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“Putin Pauses In Crimea As Ukraine Mobilized For War” –Friday morning headline, KyivPost.

The weekend started with Kiev Post’s headlines warning of war. I was in Ukraine for my energy drink. It was unsettling to be so close to something so potentially dangerous. I had to stop and question whether it was worth the risks.

Two weeks ago I had been in Kiev for distributor meetings for our energy drink launch. I was back and the political situation was getting touchier. Russia had annexed Crimea from Ukraine, at least one soldier had been killed and sabers were rattling across continents.

We haven’t had a successful political revolution in the USA since the late 1700s and haven’t seen war on our continent since the middle 1800s. It can be easy to forget how much freedom costs and what it takes to protect it.

The price of liberty seems so distant from American soil.

My wife had texted me with her concerns about going back to Kiev. A good friend that I work with suggested that I was overdoing it. They were both right to suggest it might be too much. In addition to the constant travel for 30 days, the political stress was starting to unravel me.

But I rarely find the best things in life from doing what’s convenient.

  Despite the dangerous circumstances, thousands of business owners who work and live in Ukraine, and even a few from Russia, came together to choose freedom and their futures together in Kiev yesterday. XS supplied some positive energy.

It was deeply moving to see how a simple business that empowers individuals to work together can encourage people to get along when their countries are fighting. I don’t know if there are other examples of this type of cooperation right now, but my emotions pulled pretty hard when I was introduced to Russian business leaders while standing in Kiev with everything that was happening.

I doubt that I would have traveled to Crimea last weekend as an American.

Part of the beauty of our work together in free enterprise is that it focuses our efforts on what we have in common, not what makes us different.

Business leaders like Founders Crown Ambassador Natalya Yena (she is FCA in Ukraine and Russia) continue doing the daily things that support the fabric of freedom for individuals in both countries. Free enterprise is one of the critical engines that allows a society to be free—it fuels individual thought and action. To participate in our business together under these conditions is life-changing.

It was humbling to see people from Amway and the business owners that we work with, especially in challenging circumstances, come together and continue little things like their routine business meetings and the launch of a new energy drink brand for that country.

You have to weigh the travel risks of entering a region where nations appear close to war. When it comes to supporting the people that we work with, our partners, and their daily war to support individual freedom with the small steps of free enterprise, I have to believe that the little things we did together were worth the risks. 

“In dealing with poverty here and around the world; welfare and foreign aid are a Band-Aid. Free enterprise is a cure.” – Bono of U2

Intending it as a compliment, a friend described my work in in Kiev last weekend as “selling sodas in Ukraine.” 

He’s right. I was in the embattled city to represent a company I helped co-found and our Southern California energy drink brand in meetings with more than 10,000 Ukrainian independent business owners. 

It was as simple as that and also so much more. 

Like Bono, I believe free enterprise is a cure for all sorts of poverty — economic, political, and spiritual.

Not long before my business partners and I arrived in Kiev, two of the independent business owners we had hoped to be working with were killed during the Maidan revolution when snipers opened fire on protestors who were demanding that (now former) President Viktor Yanukovych listen to the people of Ukraine and not outside interests.

“It takes great courage for these people to come from across the Ukraine to meet this weekend,” said Oxana, the woman who helped organize and run the event I spoke at in Kiev. 

They came because they wanted to choose for themselves. They wanted to freely assemble around an economic opportunity and exercise an inalienable right that we take for granted in the United States.

When I spoke to the brave Ukrainians assembled in Kiev, I quoted a phrase from Thomas Jefferson inscribed on the little porcelain dish that sits on my desk at home in California. It says, “A little rebellion now and then is a good thing.” 

When I bought it, I thought it was funny and kind of cute. I don’t think that anymore.

I’ve always gotten into a bit of trouble for being a rebel. But Maidan Square, even today in its cleaned-up, post-revolutionary state, is anything but cute. And the troubles in Crimea with Russian troops posing as citizen revolutionaries aren’t even remotely funny.

Revolution is chaos. It’s dirty. People get injured and people die. Revolution is necessary when a government does not respond to its people and when a government forgets that the people give them the right to govern in the first place. 

But more important than the revolution itself is what follows.

Will revolutionaries live to seize power and enrich themselves at the expense of the people they govern? Or will they create a machinery of freedom for all supported by a moral fabric that enhances humanity?

As I walked through Kiev, stepping carefully along demolished sidewalks, where bricks are stacked as weapons and glass bottles are organized for Molotov grenades behind massive heaps of whatever-was-available for barricades, it was obvious that rebellion is ugly. 

Rebellion is vital to the defense of freedom. And it is costly. The expense of Ukraine’s rebellion was paid through the spilling of real human blood and the sacrifice of life. Some of those who paid the ultimate price for freedom in Kiev were our partners.

Around the globe, our business model is simple: We offer both a unique brand and beverage (ours was the first global energy brand to be sugar-free, to offer a spectrum of flavors, great taste, and mega-doses of B-vitamins), and, more importantly, the opportunity to build a business with us and help us share the positive energy.

If you’ve been raised in a good family with a healthy sense of self, ego, and self-control, the idea that you can choose the life you want — that you can create and shape the world you want to live in rather than one that is handed to you by fate or outsiders — isn’t revolutionary. 

If you know that and act on it, you’re already living a life of liberty and abundance.

And yet many of us — even people living in developed countries with unlimited options and potential — are slaves to what is offered.

Self-actualization starts by getting control of your life at the most basic levels. For many people, simply realizing that they can make decisions rather than have them made for them is a personal revolution. Moving out of bondage and into a life of freedom transforms animals into humans.

Wealth at any level in the hierarchy of human needs is based on choice.

People choose basic things such as homes and cars and food at an economic level. We choose whom we want to associate, where we travel, and how we govern ourselves at a political level. As we develop more wealth than we need to survive, we can become generous and decide how we share our resources at home and around the world. 

Ultimately, we can reflect on our relationship to the universe. How we relate to things that are beyond the material world, and our faith or lack thereof, defines our spirituality. To me, that is the highest form of self-actualization.

My business partners and I had been working for more than a year to launch our energy drinks in Ukraine and expand the opportunity to own small businesses to thousands of people who were willing to choose for themselves. We believe that people are children of God, that there is a transcendent, metaphysical reason why each person matters. 

It’s not our job to tell people what they ought to believe. It’s our job to fuel their dreams and help them reach their goals. 

Twice last weekend I had the opportunity to speak to crowds of more than 5,000 Ukrainians. 

“I don’t know a lot about Ukrainian politics, and the current troubles are complicated,” I told them. “The one thing that I do know is that the group that should decide what’s right for Ukraine is Ukrainians. It’s not up to Americans or Europeans or Russians to decide the future of this country. The right to self determination resides with the people of a place.”

Last Sunday marked the 200th birthday for Taras Shevchenko, a celebrated Ukrainian poet and statesman whose renown reached far beyond the borders of his homeland. In fact, a statue of Shevchenko resides in Washington, D.C.’s DuPont Circle with an excerpt from his poem, The Caucasus, which reads:

“Our soul shall never perish Freedom knows no dying, And the greedy cannot harvest Fields where seas are lying; Cannot bind the spirit Nor the living word, Cannot smirch the sacred glory Of th’ almighty lord.”

Freedom is an idea and ideas have consequences. The application of freedom is about offering people choices. And ultimately, freedom is about helping people realize that they may choose how they associate economically, socially, politically, and spiritually.

