Hint: It’s Not One Size Fits All

I just attended one of my favorite local events that brings together some of the best creative and entrepreneurial people Orange County, CA has to offer. It’s called Connecting Things, and it happens once a month at various locations throughout Costa Mesa and beyond (full disclosure: I am one of the co-founders of the gathering).

The speaker shared generally about creativity — the tools / ingredients necessary to create, as well as the purpose for why it matters. Toward the end of his time sharing with the audience he shared something that caught my attention and it was this: DEFINE RELEVANT.

For me, this meant two things:

ONE — Define what is relevant to the people you are trying to talk to. I am completely fascinated with internet meme culture. I hardly understand it, but what I’ve gathered is that it is chalk full of hilarity and nearly unfathomable creativity. It’s a language in and of it’s self. While you could argue that memes are so “relevant” right now, it doesn’t mean that they will go along why speaking to an aging audience looking for financial services.

Said more concisely, relevance is relative. ™©® (<<< all by me)

TWO — How do you want to be relevant? As in, define relevance for yourself and don’t manufacture the version of relevance that you see around you. Because if you are simply attaching yourself to a trend, your relevance is already begun to fade.

The New Age of Patronage

I had a realization a little over a year ago, that I should have understood much sooner. You want to support people, buy their stuff. You can about equality, buy stuff from people who are marginalized or on the wrong side of the proverbial scale. Your home isn’t inviting enough, hang things on the wall from the aforementioned groups.

For real though, my entire vocation has been devoted to leveraging purchasing power to uplift marginalized people and communities. This started over 12 years ago, and the catch phrase that we’ve been a part of starting — the term “vote with your dollar” — has so many new levels of nuance in 2020.

It Can Be A Serious Win-Win

When was the last time you were genuinely happy for another person? And how great did it feel for the excitement to be purely one-directional — having their win not impact or make it feel like you lost in some way?

I was actually reminded of this while perusing the Strava app today. For those of you who don’t know, Strava is a social app where you track your fitness (mainly running, biking, and swimming) and follow friends to see what kind of workouts they are doing.

It seems like it would be a recipe for excalating competition and showing others up, but I’ve personally had a very different experience with it. I was fortunate to join the app at a similar time as a number of my friends, many of us in our mid-30s and with young kids. Everyone coming to it with different fitness goals in mind, but with one common thread running throughout… stay healthy, stay sane, and be reminded how blessed we are to be active and enjoy time outside.

Enjoy The Moments

I just attended “Dad’s Night” at my son’s preschool. I came home from work and he was waiting at the front door of our house. He ran to get in the car, filled with excitement. We watched football and ate pizza for dinner before heading to his school.

This won’t last. Of course it won’t. So I’m going to do the best I can to be present and enjoy this season.

What’s true in life is true in business — or the things we hope to accomplish. Our successes and our emotions go in cycles. The only consistent thing is change. There are seasons of growth and overwhelming optimism. There are times of struggling, self doubt, and endless questioning.

The problem, however, lies in our inability to rest in and appreciate the moments. When things are good, we hold a false sense of believing they will continue to always be good. And vice versa.

Sometimes we just need to pause and look at our present circumstances for what they are. We need to realize that time is fleeting; that things will get worse and better and worse again. And ultimately, we need to find the joy in small wins and moments of peace.

Start Simply. Simply Start.

Here’s the thing about goal setting, we think way too highly of ourselves. When we start setting goals we make two major mistakes: a) we set out to conquer the world and we set either too lofty of achievements or b) we simply set too many goals and lump them all together.

This being the first part of a new decade, I’m sure we can find a thousand blog posts on how to set great goals, so I’m not going to focus on that. However, I’d like to hone in on this one simple idea: inertia matters.