Many things people strive for are actually byproducts of what the real goal should be. But by focusing on the byproduct instead of the goal, the desired byproduct is ever elusive.

Let’s look at a few examples:

Happiness

The real goal is finding activities you’re passionate about and consistently engaging in them.

That definition skews towards work, but consider spending time with people you enjoy being around an ‘activity’ and it can encompass romance and family time.

Becoming “Networked”

Lots of people want a big network, full of powerful influential people, but if you focus on that is the end goal it’s probably not going to work out very well and you’ll come off as very insincere.

Having a large, powerful network is the byproduct where the end goal is helping other people, building relationships or trying to make an important vision happen that others can get behind.

Making Money

Making money is a byproduct of focusing on creating value.

If you focus on making money, you might end up making a lot if you’re very driven, but if that drive was applied toward how you could create the most value, you’d make a lot more money.

The one caveat with making money is that it only captures the economic spectrum of “value”, but a lot of people are working on how we can measure other kinds of currencies and make them more fungible so that in addition to financial capital we can measure things like social capital and emotional capital.

Confidence

I can’t become more confident by saying to myself, “C’mon Max, be more confident”.

Confidence is a byproduct of being really good at something, which is only obtainable through practice and repetition.

Though often people can practice and practice and not improve. That’s why people will tell you, “practice doesn’t make perfect. Perfect practice makes perfect.” While that’s directionally correct, a better answer is “practice in pursuit of perfection will allow you to increasingly approach perfection and achieve excellence”

Conclusion

The list goes on and on of things that many people try to achieve directly but are actually byproducts: Enlightenment, Love, Creativity, Status, Success, etc. etc.

It’s not wrong to want byproducts, but they are not things we can get, in the capacity we want, by focusing on achieving them directly. Byproducts are the rewards we get for living our lives the right way.

And by recognizing how byproducts break down into corresponding end goals it becomes clear there are no short cuts. When we care about other people, other people care about us. When we create value for others, we are rewarded financially. When we do amazing work, we gain respect. To live a rich life where we are happy, financially abundant, surrounded by amazing people and confident in our own abilities, requires cultivating curiosity, persistence, self-reflection, self-discipline, compassion, character, drive and many other esteemed traits.There is truth in the words that our external reality is a manifestation, or a byproduct, of our internal reality.

I encourage you to look at the things you want, and figure out what’s a byproduct and what’s the actual end goal that you should authentically commit to.

Think of it like winning a race. A fast engine is important, but being a great navigator is a stronger competitive advantage, and is something you can control. Good navigators know what to pay attention to, they know how to read a map, they know what roads are short cuts, what roads are windy, what roads are dead ends and what roads are breathtakingly scenic.

Winning your own race of intellectual fulfillment is less about your engine—we’ve all got relatively similar equipment— and more about your ability to drive the car.

Buckminster Fuller, 1970:

“We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody
has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of
us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the
rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this
nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this
false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery
because, according to Malthusian-Darwinian theory, he must justify his
right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making
instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of
people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was
they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they
had to earn a living.”

…This also inspired me to write about lean startups applied to learning and education more broadly. I think right now the way classes are taught and the way education is structured is analogous to the old linear product development model. Where classes and skills are analogous to features and customer development is analogous to passion and purpose.

—

Most learning is incredibly fat (unlean) because people make no assumptions about what they actually want to do. So all the classes they never use are akin to wasted code. The goal of education should not be broad exposure or diversity of skills, it should be passionately doing something, whether it’s making art or solving a problem.

Everything else will follow from there. As John Seely Brown said, “very often just going deeply into one or two topics that you really care about lets you appreciate the awe of the world … once you learn to honor the mysteries of the world, you’re kind of always willing to probe things … you can actually be joyful about discovering something you didn’t know … and you can expect always to need to keep probing. And so that sets the stage for lifelong inquiry.”

