photo by Djloche
I’ve spent a past life or two kicking against the pricks of growth. Things have since improved about 1,000% because I’ve come to terms with my habit of . . .
Eating New Contexts for Breakfast
My soul is rooted in a homeland, but I eat new contexts for breakfast. There’s a city where I’ll lay deep roots, but I still chew up/spit out new learning environments; I down them like rolls of Smarties(TM).
It’s not that I’m a badass, I just like kicking it Henry Thoreau style:
I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life…to put to rout all that was not life; and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.
-Henry David Thoreau
Put me in a new job, in a new learning environment, or a new situation and I’ll start drenching myself in that context. If I’m in a new city, I’ll go skinny-dipping in its rivers and lakes, visit its grimy underbelly, walk the streets of its neighborhoods, drink its tap water, and go to every possible block party. If it’s a new job, I’ll often try to meet everyone in the company, go to all the trainings, take on new projects, move up the ladder. I’m not alone in this, and chances are that at one time or another, you’ve “been there, done that.”
We all know the drill: You drench yourself in a situation, you wallow in the mud of humanity, wipe the grime all over yourself. You breathe it in, you live it, you grow from it. And then one day, like that, you wake up and discover its time to move on.
It’s not that you’ve grown out of a given situation, or grown above it or beyond it. It’s often that grown away from it. And this growing away is often painful because . . .
Clay Collins is widely regarded as one of the top internet marketers in the world. Now in his 30s, Clay left home at age 15 to start his first software company and has been practicing entrepreneurship, off and on, ever since. Clay has been behind the scenes (advising and writing copy) for some of the most important and highest grossing information marketing campaigns on the internet.