For some people, selling sodas (or energy drinks) is a first, simple step toward self-actualization. That’s what I was doing in Ukraine.

David Vanderveen is a husband by marriage, a father by birth, a surfer by vocation, and an energy drink entrepreneur. He is the editor of Rob Bell's book, The Love Wins Companion: A Guide for Those Who Want to Go Deeper.

I spent the past weekend in Kiev, Ukraine. It was electric. On the surface, the city seems fairly normal. Traffic flows, restaurants, hotels and shops are open—life goes on. But the undercurrent, like the third rail on a New York subway, is surging. Everyone is wondering what will happen with the country after the February revolution and the Russian crisis in Crimea.

 There is a perceived intensity in Ukraine. The undercurrent is because of people who are willing to choose themselves and determine their future rather than one handed to them by outsiders and fate.

My work had me in Kiev to do two events with over 10,000 Ukrainian business owners on two separate nights. As my friend Oxana from Network Twenty-One, the organization which pulled the events together, told me, “It takes great courage for these people to come from across the Ukraine to meet this weekend.”

I am a co-founding partner in an energy drink company, XS Worldwide, which licenses XS Power Drinks to Amway Europe in that region, and we decided to continue our launch plans despite the political turmoil because our brand’s core values are about supporting distributors everywhere who are willing to choose themselves.

If they were willing to invite XS and show up, then our team is going to be there. Our brand is about fueling people’s dreams of freedom and supporting their actions in pursuit of those goals.

The amazing thing about a group of people who are tied together through a shared economic interest, especially when it’s from the complicated backgrounds and histories of a place like Ukraine, is how they can connect.

We all get along because we focus on what we have in common, not our differences.

We celebrated both the ability for a people to have freedom of association (which allowed us to gather as much as it allowed Maidan Square) and to maintain the foundation--people like firefighters, nurses, doctors, security forces and other groups are essential to keep freedom from becoming anarchy. We acknowledged that there are ideas in Crimea and ideas in Kiev about how Ukraine should align itself.

We are all people with the right to voice our unique opinions.

And I recalled a dish that sits on my desk at home. It’s a historical souvenir from Virginia that quotes another freedom fighter, Thomas Jefferson. It is white porcelain with yellow and blue glazed letters that says, “A little revolution now and then is a good thing.”

When I bought it, I thought it was funny and cute. I’ve always gotten into a bit of trouble for being a rebel. But Maidan Square, even today in it’s cleaned-up-revolutionary state, is hardly cute. And the troubles in Crimea with Russian troops posing as citizen revolutionaries are difficult. It’s not funny at all.

Revolution is chaos. It is dirty. People are injured and die. Revolution is necessary when a government does not respond to the people, when a government forgets that the people give them the right to govern. But more important than the revolution is what comes after it.

Will the revolutionaries live to seize power and enrich themselves at the expense of the people they govern or will they create a machinery of freedom for all supported by a moral fabric that enhances humanity?

Seeing torn up sidewalks, where bricks are stacked as weapons and glass bottles are organized for Molotov grenades behind massive heaps of whatever-was-available for barricades…rebellion is ugly. It is important. It is vital to defend freedom. And it carries real costs in human blood and lives.

The right to self-determination and the idea that free assembly is God-given is in my blood. I was born and raised in America and my ancestry is in the Netherlands—where liberty was nurtured before it took root in the colonies. The idea of the right to choose seems hardly debatable, especially when the freedom of association is around political speech.

Political liberty is in our DNA as Americans and has infected the world over the past 200+ years.

My role as a brand ambassador for a Southern California energy drink company, born in Laguna Beach, limits what I should say about my personal beliefs when working with thousands of people we hope to support around Ukraine and around the world.

No one came to Kiev to hear an American opinion about Ukrainian politics.

My job isn’t to tell people what their politics ought to be—that is for them to decide. As I said on stage in front of more than five thousand Ukrainians twice last weekend to dramatic applause, “I don’t know a lot about Ukrainian politics, and the current troubles are complicated. The one thing that I do know is that the group that should decide what’s right for Ukraine is Ukrainians. It’s not up to Americans or Europeans or Russians to decide the future of this country. The right to self determination resides with the people of a place.”

The whole point of a power or energy drink distributed through the Amway business platform is that individuals don’t have to let a school, team, government or job dictate their futures. It is a simple business opportunity with almost no costs that anyone can approach, and if they apply themselves consistently, can achieve personal goals.

We offer people around the world the opportunity to choose themselves.

As a part of Generation X, the first generation to thumb its nose at the factory system of school and careers, I know what it means to choose yourself rather than wait for others to choose you. I’ve been an entrepreneur my whole life whether I had a job working for someone else or not.

The goal of our drink isn’t just to be different—we were the first global energy brand to be sugar free, the first to do flavors, the first to taste good, the first to do mega doses of B-12 (vitamins) for energy and the first to put an opportunity to choose yourself in every can. 

Ukrainian business owners had been waiting for over a decade—since 2002—to have our drinks in their market. We have been planning and working to launch there for a year. Over 10,000 people were making extreme sacrifices to meet in Kiev and work together to bring our drinks to their country. I wasn’t about to quit on them if they were willing to choose themselves, to believe in their own dreams and goals and show up.

Choice makes the world a better place. As people become more financially successful they make broader and more customized choices.

There is a hierarchy of human needs, and a person being able to explore, choose and determine what defines them best is what leads to self-actualization. If you believe that people matter, that we are all children of God or at least innately valuable, for whatever reason, you have to believe in human liberty.

People choose basic things like homes and cars and food at an economic level. They choose whom they associated with, where they travel, and how they govern themselves at a political level. As they develop more wealth than they need to survive, they can become generous and decide how they share those resources at home and around the world. Ultimately, people can reflect on their relationship to the universe. How people define their relationship to things beyond the material and their faith or lack of it defines their spirituality. To me, it is the highest form of self-actualization.

  Self-actualization starts by getting control of your life at the most basic levels—for many people just realizing that they can make decisions rather than have them made for them is a personal revolution. Moving out of bondage into a life of liberty and abundance transforms animals into humans. 

Every time people get to make a choice, their lives are richer. Obviously, part of making a choice is saying, “No” to whatever is being offered. But the opportunity to say, “Yes” or “No” is that makes life better.

Wealth is about choice.

Humans are the only animals that create wealth. We are the only animals that add value to each other. At our brightest and best, humanity doesn’t have to view the world as a zero-sum game where everything that can be created already exists. We have the ability to build the worlds our minds conceive for whether a dream or nightmare.

With Amway and our XS drinks, we bring new choices to new markets, both for consumer goods and for the opportunity to participate in the distribution of them. It is a choice for self-determination at the most basic, economic level.

A person saying, “No” to what I offer is as good as saying, “Yes.” My job is to offer a choice, not judge their decision. Part of the power of our brand is by offering a compelling choice, not pushing it.

Being able to decide how you will live economically and what consumer goods you can buy leads people to decide how they will organize to govern themselves. The November to February revolution in Kiev was a spontaneous uprising of the people to demand a voice. Many Ukrainians wanted the government to follow through on its promise to open its borders and embrace the abundance of liberty and prosperity in Europe compared to a Russian payoff.

The conflict over a corrupt leader who reneged on his promise happened in the center of Kiev in Maidan Square.

Maidan Square is intense. It is dramatic. It is occupied by Euromaidan revolutionaries. It felt very safe to me. It is packed with Ukrainians walking their own current events, inspecting the evidence piled in the streets and living their history. There are large political rallies. The stacks of flowers on various barricades and at locations where battles and deaths occurred seem limitless. I posted over 350 photos on my Facebook wall with very few comments. I felt that the images said most of what needed to be said.

