For some, fear is what paralyzes us. It keeps us from doing something risky. It is an excuse for inaction, routine, and procrastination.

For a few choice others, fear is what guides us. Fear is the signal that what we are doing is the right thing. It is proof of growth, courage, and progress.

Sometimes the best way – or really, the only way – to approach our fears is like the Honey Badger.

Run face-first into the bee’s nest.

Tackle the cobra. Get bit. Fall asleep, and then finish the job.

The thing about the Honey Badger is it doesn’t give a fuck. It takes what it wants. There’s no waiting. There’s no thinking. There’s no fear. And everyone else benefits from his audacity and brazen actions.

How can running head-first into your fears change your situation? What is the cobra or beehive you need to tackle? When will you stop thinking and run face-first into the thing that scares you? When will you start living life and stop letting life live you?

Start now.

Thanks for Ted Gonder for providing the inspiration for this post.

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In the first few days of Bold Academy, we’ve learned about rituals, identifying the core desired feelings that we want to experience on a daily basis to be at our best selves. We’ve learned about being leaders, communicating openly and honestly, taking care of our bodies and our minds, and following dreams.

The challenge, after talking about all of these important things that we want to apply, and should be applying to our lives, is taking the necessary action to apply them.

The application is where we most often fall short.

We start a journey with good intentions, but we lose steam.

We forget.

We get busy.

We become distracted, or lazy.

Taking action requires effort. Calories. Focus. Energy.

Human memory is weak. Our focus can be even weaker.

Here are a few tips that will help you take your ideas seriously. To create, prototype, and ship.

Write it Down

The human memory is weak. Our brains move from idea to idea quickly. If we don’t physically record our ideas, we forget, and then the opportunity to execute is lost. Carry around a notebook, or create a document on your phone. When you have an idea, stop what you’re doing and write it down.

Share Your Idea

One of the best ways we can push ourselves to take our ideas seriously is to use our peers to hold us accountable. When we begin to take each other’s ideas seriously, it encourages execution, and opens up a forum for feedback and improvement on the idea.

Prototype

Test your idea. Create a prototype and run a demo of your idea within 24 hours. Make a model. Do a focus group. Prove to whether or not there is interest, a market, or a tribe of people willing to accept your idea. Then, if the prototype sticks, iterate and improve.

Set a Deadline

We put off shipping our projects because they’re not ready. Let’s be honest, they’re never ready. Push yourself to be a creator. Set a deadline, and ship whether you feel like your project is ready or not.

Projects are ready when they premiere. They don’t premiere when they’re ready.

Project

Create, create, create! Do what you do best. Creativity is a numbers game. The people with the very best ideas also have the very worst ideas. The more things you create, the more will fail… but the more failures we experience, the more successes we can be a part of.

Write down an idea today, and tell a friend. Then set a deadline and create. It’s that easy.

Let’s start taking our ideas seriously. The world needs people willing to make the best ideas a reality.

Big thanks to George Zisiadis for these steps, and for providing a great example of someone who takes ideas seriously.

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As Bold Academy unfolds, we’ve bonded quickly by sharing things that we hold close to our hearts. We’ve shared photos, food, memories, fears, and music.

Here’s a playlist we’ve created together. Over the next few days it will grow and evolve as we feel inspired, and share the songs that mean the most to us.

Music is a moral law. It gives soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, and charm and gaiety to life and to everything.
-Plato

What is something you are passionate about that you can experience and share with others today?

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Don’t. Ever. Give. Up.

Always A Fire | Chad Jones Documentary from Union HZ on Vimeo.

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The post Always A Fire appeared first on The Bold Academy.

Listen to her story in the video below about how her life has changed, and why it will never be the same. The Bold Academy is not for the faint of heart, but those who choose to experience it will never be the same.

The post How The Bold Academy Will Change Your Life appeared first on The Bold Academy.

Here’s a transcript from the video:
What do you desire? What makes you itch? What sort of a situaion would you like?

Let’s suppose – I do this often in vocational guidence of students. They come to me and say, “Well, uh, we’re getting out of college, and we haven’t the faintest idea of what we want to do.”

So I always ask the question, “What would you like to do if money were no object? How would you really enjoy spending your life?”

Well, it’s so amazing. As a result of our kind of educational system, crowds of students say, “Well, we’d like to be painters, we’d like to be poets, we’d like to be writers. But as everybody knows you can’t earn any money that way.”

Or another person says, “I’d like to live an out-of-doors life and ride horses.”

I said, “Do you want to teach at a riding school? Let’s go through with it. What do you want to do?”

