I had a very powerful business experience about 4 years ago that taught me a lesson that I didn’t fully understand until recently.

I was the sole owner of a company that received a Letter of Intent from a publicly traded company to be acquired for around $1 million, all before I was even 30 years old.  Sure sounds sexy, right?  Well, the catch was that we were not profitable at that time and of course the time between receiving a Letter of Intent and actually signing all the contracts, getting a check in the bank, and considering the acquisition a done deal can be anywhere from a few weeks to over a year.

So we waited.  Doing our best to not be too unprofitable and not incur too many legal expenses, but thrilled at the prospect of an acquisition that would instantly remove all the stress.  I remember every day trying to act to the outside world like things were fine, but inside I felt incredibly stressed.  Each day was a new opportunity to obsess just a little bit more about when the acquisition would finally close.

And then finally it did.  Except that it didn’t go through, it fell through.

And here’s the weirdest most crazy part about it all.  I was enormously relieved.

Huh?  After months of freaking out, how could I possibly feel relief?  I realized that even though I had a new set of problems to deal with — how to pay the legal expenses, what the new strategy should be, where to go from here, etc. — I was at least free of the uncertainty of whether “acqisition falls through” would be my new situation, my new normal, so to speak.

And that’s what this post is all about.

We human beings — particularly Americans — tend to stress.  A lot.  That stress is often related to having too much to do, not meeting all our goals, or otherwise somehow falling short of what’s expected of us.

What exactly is stress anyway?  Well, stress clearly relates to not achieving some kind of desired outcome.  We get stressed when we’re studying for a test because we’re worried we won’t do well enough.  We get stressed in business because we’re worried about the implications of something not happening the way we want.  We get stressed when things might not go our way.

The key components seem to be (1) the intense desire to achieve a particular outcome, and (2) fear that we will not achieve that outcome.

But here’s the crazy part.  Once you actually get a bad grade, or fail to achieve your business outcome, the whole feeling of stress goes away, doesn’t it?  Then we just deal with whatever new normal we’re now at.  We went from being in the world of “I might get a bad grade on this test and I’m freaking out” to the world of “I did get a bad grade on that test; now what do I do?”

But the second world is just so much more relaxing somehow.  And if we go back to the definition of stress — (1) an intense desire to achieve something coupled with (2) the fear you might not achieve it — it makes sense that stress goes away after we’ve reached the outcome one way or the other.  We no longer fear what’s already here, and we’ve now focused our intense desiring on something else.

So, in this light, doesn’t stress seem just kind of silly?  We get so worked up and in such a state over such intense fear that something might happen, and even when our very worst experience does actually happen, somehow we just find a way to deal with it and get on with life.

The more I’ve thought about it, the more stress seems like one of those “legacy” emotions that served us well when sabertooth tigers were hunting us but doesn’t adapt well for the modern world.  If a sabertooth tiger is stalking me, being afraid he might kill me makes me alert and gives me energy, but if a deadline is stalking me, it just makes me feel tired.

So I propose that you do away with stress.  And the key is just to accept that whatever new situation you find yourself in will very quickly become your new normal anyway.

If you achieve all your wildest business dreams — closing the big deal, getting a promotion, earning a raise, having a successful company exit — there will be an intense thrill for a little bit…and then it dies off into your new normal, and you will soon turn your attention to something else.

And likewise, if you suffer any number of horrible business fates — you lose the big deal, you lose your job, you publicly fail — there will be a sting for a little bit…and then it dies off into your new normal, and you will soon turn your attention to something else.

Our society tells us that it’s common practice to set goals and be stressed about achieving them, but in fact the better way to be is to accept that, whatever happens, you’ll just hit your new normal, which you will quickly adjust to anyway.

And that, in turn, means that there’s no big pot of gold at the end of whatever particular rainbow you’re aiming for right now.  Because once you get there, you’ll find another pot of gold that you want to go after.

The notion of “unlimited desire” in human beings is not a failing, though.  It’s wondrous and marvelous.  Within the confines of our finite bodies lies a phenomenon that is infinite.  No matter what we desire, once we get it, we will want the next thing.  And the cycle will endlessly repeat itself.

So to summarize, embrace the miracle of infinite desire that exists within you, recognize that whatever you are stressing about and aiming for — whether you achieve it or not — will be your new normal in the near future, and that because there’s no greener grass on any other pastures, learn to appreciate how satisfying the grass right under your feet is.

I keep noticing a recurring theme in my hobbies and in business: cut out the noise and focus only on the essential.