  The images are here: https://www.facebook.com/davevanderveen/media_set?set=a.10152320882643112.1073741861.702958111&type=3

And I spent time with a few friends who were active in the revolution. Their stories impacted what I understood. The spontaneity of it all seems to be a hallmark of these types of popular uprisings around the world, amplified by the ubiquity of social media and mobile phones.

Two friends of mine were listening to the news on November 21 when Viktor Yanukovych, the then-President of Ukraine, made it clear that he would be backing out of his commitments to join the EU. A young reporter put out a social media message that he was going to Maidan Square and they both agreed to meet there…with thousands and thousands of other people.

The violence of police against students initially is what seemed to spark the escalation. Rather than make the protestors flee, it emboldened a citizenry who was fed up with lies and corruption by its government. The people stood stronger. It got violent when police attacked students and escalated from that point.

Yanukovych wasn’t interested in listening to the people. He confused where his power ultimately came from with foreign opportunities. His political career is over in Ukraine.

The people took the square and still occupy it. Taking the square allowed them to take power. There are many better first person accounts of what occurred than what I can hope to reconstruct. I wasn’t there during the protests and riots. One condensed version is on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euromaidan.

And it’s not a simple problem. Putin did offer Ukrainians a much richer package than the EU—US$15 billion versus USD$610 million in loans, no requirements to update regulations and laws, and cheaper gas. Of course, liberty in Russia and liberty in the EU are very different. Billions of dollars in loans from Russia would have many hidden costs in personal liberty for Ukrainians. Some Ukrainians prefer a Russian solution, especially those living around Crimea and along the Black Sea who are in desperate poverty and have few options, few choices.

Desperate poverty causes people to choose all kinds of authoritarian and totalitarian options historically. When people lose hope in their ability to decide for themselves, they will choose the strongest person who offers the most immediate solution to their struggle with survival.

But the Ukrainian people need to freely decide where their economic and political future lies. They shouldn’t be a political football for Americans, Europeans or Russians.

I posted my photos of Maidan Square without captions because I don’t think that I have a lot to offer in terms of what Ukraine’s political outcomes or decisions should be. Some Ukrainians may choose to side with Yanukovych and Russia, some with EuroMaidan, and some with solutions I’m not aware of yet.

The reason I was in Ukraine with XS and Amway wasn’t to give advice to Ukrainians on politics, it was to give them more choices, more freedom to choose to associate with new brands, products, people and economic opportunities that will hopefully fuel their dreams for themselves, their families, their friends and their country.

I met over 10,000 Amway Business Owners who had decided to choose themselves by making the choice to come to Kiev last weekend. In my humble opinion, that’s the first step towards making the rest of the choices that can change a person’s life and create real, lasting wealth for the entire country.

There is a statue in DuPont Circle, in Washington, DC, of a famous Ukrainian author--the national poet and statesman, Taras Shevchenko, who had his 200th birthday last Sunday. The excerpt from his poem "The Caucasus" seems as significant today as when we wrote it:

Our soul shall never perish,

Freedom knows no dying,

And the greedy cannot harvest

Fields where seas are lying;

Cannot bind the spirit

Nor the living word,

Cannot smirch the sacred glory

Of th' almighty lord."

I’ve been known to overdo it. The past 10 days have been overdone. It started out with heavy celebrations and heavier skiing in lower Austria, which converged into business meetings in upper Austria, which turned into meetings in Lisbon, Madrid and now Kiev. Last night in the Ukraine, made the work that I do with XS and Amway more special than normal.

When I push myself further than I should, I get sick. When I get sick, and I’m on a tour where people are expecting me, I play hurt.

Playing hurt is one thing when it happens because you do it to yourself. Every city that I go to, our friends whom we work with want to celebrate—it’s like a perpetual homecoming, a Groundhog Day of sporty activities, new faces, speaking for large groups and after-parties. I love it and can’t say, “No.”

Flying from Lisbon to Madrid I started to feel off. By my lunch meeting and city tour, I was exhausted, by the time I got to my room I was puking my guts out (my normal exhaustion routine)…but I still did my work that night, and I don’t think anyone noticed besides my host who had to help me find toilets.

So the idea of flying all day to get to Kiev from Madrid wasn’t terribly appealing. The idea of getting to the Ukraine immediately following the February revolution, to meet our friends, hear their stories and help them launch XS in that market was exciting, but my body had no interest to get up and get on a series of flights from 10am till 7pm.

One thing I’ve found through pushing past barriers to do the work that’s required is that it’s often the times when you don’t feel like doing the thing in front of you that it’s the most rewarding.

The best things in life come from pushing past fear and pushing past pain.

Last night I met with some of the Ukraine’s largest Amway business leaders and over 5,000 people who are anticipating the launch of XS for their own businesses. We had a fantastic event.

  When I was leaving last night, the person organizing the event said that it took guts for the 5k+ business owners to show up tonight in Kiev with everything going on...she also said that it meant a lot to have XS show up given all the difficulties. XS won't solve the political issues in the Ukraine, but we can give people more choices for how they earn their incomes and ultimately live their lives.

I’m proud to be associated with such great leaders. Some of the business people we normally would be working with aren’t there. They were killed as they stood up to corruption in their government and demanded that their voice be heard. As I said last night, “The one thing that I know about Ukrainian politics is that the only people who need to decide Ukraine’s future are Ukrainians.”

It reminded me of a coin dish I have on my desk that I bought in Virgina and has Thomas Jefferson’s quote inscribed in it, “A little rebellion now and then is a good thing.” When you see the cost of a rebellion and the importance of it, that simple quote takes on a much deeper and more profound meaning.

Kiev is operating more-or-less normally today. I do not feel threatened, and if ever there was a time where working through my own discomfort paid massive dividends, it was last night. Playing hurt pays off. You have to learn to enjoy the pain of it. As my good college friend, Mark Hansen, used to say on Sunday mornings after too much of everything on Saturday night when we were nursing hangovers, “It feels like victory.”

Today I’m visiting Maidan Square and will be hearing some first-hand reports about what happened and is continuing to evolve. Oleg Smityuk, our brand manager at Amway, Ukraine is my guide. He’s an amazing young dude who is full of energy and promise that this country will do great things. Sunday, I have another round of big meetings with business leaders about the XS launch.

Every time I have the opportunity to share value with the business leaders we work with it is an honor. We are creating wealth and making the world a better place simply by offering more choices to more people—choices about what they drink, how they get their energy, how they earn income and how they build their lives and their futures.

Last night I felt more honored than normal. Seeing so many people come out to celebrate their ability to choose themselves, to choose their own life in the midst of political chaos gives me great hope for the Ukraine and our continued partnership together.

This may seem a bit off-topic for the blog, but I think it ties into the past few posts about why I believe in building bridges and not moats.

Had two interesting interactions with different people groups who are committed to a literal interpretation of the Bible, which is a bit baffling to me.

One interaction was with some former classmates from Wheaton College commenting on an article from Christianity Today about a recent protest by gay school alumni over a chapel where the speaker claimed to have changed her sexual preference.

A former debate partner of mine from freshman year said that he found it difficult that the protestors were referencing their own autobiographical information as truth. I asked if that was different than reading stories about autobiographical references as truth (in the Bible or theology or science--all accounts start as first person observations and build from there).

