Evan Carmichael shares stories from Bono, Nick Woodman, and Jack Ma about finding your spark. Woodman started GoPro with a $5,000 tooling investment after a surf trip inspired a wrist-strap camera. For creative writing, read widely, write immediately, and treat early drafts as "first pancakes."
Questions this video answers
Start writing stories right away. Pick a style and theme, treat the first drafts like a messy first pancake, write, finish, and keep producing. Read everything you can, especially outside your comfort zone, and share your work for feedback.
Chapters
Good morning, Believe Nation! Today's message is Start with a Spark. Over to you, Bono.
When we started out, we couldn't even play our instruments. We really couldn't. We formed a band before we could even play, and we were 16, and we didn't know where we were going, and we just decided to go there together, and it was just 4 of us in a kitchen in Dublin City in Ireland. And Larry Mullen Jr. is the drummer in the group. He started it all. He just kind of pinned a notice to the notice board in school. He was starting a high school band, and we got started, and actually reluctantly. I didn't even know if I wanted to be in a band. And, but when we started to play together, when we started writing songs together, I don't know why, but we felt we could we could make a living out of it, and we felt that there was something special, a spark that was different, and between us and a lot of the other bands that were starting then, we just felt we had a spark, and we started with that little spark, and we've kind of fanned it a bit. Now it's a flame, and I suppose a bit of a forest fire right now.
Most people aren't happy with the spark. Most people expect instant success as an entrepreneur. They expect that Lots of entrepreneurs have success, and I'm talented, and I'm smart. Why can't I figure this out? And my business should work in the first 6 months. I fell into the same trap when I started my very first company. I was 19. I became an entrepreneur with my first kind of real company, I guess. I thought it would be a lot easier than it was. I saw the articles in the magazines and the shows talking about these successful entrepreneurs. I thought I could do this. Everything else I had done that I applied myself to, I had success with. So I can do this too. And I failed over and over and over and over again. And you realize, and for those of you who've been in business, you know it's way harder than you think it's going to be. And a lot of people just quit too soon. A lot of people give up once it gets hard because the spark isn't enough. We all have the spark, but to turn the spark into a fire, you need to work it and work it and work it and work it and work it. And the thing that gets you through is the absolute passion for what you're doing. If you can find the thing that you love doing, that you would do even if you weren't getting paid to do it, then you have to find the way to keep going. Even if it doesn't make sense, even if you lost all practicality, even if everybody around you is telling you that you're crazy and stupid, if it's inside here, you have to keep finding a way to keep going. Maybe you take on part-time jobs, maybe you go work for somebody else, whatever it is, you have to find a way to keep going. If you've lost interest in it, it's not exciting for you anymore, it was just something that you were trying to make some money off of, then you should quit. And move on to something else. But if you find that spark and you think that this is something that I really, really have a passion for and want to do, then you have to find a way to keep going. Don't quit too soon and turn that spark into a fire. So the question today is, I'm curious, what's your spark? What's the thing that gets you excited? What's the thing that gets you motivated? What do you love about your business? Leave it down in the comments below. Super curious to find out. I also want to give a quick shout out to David Espejo. David, thank you so much for picking up a copy of my book, Your One Word. It really, really means a lot to me, and I hope you're enjoying the read. So thank you guys again for watching. I believe in you. I hope you continue to believe in yourself and whatever your one word is. Much love, and I'll see you guys again tomorrow morning for another shot of espresso. So do you have any advice for someone who would like to start doing creative writing but has no idea where to start whatsoever?
Depends. Are you the kind of person who— do you read a lot?
I read a lot, yes. And I write snarky emails, but that's about it.
I've been told they're very good.
I mean, when you say creative writing, do you want to write fiction? Do you want to write humorous essays? Do you want to— there's an awful—
Fiction, I would think.
You want to do stories?
Yes.
OK. So my advice is start writing stories.
Just do it?
Really, it's almost as simple as that. It's start writing stories. Pick a style, pick a theme, look at the kind of— you are not expected straight out of the hat to be a brave and original voice producing fine and wonderful fiction. It's much more like the first pancake on the griddle, which is going to be this weird, black, messy thing that you will either give to your dog or to a child, trying to convince them, yeah, it's nice. You write. You finish things. You start the next thing. You write that. You finish it. Somewhere in there, you get reasonably good.
Do you give these to people, or do you just—
Yeah. The point I always found that I— I would always learn more about what I'd done the moment I saw it in print, or the moment— these days, probably the moment you'd see things up on the web. But yeah, show them to people. But the most important thing when you're just starting out is write the next one. Assume that you have a million words inside you that are absolute rubbish, and you need to get them out before you get to the good ones. And if you get there early, that's great. That's really my biggest advice.
Thank you.
Read everything you can. Read outside your comfort zone. And write a lot.
Let's talk about that initiation of the dream. How did that start and how'd that come about?
I'd started a business before that I raised $4 million of other people's money. Started a web marketing company. Went boom and bust with the first dot-com boom and bust. I knew I wanted to make it as an entrepreneur and start another business, but I had no idea what I wanted to do. And so, uh, for inspiration, I went surfing and I planned a 5-month surf trip around Australia and Indonesia. The inspiration came before I even left. I wanted to capture photos of myself and my friends that I was going on the trip with while we were surfing out in the water. And no camera existed that allowed you to do that. And so I set out to develop this wrist harness that I could put a single-use disposable camera into and surf with it. And I didn't even mean it to be a business idea. I just wanted to document my experience on this trip. And as soon as I got it working well, the light bulb went off and I realized, oh my God, there must be so many other surfers in the world that want something like this.
So you started with wrist straps, essentially? But how do you go from wrist straps, which are very simple, to hardware and to actually developing a camera?
I wanted to use higher quality cameras with my wrist strap to capture higher quality photos, but every camera that I would use with the strap surfing, I would break the camera because cameras weren't designed to be used during rigorous activities like surfing. And what I ended up doing was I spent 2 years going to trade shows the camera trade shows around the world to look for a camera that was close to what I would want to design. After a year and a half, about a year, I found it and got the manufacturer to agree to make the modifications and begin building the cameras for me. I actually did the deal without ever meeting the actual company. It was all email. I had one phone call where we could barely understand each other because of language barrier.
Were they Chinese?
They were in Shenzhen. I wired my $5,000 for the tool to be— the mold to be made, because it was actually cheaper just to wire $5,000 than to fly over there, meet them, have a business trip. And I just figured, okay, we'll just go for it. And they ended up being legitimate, and we were profitable from day one because it was just me, one employee. We just had no overhead and rolled one good production run into another and slowly scaled it. And The GoPro that, that everybody knows today has been built on $265,000 of capital.
Ma made it into college on his third try and became an English teacher with no computing or engineering background. He's an unlikely tech titan, but he says he was captivated by the internet from the moment he first saw it in 1995 when he came to the U.S. as a translator.
I never touched keyboard before, I never using computer before, and I say, what is internet? He said, Jack, you know, search whatever you want on the internet. I said, how can I search? What does search mean? He said, just type. I said, I don't want to type. Computer so expensive in China, I don't want to destroy it. He said, it's not a bomb, just type. So I typed the first word called beer. At that time, very slow. Come out the American beer, Japan beer, and German beer, but no China beer. So I was curious, and I type China. No China, no data. Came back to Hangzhou with $1 in my pocket, scared, worried, and I came back and I said, I want to do something called internet.