It seems so simple, but the fascinating thing about life is that the things and people we encounter so rarely do cut through the noise.  Instead it seems like most endeavors of consequence are messy, complicated and hard, and it’s not always clear why.

When you approach almost everything with the mentality of “how do I cut out the noise?” life becomes a very magical experience where a little effort in the right place can yield big results.

I think can think of at least 3 areas of my own life where cutting out the noise yielded big results.

First up is playing the piano.  I took traditional piano lessons for about 8 years and spent literally thousands of hours learning, practicing, and occasionally performing.  But for all my hard work, if I heard a cool song on the radio, the idea of playing it on the piano without every note written out was hopeless.  I could play these amazing, technically difficult, beautifully written classical pieces, but I couldn’t play the simplest pop song.  What the hell?

So I bought a bunch of books like “how to play the piano despite years of lessons”, Jamey Aebersold jazz lessons, the Jazz Piano book, DVDs on playing by ear, learn to play Gospel Piano, and a few others I can’t remember.  I learned a little from each of those courses, but the one course that really shined through was the cheesily-marketed “learn to play by ear in under 20 hours” course.

This course dispensed with all but maybe 5% of music theory, disregarded scales, and ignored just about everything else from “traditional” piano teaching methods and focused instead on a few key principles: to figure out a song, start with a few notes, then figure out the chords but you know it’s only going to be 1 of 4 chords for this reason, use a few different variations with your left hand, and a few other nuances and that was it.

Earlier tonight, I was playing off a chords-only version of Hallelujah by Jeff Buckley, my wife heard me play it, asked me to teach her, and so I shared the play by ear method with her.  She also had taken about 10 years of lessons and got a lot out of it but was left helpless against pop songs without the music, too.

The amazing thing was that in about 15 minutes, I was able to teach her enough information about the method that within another 30 minutes, she was playing that song plus 2 others by ear pretty well!  With a minimum of effort, she got a huge amount of improvement and is excited to practice now because she sees exactly what to improve to play even better.

I claim to be no piano teaching genius, and admittedly my wife has years of lessons to draw on, but the key point here is that based on all the methods I studied many years ago, I knew which one cut through the noise for me, and sure enough it did the same for her.

The second example is learning to speak foreign languages.  Like every other American high school student I took at least 2 years of foreign language study (4 years of Spanish in my case).  Four years and thousands of hours of study — again! — this time left me helpless against a native Spanish speaker.  It’s one thing to be helpless against a native Japanse speaker when you’ve never learned Japanese, but to study something for 4 years and be completely and utterly ineffective by every measure is without a doubt an education failure.

But I love learning foreign languages and so I hunted around for some third-party courses.  Everyone now knows Rosetta Stone, of course, because it’s extremely well-marketed.  Everyone’s heard of Pimsleur for some reason.  I tried those and others and found just more of the same — subtle variations on rote memorization.

But then I discovered a course that was marketed as the “language teacher of the stars” and which claimed to get you conversational in as little as 10 hours.  Like the “learn to play by ear” course it seemed incredible, literally not believable.  But I figured it was worth a shot.

So I tried out the French course.  At the time, I happend to be dating a girl who was fluent in French so I also had someone to practice with.  Amazingly, within 10 hours, I was able to conduct complete conversations in French.  I didn’t know everything obviously, but I knew the 70% of what mattered and so was able to communicate.

In fact, the course even makes the point that the English language has over 200,000 words but if you count all the words in a single edition of the New York Times, you find I believe less than 2,000 unique words.  So, you can literally cut through the noise in this situation by focusing on the 2% of words in any language that are used regularly.

Anyway, the course was absolutely amazing and cost all of $80.  If you’re interested, check out my foreign language hero, Michel Thomas, for more info.  Sadly, Michel Thomas passed away in 2007, but his courses are still available.  A very cool documentary on him is also available on Youtube.

Again, we see the power of cutting through the noise.  Four years and thousands of hours of Spanish left me helpless in the face of a simple conversation, but 10 hours of focused work enabled me to be almost fully conversational in French.  Wow.

My third and final example is business.  One thing I have learned about starting and growing a company is that you don’t don’t always know what you should focus on.  In such situations, you make an informed guess, check with colleagues and your instincts, and then make a decision.

But there are just huge amounts of uncertainty in business.  In fact, it seems that whenever there’s high uncertainty between going from Point A to Point B, you take a lot of wrong turns until you ultimately stumble on the path that gives you the clarity of being able to cut through the noise.