I mean, do we really believe that the Bible landed in Costco, ready-to-buy, in infallible English? Do literalists truly believe in unicorns? (“Unicornium” occurs six times in the Bible in the latin translation, which pre-dates the English.)

The second interaction (entirely in my head) was from a post I saw from someone I don't know, angry that Matthew McConaughey thanked God for his Oscar. He stated that God is basically a bigot and murderer if you read the Bible literally, so no one has any business thanking God...which is a wonderful reading of the Bible if you’re a slow 13-year-old.

Not to dwell too deeply on the topic, but why would anyone want to read an ancient text or epic poem literally? Perhaps it says more about the reader than the text?

...then Rob Bell started a conversation with Frederick Buechner about the Bible yesterday, which was outstanding:

"Fred: If somebody claims that you have to take the Bible literally, word for word, or not at all, ask him if you have to take John the Baptist literally when he calls Jesus the Lamb of God. If somebody claims that no rational person can take a book seriously which assumes that the world was created in six days and man in an afternoon, ask him if he can take Shakespeare seriously whose scientific knowledge would have sent a third-grader into peals of laughter…Finally this. If you look at a window, you see fly-specks, dust, the crack where Junior’s Frisbie hit it. If you look through a window, you see the world beyond. Something like this is the difference between those who see the Bible as a Holy Bore and those who see it as the Word of God which speaks out of the depths of an almost unimaginable past into the depths of ourselves. (Beyond Words)" 

http://tmblr.co/Z8QMAt194_EcG

...which reminded me of Reed College's Student Handbook from 2008 about their legendary (and very secular) HUM 110 course 

"Other people not to be: The This-Text-Offends-Me-Personally Girl. If you don't believe in God, great. Neither does the vast majority of your conference. But the Hebrew Bible is still the foundational text of an entire people, often the only historical document for many periods and regions, and the soil from which every subsequent bit of Western culture springs. Get over it. The Bible has about as much in common with Jerry Falwell as the Illiad has with Brad Pitt. Less, actually. "Plato is a misogynist." Okay, fine, whatever. What made him that way? Letting your personal distaste for the morality of a text get in the way of actually trying to understand the text is lazy, intellectually weak, and a dishonor to the text. Do it, and I'll hit you."

For me, the world is full of great mystery and great truth. I have never seen much value in true and false or multiple choice tests--unless you are simply testing the veneer of truth, and where’s the ultimate value in that?

A black and white universe of literal truths seems to be one of our own design, a god in a box (whether you believe in “God” per se or not) that we can carry around and shake at people who scare us and unsettle the worlds we've built. It is focusing on the window and missing the universe beyond it that is waiting to be explored.

Logic and rationalism are useful tools to help us understand how things work, but leave us with unfulfilling answers for why we are here. For exploring ultimate truths, we need poetry and imagination, not math and science.

Epic poetry and parables give us a portal from which to explore truth and the mysteries of the universe. Fixed theologies and literal interpretations fail over time. They don't hold up to the changing mores or morality of culture, to our own understandings of who we are through our own shared stories.

As GK Chesterton said in Orthodoxy, The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits."

Q. At the end of the day, what aspect of your surfing gives you the most satisfaction? A. I think it is where it's always been: getting a little scared. Getting a little scared and doing new things, things you haven't done before, and continuing that pursuit is the key for me. Getting on the edge seems to keep everything in line. That keeps you humble and keeps your perspective right. That's the pursuit, really. Keep evolving, keep improving and doing things you haven't done ... and get a little scared. (Laird Hamilton being interviewed by Jake Howard for ESPN.)

Living in Bavaria last fall, I was enjoying OctoberFest with friends from Amway Europe and our agency, Akzio, when someone at our table suggested that we should all sign up to compete in an event we sponsor called the Wild Face Freeride Extreme Race in Pitztal, Austria. 

After a few liters of beer, I agreed to race.

The Wildface race is pretty unique. It happens over two days in late February and occurs mostly off-piste (back country) in steep loose snow with chutes, rocks and trees that must be navigated at speed. The qualifier race starts on the Pitztal ski area and quickly goes out-of-bounds…once you’ve developed plenty of speed.

When I received the sign up forms online, I got pretty nervous. The whole idea started getting real. Last week when I took a trial run down the qualifier course, I started getting scared. The gates on the course force contestants through the narrowest chutes and the steepest terrain. It’s not easy skiing at any speed, and it doesn’t help if you don’t live at altitude, don’t ski more than a dozen days a year and are in your mid-40s…

The first step to managing your fear is to shut down the internal whining 

Everyone knew that I had no chance against professional skiers to win or place. Even qualifying for the main event would be nearly impossible. My job wasn’t to impress anyone with my skill, speed or ability on skiis. My job was to show how good the other guys are and that it’s ok to try, even if you don’t really have a chance at success.

My goal was simply to finish the qualifier without personal injury and without walking down the course.

And because we happen to be launching a new XS flavor in Europe, Wild Berry Blast, Amway and Akzio thought it would be good to film a video of the day, so I had three GoPro cameras strapped on. (Thank you, Jeff Smith from GoPro for the new equipment!) I had one camera on my chest shooting my face, one on my helmet pointing forward and one on my ski pole looking back…

The best question I got about the cameras was, “What happens if you fall on that one with the pole on your chest?”

“I guess it pokes a hole in me,” I replied.

The day before the start looked pretty reasonable—a fast run straight down the back side of the first big ski lift…when I looked again the next day, I noticed that they had put a five-foot jump in the middle of the course…at the bottom of the first hill…just like a Super-G race course. Nice. 

The females and male snowboard competitors didn’t have to hit the jump, but the male skiers did. Perfect. Putting on my cameras, race number and goggles, my heart was about ready to jump out of my chest.

Most guys just went straight at the jump as fast as they could ski…and they were flying by the time they hit it. I took a few turns, like a graceful old lady, and made it over with relief. And that was just the first 10 seconds of the race…

As soon as you turn a corner around the last t-bar on the hill, you’re flying over a cornice and into the first chute, past rocks and into what looks like light loose snow. It’s not. It’s been sun baked into white concrete with a crème-brulee-like crust and with varying weight and hardness of snow underneath. It’s perfect for two skis to go in separate directions, but not ideal to go together in unison.

That crusty concrete is also perfect for injury. Julian from Akzio is a great skier and much younger than me. He was racing behind me and much faster. Something went wrong in that heavy snow and he blew out the tendons on his knee.

One goal of the race for me was avoiding a trip to an Austrian hospital.

I could feel the potential for a knee injury (my left knee isn’t exactly 100% after 45 years of scar tissue and abuse), so I was taking my time. I was taking so much time, that four other racers passed me on my way to the bottom. On the second half of the course, I spent most of my time looking behind me before entering the gates or chutes so I didn’t get run down by other racers.

I became an obstacle.

On the last quarter of the course, the gates force racers into the narrowest chute. A stream runs through the middle of it with small trees and bushes protruding and only a very narrow and vertical passage. One of my skis went the wrong direction as I was passing through, and I ended up straddling a small tree with one ski on in the middle of the course.

My three GoPro cameras caught both the most ridiculous wipeout that day and my verbal assault on the poor tree. When in doubt, abuse inanimate objects to preserve what remains of your pride.

After the tree incident, I had to stop twice to let my legs and lungs catch up with my brain. My head knew where I needed to ski, but my body wasn’t having it.