When we finally got down to something which the individual says he really wants to do. I will say to him, “you do that, and forget the money. Because if you say that getting the money is the most important thing, you will spend your life completely wasting your time. You will be doing things you don’t like doing in order to go on living that is to go on doing things you don’t like doing. Which is STUPID! Better to have a short life that is full of what you like doing than a long life spent in a miserable way.”

And after all, if you do really like what your’e doing, it doesn’t matter what it is, you can eventually become a master of it. It’s the only way to become a master of something, to be really with it. And then you’ll be able to get a good fee for whatever it is. So don’t worry too much. Somebody’s interested in everything. And anything you can be interested in, you’ll find others who are.

But it’s absolutely stupid to spend your time doing things you don’t like in order to go on doing things you don’t like and to teach your children to follow in the same track. See, what we’re doing is we’re bringing up children, and educating them to live the same sort of lives we’re living in order that they may justify themselves and find satisfaction in life by bringing up their children to bring up their children to do the same thing. It’s all wretch and no vomit. It never gets there!

And so therefore it’s so important to consider this question. “What do I desire?”

The post The Best Career Advice You’ll Ever Get appeared first on The Bold Academy.

Flip on the light, and the nightmares would all disappear.

Fear of the unknown and an overactive imagination was my enemy… and to be honest, it still is.

I’m not so much scared of the dark anymore. My fears don’t hide in my bedroom closet. Rather, they lurk around the corners of big decisions. They wait to pounce on me from underneath an unmade bed of daring changes.

“What if I quit my great job and can’t find something better?”
“What if I tell her I love her and she rejects me?”
“What if my project/start-up fails?”
“What if I move cities to pursue a dream and it doesn’t work out?”

Unfortunately, as an adult, getting rid of fear isn’t as simple as just flipping a light switch to reveal the embellishments of your imagination. Sometimes you have to stumble through a dark room and confront your monsters without the help of light. Taking on those big, mysterious, scary-monster decisions — decisions that mean significant change in your life — is rarely easy.

To do it, you need courage. You need desire. And it also helps to have the love and support of a community. A community for people who are ready to tackle their demons right along with you.

That community exists, and it’s called The Bold Academy.

This is a place where people are given permission to experiment, push their limits, try new things, and fail. It’s a place to receive direction, support, encouragement, and experience to help navigate a world of imaginary (and often real) monsters who show up to impede our paths for growth.

Applications are now open. Is it time for you to flip on the light and chase your monsters instead of letting them chase you?

Nate Bagley is The Bold Academy’s Director of Communications. He loves passionate people, the internet, and high-fives. He loves helping to build and facilitate exciting communities both on the interwebs and off. You can follow him on Twitter or watch for his new pet project, The Loveumentary, to launch soon!

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Oh hey, San Francisco!

This January 2013, our next Bold Academy, a 10-day experience, will take place in the middle of the world’s largest innovation hub, San Francisco. A city infused with a tribe of entrepreneurs, thought-leaders, world-changers, and do-gooders… it’s unlike any other city in the world. Whether you’re into food, music, science, design, technology, entrepreneurship or art — San Francisco provides an avenue for each with Bold as your way.

Sign up for Bold updates to be notified about when applications open, and other big announcements.

New team members

To complement a new location, we’ve added some bold and ballsy members to The Bold Academy Team:

Terri Simon | Chief Strategist

Terri Simon, a Bold 2012 mentor, is joining the Bold crew as our Chief Strategist. In addition to her alignment with the purpose and vision, Terri brings unmatched expertise in leadership, culture, and bad-assery. She’s the Senior Vice Present of Talent and Culture at Ignited, consults for Delivering Happiness at Work, a Zappos Family Company, and travels the world as a self-proclaimed foodie and yogi.

Smiley Poswolsky | Academy Director

Adam “Smiley” Poswolsky is joining Bold as our Academy Director. He is a writer, lover of life, and is inspired by the next generation of leaders. His passion for projects involving people who are hell-bent on making a difference is what drew him to be a Bold Academy Mentor in July 2012. It was love at first sight, and neither he nor the Bold team have looked back since.

Nate Bagley | Director of Communications

Nate Bagley is Bold’s new Director of Communications. Nate (aka: Bags) likes telling lame jokes, getting shit done, and people like you. He’s excited to help build upon the amazing Bold Academy community. He sincerely believes deep down in the very core of his being that Bold is the happiest place on earth, and there’s no group of people in the world he’d rather be working with right now.

Whitney Flight | Visual Storyteller & Communications Apprentice

Whitney is the kind of person everyone wants to be around… which is why the Bold Academy team decided not to let her out of sight after experiencing her awesomeness throughout the first session in July. Whitney will be joining the team as the Visual Storyteller and Communications Apprentice. Her mad storytelling skills and ability to connect with people will help take the Bold experience to the next level for everyone.