That’s also reminds me why I had a slightly negative gut reaction to teaching customer development classes to people who haven’t done a startup or aren’t working on a startup. It’s analogous to when you said to me, “people shouldn’t hire consultants until they’ve fucked it up themselves. Otherwise they can’t even process a Sean Ellis or Sean Murphy”. Same thing with students. They need to create a first draft for a startup startup and mess it up before they learn customer development. I guess you overcome some of this problem with simulations, so they experience the problem viscerally. But that says that customer development is an end not a means. I think people need to apply customer development to solving a problem that they are really passionate about, and thinking about regularly; that resonates deeper than a simulation.

I interacted a lot with students from a few student entrepreneurship clubs this last year and I was frustrated with how many people wanted to consume inordinate amounts of knowledge about entrepreneurship before even hypothesizing about the company they wanted to start, much less just starting. It’s easy to fall into the skill accumulation as progress trap. Skill accumulation doesn’t even work very well because the Human Forgetting Curve is so steep.

Before learning customer development people should focus on vision — just exploring their own interests, and finding problems they want to solve.

Education is usually like the linear product development model startups use, in that students follow the process and get to the end ( a degree) yet most fail to find something they are passionate about. And failing to find their passion they get a regular job to pay the bills and that cycle is really hard to break out of.

In approaching my education, I have an hypothesis about what I want to do: This business Founders First. And I’m going to learn way more doing this then I could from scattered classes. Then I’m looking to learn what I need to make this happen. And along the way I get to meet great people, make an impact and integrate ideas from many disciplines.

Then after this project I get to go broad again: refocusing on things like the humanities. It doesn’t make sense to explore unrelated interests in left field when I’ve found something I’m passionate about. It’s like building all sorts of cool but extraneous features even after I’ve found product market fit. Once Product Market fit – I.e. Passion for a project, is found double down all your energy there.

Free form inspiration mode is waiting when you’re looking for the next thing to do.

I’ve written a few blog posts before about how to improve education and career development paths

(1) No Desire —intrinsic motivation suppressed (usually by the school system) (2) Desire to make an impact and be entrepreneurial, but uncertainty about how to channel that desire (3) Possess an idea for a project but lack the knowledge and ability to know how to begin (4) A prototype has been built but need help gaining traction (5) The project has succeeded on a small scale but needs support going mainstream.

I believe the world’s biggest problem is not one of the many challenges we face such as global warming or extreme poverty, but rather that we have too few people engaged in working on solutions. The root of this problem stems from the ineffectiveness of the world’s institutions to support people in finding their passions, and their inability to help people align their work with these passions. Entrepreneurship in its broadest sense can give people the intrinsic motivation to solve these problems. And the way to solve the world’s biggest problem is to support a greater percentage of the population through each of these 5 stages of the entrepreneurial journey.

Founders First, my current focus right now, is trying to support groups 4 and 5. In hindsight, I can see that what I’ve been working on has evolved through solving problems in each of these stages.

1- Technology Club — One major goal was to find exciting people, projects and companies and integrate into my uninspiring education

2- Youth Action Research Network — Bring together all the people inspired to do something more and actually start doing

3- Force For the Future stage 1 – targeting college students with ideas who are having trouble making waves

4, 5 – Force For the Future stage 2: Founders First — targeting founders who are alumni of start accelerators

I’m confident that the best way to approach solving the problem of liquidity through the 5 stages, is to start from stage 5 and work backwards.

It is actually the most doable, because by the time people are there, they are very motivated. And the ecosystem for people in that stage is the most developed, because enough people in this stage have been able to create profitable or impactful organizations.

Tackling the other stages is much more complicated, and requires a lot more infrastructure. To affect stages 1-3 where most of the world’s population resides, we requires resolving political conflicts, alleviating poverty, overhauling institutions, and overcoming pressures from peers, family and other lower level Maslovian needs. And while it’s important for work to be done there, I don’t think we can create any lasting change until the higher stages are more organized and developed, otherwise we’ll just have people temporarily reaching new levels and then falling back down to tell all their peers that it isn’t possible and isn’t worth trying.