When I finally finished, the crowd was very enthusiastic. The fastest male skier made it down the qualifying run in three minutes and forty seconds. The slowest and oldest male skier (me) made it down the hill in 12 minutes and twenty seconds. The other male over 40 who was racing was over nine minutes. I think most of the racers were wondering how anyone could race for so long without having a heart attack. I wondered the same.

I’m not sure if skiing in that qualifier was the scariest thing I’ve done this year, but it’s in the top few. While the event itself had its fair share of adrenaline, fear, sweat and exhaustion, the feeling when you’ve finished something that scared you a little bit to try is exhilarating.

Laird is right. Scaring yourself a little bit is humbling, it is what keeps a person sharp and puts life, the things that matter, into perspective. We don’t have to win. We don’t have to succeed. But we do need to try. We need to figure out how to finish the things we start.

We need to scare ourselves a little bit.

My college roommate, Mark Metherell, became a Navy SEAL and later worked for the US State Department as a military advisor in Afghanistan and Iraq training those countries’ special forces so that they could develop their own right to self determination.

He told a story about training Afghani specialists in the use of global positioning systems (GPS) for their work in remote terrain there. Many of the tribal people that he worked with had a very different worldview than we have been raised with in the West. They called him “Mr. Mark” and asked him unusual questions, like “Where does our river go? Does it flow under a big rock as our leaders tell us?”

He noticed that they were having great difficulty understanding the fundamentals of how GPS worked. They weren’t getting the basic concept of satellites and their relationship to the Earth. He stopped the class and asked them a question, “Is the Earth round like an orange or flat like a piece of paper?”

The class responded that, of course, the Earth is flat like a piece of paper.

So Mark changed the curriculum to train the use of GPS for staff who believed that the world is flat like a piece of paper, and they learned to use the technology with great skill in their region.

The USA and Afghanis needed to be able to work together effectively to allow that region to free itself from violent totalitarianism. Being able to communicate with GPS between local experts and foreign operators was an essential element in that collaboration.

Mark could have rolled his eyes, let the class know how stupid they were, and tried to convert them to his point of view about the nature of the universe. If and when he was able to change and transform their entire oral tradition for how the world works, he might have then been able to teach them GPS. He also had the choice of updating the training model for the tool at hand so that it connected with their belief structure, meeting them where they were rather than withholding value until they came across to his beliefs.

Mark could have built a moat and isolated himself from them, safe in his preferred view of how planets and sattelites work. Instead, he built a bridge from his worldview to theirs, because he believed that the shared value of working together was more important than trying to prove that his ideas were superior, right or more true than theirs.

Mark was also intensely curious about why other people had ideas that were different than his own. It was part of his love of humanity as children of God which led him to want to share and add significant value to the lives of people he met.

Building moats rarely adds value to others. It almost never gets the other to ask more questions about your worldview. Building moats also raises questions about how the people behind the moats believe the world works.

Does the world prosper from the freedom of association and the exchange of ideas or has truth reached a finality? Has everything of value been discovered? Do we live in a world of abundance where wealth is created by adding value to each other or do we merely have a finite set of resources that we need to hoard?

Is humanity progressing or not?

How we behave exhibits what we believe. I’m a fan of abundance and freedom.

If you believe that we are pilgrims on a journey, and if you believe that we each are inherently valuable, and if you believe that we create more wealth in this world when we share our inherent value with each other, then digging moats is the wrong behavior. 

I believe that we have to meet people where they are and find common ground if we are going to move forward together. Bridges require common ground to connect. Pilgrims build bridges and help each other across them in our collective journey.

Help a fellow pilgrim. Share the love. Build bridges, not moats.

“Born in Laguna Beach. Brewed in Japan.” –XS can art, Japan.

How do you translate a locally born, Southern California lifestyle brand to the world? What about the brand ethos is universal and what needs to be updated and translated in the execution of the idea for new cultures?

The initial market launches for XS outside the USA weren’t too far afield culturally: Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom. We are definitely different, but we’re not alien to each other—language, food, and customs are similar. The expression of the brand has slight variation.

Japan is a totally different animal, and I love Japan.

I moved to Japan after graduating from college in 1991. There weren’t great job prospects in the USA, and I needed to make some money. So I borrowed a couple thousand dollars from my father, bought a plane ticket and went to Japan, where a friend said the economy was booming, to teach English and find my fortune.

Before my first trip to Japan, I hadn’t ever tasted sushi.

Working and living in Japan, even if it was less than a year, opened my eyes to how different a people, their culture, language and values can be. The latin term that describes this is “mores,” where we get the English words “moral” and “morality” that define cultural values and customs.

As I lived, worked and made friends in Japan, I also learned that, like other parts of the world I had already visited and studied, although the expressions of a people, place and culture might be quite different, the fundamental ethic from where their specific morality developed was very similar if not the same. They organize themselves to serve the god(s) they love and their tribe.

Walking back into the Japanese market nearly 20 years later with XS was both exciting and intimidating. It was a great challenge with huge cultural hurdles to overcome.

Japan has one of the most dynamic beverage markets in the world. The taste for new flavors and concepts is unbelievable and the execution is flawless. Perfection is the rule. It is a brutal place to do business.

And our space with XS, the energy drink category, didn’t have the normal comforts. RedBull had not emerged as a force in the market, it was still a small and struggling brand there. The energy category was dominated by “genki” drinks—small brown bottles of nasty-tasting vitamin and herbal remedies.

Our distribution, marketing and sales partner, Amway Japan, also wasn’t exactly a lay up. While John Parker, then-president of Amway Japan, and Greg Clark, our brand manager in the country, wanted XS to help that company engage the next generation of distributors, the average distributor was a defined as a late-middle-aged housewife doing cookware demonstrations and the business was in a decade-long slump.

XS didn’t have a natural place to fit. We were misfits again.

One obvious opportunity is that Japanese culture loves elements of American lifestyle and fashion. There is a book, published originally in the 1960s, called Take Ivy. It’s basically candid photos of preppy guys on Ivy-league campuses in khakis, t-shirts, sweaters and penny loafers. It is the Bible, the foundation, that most Japanese sportswear design is based on.

Surf or beach culture in Japan is also very connected to the USA, especially to retro beach culture from the 1960s, which inspires much of the “hipster” movement today.

Laguna Beach was and continues to be an epicenter of surf culture and brand development for the USA and the world. It is an art colony that became a bohemian sports and alternative lifestyle center in the late 60s and 70s that endures

So translating the XS brand in Japan meant keeping it American where “American” is defined as “Southern California beach culture.” And “freedom” didn’t mean American flags, big trucks and gun racks. It meant the ability to live differently, pursue adventures and opportunities with friends in harmony with your environment.

We kept our big, sweet American flavors, loud can colors and Frampton-ish XS logo. XS is Southern California America in a can and translated for Japan. The brand has become a huge success there through close partnerships with Amway staff and major distributors.

Two of the largest distributors in Japan, Nakajima-san, and Azumi-san, told us that what XS brought to Amway was the ability to make the business opportunity more fashionable for the next generation. And they pushed us and Amway to take it to new places we hadn’t been able to go before. We started hosting and sponsoring nightclub events, large outdoor surf culture activities and concerts—experiences that allowed a new generation to see, taste, touch and feel what it might be like to own a business that has the potential to let you define your own life.

XS became the largest energy drink brand in Japan and is growing faster than the competition. Amway is now in its third year of growth and the average distributor getting into the business today is in their mid-20s. Together and in close partnership with distributors and Amway, we were able to transform a market that does over US$1 billion a year in revenue. It continues to be a huge success for all of us.

