Evan Carmichael and astronaut Sally Ride explore how life rarely goes as planned. Carmichael shares how over-planning a software company's business model caused him to miss opportunities, while Ride describes how she became an astronaut by accident while pursuing a physics PhD. Both argue that focusing on your why instead of the how matters more when plans inevitably change.
Good morning, Believe Nation! Today's message is life is unpredictable. Over to you, Sally Ride. I wake up every morning, espresso keep me going.
I hadn't really planned my career around being an astronaut. I had planned to go into— planned to go into physics and to do research in physics, get a job at a university. Do a little bit of research and a little bit of teaching. The application procedure, I was about to finish up my PhD and it was time to go look for a job. And it was exactly at that time that NASA asked for applications. And I heard about it through the Center for Research on Women at Stanford. NASA had sent out word to women's centers and minority centers that they were encouraging women and minority applications. So it was really through them that I heard about it.
I love this message because I think too many entrepreneurs, too many people are attached to the how something will happen instead of just the why. The most important thing is the why. Why are you doing this? What is the big outcome that you want to accomplish, right? What is your purpose? Stay focused on that and not the how it's going to happen, because life is unpredictable. Because no matter how much you plan, no matter how much you focus, no matter how much you think something is going to work out, Once you actually get out to market and try your ideas out, they are likely going to fail. And what you're gonna have to do is listen to the market, listen to what people are telling you, talk to your customers, and adjust. Make tweaks, make changes. It'll take you down a different path. So it's holding on to the big picture, holding on to why this is important, holding on to that big goal that you're chasing after, but not being too attached to the how you're going to go out and accomplish it. I look back to my first software company and I spent an entire summer working on the perfect business plan. It was the perfect, perfect, perfect business plan. And once we actually launched at the end of the summer, we realized that everything— not everything, but a lot of the things in my business plan were wrong. A lot of my assumptions were wrong. The things that I thought were really great ideas turned out not to be really great ideas, and that could have cost us a lot of opportunities. It cost us a major deal where one of our competitors got bought out, and that could have been us, for a much larger deal than what I got bought out for because I didn't focus enough, right? I focused too much on the planning, the researching, the writing, and not enough on actually getting out there and testing my assumptions. I was too focused on the how something was going to work instead of the why, getting it out there, getting feedback, and testing. I look at my YouTube channel now, my big goal is to help a billion entrepreneurs. My next goal, my next challenge is to get to a million entrepreneurs. The rate that I'm growing now, right, I'm getting 15,000 to 20,000 subscribers a month on the YouTube channel. At that rate, it's going to take me 5 years to get to a million subscribers on my channel. And so that's my big goal, that's what I want to accomplish. The how has to change, right? The quality of the videos that I do has to change, the content of the videos that I do has to change, I need to change and get better. If I keep doing what I'm doing now, I'm going to get the results that I'm getting now. Or if I want to get better results more quickly, more effectively, more efficiently, then I'm going to have to change. So I'm not trying to be too attached to the how I get there, but I'm staying attached to the why and the big goal. So the question of the day today is, are you more attached to the why or the how? I'm really curious to find out. Leave your comments below. Thank you so much for watching. Have an amazing day. Continue to believe, and I'll see you again tomorrow morning for another shot of espresso. Espresso, keep me going.