Palomar5 — Palomar5 launched its first project this fall, an innovation camp on the future of work for 30 people under 30 sponsored by Deutsche Telekom. We lived in a factory for 6 weeks, bonding, brainstorming, prototyping and storytelling. We’re now building hubs to continue or work in Berlin and San Francisco. I created the initial hub concept for our continued interaction at the conclusion of the camp. I am one of the project leaders for Palomar5 Hub San Francisco

Ambassador for the Sandbox Network — I am working on growing and strengthening the Sandbox community both globally and in San Francisco. With other Sandbox Ambassadors I organize frequent dinners in the Bay Area. I am also designing a few entrepreneurship specific initiatives to strengethen Sandbox’s ability to support the creation of projects. Sandbox is an exclusive community that selects the most inspiring young achievers and innovators under 30 worldwide and connects them to each other. Sandbox offers its members a trusted environment (online and offline) where they can build meaningful relationships, learn from each other and get access to resources that help them realize their next big idea. The ultimate goal is to bring together amazing people and push already impressive initiatives to the next level.

I was so focused on making sure I continued to push my project forward that I wasn’t sure I wanted to go to Palomar5. I worried leaving the Bay Area for 6 weeks would cause me to lose all my momentum. I asked friends for advice and reflected. I knew it was a big decision. Fortunately I made the right one. I wrote two comprehensive blog posts about the camp here and here.

The weekend before the final summit of the camp we went to a incredible spa called the Liquidrom. I was floating in a large salted pool heated to body temperature. I rested my feet on a noodle and put my head back into the water, listening to the music drifing out of the underwater speakers. I sank into deep reflection, feeling the present warmth and everything that had happened the last few months. Fifteen minutes later, head still submerged, body still relaxed, I had a stroke of insight: for the first time in my life I’m exactly where I want to be. I’m not at a check point, I can’t stop and take vacation, I need to keep doing what I’m doing, but I’m finally at the place I want to be. For the last two years I’d been pushing myself to carve out a new path, continually fighting resistance, getting knocked down and getting back up with more resolve. My life was now on a trajectory I was completely satisfied with: personally, professionally, communally….It was appreciation not complacency. There’s a lot I still I wished I had my in life but I knew it was because I made a choice to place more importance on some things than others. And the things I didn’t have yet I knew I just needed to attack with the same tenacity I used to get here. Or I just needed to let time run its course. After I left the liquidrom hours later I could still feel a faint glow emanating from my body. In the last month or two when I’ve felt out of balance I just remind myself of that moment and how far I’ve come.

Three weeks later another one of my biggest goals was achieved. I was admitted to Stanford. But if you know me, you know I have radical views on education and getting into Stanford has not changed that. More later on my quest for an unconventional educational path.

Other gap year highlights include my first Burning Man, which will surely not be the last and a 5 day trip in the magical and fantastical city Prague, before returning back to America.

Aside from working on my primary projects, things upcoming that I’m excited about are: Attending the EG conference in Monterey, (founded by Richard Saul Wurman who founded TED —which I also have dreamt about attending one day), taking part in Jerry Michalski’s 4 day retreat with many fascinating people who have been involved in Silicon Valley since the early days, spending a few weeks in New York and Boston to visit friends, attend the Starting Bloc Institute, visit my sister at college with an intermediary trip to Austin for my first South by South West, and begin integrating with the Stanford community.

And that’s only the next 3 months I know about.

I tell people now, I’m not on a year off, I’m on a year on.

I’ve completely overhauled my about page on my site to reflect the changes of the past few months and  I will be releasing a number of reflective posts revealing my path and some of my theories that have guided.

This blog post is part 2 of the Sandbox Network ‘Palomar 5′ series: a six week innovation camp in Berlin from 9 October – 24 November 2009. To follow the progress of the conference, you can view the official Palomar 5 blog. Alternatively, if you are on twitter, follow hashtag #p5 for real-time updates. You can also check out one of our camp member’s daily video blog on Youtube. (Part 1 is here)

Two thirds of the Palomar5 Innovation Camp has already passed. Four weeks down, two to go until the 2 day Summit, when we will have the opportunity to present the fruits of our labour to an eminent group of thought leaders, politicians, scientists and investors.

