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It's a fairly typical island, as these things go. It took a while to make it here, with connecting flights through Hong Kong and Kuala Lumpur. It operates on island time, where breakfast goes until 11am and happy hour is at least a four-hour period beginning in the late afternoon and continuing indefinitely.
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When I awoke in Kowloon harbor at 4am, I knew it was a good sign. The previous day I had flown 13 hours from San Francisco to Hong Kong with only a brief nap on the flight. Arriving at 8pm local time, I went to my hotel, settled in, and crashed out well before midnight.…
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Amy wrote in and said she was struggling with writing her book. “I know I have something good to share with people!” she said. “But I’m having a hard time just getting started.” I’ve written about working through process a few times before—see how to make decisions, starting a business, and how to finish, for…
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If you want to get something done, don’t give yourself enough time to finish. Keep it short and tight. Give yourself a fixed deadline. WDS is the ultimate fixed deadline for our team, because there’s no way in the world it can be pushed back. Thousands of people book plane tickets and hotel rooms for…
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We did it! Ten days ago, nearly 3,000 people descended on Portland for the third annual World Domination Summit. Everyone asks what WDS is, and here’s what I usually say as a brief answer: WDS is an annual gathering of creative, unconventional people from all over the world. This brief answer doesn’t tell the whole…
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I had hoped to write up my comments on last week’s adventure with 2,800 people, but I’m still in recovery. There’s just too much to process, at least for me as the host. I hope to do so more next week in some fashion. In the meantime, here are a few posts that are making…
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Over the past few days I’ve had very little sleep at night and an amazing time from 5am to midnight. Working with an incredible team, we welcomed 2,800 people to the Rose City for an adventure like no other. Several hundred initial photos are now available on our Flickr stream. I’ll be back on Thursday…
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In more than a decade of frequent travel, I’ve stayed everywhere from five-star hotels to sleeping on the ground—and I don’t mean camping, I mean sleeping on the ground with my bags next to me. As I roamed the planet during my quest to visit every country, I had all sorts of difficulties—especially with visas—but…
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It’s been a jam-packed week here at World Domination HQ. We have thousands of people coming to town in just a few days, a sentence that sounds odd even as I type it here in the WordPress interface where this blog is published. Nevertheless, it’s true! Next week we’re also attempting to set a WORLD…
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You may be familiar with the story of Hernán Cortés and his arrival in Veracruz. In order to prevent his crew from turning back from battle out of fear, he ordered them to burn their ships. That way, there was no return—the only way out was through. No going back! There are a least a…
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Sometimes it’s hard to know if it’s all worth it. You’re out in the woodshed, slaving away on this thing you love, night and day. But does anyone else care?Will anyone else care? At times, you may be tempted to pack it in. You’d like to return to normal, to the way things were before…
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In thinking through how to make some changes in my business, I’ve been thinking about identity in general. One of the strongest drivers of our behavior is to comply with the person we believe ourselves to be. If you want to do something different, you have to adopt the identity of the kind of person…
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Once upon a time I lived in the small country of Togo in West Africa. I was based on a hospital ship docked in Lomé, the capital, and the team I worked with had a project three hours’ north in a village. One of our team members needed to be there during the week, but…
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What if learning wasn’t confined to a rigid program in a university? What if you could begin learning now, without going back to school?
The One-Year, Alternative Graduate School Program was one of the more popular parts of the original AONC book, in the same chapter where I compared the value of my graduate school degree to my career as an independent writer. I’ve since heard from a number of “students” of all ages who implemented this practice in a variety of forms. The point isn’t to disparage traditional education, but to provide an alternative for different kinds of learning. You never have to put off learning, and higher education isn’t the only option. Read More
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I was going down to SF to see Ramit Sethi, an expert on negotiation and psychology. Ramit and I have known each other for a while, and he asked me to film a segment in his studio for an upcoming course.
I should explain now that Ramit and I, along with Jonathan Fields, have the habit of calling everyone dude, regardless of their age or gender. I texted Ramit: Dude, flight delay up here. What should I do? He wrote back: Dude, hold on. I’m busy counting stacks of money! Just kidding—Ramit didn’t actually say that. He was busy filming someone else, but I heard from his assistant and we quickly looked at the schedule together. Read More