Marine Corps combat veteran. Ultra marathoner. Nonprofit entrepreneur. Akshay Nanavati finds his nirvana in worthy struggles.

Don’t demonize stress and anxiety, he advises. Learn how to control your emotional response to them instead.

“I believe that the most important skill to master in life is the ability to develop a positive relationship to the experience of pain and suffering,” he told me during our conversation on Follow Your Different.

Without fear, there can be no courage. Without struggle, there can be no reward. Out of the presence of inexplicable evil will rise “inhuman good.” All three ideas are central to Nanavati’s eye-opening book, “Fearvana: The Revolutionary Science of How to Turn Fear into Health, Wealth and Happiness.”

Inspired by his battle with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) after serving in Iraq and his frustrations with traditional counseling, Nanavati’s book is part confessional and part scripture — one endorsed by both the spiritual leader Dalai Lama and motivational speaker Jack Canfield.

His mission: inspire readers to earn their life. “It’s not about finding yourself, it’s about creating yourself,” Nanavati told me in this life-changing episode.

An Unlikely Marine

In a world full of people who claim to live on the edge, Nanavati’s backstory — survival tale, really — is a stunner.

After immigrating to the U.S. from India as a young teenager, his addictive personality led him into a lifestyle of drug addiction and self-mutilating behavior.

A series of events flipped his switch: the death of two high-school friends related to drug addicition, the events of 9/11 and the movie “Black Hawk Down,” which he binge-watched before binge-watching was even a thing.

Another inspiration: The incident at Hacksaw Ridge in World War II, in which an Army medic saved 75 men — without raising a gun.

“What kind of human beings would knowingly put themselves in a situation like that and sacrifice their lives for somebody else?” he recalled during our conversation. “I hadn’t really been exposed to courage of this capacity before this, really.”

Determined to serve his chosen country – The United States, Nanavati — who stands just 5’ 7” and then weighed maybe 160 pounds — enlisted in the Marines, ignoring the advice of doctors who told him his genetic blood disorder, flat feet and less-than-Marinely physique made his chosen path a real danger to his health.

As in, he might not survive boot camp.

“It took me about a year-and-a-half to take in all these medical waivers, but that was the turning point,” he says. “That is why I wanted to join, to serve an institution where the good of the group matters more than you, the well-being of the group. You serve for the people next to you and everything is your men and the mission and that’s beautiful.”

Addicted to Extremes

For Nanavati, seven months of combat in Iraq where he was a specialist in finding improvised explosive devices (a.k.a. IEDs) became an addictive experience — so much so that he trained as a journalist with the thought of becoming a combat photographer after his service.

Back home, he struggled with survivor’s guilt and depression, falling back into the bottle — he was later diagnosed with PTSD.

Dissatisfied with traditional treatment, Nanavati turned to extreme activities meant to push his limits — from climbing mountains in the Himalayas to scuba diving in underwater caves.

He once dragged a 190-pound sled 350 miles across the second largest icecap in the world in sub-zero temperatures and just a few months ago ran 80 miles around 0.2-mile-long track. Just because.

A life goal: Run across every country in the world.

For Nanavati, “Fearvana” is “the bliss that results from engaging our fears to pursue our own worthy struggle.”

All the proceeds from his book are being donated to the Fearvana Foundation, dedicated to helping communities in need “transcend their own suffering.” One of the named projects on the foundation’s website is a school in Liberia, the fourth poorest country in the world.

Wise Beyond His Years

Nanavati hasn’t hit 40 yet, but I think you’ll agree he sounds kinda like a 103-year-old monk. Not that I’ve met one, but you know.

Our conversation was sobering, exhilarating, mesmerizing and mind-altering. Here are 6 moments that really stuck with me:

1. Embrace dualities. Only by living in the dark will you be able to really see the light. Likewise, you can’t have courage without fear. To continue the analogy: “If you seek out easy, your life will be hard. If you seek out hard, your life will be easy.”

2. Guilt is an expression of love. Reconsider it through that lens, and it will rewire your thinking. ‘Nuff said.

3. Don’t deny your emotions. Rather, study what triggers certain feelings and learn how to step into them. “There are no good or bad emotions. There are just emotions, and every emotion is part of the human experience.”

