Live Notes from World Domination Summit 2015
I spoke last year at The World Domination Summit about Saving Your Creative Soul, and had such an excellent time I decided to return. Like last year I’m posting live summaries of every talk (2014 talk summaries here).
What is WDS? The event was founded and led by legendary man of the world Chris Guillebeau and in his opening comments he explained the goal of the entire enterprise (which is now four years old) is to find answers to this question: How do we live a remarkable life in a conventional world? The event tries to answer the questions in different ways and through different activities, but all have three values in play.
Community – connecting with interesting people
Adventure – taking risks and doing new things
Service – making the world a better place
Many of the 2500 attendees are solo entrepreneurs, small business owners, marketers and people with a passion for three goals above. Over 150 people work on putting the WDS event together. Most are volunteers including the core team. And it’s a non commercial gathering – there are no sponsors and nothing is sold other than ideas, and books from speakers.
1. Jon Acuff
He opened with a story about how children have a different perspective, one that can’t always been reconciled with ours. Children can’t understand what Blockbuster video even is. And children today can make mistakes without the world watching. He shaved lines in his eyebrow as a child to look like Vanilla Ice, but no one would remember that now unless he told them. But he remembers how in 3rd grade his teacher posted his poetry on the wall. and he realized for the first time he had a voice.
But he wondered if the the 3rd grade version of himself saw the 36th year old version, what would he ask: “did we become a poet?” And when the 36 year old version told him about what happened, the 3rd grade version would ask “Why did we trade our voice for money?” Which led him to a series of questions and observations:
Regret has a much longer shelf life than fear.
Will I face the fear of today or the regret of forever?
But actually being brave sucks. It feels like you’re going to throw up and you get no sleep.
Bravery is a choice, not a feeling. You’ll never feel brave enough to do the things you want to do.
“What’s your daydream?” “To be able to daydream again”
How do we misplace our voice? We’re too busy.
If you stay in motion you don’t have to face things that make you emotional.
Sometimes when you get enough money, you abandon your voice (e.g. bloggers chasing traffic)
“Can I pay you not to work on things you don’t care about” – yet many “successful” creators end up doing little of the work they set out to do when they started
Trying to make everyone like you is the quickest way to hate yourself
Often people fear not being liked and sacrifice their voice for popularity. Not being able to say no is often a sign you want to be liked too much. He said, “”If you tell someone no and they react in anger, they just confirmed you made the right decision”. We often surround ourselves with people who are good at saying no to us, or who poke at our ambitions, unintentionally, in negative ways. “Are you still trying to start a company / write a book / live your dream?” The word still has surprising judgmental power.
To help him and his fans get back on track and help focus his energy he created dosummer2015 and wrote the book Do Over. Projects he thinks will help you find and develop your voice.
2. Jeremy Cowart
3. Megan Divine
4. Asha Dornfest
5. Vani Hari
6. Lewis Howes
7. Kid President
