Practice #77 - Rock Dribbling = Entrepreneurship

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Do you ever find yourself skipping a rock down the block, just walking down the street

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and you find a rock and you just start kicking it?

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Well, I do that all the time and I know that a lot of you guys do it too.

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And I was doing it the other day at the park and I was like, I just read a book called

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Observation, Every Man, His University.

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And it's an older book and it's a really quick read.

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It took me two hours to read it.

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But basically the main point that I got from it was to start observing.

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Just start looking at things and observing nature, being more observant.

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So I was like, okay, I just went on with my day and I was like, and I was thinking to

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myself, when I go on my walk, I'm going to be more observant.

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I'm going to start looking at the trees more so than I normally do.

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I'm going to look at the ducks at the park and I'm going to do all these things.

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And I forget a little bit to do it and I'm not observant the whole time, but I start

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kicking this rock.

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You know how when you start doing something and it's just kind of automatic, kind of habitual?

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Well, that was that instance.

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I was not really consciously aware of what I was doing.

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But I just kept kicking the rock and then I lost it.

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And what do you do when you lose the rock?

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You keep walking, right?

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That's the cardinal rule.

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You keep walking.

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So I kept walking and then I found another rock.

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Started kicking it again.

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And then eventually I lost it.

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And then the psychorapyta I kept on finding more and more rocks and I kept kicking them

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until eventually I kicked one all the way home.

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Now why do I tell you this?

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Well as you might guess from the title of this video, rock dribbling is entrepreneurship.

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I started doing entrepreneurship in maybe middle school, elementary school, I don't know.

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I would start in middle school, I would trade chips and I would sell them or I would trade

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them for hot lunch and then eventually that wasn't going anywhere so I switched to a different

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thing and I started thinking bigger, started actually thinking about business and I started

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to learn how to code websites.

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And then eventually I realized that there's actual website builders out there that can

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do it way better than I can for fairly cheap.

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So I just stopped doing that.

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And I moved on.

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The original rock that I was dribbling was trading chips and then I lost it but I kept

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moving forward.

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I didn't get so angry or sad or I didn't just get stuck trying to bring the rock back because

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once it's gone it's gone.

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You gotta move on.

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And then when I started to realize that the website programming is actually not that good,

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that's kind of like I realized that the rock is not that fun to kick.

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It's not like the solid nice rock that's easy or not necessarily easy but is just not enjoyable

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or it's not long term.

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Kind of like during the winter time when you kick an ice, like a piece of ice or a snowball

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down and it's a weak snowball so it like breaks apart so it's not going to last a long time.

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That was the instance of the website builder.

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And then I just kept trying different things until eventually I discovered YouTube.

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And that's the end of the story because that's where I'm at right now but you dribble the

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rock until you either lose it or you make it home.

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And so the rock that you get home with is the one that actually changes your life.

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So I haven't arrived, I haven't made it home yet but I'm still dribbling the rock.

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It's been eight months.

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This is the longest I've ever lasted doing one venture.

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Trading chips in middle school lasted like two years or three years but that doesn't

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really matter because it was just like a little thing.

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But this is the most time that I've ever invested into anything.

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So I don't know.

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What are your rocks that you've dribbled in the past?

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What are the rocks that you left behind because you realized that they were bad?

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Think about that because it's actually really important.

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I thought that I was not really productive or I basically thought that I was wasting

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my life before high school or even during high school until I started lifting weights

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or actually reading books.

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But I realized that I was actually learning a lot of lessons.

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I just had to have the hindsight to realize.

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There was a speech that Steve Jobs gave to a commencement.

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It was basically where he talked about how all of the dots are happening in your life.

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You can't see how they connect until you have hindsight, until you look behind and you actually

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look back into your past and see, oh, that connected.

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Like, oh, that was actually helping me towards my goal.

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He said that you just got to trust and have faith that all of the dots will connect eventually.

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So that's kind of like rock dribbling.