Our partnership in Japan has become a model for how aligning strategically between a small edgy brand and a large, established business can fundamentally enhance the overall brand and total distributor/customer experience.

The ethos of XS never changes—we have a brand key, mission, vision and values that remain constant, but our execution of that ethos in global markets is translated very differently through everything from flavor and formula variations to how we express what it mean to be born in Laguna Beach but rebuilt for a new audience in a new place.

The “mores” or morality of a place varies with the culture it inhabits—people have a surprisingly wide variety of customs on this planet that appear on the surface to each be wildly different. What I continue to find, when I dig deeper, is that the prevailing ethos, like the ethos of XS, is that we all really want the same things. Our core ethic that the morality expresses itself from is generally the same—we love whatever we worship and we love our tribe.

Our goal at XS, wherever we do business, wherever we exchange value with others, is to support and fuel the dreams of those people and that place.

“To avoid criticism say nothing, do nothing, be nothing.” ― Aristotle

“He has a right to criticize, who has a heart to help.” ― Abraham Lincoln

The problem of creating, of putting something out into a more-and-more connected world is that in addition to hopefully attracting positive engagement, if it is worth discussing, it will attract negative energy as well.

The original anonymity of the Internet has allowed people to do and say things that they don’t have the courage to say to your face. These people are commonly referred to as trolls.

Don’t fear the trolls.

The great thing about creating your own thing, whether it’s your Facebook page, a blog, a business or a life, is that you get to control the story you tell. You get to choose what is worth responding to, and the more people talk and debate your idea, regardless of its shape, the more powerful it becomes.

Embrace the hate but don’t let it taint your project.

When my friend, Cathleen Falsani, went to Sojourners to help them develop their online experience we talked about the problems of other social-religious-political discussion sites that quickly devolved into shouting matches and name-calling.

Polite company, people that care about each other and about civilized humanity in general, don’t revert to name-calling…not as a rule anyway.

Sure we’re all guilty of getting carried away, or letting our emotions drive our behaviors, but it should be the exception. And we need to apologize when we do it.

So Cath and her team developed up a great list of rules for the site, eliminated anonymous posting and encouraged vigorous debate within reasonable guidelines. She also deleted users and comments that were inappropriate to her community.

This is the “Sojourner’s Comment Community Covenant:”

 1. I will express myself with civility, courtesy, and respect for every member of the Sojourners online community, especially toward those with whom I disagree, even if I feel disrespected by them. (Romans 12:17-21)

2. I will express my disagreements with other community members' ideas without insulting, mocking, or slandering them personally. (Matthew 5:22)

3. I will not exaggerate others' beliefs nor make unfounded prejudicial assumptions based on labels, categories, or stereotypes. I will always extend the benefit of the doubt. (Ephesians 4:29)

4. I will hold others accountable by clicking "report" on comments that violate these principles, based not on what ideas are expressed but on how they're expressed. (2 Thessalonians 3:13-15)

5. I understand that comments reported as abusive are reviewed by Sojourners staff and are subject to removal. Repeat offenders will be blocked from making further comments. (Proverbs 18:7)

We do the same at XSNation sites. We edit and delete comments as well as block users that refuse to behave. It’s my world. House rules.

I love the example of Gandalf, in the Mines of Moria, when he has to stop the Balrog from destroying the ring quest, and he says, “You cannot pass. I am a servant of the Secret Fire, wielder of the flame of Anor. You cannot pass. The dark fire will not avail you, flame of Udûn. Go back to the Shadow! You cannot pass.”

You have the power to stop trolls that matter with light. You can control your own space. You can tell more powerful and bigger stories that hate posts. And when you realize that half the price of success, the cost of doing anything that really matters is creating enemies, you learn to embrace the hate as part of the process.

It’s also important to remember that you don’t have to respond to vapid criticism. Many times the best response to a bad question is another question—have you actually used the product? Did you read the book? Have you watched the movie? Most critics want to tell you what they think. Ask them why they think that. Sometimes a few simple questions point out misunderstandings, common ground and actually lead to strong relationships.

Most importantly, remember that trolls really aren’t talking about you or your work. It’s about them. It can be a call for help but it’s mostly just people that want to use the sunshine you created to see if they can create a following of their own. You have to decide whether it’s worth the attention, the light you create, to let it be absorbed by that darkness. Mostly it’s not.

Use your creative power to focus on what you’re building. Honest and vigorous debate about your ideas means those ideas, your project, is developing it’s own gravity. Be stoked for that! Don’t be afraid to delete and snuff out the trolls that come only to destroy. Engage with questions when possible, and remember that it’s not about you or your work most of the time. Save most of your positive energy, your light, for the project itself.

“…Have you come here for forgiveness?

Have you come to raise the dead? Have you come here to play Jesus? To the lepers in your head…”

--U2. “One.”

Traumatic separation from a community creates phantoms that haunt us. We think about ourselves more than anyone else ever will, and while we will quickly fall off the radar of the group we’ve left (since they’re primarily thinking about themselves), the easy road is to let our reactions to the thing we’ve left define who we become.

In the spring of 1990, at the end of my third year at Wheaton College, I was strongly encouraged by the administration of that school to continue my liberal arts education elsewhere. They gave me two choices, expulsion or withdrawl—I got kicked out.

Wheaton is a conservative, Christian college in suburban Chicago that required students to sign a pledge that they wouldn’t drink, dance, smoke, fornicate, gamble or think bad thoughts. Some of my friends and I decided that life was more colorful and interesting with an alternative pledge that superceded the original Wheaton pledge (so we could truthfully admit we were keeping ‘the pledge’ whilst thoroughly breaking the original one).

  We had a secret society called the Church of Reason. There was an unofficial campus newspaper called The Icecream Socialist. We ran candidates in elections, held parades in our own honor and threw some epic parties.

I probably wasn’t an ideal Wheaton student.

So when I met with the vice president of student development, the dean of men and the dean of women (still haven’t figured out why she was there) to choose between expulsion or withdrawl, it was a poem about surfing with some sexual innuendo in the Icecream Socialist that was the straw that broke the camel’s back.

Wheaton College kicked me out over a poem. 

In all fairness, they had a million legitimate reasons to send me packing. A columnist at the Wheaton Record, Neil Carlson, said, “Vanderveen, kicking you out of Wheaton for poetry is like busting Al Capone for tax evasion.”

  Some friends, professors and I held a student protest and hosted a media circus. My parents found out because a friend saw me on the 11 o’clock news. We made the front page of the Chicago Tribune and the college section of the New York Times. It helped me get a very competitive internship at the American Enterprise Institute. It became a life-defining experince for me then that helped propel me forward.

As I have progressed and regressed through life, there are times there I pretend that the thing I left is in the past. The fact is, our life may have chapters, but it’s one book.

  As my friend Rob says, “Reconcile your story.”

  Progression through life may lead us to believe that things we used to do are in the past. But that never really seems to be true. We may modify our behavior and we may adapt our beliefs, but communities we come from will always be a part of us.

We are one story. We have to reconcile our past, but we don’t have to let it define our future.

When you figure out what you are supposed to do, don’t let your past or your critics define you. Reconcile your story, embrace the present and write your story through the actions in your life. The phantoms in your head only take shape if you focus on them and give them quarter. Slay them by focusing on the story you want to present to the world.

“..One love One blood One life You got to do what you should…

…One”

--U2. “One.”

“We want you to be as successful as you can be, here or where ever life takes you.” –previous boss.

“Every time a friend of mine succeeds, a little piece of me dies.” –Gore Vidal.