Before we dive deep into the Palomar5 experience let me give you a quick overview of the last month:

Our first two weeks, focused on understanding the thought landscape we’re operating in, generating hundreds of ideas for projects mixed in with some intense bonding experiences. Two weeks of intensive prototyping ensued, and now we’re transitioning into storytelling mode for the summit.

The last 4 weeks have been amazing but I was hoping to get more done. But that’s probably just my restlessness to change the world talking. But it is strange how fast a month has flown by.

We had our second “reality check” yesterday, where we all presented what we’ve been working on to many highly respected professionals and received their feedback. Someone asked me how long ago the first reality check was, it felt like ages, a month at least, but in reality it was only two and half weeks.

As a rule of thumb, if you’re trying to describe a prolonged experience and it feels like time has passed incredibly quickly but when you reflect on things you did in the beginning and it feels like it happened a long time ago, it probably means you are doing something right.

The Final Stretch

I have spent a lot of time the last few years learning about frameworks that have supported me in developing visions for a better future, but it has taken time for my entrepreneurial skills to catch up to the size of what I’ve set out to accomplish. The last half a year I’ve become increasingly anxious about pontificating while building takes a back seat. With only two weeks left of the camp part of me wishes more had been accomplished while here. But I have to realize that while we’ve been here a month, real work only started two weeks ago and our last two weeks of focus have been incredibly productive. The end goal of the Palomar5 camp is not to create fully functional products for the summit. Of greater importance to Palomar5 is conveying the underlying vision behind our projects and validation of the experiment of bringing 30 diversely talented young people from around the world and forcing them to live and work together for 6 weeks. Fully functional projects that make an impact are definitely vital for the success of Palomar5, but we don’t want to be another idea factory producing theories and patents; we want our projects to make a mark on the world, but the purpose of the 6 week camp is just to create the gravitational core for these projects to continue to flourish once the camp is over.

The summit should play a huge role in jumpstarting this process, but it all depends on the quality of our storytelling and how well we convey the enveloping experience of Palomar5: the lifestyle, the passion, the big projects and all the little creative projects the flit in and out serving as creative fuel for our bigger initiatives. If we do this well, TED-esque as we all like to say, (it being our common inspiration and the height of sexy intellectualism), we’ll create a buzz around the camp that will accelerate the development of our projects.

The Malzfabrik and Beyond

While we’ve spent most of our days in our stylish cubes dreaming up the next big thing followed by nightly recharges in our sleeping boxes, the weeks have not been without some atypical extracurricular activity.

After an intense first three weeks the Palomar5 team announced a mysterious weekend trip with few details except that we were supposed to bring our passport and pack warm. We speculated about trips to Poland or Holland.

On Halloween morning we piled on our bus unsure of our intended destination. A few hours later we found ourselves at the beginning of 8 kilometer canoeing expedition down a river somewhere in northeast Germany. We exited our canoes 3 hours later to find ourselves on the outskirts of a sparsely populated town with a nearby castle awaiting our presence. In the evening our creativity was out in full bloom as we showed off our elaborate characters including killer Mario, the bloody nurse and cross-dressing men.

Our favorite part of the weekend getaway at the castle was the sauna buried in the basement with plenty of half naked sandboxers to go around. We now request saunas wherever we go.

Other highlights included a Sunday afternoon project constructing an 8 meter mask out of branches and twigs, which was burned in it the evening. And I enjoyed my longest period of silence in a while during a solitary forest walk.

Atmosphere

Earlier this week we attended the ceremony for the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. On our walk back we noticed how this experience felt like the beginning of a new school. We’ve been living together for a month now and it feels like this is just the beginning of a new phase of our lives, which it is, but at the same time our concentrated camp experience is heading into the final stretch. The flight home will be very strange. The following weeks we’ll experience withdrawals as we return to reality, basically from the future. While we’ve been working on inventing the future of work, we’ve also been living it. This experience has seamlessly combined, friendship, fun, adventure and the birth of some really ambitious projects.

One thing I might change if I knew this could last beyond 6 weeks is not working as many hours during the day, I feel like life is cyclical, times where intense focus is required and other times where experimentalism is a better frame of mind. Making the most of my time here has been a higher priority for me. Trying to change the world takes sacrifice; again my restlessness talking.

