"WAKE UP! WAKE UP WAKE UP!!!"

...As if I could have slept anyway. The overnight bus from Panjim to Hampi was a rollercoaster of hills and honking for 10 hours straight while I was cooped up in a bunk designed for a far slighter body frame than mine. That the driver might assume anyone could catch sleep on such a journey seemed a particular kind of madness.

Shaking off the mental fog, I hoisted my pack, clutched my motorcycle helmet and descended the exit stair. The doors at the bottom opened into the predawn darkness and, rather than the silence of a world clinging to the last vestiges of its repose, we were met with a roaring cacophony of voices.

At least 30 tuktuk drivers surged to fill the door opening, arms extended and hands grabbing for flesh, yelling endearments and demands.

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The entry into Goa's Dabolim airport was completely different than the smoggy rush of Mumbai. There was the same bureaucracy - the taxi unions have an iron grip on travel so prices for a ride into Panjim are extortionate and the shoving necessary to get a ticket would send an order-seeking Scandinavian into a dead faint - but rather than the potent cocktail of human habitation I'd just left, the air wore a thin veil of woodsmoke which would prove to be omnipresent.

Nervous but ready to get started with the motorcycle portion of the adventure, I needed to track down a viable bike. In what would prove to be a consistent theme, the hostel receptionist "knew someone who could help". I ended up halfway on the back of a tiny moped that sped through the streets and down to the transportation corridor where the rental stalls were located. Not only did I discover that the tyranny of the taxi lobby had destroyed the ability to take rentals outside the state, forcing me to completely change my itinerary, but the fella who took me down there tried a shakedown of hard currency for the favor.

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The first thing I noticed when stepping beyond the doors of the airport terminal in Mumbai was a potent cocktail of vehicle exhaust, human feces and burning garbage. The haze that I'd mistaken for fog outside the airplane window hung in the air everywhere, obscuring the far edges of the taxi bay and bringing tears to my eyes. The humidity lay thick in the air.

I stumbled over to the designated vehicle, handed the prepay slip to the driver and hunched down to fit myself and my backpack into the little taxi. Noticing the buckle but not a strap, I reached back to fumble with where the seat belt should be. The driver's "no-no-no-no" was the only English he would speak for the whole trip as he motioned that I shouldn't try to dig for it behind the seat.

Even at 6am, there were cars all over the roads. Pulling onto the highway, we merged into the thick soup of traffic with no look but a loud honk that raised my blood pressure. I got another start when, looking ahead for some landmarks to indicate I was on the right track, a ragged group of children emerged from the shacks by the side of the road and raced across 6 lanes straight through the middle of traffic.

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I'm always amazed that people seem shocked when something they've trusted is usurped for commercial gain. Somehow, in a world that's incredibly dynamic and built on Darwinian evolutions at all levels from single cell organisms up to commercial entities, we still hold onto this naive view that our trust in systems is somehow static.

This is probably because we build our relationship with trust based on our relationships with close friends and family. In most (healthy) cases, this one-to-one trust grows slowly or remains constant over time. A fairly static model for trust is reasonable in this microscopic system.

Unfortunately, we tend to implicitly model the trust we place in third parties and macroscopic communities along similar lines and that simply doesn't reflect reality.

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"Inch towards daylight" is one of my favorite mantras from a book I read recently. It also accurately describes how to develop the oft-discussed but seldom mastered skill of Grit.

Grit is generally defined as perseverance in the face of obstacles and/or lack of positive reinforcement. It's the ability to do hard things regardless of whether the environment is supportive, and it's the ability to maintain determination and motivation for long term goals through all the shit work between now and then.

Grit is often and inaccurately presented as an innate characteristic. That gives those who lack it far too convenient an excuse to stop trying or to justify their deficits. In reality, Grit is a muscle that needs to be trained.

In 2017, I ran an Ironman triathlon and sold a challenging service business that I'd bootstrapped through 4 arduous years. I live with a group of highly motivated high achievers who span the world of entrepreneurial and life success -- the collection of their acquisitions, press articles, TED talks and general awesomeness gives me constant awe -- yet they constantly express amazement at the kind of will I'm able to deploy to the fulfillment of a particular goal. Why?