In the late 1990s, I went through an acquisition at a boutique software consulting firm where I ended up at the second largest software company in the world. It was quite a cultural shift in quality of work, life, expectations and associates.

My boss, the guy who ran the Western United States, was the guy who had hired me at the previous firm. He had great life lessons and sayings that helped me sort through the new environment.

When we started at the new company, he addressed all the staff and said, “Welcome. You’re all here, because we think you are among the best consulting staff we have, so we kept you. We have compensation plans that allow you to make from six figures to two comma incomes [incomes over a million dollars]. Some of you will hit that mark. Some of you won’t. And some of you will exceed the ability of this firm to contain you. That’s ok too. We want you to be as successful as you can be, here or where ever life takes you.”

My boss had been a part of the shareholders who were significantly enriched by the acquisition of our business. He understood that succeeding in life is largely based on ownership, not what you can trade your time for in a job.

Ownership and changes in ownership means that some owners will graduate on to new things in the process of succeeding at life. But, as Gore Vidal says with ironic humor in the quote above, there is also a lot of jealousy when a friend is uniquely successful. For some it is so painful to see friends move on in life that they cut them off.

Graduation shouldn’t mean divorce.

One day as I was working on developing some projects between a new dot-com business and one of my Fortune 100 accounts my boss said, “David, it’s about wealth, not wages.” He was telling me to own a piece of the bakery. Don’t just get slices of the pie.

He also understood that professional relationships have great value beyond the immediacy of the environment where they are formed. We shouldn’t be offended if some people migrate to other opportunities or communities. You shouldn’t mate with siblings and cousins. You’ve got to introduce new cats to your barn if you want healthy cats.

Healthy DNA requires some forks in the family tree.

As a Dutch, Frisian-American who married a Dutch, Frisian-American from a Dutch-Frisian American community, I can talk for hours about why refreshing the DNA is a good thing (although I’m extremely happy with my family). The Dutch have benefitted immensely from a global trading empire for the past 400 years—lots of fresh bloodlines in the gene pool.

It is good and healthy and important for people to be able to move on when what they are doing isn’t working any more and the culture they are in does not want to go where they are heading. When and if people need to move on to other things, it is a very good practice to keep a bridge open with them. Stay in contact. Be in touch.

Learn to practice celebrating graduation without divorce.

In the religious tradition of my youth, there are two very similar Christian, Protestant denominations: Dutch Reformed and Dutch Christian Reformed. They are so similar, most members of each have no idea how they are specifically different. But they will fight tooth and nail for their particular flavor of Dutch, Protestant Christianity. They will shun their neighbor if they move on to the other flavor or, God forbid, a non-denominational church… 

And yet, both of those churches believe that people, all of us, are children of God. That each person was fearfully and wonderfully made to do something special and unique and passionate with their lives. We can’t all find our special purpose living in someone else’s systems. Now more than ever, we have the tools and opportunities to create something fresh and new. Graduate.

If we truly love the people who we consider our friends, we will celebrate their success, their progression and their decisions to shift gears. Sometimes that may mean moving out of the culture and organization that we come from to something else. If you are wise, you will keep a relationship with them. Freshen up your DNA. Celebrate graduations.

“It feels like it’s too late for me to change.” – a participant at a recent Rob Bell Two Day event.

When working with a variety of global leaders at his event in Laguna Beach, California, Rob Bell responded to one participant who verbalized her reluctance to change based on her age. Rob said, “The first number is one.” 

Rob was basically saying, that people worry about changing because they know there are a lot of steps, and they're worried that they're not prepared for the journey. Bilbo never would have left the Shire if he knew he had to battle Smaug. We don't know all the adventure and danger ahead. All we really need to know is what the next step is. The first step is the first, and then the second, and so on...just focus on the first one now. THEN focus on the next one.  

The first number is one. Thank God we can't see the future.

You go on a journey, because it’s the right journey, not because of the number of steps or because of how far you’ve already traveled in another direction.

The right direction is the right direction and the wrong direction is the wrong direction. If you think you’re going in the wrong direction, then stop going that direction. If you know that the right direction is a different way, then start moving in the right direction, or at least start moving in another direction from the wrong direction. 

Sometimes we’ve been on the right path but the right path becomes the wrong one. If your eyes are open and you’re aware, you know when the winds of life change. There isn’t a GPS for life. You need to know yourself well enough to know when it’s time to turn the rudder.

The first number is one, and the next number is two, and as we do the work every day, we develop more skills and more relationships and then hopefully one day someone asks us “How did you end up where you are?” And there isn’t an easy answer.

It is always one step at a time. Make each step as best you can.

There was no formal map. There was no end in mind. It was all about making the next step in the right direction and moving along the journey every day.

Are you willing to do the work? Will you create a plan to do it consistently? To get up earlier and make the thing you’re supposed to do (as opposed to the things you have to do) happen every day?

You rarely meet great writers who know the end of their stories before they write them—if they did, then why would they bother? The joy of writing is usually the process of discovery in the journey of developing great characters, especially discovering the ending. But all great writers do the work. They must write all the time.

Doing the work we are meant to do will lead us to where we are supposed to be. I have yet to meet someone that ended up where they were supposed to be and knew the destination when they started their life’s work.

Strategy comes later. It shakes out of the work when we look back at what works.

There are two great resources for doing the work that I strongly recommend:

The Artists Way by Julia Cameron: http://juliacameronlive.com/the-artists-way/

The War of Art by Steven Pressfield: http://www.stevenpressfield.com/the-war-of-art/ 

You can choose your path. You can do the work. Start today.

“Say, ‘Yes’ to everything.” – John Parker.

When my wife, Sissi, our son, Willem and I were heading over to live and work in Bavaria last year, a good friend and former ex-pat and Amway executive that we’ve worked with around the world, John Parker, gave us some great advice. He said that when you’re living overseas, you get invited to things that might not always seem like you want to do them, but you should do them. “Just say, “Yes” to everything,” he told me.

So we did basically everything plus a few Vandertwists.

There are so many reasons we all say, “No” to things. Sometimes maybe we say, “No” because we don’t think we’re good enough to try. So foolish. Being naturally good at something probably means you’ll never be exceptional at it. No one is ever great at anything without a tremendous amount of effort. If you don’t have to work at something, you probably wont.

The hard work is what makes doing something well worthy of the achievement. 

You can choose yourself. As my friend, Rob says, “You can choose your own path. You can do your own work.”

But to figure out what you can do best in the world, you have to try a lot of stuff.

My friend Cath and her husband, Maury were on a trip in Malawi, which is a story in and of itself, and their guide, Mac, asked them, “Would you like to see one more child?” They said, “Yes” when they were hot, tired and just wanted to get back their hotel for a cold beer.

When Cath and Maury said, “Yes” they met Vasco, who they helped bring back to the USA so that he could have heart surgery and ended up adopting him…one of less than a handful of Malawaian children to have been adopted by foreigners.

Now Sissi and I are lucky enough to be Vasco’s godparents and a part of his life.

Saying, “Yes” is scary some times. It can be awkward, tiring and difficult. Of course you need to have some boundaries and there are times when a “no” is absolutely necessary. Saying, "Yes" to everything in Vegas, Miami, New York City or Berlin is definitely NOT recommended, for instance.

The truth is that most people don’t regret what they’ve done as much as they regret the things that they’ve left undone.

Adventure is all about saying, “Yes.” Entrepreneurship is all about knowing what to say “No” to so that you can say yes to all the right opportunities. Most people need to say, “Yes” a lot more to learn what to say, “No” to.

