computer, go outside and let the sun bathe you in its glory or the rain wash you of your anxiety.

It’s the science behind health and the outdoors that should make you shut off your computer, go outside and let the sun bathe you in its glory or the rain wash you of your anxiety. | SUCCESS

5 Ways to Get Outside (and Why You Should) | SUCCESS

https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/5-Ways-to-Get-Outside-and-Why-You-Should.jpg

Glenn and Mindy Stearns combine their powers to create more opportunities for others.

Glenn and Mindy Stearns combine their powers to create more opportunities for others. | SUCCESS

Glenn and Mindy Stearns: Building a Legacy of Kindness

Glenn and Mindy Stearns: Building a Legacy of Kindness | SUCCESS

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Entrepreneur Steve MacDonald inched his way up Cotopaxi, a 20,000-foot tall volcano in Ecuador. He was tied in to his fellow climbers, and at best, they covered 50 feet per minute, one halting, shuffled step at a time.



Darkness engulfed him on the slow and treacherous climb. He looked up toward a peak he couldn’t see. He looked down at the edge of an ice shelf, and couldn’t see that either. Exhaustion swallowed him, taunted him, told him to give up. “You look down and say, I can go back down. But you also realize, if I [mess] this up, I’m literally going to slide off this mountain, and you’ll never see me again.”



This is the dilemma every entrepreneur, solopreneur or side-hustler faces. To succeed requires a fight into the unknown. Giving up is equally perilous. MacDonald turned his <a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/11-ways-to-stay-motivated-from-people-who-refused-to-quit/">thoughts from quitting</a> to pushing for the summit.



Some 400 feet before reaching the top, the climbing team accepted that they would run out of daylight before they could reach the summit. This personal apex would have to do, and it was no less breathtaking. The clouds cleared. Getting to this point had been miserable, cold, arduous, dangerous... and awe-inspiring. MacDonald looked at the world below him and thought, If I can persevere through this climb, I can do anything. “Although it’s just one day in your life, it’s something you always reflect back on,” he says.



Indeed, the fortitude MacDonald built on the ice-slicked side of Cotopaxi helps him weather tough times in business. But the opposite is also true: MacDonald has withstood being fired from a company he founded while simultaneously going through a divorce, and that experience has <a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/10-ways-to-build-your-mental-strength/">increased his mental strength</a>. He credits it with helping him complete marathons, ascend high peaks and withstand frigid temperatures. “Each of those things is like building blocks,” he says. “They prepare you for the next thing.”



Perseverance is a unique trait in that the only way you find out you have enough of it is the exact moment your career, if not your life, requires it. MacDonald says he first showed such grit as a young boy, when a bigger kid wanted to beat him up every day. He responded first by trying to outrun the bully and then by lifting weights to get stronger.



He wasn’t tested again until he was in his late 20s. In 1999 MacDonald quit a good-paying job to start TechHealth, an online community for people with catastrophic injuries. Eventually he lost leverage on the company’s board and was forced out. He woke up every day not knowing what to do. He sometimes wanted to give up and go back to the safe corporate job he had left behind.



He resisted that urge. He saw himself like a bird on its first flight—there was no way to go back to the nest. “Pivoting my life away from what I thought I was doing and finding the next new thing—perseverance is what got me through that,” he says.



He started another company, myMatrixx, a pharmacy benefits firm, in 2001 and sold it in 2017, exiting with $250 million. After navigating a career packed with outdoor adventures and business variety, he now runs MacDonald Ventures, where he pursues his passion for startups as an angel investor. He speaks often on investing, entrepreneurship and the startup mentality.



<div class="wp-block-image"><figure class="alignright size-large is-resized"><img src="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/Steve_MacDonald.jpeg" alt="" class="wp-image-60885" width="200" height="200"/><figcaption>Steve MacDonald</figcaption></figure></div>



When times are tough, MacDonald repeats to himself a mantra he learned on slopes and in boardrooms, mountain sides and conference calls: Enjoy the ride. “I know this is going to be hard,” he says. “But I’m going to look back on it and say, this is the best ride ever.”