In business, cutting through the noise means understanding what feature of the software will make a big impact on sales and customer satisfaction but maybe requires little investment of time and energy, or what marketing approach to take, or where to sell your product, or how to position it, or any other one of a million things.

The reality is that if you knew the optimal route to build, market, and sell a product from day 1 you could do it in a third of the time it takes to bring a new product to market.  But the reality is that you will make countless wrong turns along the way, course-correct, and get back on the right track.  Only in hindsight do you develop perfect clarity about how to move ahead on things.

So there it is:

• Most endeavors of consequence involve high degrees of uncertainty in going from Point A to Point B
• Uncertainty = lack of clarity = lots of noise to cut through
• Cutting through the noise is hard and non-obvious, but once you’re able to do it, the results are spectacular

Thrashing n. To expend a disproportionately high amount of energy relative to the quality of output you receive

When I was younger and looked at successful companies, I simply could not for the life of me understand how they ever went from NOTHING to what they were today. The modern equivalent would be like asking “How did Jamba Juice launch hundreds of stores across the country? How did that start?” It made sense to me that if you raised a massive amount of money and then immediately bought all the capital equipment and hired all the people you needed then you’d at least be capable of serving all the customers, and that the massive revenue from the customers would balance out your massive expenses…but how did it all come to be from NOTHING? It seemed like magic to me.

And from this line of thought I embarked on what I believe is the fundamental fallacy of entrepreneurial thinking: asking the question “what does a company need to do to succeed?”

What’s wrong with that rather innocent question? Well, it’s missing a critical component that ultimately matters more than anything else.

Time.

If I were speaking to my self from 10 years ago today I would make a very important point of clarifying that the real question is not how can you grow a company to be successful. The real question is, how can you learn to be successful in the shortest possible time?

A college professor once told me: “Given enough time, every single one of you could completely master the subject I’m about to teach.  But the problem is you don’t have enough time and neither do I.  So you’re going to have to figure it out in one semester while you take all your other classes, too.”  What a perfect example of the same phenomenon.  When you go to school, the question isn’t “what can I do, no matter the cost, to get the highest possible grade in this one class”, the question is “how can I get the best grades in all my classes this semester while still having lots of time for fun?”.

I would say for myself that I have experienced more personal and business growth in the last 12 months than in the prior 3 years combined.  One of the fundamental differences?  I’ve started imposing more constraints on myself than just “learning how to be successful.”  I think about how I spend my time on each of my days.  If I feel like I’m thrashing a little bit (see definition at the beginning of the article), then I know something’s wrong and I invest some time to assess what’s going on.

I think one of the main differences for myself is that in the past year I’ve been fortunate enough to find some amazing mentors.  These are people whose accomplishments I am blown away by, who I have a great personal relationship with, and who are willing to give me input on ambiguous issues that come up.  After enough conversations, you basically start to pick up the same patterns of learning and the lessons that they accumulated over a lifetime.  Mentorship, I’ve come to realize, is literally the primary mechanism through which society evolves itself.

I mean, think about it.  If you didn’t know how to write but you knew how to speak, how ridiculously hard would it be to invent this concept of an alphabet, which combines different “letters” together to form “words” which are expressed in “sentences” which are organized in “paragraphs” and annotated by “punctuation.”  Writing is such a basic thing and yet figuring out writing from scratch would take probably a millennium.  But learning writing?  Well, a few years in school.

That’s how it feels since I’ve been fortunate enough to find mentors.  The “learning on my own” process is shortcut by about 99%.

When I think about how much thrashing I’ve done at different periods in my business career, it just makes me sad.  As Mark Cuban says, you can make as many mistakes as you want in business as long as you don’t make a really big one.  So, yeah, I avoided a really big mistake, but I think about how much time I spent on some things that one great conversation with the right person could have saved me from.  I mean, really, think about it.  The idea that a single 1-hour conversation could save you months of work?

And that’s really what it comes down to in the end.  The enemy of entrepreneurial success is not failure.  The real enemy of entrepreneurial success is thrashing.  What would you rather be?  Moderately successful at age 30 where you have another 70 years to apply the lessons you have learned, spend money, earn money, love, live life, grow, etc.  Or ultra-successful at age 80 where you’ve spent the bulk of your life learning how to actually figure out how to be ultra-successful.

Life, of course, rarely presents such black & white choices and the greater point here is really about how given enough time, sure, just about anyone could learn to be as successful as they wanted, but that time is precious, and scarce, and should be spent thoughtfully and purposefully.  A day spent making awesome progress on something you care about is infinitely more satisfying than a day spent thrashing.