Connect the dot's

This is the third installment of a series about how I've figured everything out. It probably does not make all that much sense yet as you read each installment but it will come together faster than a pee wee soccer game with the coach screaming "spread out!". Right now I would like to simply introduce some thought's and theories that have heavily influenced me over the last few years. One of the strongest is Steve Job's graduation speech at Stanford.

Jobs lay's down a number of thoughts that can change your life if you choose to let them. One small thought is about how he looks in the mirror everyday and asks if he were to die at the end of the day would he be satisfied with what he was doing. After a few to many "no's" he realizes he has to change direction. This is extremely important for people who are heavily tied into something and then one day look up and realize that ten years has escaped them. They are spending everyday doing something they do not enjoy at best, at worst doing what they hate. I am twenty six and do not have a lifetime of experience under my belt, I do not have ten years of wasted time to look back on but I know that I lost all of my 25th year of life and I'm terrified to loose any more. The year of 2008 started with me working at Southwest Airlines throwing baggage trying to figure out how I was going to survive a failed business partnership. My wife was pregnant and spending almost thirty hours a week in the class room teaching dance while working another thirty to sixty hours a week just trying to juggle all of the administrative and secretarial duties. We are and were grinders, make it through the day, and we made it through 365 days in a row somehow, one stretch saw just over 90 days without a single day off. During that time I was not looking in the mirror and asking myself anything because I knew the answers. I'm thankful however, that I saw this video and started asking before one year of grinding turned into a life that had eventually ground me down to dust.

Secondly, and to me more importantly, is the notion that in life all of the dot's connect but you can only connect them looking back. Job's says that we must stay attentive to everyday because we do not know how the dot we are in today will connect to both past and future dot's. Let me tell you a story.

Mark, co-owner and sole talent holder of the construction side of me, is wandering through Lowes late one afternoon finishing up a job. An employee asks if he needs anything and they strike up a conversation. The employee is the regional manager in charge of forty stores. The reason they strike up a conversation is Mark is wearing a shirt that says "Home Depot" on it, the company he worked for previously but was tragically laid off from when they downsized his entire branch of bathroom installations. This manager informs Mark that Lowe's may be looking to bring in a bathroom instillation company to fill a vacant need.

To give you an idea of the magnitude of this, when Mark was working for Home Depot's install team they were doing around $105k a week in sales! Also known as $5.4 million dollars annually. And this is just the front range of Denver and surrounding metro area.

Now whether or not we turn this into a life changing experience let me throw some dots at you about how this ball got rolling. We had already made fun of Mark that morning because he showed up to the job site all shaved and put together like he was better than the rest of us, as it turns out he really is. Secondly, Mark had focused immensely on the dot at hand when he worked for Home Depot by understanding how they did business and paying close attention to their books even though he was only an installer. Finally, both Mark and I had already seen this potential opening in the market and spent a few meetings putting together a game plan for what a company would look like that was solely built to fill the need that we knew Lowe's had. So off the cuff, Mark had the research already in his head to sound extremely intelligent.

If we get this we will be an overnight success. An overnight success that spent years working inside of Home Depot spending time and energy to learn things that did not matter at the time. An overnight success that just happened to be in a Lowe's store late in the afternoon working a job forty minutes away from home because as Mark say's "the harder I work the luckier I get". If we end up making millions off of this single deal I will write a book that will be long enough to justify the $20 tag but will in fact boil down to work hard, the dot's will connect. Don't float through life but also don't grind through life. Live as if what you are doing now is going to be worth a million dollars some day, even if it really looks like a job working for a poorly organized company. And then inside of this hard work and focusing on the now, check the mirror each morning, in the face of your own mortality does now matter?