4. Go back and reread Viktor Frankl (or read him, if you haven’t): The Holocaust survivor’s book, Man’s Search for Meaning,” is a Nanavati must-read, and he channels it often. A favorite quote: “Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space lies our power to choose our response, and in our response lies our growth and freedom.”

5. You gain confidence by failing and falling and picking yourself up. Go out take some risks. You can’t be a legend without being a loser.

6. When you can’t change the situation, change you. When faced with danger or some sort of pain — like a person’s death, an unexpected life event, what Buddhists call the “first dart” — every human will have a primal, visceral response. That’s natural. How a person reacts afterward — by overreacting or overanalyzing — is far more important.

You really need to listen for yourself. Here’s the complete podcast. It’s very real. And very different.

Nearly four decades ago, a seventeen-year-old coder living in Boston, Massachusetts with $400 to his name packed his bags, climbed aboard a Green Tortoise Bus and high-tailed it 3,000 miles across the country to San Francisco, California. 

There, my buddy and podcast guest, Big Ben Rewis would spend the next thirty-eight years of his life as a trailblazer in big-tech, leading the way for titans like Visa, JP Morgan Chase, and First Data as they underwent large-scale digital transformations. 

One of the things I love about Ben is unique compared to other technology strategists, as he often finds himself occupying two wildly different worlds: both the digital and the physical. 

When Big Ben isn’t coaching leaders of massive digital initiatives for Fortune 1000 companies or founders of digital-native startups, he’s climbing mountains, sailing and surfing around the Tasman Sea or hiking the world’s deepest canyons. In 2019 he was honored as Fellow Royal Geographic Society Fellow (FRGS), an honor he shares with Charles Darwin and Sir Edmund Hillary. 

It’s this dress shoe on one foot and hiking boot on the other that has allowed Ben to perceive data and technology more like a cohesive ecosystem rather than simply numbers on a screen. 

But, more than this, Ben’s passion has brought him to the realization that data and technology can not only make companies copious amounts of money… but they can help change (and hopefully save) the world, too. 

Inspired by Jake Burton, Big Ben was an early pioneer in Snowboarding and rode some of Jake’s first boards in Vermont. He was a competitor taking 17th overall in the first world championships for snowboarding. He even got to write an article about it for Thrasher magazine. 

He was 17 when he realized the connection between technology, entrepreneurship, and nature. In many ways, Ben’s life has been a quest to live at the center of those three things ever since.

A lesson learned in the waves. 

Ben Rewis caught his first wave at forty years old somewhere along the coast of Santa Cruz, California. After that, he was hooked, spending the next decade and a half surfing waves both right in his backyard and thousands of miles away in New Zealand.  

It was Ben’s love for the ocean (and getting fed up surfing alongside trash) that attracted him to Save The Waves Coalition, a global nonprofit organization dedicated to protecting coastal resources. 

Like so many of the companies he had advised over the years, this non-profit on a mission to save the ocean one surf zone at a time was missing out on huge opportunities in both technology and data. 

Ben volunteered his expertise in data and technology to work alongside Save The Waves to create a mobile application called The Endangered Waves App that would go on to “make waves” in both the non-profit and technology sector as a whole… winning an X-Prise award for best conservation app. 

Big Ben’s strategic thinking behind Endangered Waves was to design it so that it would function on crowdsourced data. While Save The Waves is a global non-profit, they can’t be everywhere at once. 

So, the application encourages beachgoers and surfers to monitor their coastlines easily by taking a picture of a threat they see, selecting an issue that most accurately defines the threat (like erosion, sewage, oil spills, etc) and then tagging their location. 

This then propagates onto a large scale map working as a living breathing data set for Save The Waves and the agencies they advise, allowing them to make better faster decisions on a global conservation level. 

One might think of Pareto’s Law where 80% of effects come from 20% of the causes. To put it in terms of business, generally speaking, 80% of a company’s revenues come from either 20% of their customers or 20% of their products. 

So, a short-cut to not only efficiency but large-scale growth and impact are doubling, tripling and quadrupling down on this 20%. 

While Save The Waves eventually hopes to eliminate ocean threats, a huge win would be to eliminate 80% of threats. And, if Pareto’s Law holds true… this 80% is coming from 20% of the world’s beaches –– the application allows Save The Waves to pinpoint this 20%.