How we maintain the community after the camp is an issue that looms large in all our heads, both for the continued success of our projects and the friendships we’ve built.

No matter what happens I think we can all say that the camp has inextricably altered our lives. And we’ll look back on our lives in a few years time categorizing our experiences with two denominations: BP and AP. Before Palomar5 and After Palomar5.

The pace of learning at this camp has been so high. I’ve often thought about what kind of person I’d become if every night I could go to bed completely mentally exhausted from the pushing my 3 pounds of grey matter continually past its limits. Palomar5 has given me four weeks of that dream. Everyday we discuss wide-ranging ideas, on many topics like learning, innovation, and culture.

One night Valentin and I were up late debating whether culture or technology was the stronger force driving society forward. While interesting, these conversations rarely lead to anything tangible, but Palomar5 begs to differ. The following day we were discussing how the iPhone achieved widespread cultural adoption so fast with technology so far ahead of what was previously available (normally a sticking point for products ahead of their time) and how our projects could succeed by similarly speeding up cultural adoption. The conversation immediately jumped to a new level as we drew on last night’s debate. Something in both our minds then clicked, “Wow that’s a first! Last night’s debate was enjoyable, but I never thought it would actually be productive.”

What We’ve Been Building At Palomar5

The theme of the camp of was the future of work, but that was just a starting point to sell the project. We’ve been given very little structure, and that’s the way like it. Lack of direction does not mean chaos, at least over the long term, our projects have naturally converged around big themes: Social consciousness, data and entrepreneurship.

These are incredibly important areas where a lot of growth will be made, and it’s even more notable that we were not told to pick 3 these topics, but our internal compasses driven by creative destruction, cycling through hundreds of projects over the last 4 weeks, led us here.

Our vision for redesigning society for digital age and generation is now more palpable with these themes guiding us. What’s notable is that while many of dreamed of redesigning society this kind of re-envisioning around our idyllic yearnings hasn’t always been possible. The industrial era required sacrificing creativity in the name of scalable efficiency, which was necessary to create the infrastructure to raise the quality of life to what is today. But while this era is long past its expiration date, it continues to live on like an infectious bacteria, contaminating our work and lives. So many of us realize it’s time to reinvent society and its organizations from the ground up, we now just need to commit to making it happen. Count Palomar5 in.

Magnifying Glass — Palomar5 Project Sneak Peak

Here’s a sneak peak into the vision of the project I’ve been most intensely involved in:

We’re postulating the future of work is going to have a lot more startups, because that’s where all the innovation is coming from.

The startup accelerator model is a big part of the future innovation landscape, think YCombinator, Techstars, Seedcamp, and now there are accelerators for more than web startups, using basically the same model like Palomar5 and the Unreasonable Institute. We think we’ll see a lot more of these.

The rise of accelerators means that there are now two big emerging markets: Pre and post accelerators.

We’re trying to build many of the tools needed to support startups post-accelerator: expert feedback systems, social network amplification in order to get connected to the right people, just in time learning to acquire skills to overcome new challenges, and repositories of best practices and eventually developing some kind of recommendation engine to streamline and automate the whole ecosystem.

Also, while startups are more innovative because they have freedom, flexibility and autonomy corporations still possess advantages of scale and greater resources.

Startups need to achieve advantages of scale as well, but they will be able to do this modularly and collaboratively. Currently large organizations are organized like big towers, even Google operates like this. But startups will be able to achieve scale and preserve their autonomy by acting like lego pieces. Currently, startups don’t have lego functionality, they’re just rectangular blocks that don’t interface well with each other but we’re providing the knobs and the holes to assemble large towers for particular projects that can easily dissemble at the conclusion of the project and build a new tower.

The prototype for our skill acquisition platform for entrepreneurs has recently been launched. Currently we’re only offering it to alumni of startup accelerators. http://forceforthefuture.com/founders-first/

Conclusion

There’s a lot of uncertainty in many of our lives now, but I love it. Many of us have nothing to go back to, no work to return to, just the opportunity to take the projects and relationships built over the 6 weeks as springboard for the next few years of our lives. It’s easy to get scared by the uncertainty, I still fall victim to it from time to time, but I know it’s really just a sign I’m taking good risks. While it’s comforting to know what life has in store, the predictability is antithetical to impact and growth.

