open a bar/art gallery with friends

One of my buddies is getting out of the service soon and we are planning to do this. In the meantime, I am managing a coffee house in Charleston and bar tending at nights at another establishment. It’s good experience and I consider myself to be a social creature .

Everything is happening this week. Wallpaper, track lights, wall, inspections, desk, art, lightboxes, sofa, everything! It’s off to a good start with our wallpaper. I couldn’t stop staring at it as the wallpaper guy magically covered the walls with this magic decorated paper!

A very good strategy in life is to hedge bets. I think this strategy has been one of my greatest strengths… to consider and pursue multiple (sometimes incompatible) options until one surpasses the others in obvious value. Then taking that, until something else surpasses it in obvious value. This will get you through high school, college, and well into your adult life. Old age even maybe. Keep lots of friends, consider lots of jobs, anticipate a variety of possibilities. If one ship starts to sink, shift your weight into another. And be sure to get your foot in another door quickly. Balance balance. Mix metaphors, thrive in ambiguity, make many bets. A little bit of this, a little bit of that. Hedging bets is common sense.

I think bet hedging is a good beginner and intermediate strategy. It works immediately, even on very little information. By being invested in a number of things, there’s a good chance that at least some of them will carry you through. The pattern of things that carry you through become your personality—your preferences and tastes. At some point, you might abandon the hedge bets strategy for the more specific pattern of success that you’ve discovered from trial and error. Or you might not.

You will win some, and you will lose some. It’s almost a universal fact of life. The strength and the curse of the bet hedging strategy is that you’ll never be fully invested in any of your pursuits. You’ll always have a fall-back. With a fall-back, you will never be fully invested (in the metaphorical sense of the word) in any of your pursuits. The difference between hedging your life and hedging your bets is that life is impacted by your investment in it. The more invested you are in something, the more likely it is to become a reality. Imagine if this were true in gambling. Imagine that the more you bet on something, the more likely you were to win. Wouldn’t we bet quite differently then? And, therefore, wouldn’t we live quite differently if we truly believed that the amount of investment we have in life were a critical factor in the chances that the desired life will come to be?

Over the last year, I’ve stumbled backwards onto this counter-intuitive life strategy. The strategy of being 100% in the game, all or nothing, going for broke. In it to win it. This is an advanced strategy that, executed at the right time, can beat bet hedging a thousand-fold. No more dilly dallying. No more hedging bets. I’ve found a couple bets that I want to be 100% invested in. It could of course also lead to rock bottom. No good friend would recommend this strategy, but good friends don’t expect you to win big. To their credit, they really just want you to be happy. More than they want you to succeed, they want you not to fail big. Who will egg us on to a wild and extraordinary life if it requires that we risk ruin? Who will demand that we go out with a giant bang and stretch ourselves to crazy unheard-of limits? Only I can take the responsibility for giving and taking that advice for myself. And that’s what I’m notifying you about here. What I’ve found, is that once people see that you’re in it to win it, and see that you’re acting accordingly, they loosen up their hedges on you and are able to, in return, invest more of themselves into you. It’s a virtuous cycle that leads to everyone living a more extraordinary life.

To repeat, being in it to win it isn’t a risky strategy. The non-intuitive part of this is that hedging all of your bets is risky in the long term because you’ll never put enough of yourself into your life to really get the most out of it. The act of being 100% invested in your life and your projects and your friends will by its nature make it a safer bet, and people will feel safer having you on their side, and might even be inspired to help. If this is all there is, you should make sure that at least once in your life, you are 100% invested. Intuition understands this. In movies, or in stories, where everything is threatened, it is understandable that then it is appropriate to act in this manner… but in daily life our lives and everything we know are rarely threatened on a tangible and immediate level. Instead, the slow molasses of time threatens only small parts one at a time, never raising our alarm that this entire ship is slowly sinking all the time! It’s really a reason to celebrate, relax, and stop dilly dallying.

This is what my new life has become. My name change, my new business, my old business, my friends, everything and nothing, all of this will be wrapped up in a new strategy for living an extraordinary life, rallying people, and creating a bigger idea about what life can be that we can then all step into. Starting, officially, now.

I helped run Pond from May 2003 until March 2005. Funding was always an issue and it was difficult to juggle working there in addition to my 40+ hours a week. I’m glad I had the experience, but I’m not sure I’d do it again.