You can read more about Terri, Smiley, Bags, Whit and the rest of the Bold Academy leadership in more detail here.

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Bassam’s Bold Experience

If nothing else, I’m an intense and accountable guy. And The Bold Academy was essentially that in a month-long program for young adults trying to carve their path in life. When I was asked to present a workshop on goal setting, I jumped at the chance to be part of the Bold narrative. There are no better students than the curiously hungry and The Bold Academy was brimming with them.

I wish I had something like this when I was in my early 20′s, when I was questioning what it is I wanted to do and how I wanted to get there. Of course, at that age it’s easier to act like you have it all together when in fact we should be leaning on each other at times of exploration.

We need more vessels of group interaction, group accountability and group vulnerability. When you combine these 3 “anchors of doing”, you create a super cell of immersion and accomplishment. Too often we feel like we’re all alone and that no one can relate to us. The Bold Academy allows individuals to be part of a clan and to be part of it for long enough to build unbreakable bonds.

Although I was only at Bold for 12 hours, one of the great things to watch was the interaction between the Bolders at lunch. There was no “cool table” or cliques. You sat next to whoever happened to be next to you and you engaged in a conversation that befit the moment. It was the “shared existence” of the entire experience epitomized in a 30 snapshot of a random day.

My advice to those who want more out of life? Funny enough, I just wrote a post called: The Ultimate Guide To Getting Anything Done In 4 Weeks. In it I talk about needing to find the “why” before your “do”. What is the motivation that illuminates your identity? I talk about getting down and dirty and learning something instead of imagining what it might feel like when you do. So often in life we search for a passion as if it was hidden under a rock somewhere. Unfortunately, that’s not how passion works. One has to tinker. Tinker. Fail. Try. Be Bolder. Get good at something rare and useful and then use that skill to support the things you cherish in life. Sometimes it is about doing something you enjoy “enough” and keeping the ball moving forward, even it does feel a little bit like tacking in the wind.

The post How Passion Works appeared first on The Bold Academy.

What was the most meaningful takeaway you had from Bold Academy?

I loved the raw authenticity of each person. Everyone was both incredibly talented and yet humble and honest about their struggles and current endeavors. I saw people who had built major businesses and ideas to fruition, and circled back on their next idea to start again. It reminded me that entrepreneurship, life design and creation aren’t one-time events. They aren’t things you can accomplish and check off of a list or a box. It’s a perpetual process, and the most talented people are those that keep getting back in the ring, keep creating, keep questioning, keep going. The people were curious and willing to put in the work to make their dreams possible. When you surround yourself with other talented people who have the will to make things happen, you realize that you’re not alone–and that there are hundreds of people who are willing to help you as much as you’re willing to help them. It’s incredible.

What drew you to the Bold Academy?

The people and the mission. There were tremendous people involved, and I was thrilled to be asked to present on something I’ve been learning a lot about – storytelling. We need to find better ways to express ourselves and communicate our stories to others. I got to teach a 2-hour workshop and then work one-on-one with a handful of people about their visions and future projects. Listening to the ideas, dreams, and plans of so many talented people was reinvigorating and inspiring for me– there’s so much I still want to do!

Why do you think it’s important that something like Bold Academy exists in the world today?

I think the world is craving–not craving, STARVING–for community and experiences that entangle humans together in the pursuit of high accomplishment. The corporate world is stifling creativity and isolating humans into silos of nonproductivity, and we’ve forgotten how to engage, encourage, and create with and for each other. We need places like the Bold Academy, but on a scale much larger than even what Bold has started. We need to figure out new ways to live and work that promote and encourage serendipity, surprise, chance encounters, and interactions among people. We can’t keep living in cubicles.

In some regards, we’re fed a strange promise by the systems we’ve set up: go to college–a place that people spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on–and live for four years in a place that encourages community, learning, experimentation, reaction, creation, and a fully-fed life. Then, post-college we thrust all of these twenty-year olds into jobs where there aren’t cohorts or peers their age, where the job is often singular or in small teams, where the tasks aren’t challenging enough, and where we strip life of everything that keeps it balanced (health, activity, recreation, experimentation, and more). We need to find a way to fix this.

It’s ironic that we spend $100,000 on the best years of our lives and then struggle with the next 25 years trying to figure out how to get that back.

What is your best advice to people who feel “stuck” in life?

Try one new thing a day for 30 days. Give yourself a list of things to do, and experiment. It doesn’t seem like one change a day can make much of a difference, but over time, change happens quickly. One of my favorite quotes is “You can’t get that much done in a day, but you’d be surprised by how much you can get done in 30 days.”

Things are always changing. That’s the nature of humanity, of earth, of life. Give yourself permission to experiment, to change, and to know that if you take action now, your life could be different in a couple of months.

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