So we dove with Great White Sharks (and surfed with them) while in South Africa. We skied the Alps, rocked Octoberfest and wrestled Krampus. I don’t recall saying, “No.” We were a bit exhausted when we got back to Laguna Beach after a season near Munich, but we had the time of our lives.

You can choose your path. You can do your work. It all starts by saying, “Yes.”

The masters in the art of living

Make little distinction

Between their work and their play,

Their labor and their leisure,

Their minds and their bodies,

Their information, their recreation,

Their love and their religion.

  They hardly know which is which.

They simply pursue

Their vision of excellent

At whatever they do,

Leaving others to decide whether

They are working or playing.

--Often attributed to James Michener

Jim Collins talks about having $200 million dollars and only five years left to live in a classic Inc Magazine interview from the 1990s (http://www.inc.com/magazine/19971001/1335_pagen_5.html). He says to make a list of what you would do with your day versus what you’re going to do with your day. 

Build one life.

Segmented lives aren’t true. They are a way to hide a variety of incongruencies, half truths and lies from the one true life we all hope to live.

If you don’t want one life, that’s okay. We all lie to ourselves. Just make a point to move past the variety of selves you attempt to inhabit and find your one true self eventually.

It’s a process.

My goal with my life, my family, my business and what I hope XS brings to people who want to choose themselves, is that it helps people learn a lot about themselves in the process of fueling whatever dreams they have.

It’s funny how we think we know what we want until we get it.

Money gives you freedom, but it doesn’t buy you happiness. And I don’t think that you’ll be truly happy until you wake up one morning and you wouldn’t change a thing about your life.

Make a list. What would you do tomorrow if you had $200 million, so money isn’t a concern, but you only have five years left to live. Time is running out. What would you do tomorrow versus what you’ll have to do tomorrow? Make the lists.

And here’s what can change everything for you… Keep the list of what you truly want, more than anything else in the world, and every day, every time you have to make a decision, ask yourself if the decision you are about to make is bringing you closer to or further away from what you really, truly want in life.

If you will be brave, and if you will be true, you will start to make daily decisions that move you closer to what you really want from life. Defeat the lies. Own the life you want through small, daily decisions.

One day you will wake up, and you may or may not have millions of dollars…but you won’t change a thing.

“Born in Laguna Beach, Brewed in Japan.” – XS can art in Japan.

Where we come from shapes us.

We also shape ourselves with the choices we make. Who we call friends and where we move. What we do for work and play leads us somewhere. Some people wait for life to make choices for them while others choose themselves.

Place, climate, the people we are made from, the language we speak and the culture we inhabit give us raw material for our lives, for our stories, for the brands we build and share with the world. It’s part where we come from and part what we do with it.

XS was born in Laguna Beach, California. The appellation, the place it grew from and continues to grow out of is all about a culture where people have historically had to choose themselves. Laguna was originally an artists’ colony where the Impressionist movement arrived in the early 1900s, a couple of decades after it started in France. The Southern California light and unique coves, hills and seascapes helped form a new expression of paint and color.

Later, Laguna became famous for some of the first major surf brands and innovations: Hobie Alter and Grubby Clark shaped the first foam surfboards in Laguna Beach, a long list of professional watermen and brands were eventually developed along this stretch of coast that contributed to a global enthusiasm for the freedom of a Southern California beach lifestyle.

There is a natural, positive energy that comes from living in the sun, on the sand with regular immersion in cool sea water. It becomes addictive. Fueling that sort of existence doesn’t fit into the boxes that the world builds for people. It’s an alternative lifestyle choice.

Living differently from everyone else means that you have to choose yourself, because no one else is going to choose you. You’re too weird but in the coolest possible way. You become weird in a way that everyone else wishes they were. You don’t have to rely on the past, your “permanent record” or who your family was or wasn’t to shape your future. You can decide to make a new story and a new life, but you need to know what you want.

Embrace the coolness of being a better sort of weird.

XS is all about a beautiful place full of adventure and promise, light and hope. It provides the raw material to go where you want with whom you’d like as you see fit. Like Laguna Beach and the California Impressionist painters or surfboard shapers, it gives a person the fuel and inspiration to do more, but what you choose to do depends on you.

“When you first start off trying to solve a problem, the first solutions you come up with are very complex, and most people stop there. But if you keep going, and live with the problem and peel more layers of the onion off, you can often times arrive at some very elegant and simple solutions. Most people just don’t put in the time or energy to get there.” –Steve Jobs 

Steve Jobs’ and Apple’s dedication to elegance is legendary. Elegance is a great virtue, particularly for people pursuing models or truth, whether in science, religion or anywhere in between. When making models of whatever truth we are trying to capture one rule we use to establish the truest model is elegance—which model most accurately describes the truth in the simplest terms?

Before we realized that the Earth wasn’t at the center of the universe, before the Western world could dismantle their poor reading of the Bible from their better reading of the universe, scientists made elaborate models with dramatic constants to predict where the stars would be in the sky each night…assuming the Earth was at the center of it all. Inelegant models can work, but the constants you need to make them work generally tell you that something is wrong.

When a tool or model fits elegantly into our lives so well that we barely notice it at all, it’s probably among the truest things we know.

Steve Jobs has translated technology into elegant machines that power our lives in transformative and dramatic ways.

This is among the first models of Apple home computers, the first one that I had anyway—the Apple IIe. It allowed people to have the power of computing in their homes! A great step forward, perhaps, but you had to learn an entirely new language, Apple’s disk operating system (DOS) to load and run an application.

The goal was to get to the application that would make your life better, not become a computer hobbyist.

So the folks at Apple updated Xerox’s object-oriented database and added a new desktop tool, the mouse, so that a home computer user could simply point and click…1984 did turn out to be a very revolutionary year, but one that favored distributing more and more power out to the end user, with the Macintosh.

 And who hasn’t seen this?

The iPad has become so simple and easy to use that even toddlers who can’t read, can’t write, and maybe can’t even speak yet, can find and run their video or game or whatever it is they are trying to do. They have no idea what Apple is. They may not be aware that they’re holding an iPad, a device with more computing power than the entire world had in 1961, but they know how to find and run their Dora video…

The worst question that you can ask in a retail store is “Can I help you?” The problem with asking a potential customer, “Can I help you?” is that both the person asking and the person answering know that the question is a lie.

“Can I help you?,” If we were all being bluntly honest, would actually read, “Can I sell you something?”

No one likes to be sold things. No one likes to be forced into other people’s ideas about what they need for themselves.

People like to buy. People like to shop. People like to discover items that are interesting, that maybe surprise them, that bring value and enrich their lives.

Ernest Hemingway said about the essence of writing, “All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.” It’s a great metaphor for all of life. Truth demands elegance. It is rarely flowery. Finding one’s authentic self usually involves cutting away the crap that we’ve been carrying to cover up the bits about ourselves that we’re afraid of correcting.

Prune, clean it up and be your authentic self. Learn to ask questions to others about who they are, where they’re headed and what they’re working on.

Back in the late 80s, I outlawed using the phrase “Can I help you” when I helped manage three, small surf and snowboard shops in Michigan. Sales staff had to start conversations with people when they came in the store, ask questions, show real interest in the person. We used to say, “If you can get the customer talking about their interests, eventually they’ll tell you what they want to buy.”

Part of writing the truest sentence you know is to also know when you’re lying. Stop lying. Prune away the crap. Write the truest sentence you know. Be your best authentic self.