That’s why he can say being fired was the best thing that ever happened to him and describe an adventure like Cotopaxi as physically and mentally excruciating while also making clear he loved it.



“The suffering is what makes life beautiful,” he says. “A lot of people don’t have any desire to appreciate life like that. They’d rather sit in a chair and watch TV. People who really aspire to suck as much life out of life as they can are people that in the end are ultimately happy. <a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/3-tips-on-how-to-face-adversity/">Adversity creates the best memories</a>.”



This article originally appeared in the July/August 2021 issue of SUCCESS magazine. Photos courtesy of Steve MacDonald

This adventurer and serial entrepreneur is never satisfied.

This adventurer and serial entrepreneur is never satisfied. | SUCCESS

'Suffering Is What Makes Life Beautiful'

&#8216;Suffering Is What Makes Life Beautiful&#8217;

'Suffering Is What Makes Life Beautiful' | SUCCESS

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6 Ways to Build Resilience from the Veteran Who Helped Create the Army’s Resilience Curriculum

U.S. Army Sergeant First Class <a href="https://www.jenniferballou.com/about-jennifer/">Jennifer Ballou</a> was stationed in Italy when a friend asked her about setting her up with a guy named Eddie—Army Specialist Eddie Loredo. Ballou resisted at first. I don’t want to be set up with anybody, she thought.&nbsp;



She relented and quickly discovered Loredo was like no one she had ever met. “From the moment he opened his eyes until the moment he went to sleep—I don’t understand it—but he was happy to be alive,” Ballou says. “His smile lit up a room. He had a <a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/how-and-why-to-reconnect-with-your-inner-dreamer/">zest for life</a> that I’ve never seen.”



They managed a long-distance relationship that life in the Army requires, and after a few years of that, they married. Even then, work often kept them apart. Ballou was pregnant with their son while Loredo was deployed to Iraq.&nbsp;



They tried to time Loredo’s two-week leave to the baby’s arrival. Ballou went into labor while he was on the plane home. “They were trying to do everything they could to not let me have the baby,” she says. “This is a movie—he runs in, still in his uniform, just in time to see our son born. And then he left again two weeks later.”



In 2010, they were both sent to Afghanistan; Loredo, by then a staff sergeant, was an infantryman on his fourth deployment and Ballou was on her first and worked to set up dental clinics across the country.&nbsp;



One day in late June Eddie stepped on an IED—improvised explosive device. Initial reports were that he would lose his leg. Ballou rushed to get to the hospital, but he died while she was on the way, just minutes before his 35th birthday. “It didn’t even cross my mind that he was going to die. He was a fighter. He was so strong. We were going to be fine, he just wasn’t going to have a leg,” she says.&nbsp;



She escorted his body back to the U.S., the beginning of a long journey. She realized the last day she had spoken to him had been Father’s Day. “Everything changed. Everything that I thought was so important, just no longer was,” she says.



Resilience is a unique trait in that you don’t know you have it, or to what extent, until you desperately need it. Life had knocked her down before, she says, many times, though nothing like this. Still, even those relatively smaller challenges prepared her to a degree. She had two children at the time and was suddenly a single mom and sole provider for them. “I just had to keep it together for them,” she says.



She discovered that the Army had room for improvement when taking care of the families of fallen soldiers. She drew up solutions, ran them up the chain of command and eventually many were adopted.



Meanwhile, Fort Bragg, where she was stationed, was starting a resilience program and she was asked to help stand it up. That led to her studying resilience at the University of Pennsylvania. She taught what she learned at Fort Bragg and later the Pentagon, where she was the senior noncommissioned officer of the program, with a staff of 200 and a budget of $60 million. She assisted in the development of a resilience curriculum that the Army used all over the world.