Data equals Money.

Back in 2017, there was a study done that estimated the worldwide surfing industry to be worth a staggering $50 billion a year. On a more micro level, the city of San Clemente, California brings in an estimated $8 – $13 million a year from surfing alone. 

Naturally, if one day surfers have to worry about running into metal oil drums, plastic containers, fishing nets, and sewage whilst doing the thing they love, it’s safe to assume they’ll take their boards elsewhere, somewhere far away from San Clemente. 

This is a real-life example of where data can directly equate to money. 

While Save The Waves is on a mission to clean up the planet’s waters, professional surfers, surf brands and beach towns all around the world should be backing them because their success will be a huge contributor to the ongoing financial health of the surf industry. 

This is a congruence Ben has seen in the private sector, too… that data often times equals money. 

But, in order to capture this data and ultimately make decisions with the data being captured that can either be monetized or cut costs, organizations must have the right digital business. Otherwise, they’ll end up like the semi-recently extinct Radio Shack and Toys R. Us. 

Where technology, data, and nature collide. 

Artists, engineers, philosophers, and thinkers spanning a variety of different crafts and industries have found tremendous success pulling inspiration from nature. 

Leonardo Da Vinci gained an in-depth understanding (centuries ahead of his time) of aerodynamics by watching the flight of birds. 

Georges de Mestral, a Swiss electrical engineer, thought up the idea of Velcro after a hunting trip in the Alps where he noticed the way burrs from burdock plants attached stubbornly to his dog’s fur.

Lenovo, one of the world’s largest technology companies, is constantly designing their products with nature in mind –– their laptop fans are shaped like owl wings and their computer stands are similar to the stem of an orchid. 

Big Ben takes the same approach when helping companies through a digital transformation by applying Biomimicry to the digital businesses he’s creating. For those who are not privy, Biomimicry is the imitation of the models, systems, and elements of nature for the purpose of solving complex human problems. 

Big Ben views digital businesses in the same light –– that if data is eating the world, it better be putting out more data. He’s isn’t afraid to get granular though, either. 

How businesses can begin on their journey towards Digital Transformation today. 

When businesses or nonprofits like Save The Waves are making the push to go digital, here are a few tactical pieces of advice Big Ben always passes along. 

1. Design with the user in mind. Bring the customer and the user into the design process. They’re who is paying you, after all.

2. Understand the existing ecosystem. Ask yourself: Am I disrupting, creating a new category or product, or improving on something existing?

3. Design for scale and sustainability. Ensure the technical and business architecture of what you’re building can scale and can ultimately be sustainable for years to come. 

4. Be data-driven and use data as a flywheel. Today, data is more valuable than cash. Data should be leveraged to power further innovation, explore new revenue streams and cut costs. 

5. Use open standards for innovation. Open data, open integrations and innovation will not only enhance team communication and even patent creation but it will 2x your speed to market… make sure they’re working cohesively. 

6. Reuse and improve. Bundle features into a series of Minimal Viable Product releases, and reuse the things that work and improve the things that don’t. 

7. Address privacy & security. You can build insanely great stuff and ignore privacy and security, but don’t. It’s as simple as that.

8. Seek out leadership themes/best practices. There are common organizational themes across people, processes, and tools in both small and large new digital businesses. Be very aware of these themes.

9. Have fun building your digital business. You’re going after a lucrative, cost-saving opportunity. It’s exciting. Treat it as such. 

10. It’s good to use a catalyst. A catalyst is someone that’s able to help businesses, both big and small, create a data-generating digital business or tool.

PS For more with Big Ben Rewis you can enjoy our podcast dialogue here.

Have you noticed?

Most marketers play safe.

As a result, most marketing plans are predictable, uncreative and uninspired.

The longer I work in the entrepreneurial marketing world, the more I think that, if it’s legendary, it’s radical.

So I’d like to propose some ways of thinking, about creating, reviewing and updating marketing plans.

So here are three questions:

1. Will this plan enable us to design and dominate a giant category that matters?

I think that’s the job of the CEO & CMO.

And frankly, that’s the job of the marketing organization, the job of the board, and the entire executive team.

