The Practical Guide to Thinking Like Me

Raise the Bar

I once had a boss that always told his employees to "Raise the bar!" .  It became a kind of mantra we all had to celebrate, like a will induced notion, a kind programming I was expected to gel with, understand, resonate, own.

I was conflicted.  

To me, I tell people to put the bar on the floor.  You don't need yet another measurement to live up to, you just need to keep swinging.  

Just keep swimming.

Working harder isn't momentum.  Working harder isn't traction.  

Willingness to work another day is more powerful than the cross examination that you should.

I would tell young founders, "If you wake up in the morning and still care, you're winning.".  

Your idea will die when you stop caring about it. 

Raise the bar, so lame.  Its not like I strive for a subpar existence.  I just don't have to beat my chest to know that I'll make a concept happen.

I love the audacity trade.

I love the pure feeling of being backed into a corner of which your pressure, our applied will of no or loss has pushed you into the tightest corner of your life.  

And what's great about that is that your mind, your ability to reset reality on a whim can occur.  That corner, gone.  You just changed it.  

There is no bar.

There is only you.  And as long as you're engaged, trying, failing, and always getting up to try again, you will be unstoppable.  

I've met numerous CEO's in my life.  Leaders are born for all types of fabric.  The best CEO's I know come with incredible will manifesting powers of awe yet at the same time have a huge disadvantages core connected to themselves.  

Balance.

Many obsess themselves with measuring by some progress bar.  The very technology we create, we embolden it with status gestures.

We are consumed by a society obsessed with status.

I find myself at fault, spinning a tizzy daze wondering the status of my various networks.  What is happening on Linkedin right now without me?  Is someone looking at me?  Did someone like me?  

One of the first concepts I made when I started my little bit venture was a tool for twitter that would harvest the whys behind WHY people followed you.  I did alot of twitter analysis back then, 2009-2010, those were the golden years of screwing around with the twitter API.

It was called Source Cow.  I had a little cow as an icon, a plugin for the chrome browser.  Every time you followed someone it would pop up a prompt asking you why you followed them.  It was cool and fun and then yeah like anything it died.  But those old experimental notions, those ideas, still exist today.

While we're obsessed with status, what don't realize is that we're being baited with that notion of knowing yet we'll never know by design.  The goal of the network isn't to really inform us, its to keep us on the network.

Entrapment.  We engineer entrapment for the common man woman child. 

How do we free ourselves from the bar notion?  The bar ideal?

Can you I wonder?

The measure of you is within.

Its really that simple, yet you are a god.  You have the ability to create you, to build within with enormous power and that exact essence can enable you to destroy you.  

Finding balance within, isn't something you're born with, its a constant target of the soul.  You earn it and use it like currency.

For me, the bar is on the floor and the day I wake and don't care is a day I deal with until I care again.