The convergence of her needs and skills and the Army’s needs is amazing—a person who both needs and has resilience was handpicked to develop courses used to teach it to thousands of soldiers. She showed her resilience at the same time she was learning about it and teaching it.



Ballou eventually rose to the rank of Master Sergeant. She has since left the Army, remarried and had another child, developments made possible only by years of resilience-fueled healing. She lives in Texas now, where she is <a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/3-tips-for-solopreneurs-to-stay-ahead-in-a-constantly-changing-world/">prototypical solopreneur</a>: writer, life coach, yoga instructor, CrossFit trainer, speaker.&nbsp;She offers “a toolbox of strategies for how to be more resilient and joyful in the face of change, no matter how challenging.”



The first tool goes into the box long before anything bad happens, and that’s to create a healthy and balanced lifestyle—eat well, get plenty of rest, exercise, etc. “If and when something challenging happens, you’re already a few steps ahead,” she says. “You can, for lack of better words, afford to take a few steps back and more than likely not crumble.”



When those challenging things happen—when not if—Ballou offers the following tips on resilience.



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-relationships-matter">Relationships matter.&nbsp;</h2>



“In the immediate aftermath I found that the connections that I had, the close relationships I had, were vital because I never felt alone,” she says. “Some people feel so alone.” In the midst of a difficult situation, these relationships can suffer. “Don’t allow the distractors in our lives to take away from the people that matter most,” she says.



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-ask-for-help">Ask for help.&nbsp;</h2>



This is a sign of strength. We think we’re bothering people, or worse, showing weakness when we ask for help. Neither of those are true, she says.



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-practice-gratitude-and-optimism">Practice gratitude and optimism.&nbsp;</h2>



She sees these as interchangeable. In studying at Penn, she learned the phrase “hunt the good stuff.” One way to do that is to make a daily habit of writing down three good things that happened. “We know that if you practice this simple skill every day, it will build your optimism, and optimism is the engine of resilience,” she says.&nbsp;



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-allow-yourself-to-feel-the-bad">Allow yourself to feel the bad.</h2>



&nbsp;This goes hand in hand with practicing gratitude and optimism. Neither one denies the other, and neither can exist without the other. Blocking yourself from the bad also blocks you from the good.&nbsp;



Ballou experienced this one first hand and learned about it more from <a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/5-ways-being-vulnerable-can-make-you-happier/">Brene Brown</a>, a renowned author. “You’re never going to be able to experience happiness and/or joy the way that you might want to if you’re not allowing yourself to feel the crap,” Ballou says.&nbsp;



It took a long time for her to accept this. “It wasn’t day one, week one, or year one that I really dug in and allowed myself to grieve Eddie dying. It was years later, but once I did and I got the help that I needed, that’s when things started to shift.”



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-focus-on-things-you-can-control">Focus on things you can control.&nbsp;</h2>



She learned this much later, after losing a job after she left the Army. She found herself “wasting a ton of time and energy ruminating about these things that you have no control over.”&nbsp;



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-do-what-makes-you-happy">Do what makes you happy.&nbsp;</h2>



The hobbies that make you feel good—whether it’s exercise, meditating, walking, reading or something else—find time for them every day. “I love CrossFit. I love yoga,” says Ballou. “Sometimes I just don’t want to do it, but I make myself do it because I know I’m going to feel better when I’m done.”



--



Post-script: CrossFit has a series of workouts known as Hero WODs (workout of the day) created in honor of fallen first responders and military members. One of them is named for Loredo. The <a href="https://www.crossfit.com/workout/2012/12/31#/comments">Loredo WOD</a>, which Ballou helped develop, is six sets, for time, of 24 squats, 24 pushups, 24 walking lunges and a 400-meter run.