What we learned in writing my first book Play Bigger is that, at least in the tech space, one company, earns 2/3rds of the economics in the entire category. 76% to be exact.

And so, as you are working on plans, I think a powerful lens to use is the question, “will this plan and the sub-components of it, enable us to design and dominate a giant market category?”

2) Do we have a radical way to evangelize our category POV?

Legendary leaders market the category NOT the brand.

We live in the world of marketing where all we hear is: brand, brand, brand and the thing that many people don’t get is: categories make brands not the other way around.

Categories are about customers and brands are about companies.

So legendary marketers, market the category with a provocative point of view.

Things to think about along these lines:

Are you getting your CEO out there? I believe The E in CEO stands for the evangelist, and your CEO needs to be a missionary.

She needs to be out there, evangelizing.

Is she speaking? On podcasts? Does she have a high profile in the industry?

Is she out in the world delivering the point of view? Can you put her on TV?

Ask, “are we developing a big footprint for our CEO?” There’s no more powerful evangelist in your company, whether it’s a small business, the owner herself, or a major publicly-traded company, the CEO must be your #1 evangelist.

If you’re the CEO, at least 1/3 of your job is to be publicly facing.

Other questions to consider:

– What’s your owned media strategy? (I’m amazed more companies don’t understand that they have to become media companies and create their own content)

– What high-impact PR are you doing?

– When you get PR results, are you multiplying it?

– Does your website communicate a provocative POV?

– Are you constantly testing how to execute your POV?

– Do you experiment on new headlines, new offers, new copy? On new and different platforms?

The bottom line is: you want to get people in the category talking about you.

You want to drive word of mouth. You know you are winning when prospects and customers start parroting back your point of view.

And most importantly, as you evangelize your category POV, you want to create a sense of inevitability with your target customers.

This perception will help make your new or different way of doing things become the defacto standard.

3) What’s a radical way to generate leads and drive revenue?

Legendary CEOs and CMOs design the category for the mid-long term and drive revenue in the “ASAP, right now” term.

Questions to consider:

– Are you dominating digitally?

– Are you making a radical offer to gain attention?

– Are you doing what my friend John Bielenberg, the legendary designer calls, “thinking wrong”?

As you look at any of your marketing executions, particularly in the area of driving revenue, ask yourself: what does everybody do here?

What’s the opposite of that? That’s thinking wrong and a great technique to start thinking in non-traditional ways.

Most legendary marketing is radical in some way. And most marketing plans are not.

So I encourage you, be different.

Get radical with your 2020 marketing,

P.S.
For more, you might love this episode.

Many people think “making it” is about money.

Now, money is awesome. And financial freedom is a great goal and a life-changing achievement.

But for me, “making it” is not about money.

I knew I had truly “made it” when I realized that the journey is the destination.

That is to say, I “made it” when I realized that life is a thing you can proactively design and then build out your design. And if you’re super lucky, you get to co-design and co-build the life of your choosing with people you love.

Life feels very different when you wake up every day:

1. In the place you want to be
2. doing things you truly want to do
3. with people you really love
4. making the difference you want to make
5. and having a ton of fun.

And the big “aha!” is that we can all do this.

“Making it” is not about a particular financial outcome. It’s a way of being in life. We all have the power to design our lives, careers, and businesses.

When I started co-creating my life with people I love, that’s when I knew I had “made it.”

by: Eddie Yoon, Christopher Lochhead, and Nicolas Cole

First published by the Harvard Business Review on 11/21/19.

What makes Kerri Walsh Jennings remarkable?

For starters, she’s the Muhammad Ali of beach volleyball — the undisputed greatest in the game. She owns three Olympic gold medals. 133 career victories. And she’s a two-time Sportswoman of the Year Award recipient.

I was pretty pumped to chat with Kerri about her career — and more specifically, her philosophy on drive and inspiration. On the podcast, she shared why being an inspired person and living an inspired life mean so much to her.

In this article, I list the most insightful takeaways from that incredible conversation. So get out your notepads, because this inspirational woman and athlete has a wealth of valuable life advice to share with you.

Discipline liberates and the consistency feels great.

To Kerri, discipline is “a beautiful word.”

