Robert Stanke.com

My mind has been pretty cluttered lately.  I have been thinking in circles about a lot of different things lately.  One line of my thinking tells me that I have so many things that seem to be going right at this point in my life.  I am in a career position that I truly love and think I can make a serious difference in for years to come.  I am continually challenging myself to go above and beyond to make Life Time Fitness a serious social enterprise.  Being social is not just having a Facebook Fan Page, or a Twitter account.  It is so much more than that.  It is about connection and community.  I am constantly trying to find ways to be different from our competitors and create a precise art and science of my responsibilities.  To create a repeatable process that will deliver results.  That is the mission there.

At the same time, I battle myself internally on what more I can be doing.  What can I do to truly satisfy the burning desire to create, innovate, and lead?  How can I take that repeatable process and put it in motion for a greater personal good?  How can years of focusing on connections, networking and community come together?  How do I extend my passion?  How do I reach deep down inside and unleash a whole new creativity that I know is there, but struggles to show itself.  I become creative every day for my position, but like an onion being peeled, I know there is a core of passion that is not even being tapped.  It is undiscovered by all around me... and myself.  If I don't start taking the steps to peel back the layers of that onion now, I will continue to fight this struggle internally.

What has unleashed my creativity in the past?  Well, a couple of things I guess...  Struggle was one of them.  Struggling after making mistakes, feeling disappointment and regret.  Down to the last few chips on the table, it was creativity that made me double down and find a way to get back on top.  Challenge was another one.  As I reflect, I find myself realizing that when challenged, I was able to step up and rise to new personal levels.  My parents challenged me when I was young, and while I never realized it until now, I see what it helped me achieve.  Passion is another one.  I feel deeply for every goal and mission I strive for.  Passion opened creative doors because I become engrossed in learning.  Passion was a result of my hunger to learn.  None of these - struggle, challenge, passion, and education were never about me against someone else.  These avenues towards creativity could only benefit me and my craving for finding the next thing.  The strongest (by far) driver for my creativity has been business.  Business brings all of my passions together, it challenges me, forces me to learn, and hopefully will continue to ground my thinking through struggle.  I need to build something.  That will unleash new levels of creativity and innovation for me personally, while at the same time providing some sort of value to others.  I want to build a new model for business.

I look 20 years ahead now and say "How can I build a creative, innovative business?"  How will I build something that will make me drill to that core, discover new things, and make me play that last chip again?  I think I have an idea of what that vision looks like, but it is foggy due to doubt, fear, and uncertainty.  Sure, I have done this before, but then it was different.  It was for thrill and money.  This is about sustainability.  This is about challenge.  This is about doing it my way this time; on my terms.  For example, I don't want to pick and choose what my "building" will look like now.  I want to place the bricks as I go.  And I want different types of building material.  I don't want to choose a model - I want to choose multiple models.  I can't contain my multiple channels of creativity anymore.  It is all or none.  No more debating.  That has only slowed me down from making this decision in the first place.  I can build some pieces from the ground up.  Others I will invest in.  Others I will collaborate with.  However the pieces come together, they will serve different purposes for me, ultimately making me whole and not so scrambled inside.

Sure, there is still a fear to overcome, as difficult as that is for me to say.  Three past successes and a failure, with the latter having more weight than the other three combined.  How am I to navigate that uncertainty?  I think the answer lies in three words: flexibility, collaboration, and inventiveness.

Fortune favors the brave.

There is a lot of planning to do over long nights and weekends.  I will need to find order in chaos.  The exact pieces are unknown at this point, but I know of several things that will not be forgotten in the planning...

At the end of the day, I will strive harder than anyone to help companies build fan bases and create content.  I will preach community and its importance.  I will find new ways for companies to deliver content.  I will help companies think of information as a way to foster communication, as opposed to forcing communication to get information.  I will draw intersections between avenues that were previously running parallel with each other.  I will create product and process, as opposed to just mirroring success already achieved.  It needs to be new and fresh.  And it will come from many different angles.

In doing this, I must make promises to myself.  First and foremost, to do this my way, on my time.  I will not feel pressured to push to fast.  I love my job and will continue to work the long hours I do to help Life Time Fitness be successful and advance my career.  But when the creativity urge strikes, I know I have the platform to execute it on.  I will adapt to new information, assess the risks, and create opportunity.  This venture will not be fueled by money or outside investment.  As corny as it sounds, the operations of this venture it will be driven by pure soul.  My soul.  My vision.  My own blood, sweat, and tears.  The end product will always contain collaboration.  I will improvise on the fly.  I won't let marketing get in the way of innovation, like in the past.  While I have often put to much emphasis on marketing tactics, growth for my new venture will be organic in nature.  Whereas marketing budget may have superseded innovation in the past, this model will be reversed.  I want to create a venture that is collaborative, creative, educational, experimental.  Clients who understand this model will benefit greatly.  Clients who don't understand this model will benefit more in the end.

There truly is something in my blood that will never make this feeling go away.  I can try all I want, others can try to deter me, I just can't help it anymore.  Four years removed from the game has made me hungry again.  It was in the genes passed down to me, but more than that it is just a passion to always be learning and growing.  Higher education is good.  Mentoring is good.  Building and experience from going after what you want is even better.  If you let things slow down, they lose momentum.  That is why now has to be the time.

It is long-term goals broken into short-term tasks... that is how to get from the bottom to the top.

Fortune favors the brave.