I have done this workout often in the last 18 months because it helps build my resilience, physically and mentally. Curious about its namesake, I looked up the details on Loredo and discovered Ballou’s expertise on resilience. I reached out to her to ask if she would let me interview her for the story above.&nbsp;



I told her the Loredo workout has been important in my life, and she said the structure of it honors Eddie in several ways. The six sets and 24 count represent the month (June) and date (24) of his death. The moves in it—simple body-weight exercises—represent how he liked to exercise. He favored routines he could do outside; he didn’t need a fancy gym or equipment. He was 5-foot-6, barrel chested and a great runner.



Ballou said as the 10th anniversary of his death approached last year, she had hoped to be able to travel to as many CrossFit gyms as possible to do the Loredo workout with as many people as possible. The pandemic made that impossible. She asked me to encourage as many people as possible to do the workout this year on or around June 24 and post on social media about it using the hashtag #RememberLoredo.



I plan to do it and have rallied hundreds of men in my workout group to join me. If you do it, write about it in the comments.



Photo by STILL Photography - Central Texas Portrait Photographer

Resilience is a unique trait in that you don’t know you have it, or to what extent, until you desperately need it. Life had knocked her down before, she says, many times, though nothing like this.

Resilience is a unique trait in that you don’t know you have it, or to what extent, until you desperately need it. Life had knocked her down before, she says, many times, though nothing like this. | SUCCESS

Building Resilience: 6 Insights from an Army Veteran

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Opening night. A restless crowd hums with anticipation, waiting for the artist to take the stage. Jackie Augustus watches from the wings, feeling just as much a part of the audience as she does the artist’s team.



She’s worked behind the scenes with global names like Justin Bieber and Ariana Grande, helping shape the digital strategies that turn passive fans into devoted communities. Her job isn’t about chasing virality; it’s about building something deeper. “I always try to keep the fan inside me alive,” she says. And that intention—<a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/how-to-connect-with-a-large-audience-without-sacrificing-authenticity/">connecting with an audience from a place of authenticity</a>—has guided her every step.



So, do the experts agree that this is how to connect to your audience? Turns out, Augustus isn’t alone in this approach. Experts across public relations, branding, and live events agree: the key to engaging your audience today isn’t performance—it’s connection. Below, we break down five audience engagement strategies they swear by.



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-1-lead-with-relatability-and-realness">1. Lead with Relatability and Realness</h2>



The fastest way to connect with your audience is to stop trying to impress them. <a href="https://jilliansanders.com/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Jillian Sanders</a> is a veteran publicist and branding strategist who has helped shape the voices of bestselling authors, lifestyle experts and household-name personalities. She’s seen firsthand that audiences don’t respond to perfection—they respond to people who sound like them. For her, authenticity means “dropping the performative polish” and “speaking like a human, not a highlight reel.”



Jennifer S. Moxley wholeheartedly agrees. As founder of <a href="https://www.sunshinemedianetwork.com/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Sunshine Media Network</a> and a <a href="https://youtu.be/dGF24fpv-xU?si=MS3_uC6TNJ1js7nD" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">TEDx speaker on brand storytelling</a>, she has helped celebrities, professional athletes and politicians build their audiences. She explains that your early audience should feel like insiders: “Treat every single person in your community as special.” Creating that sense of belonging can be as simple as leaning into nostalgia or sharing something personal that your audience will recognize in themselves.



Augustus channels this principle in every client campaign. She pays attention to the quirks that make someone’s voice feel personal, even asking artists questions like “Do you always write in lowercase?” These small signals of consistency help make the audience connection feel natural, not staged.



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-2-build-trust-through-clarity-and-consistency">2. Build Trust Through Clarity and Consistency</h2>



Once you’ve earned attention and are connecting with your audience, maintaining trust requires repetition and alignment. <a href="https://choicemediacommunications.com/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Heather Adams</a>, founder and CEO of Choice Media &amp; Communications, has helped build the brands of household names like President Jimmy Carter, Johnny Cash and family and HGTV’s Jenny and Dave Marrs. For her, clarity is what keeps audiences coming back: “Connection doesn't come from cleverness. It comes from clarity. You want your audience to feel known, understood and served.”