As former Navy SEAL and famed author Jocko Willink says, “Discipline equals freedom.” It’s also the title of his best-selling book — and is a life philosophy Kerri fully subscribes to. Personally, she defines discipline as “showing up and doing what it takes on the daily.” She says having discipline in her life “allows me to breathe, it allows me to accomplish, and it allows me the space to maneuver in.”

To Kerri, discipline is mindfulness, awareness, and fortitude. Over the years, she has learned to deeply think about everything she consumes — from social media to books to food. She’s become more sensitive with age (a good thing) and recognizes that everything she interacts with affects her in some big or small way, both mentally and emotionally. She remembers a time in her life when she didn’t pay enough attention to her influences and is happy to have grown up in that sense: to have become more disciplined.

As a gold medalist, Kerri believes love for winning always wins.

And for Kerri, that love is undying.

Most recently, she and Brooke Sweat took home third place at an FIVB World Tour 3-star tournament in Sydney, Australia. 10 years ago, she would have considered that a failure. But today, she puts the result in perspective by acknowledging and appreciating the wins it took to place at all.

Above all, Kerri attributes her success to her love and desire to win. She views winning as an “amazing, beautiful fuel” that keeps her going. “Winning is a habit that gets into your psyche and drives you crazy,” she said. “I love winning more than I hate losing.”

And, above all, she attributes her ability to win to her mental strength — “to compete at the highest level, you have to have your brain trained,” she said. What separates elite athletes from great athletes is less about skill and more about mental fortitude during crunch time, according to Kerri.

Kerri liked to call crunch time “tight moments” — until recently. During a session with Michael Gervais, the host of “Finding Mastery,” a podcast that “explores how the best in the world master their craft,” Kerri discovered a way to better frame those high-pressure situations.

When Gervais noticed Kerri reference a “tight moment,” he interrupted her and said, “Kerri, there are no tight moments. It’s just another moment. You’re making it tight. Let’s reframe it; let’s call it a competitive moment.” She liked the idea of “competitive moments” a lot better. Especially once she realized that “all I’m there to do is be competitive and show up.”

When Kerri shows up, she makes sure she’s done what it takes to feels right mentally, because she knows that’s the best way to execute during competitive moments — and because, more than anything else, she loves winning.

How she came to feel right at home as an Olympic gold medalist.

On the biggest stage in the world, of all places, is where Kerri feels most at home.

“I’m just an athlete playing a game I’ve played since I was 10 years old. At the Olympics, it’s so fun.” Of course, the noise, media and sheer weight of the Olympics can certainly distract an athlete from truly enjoy themselves — but only if they allow it. Kerri makes sure she always has fun at the Olympics by “creating a bubble” around herself. This mental bubble blocks out noise and helps her feel safe, focused, and poised to compete well — and helps her have fun while competing.

Why her company is “her baby.”

Kerri knows how good it feels to hang a gold model around her neck after a hard-fought win on the court. Now, she craves a similarly fulfilling feeling from entrepreneurial success.

“The business world is really exciting. I feel like I’m getting a master’s degree every single day, learning so much. It’s a hell of a world,” she said. Last year, she launched p1440, a technology and event platform aiming to “redefine and modernize beach volleyball.” The company’s four-pillar offerings include competition, health and wellness, personal development, and entertainment.

Kerri frequents major events to market the company, where she enjoys speaking passionately about the bright future she envisions for the sport she loves. “I don’t want to be just a canvas, I want to be a mouthpiece,” she said.

A few things Kerri has learned as an entrepreneur:

• Get your hands in the mud, in the sand whenever possible.
• Don’t assume anything. Don’t presume to know what others are thinking.
• When working on projects, play it step-by-step.
• Like in sports, your team and attitude are everything.
• When facing issues, be nimble and ready to adjust.
• At any company, having open, honest communication and a culture that holds people accountable is imperative.
• Like with sports, there’s a lot out of your control in a business. That’s tough for Type A personalities like Kerri. All you can do is focus 100% on the things you can control.
• Different people have different visions. Not every potential partner will want to work with you.

On an endnote, Kerri shared that she believes strongly in the tie between inspiration and motivation, but also in the distinct differences between the two. “I’m motivated by the money, I’m motivated by the glory, I’m motivated by these things that will come to me as a result of this on the outside. But to be inspired to me is a touch of God. It’s something that fuels your heart and your purpose in life and that’s hard to F with.”