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I'm a huge fan of any models that find applicability beyond their intended domains and there are few quite as versatile and useful as The Hedgehog Model.

In his seminal book "Good to Great", Jim Collins examines 1,435 businesses over a period of 40 years in order to answer the question "what separates the good companies from those which make the leap and become great companies?" Over the course of his analysis, he uncovers a variety of factors that drive this distinction but one of the most fundamental concepts he explains is "the Hedgehog".

This idea is based on a fragment attributed to the ancient Greek poet Archilochus which says "a fox knows many things, but a hedgehog one important thing." Both these animals have survived successfully by deploying greatly different strategies. The fox is clever -- she knows a great many things and tends to rely on her intelligence to hunt and survive. The hedgehog is a far simpler creature -- when she is threatened, the hedgehog simply curls up into a ball and points her spines outwards.

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At 7:41:10pm On July 29th, 2017 I slowed to a halt, put up my hands and wept. I could barely breathe after the deceleration but didn't care because I'd stepped into the moment I'd visualized 10,000 times and it was every bit as sweet as I'd hoped.

This was a moment to culminate the most difficult challenge I've ever undertaken in the course of my life -- and ever hope to. The Ironman triathlon, commonly known as the most challenging single day sporting event in the world, is something so stupidly crazy that it prompts concerned looks and a whole lot of "why?". No one questions any more if you decide to train for a marathon but this mother of all triathlons is that and more -- a 2.4 mile swim followed by a 112 mile bicycle ride followed by a full 26.2 mile marathon.

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A respected friend and academic was speaking about something personal. I wish I could recall what it was but the only thing I can remember about the conversation is how incredibly often she used -- clearly without noticing -- the word "like". It was placeholder, punctuation, and security blanket in one. When this person wrote, I knew, it was clear, eloquent and incisive. When she spoke, she undermined every phrase with disqualifiers, fuzzy words and, of course, "like".

I couldn't help myself... I started counting. She used "like" 13 times in one single sentence. Hearing that broke something in my ability to flow with normal conversation and I began noticing similar things that I never had before. It quickly became apparent how important subtle (and not-so-subtle) communication patterns are in determining a speaker's credibility and impact. A few of these stand out more than the rest.

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The proper way to start a conversation in San Francisco during the past couple of weeks has been to ask "how are you holding up?" A palpable sense of pain, disbelief and fear has captured the city since the recent and historic upset in the presidential election. To those outside the city this may seem like an excessive comparison, but I honestly haven't felt a sense of shared loss and mourning like this in the 15 years since the national tragedy of 9/11.

I knew this outcome was a possibility, especially given the trends of the previous few weeks and the dangers of voting between such deeply unfavorable candidates. On the trading floor, you have to develop a healthy appreciation for clear signals that "the market" is trending away from what you consider to be "the fundamentals". In this election, it felt like sentiment was divorcing aggressively from fact but, until the very end, it still seemed like the results would be forgotten as just a painful close call.

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A common saying holds that you are the sum of the five people you spend the most time with. More simply, the people you surround yourself with matter. They are the sounding boards for your ideas and the key forces which shape your growth.

Growth is achieved only when you are challenged. It isn't a single-track process but occurs across four dimensions (which are simply the four dimensions of self):

1. Physical
2. Intellectual
3. Emotional
4. Spiritual

Most of the challenges you will receive across these dimensions are laid extrinsically by others because it's basically impossible to change a system without some form of external stimulus. People can challenge you via three modalities:

1. Inspiration: They inspire you by exhibiting a behavior you aspire to enable in yourself.
2. Collaboration: They offer to work with you towards a shared goal.
3. Direct Challenge: They lay a gauntlet at your feet and say "show me".

Inspiration is the wind at your back and it's maximized by putting yourself in an environment where you are constantly inspired by the people around you. Moving to San Francisco and choosing to live in a co-op based around the goal of "mutually assured non-complacency" were two big steps towards my doing this and I'm endlessly curious to find people who inspire me, whether they are intellectuals, artists, entrepreneurs, or pretty much anyone living their life fully engaged.

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