That clarity is especially important as your community grows. And the larger your community, the more important it is to <a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/6-tips-to-be-a-more-confident-speaker/">stay clear and confident</a> in your message and how it’s delivered. As your community expands, you’ll reach more people while making sure those who believed in you early on still feel seen.



Moxley warns against overlooking early adopters. “People tend to take their first hundred followers for granted,” she says. “Overlooking the people in the beginning is a quick way to lose them.” Moxley’s tip to engage your audience is to treat each member of your audience like they matter, because they do.



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-3-use-storytelling-to-create-shared-identity">3. Use Storytelling to Create Shared Identity</h2>



When considering how to connect to your audience, storytelling is your strongest asset. Augustus taps into nostalgia by re-sharing old videos or references that only longtime fans would recognize—what she calls “inside jokes with meaning.” These moments create emotional stickiness.



Moxley suggests a more structured approach to connecting with audience members: “Identify 5 to 7 things about yourself that you always lead with.” These identifiers—like being from a specific place or holding a specific value—allow your audience to feel seen in your brand.



Sanders agrees that storytelling doesn’t have to be refined to work; it just has to be honest. In her campaigns, authenticity has outshone production value time and time again, and she advises clients to “drop the performative polish.”



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-4-match-the-message-to-the-platform">4. Match the Message to the Platform</h2>



Not all platforms function the same, and neither should your content. Augustus describes Instagram as a résumé: clean, curated, aspirational. Platforms like X/Twitter, on the other hand, are where personality shines through. “It’s less polished, more ‘on the fly,’” she says.



Instead of trying to grow across every channel at once, she recommends focusing on where your audience already spends time. This not only reduces burnout but also leads to stronger, more consistent engagement.



Moxley encourages <a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/how-to-find-your-audience-because-you-dont-need-everyone/">creators to start with a niche</a>. “You are not going to be for everybody and you shouldn’t want to be,” she says. “When someone sees themselves in you, they more likely want to be in your community.”



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-5-stay-flexible-and-keep-listening">5. Stay Flexible and Keep Listening</h2>



If you’re wondering how to connect to your audience once they’re paying attention, the answer is to adapt by listening to feedback. Feedback is a signal that someone is invested. Whether it comes through comments, analytics or real-world conversations, paying attention to your audience’s responses can reveal what’s resonating and where you might be missing the mark.



That responsiveness doesn’t mean chasing trends or shifting your voice to match every passing moment. It means staying grounded in your message while remaining open to how your audience wants to connect. When something isn’t landing, you adjust. When something sparks engagement, you go deeper.



That’s why conviction matters. Laura Ries, a world-famous positioning strategist, bestselling author and chairwoman of <a href="https://www.ries.com/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">RIES</a>, encourages bold positioning. “Pick a side,” she says. “Take a stand on something that matters to you and your audience.” Shared values give people something to rally around and keep them coming back.



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-build-real-connection-not-just-reach">Build Real Connection, Not Just Reach</h2>



Jackie Augustus has helped some of the world’s biggest artists build online audiences, but what she’s learned applies to anyone trying to make a lasting impact. Whether you’re managing a brand, building a platform, or just trying to grow your presence, the rules stay the same: be real, be consistent, and listen to the people you’re trying to reach.



Want to increase audience engagement and make sure that your audience sticks around? Make sure they feel seen.



This article originally appeared in the July/August 2021 issue of SUCCESS magazine. Feature image © Catherine Powell

Jennifer Johnson

Learn how to connect to your audience with five actionable, expert-backed tips on authenticity, storytelling and audience engagement strategies that build trust and loyalty.

Jackie Augustus helps the biggest names in entertainment connect with their fans. Here’s what you can learn from her to benefit your business or side hustle. | SUCCESS

How to Connect to Your Audience: 5 Expert-Backed Tips that Actually Work

5 Expert-Backed Tips for Audience Engagement

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