People don’t want to be sold on an idea — they want to learn from a real person through a natural conversation.

We’re constantly bombarded with images, taglines, and “sponsored posts” that show us a perfect version of reality. Of course, when you’re trying to sell a product or service you want to show only the best side — any business owner worth their salt understands that. But after decades online, audience expectations are shifting.

Having a natural conversation with someone instead of slamming down a glossy advertisement works on several levels — it makes space to explain the product better, makes the customer feel more comfortable, keeps things natural, etc. But most importantly, conversational marketing (as it’s sometimes called) is authentic.

And that’s what audiences want — authenticity.

I was stoked to have David Cancel on my podcast to talk about conversational marketing, which is both the subject and title of his latest book. Cancel is a serial entrepreneur, angel investor/advisor and now founder & CEO of Drift, and he’s also a fellow podcaster for a series I’m obsessed with, Seeking Wisdom. In his wildly popular book Conversational Marketing, Cancel digs into why messaging systems are the best way to reach new clients and why using intelligent chatbots actually creates a more human sales experience.

Cancel brought his expertise while simultaneously giving a master class on entrepreneurship to our episode together, where we talked about why people want a more authentic touch in marketing and how crazy it is to see so many people “Following Their Different.”

Ignore Influencers: Customers Want A Pro’s Opinion

First and foremost, I have to know — what is going on that people want to be an influencer?

It seems like every 23-year-old on Instagram takes a few Tony Robbins courses and all of a sudden thinks they’re an expert on personal branding. They’ll sell you teas, vitamins, workout plans, purses, clothes — the list is endless. And you’re supposed to listen to them, why?

“I would think first you’d have to do something to be an influencer,” says Cancel. He points out the people who are actually doing the hard work aren’t the ones posting about it every day on social media. And even the people who claim series milestones — Ty Lopez, Gary V, etc. — don’t offer anything useful in their podcasts or social media presences. They just repeat the same “hustle, hustle, hustle, follow your passion” nonsense.

I call them “pornstar” entrepreneurs.

But their hold on the internet is going to wear out. Cancel says he can see a progression in which people are moving toward a different mindset. One in which they want to know the person giving them advice is the same person who’s already put in decades of hard work.

Hopefully, this will spell death to the Instagram influencer craze and we can go back to listening to people who actually know what they’re talking about.

The “Old Advice” Is Bad Advice

The world tells us we have to play the game, we have to fit in, we have to do what’s expected. That usually means: go to school, get a degree, get a job, work up the ladder, and then retire.

But that’s not the path that builds groundbreaking work.

When I was writing Niche Down: How To Become Legendary By Being Different, the biggest response I got was people saying to me, “Wow, I can be myself and find a way to connect my difference to the world in a way that matters.” Readers loved seeing that they could build a business around what made them stand out.

Cancel didn’t follow a conventional path either, and he’s built incredible companies with a great amount of success — not everyone can say their company was acquired by a unicorn. He believes people breaking away from the norm and following their own dreams is the way the world is headed. “People are realizing all that stuff [we were told] doesn’t make sense anymore,” he says. “That’s for a world that no longer exists, right? That’s not the advice I give to my kids.”

Cancel says he tells his own kids to embrace their differences, to apply them to make the world a better place. We should all be so lucky to hear that from our folks.

People Want Authenticity

It’s okay to be inspired by someone else’s work, but copying it exactly isn’t going to help you build your empire.

Think about tribute bands — bands that cover songs from a popular group, but cover them exactly, including the sound and style as they were originally performed. Those bands may sound like Led Zeppelin, but they never ascend to the same rock-god level. Because when Zeppelin did it, they were being themselves. When the tribute band does it, they’re copying someone else.

And no one responds to a copy like they do the original.

When Cancel was growing up, being different meant getting beat up and teased at school. And now, he says, it seems that people are racing toward embracing their real selves, no matter how much that makes them stand apart from the pack. Because authenticity is what works — it’s what brings people in and keeps them. They want something real and to know they’re investing in a person or a service that isn’t going to fake them out.

When you get down to it, authenticity builds trust — and there’s no stronger way to keep people coming back to your business, podcast, or website than if they know you’re the real deal.