A few nights ago Eddie (Harran) was hopping around in the cube with typical exuberance saying, “I wish could just work with you guys for the rest of my life” “What’s stopping you?” “Well, nothing!”

The Palomar5 experience began with a warm welcome to a chilly Berlin at the Malzfabrik, a former giant brewery that is being transformed into a creative hub. However, we are its first full-time inhabitants. The indoctrination began when we donned identical blue jumpsuits which were worn for the duration of the first weekend while we consolidated our collective consciousness. However, we were able to keep slivers of our individuality by deciding the placement of the logo–which cleverly represents both the 5 and “lo” of “Palomar5″.

n our first week we ventured into central Berlin twice. The inaugural Sunday, we were invited for a private tour at one of the city’s avant garde art galleries housed in a restored bunker from the WWII–Bunker Berlin, Boros collection, have also a look at this link. We then caught the sights and sounds of the city on a boat ride down the river Spree, finishing our day with excellent pizza at a famous cult-like restaurant run by punks.

While some soaked up the city on our trip, Max, upon returning home realized his memories of the city were sparse as he spent most of the time in the inner caverns of his mind plotting world domination with his fellow campers. It’s a gift and a curse.

…We know we’ve left them with a gift: a break in their routine to expose the hidden assumptions that chain these transit-goers to their habits and thus their lives, precisely the same affliction that shields oversized companies from realising the ways of working in the future. Have no fear, their eyes will soon be pried open— and if not, they will awaken from their decadent slumber to find that the next generation holds the reins to the world they once held in the palm of their hand.

From my profile on the Palomar5 Blog

‘I try to make what I do and what I am passionate about as close together as possible. I believe that should be one of everyone’s major goals in life. I think passion almost always manifests itself as a desire to change or improve something, whether it’s the entrepreneur who wants to change an industry, the writer who wants to change public opinion, the artist who wants to change collective consciousness or the musician who just wants to change how people feel in the present moment.’
Max Marmer

Max Marmer from the US likes to make big ideas happen. He’s obsessed with learning and conversing about frameworks that give insight into where humanity is headed and why humans do what they do. As both an entrepreneur and a big picture thinker Max tries to pinpoint the biggest problems and opportunities that he can affect. He tries to clearly understand both present circumstances and future scenarios worth inhabiting and then start shaping the future by approximating ideal outcomes through iterations of entrepreneurial projects.

He’s currently involved in founding a very ambitious startup working to weave together converging trends in education, entrepreneurship and the future of work. The startup is called Force For the Future and is beginning by providing decentralized, local support networks for entrepreneurs. But the larger vision for the project is to evolve into a liaison for “Real World University”, the best learning environment of all, where passion, learning and work are all fluid and intimately related. The world’s major institutions in the corporate and educational sectors are failing to develop the talent of the next generation. And we need our institutions to prepare people to work effectively in the 21st century, and support people in finding the problems they are passionate about solving. And that is perhaps the world’s biggest challenge and opportunity right now: getting a greater percentage of the world’s population working on solving humanity’s biggest problems. Max believes entrepreneurship is the most effective way attack these problems and that life approached in an entrepreneurial manner is one of the best ways to create a life of personal fulfillment and greater contribution.

Max is honored to have the opportunity to immerse himself in a creative environment with 29 other amazing people all trying to implement their visions for a better world. It looks to be an incredibly stimulating atmosphere where the seeds of big projects will be sewn and lasting friendships begun. He expects the Palomar5 Camp to be an incredibly stimulating experience that will help shape the nascent project described above through conversation, experimentation, iteration and implementation. He expects an overstimulated but happy brain, a warm heart and cold skin. He’s ready for early mornings, late nights and sweet dreams.

But frankly, this will be a first experience for all involved (the organizers included) and we don’t really know what to expect what will come out of this six week experience except the unexpected.