Beyond the Pitch

Editor's Note: This is an op-ed I did for the Michigan Review following the 1000 Pitches Summit last Saturday.

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Pat Milligan is a member of MPowered on the organizing committee for the 1000 Pitches Summit

True to the spirit of entrepreneurship that MPowered works to promote, we as an organization have launched a multitude of different projects in our short existence thus far. Most have fallen by the wayside. A few worked out well and are still running. But none have achieved the kind of success that we've had with 1000 Pitches. This year is only the fourth time the competition has been held, and two weeks ago at the close of this year's competition, we set an official world record with 3,303 pitches.

It was a fantastic year. But although 1000 Pitches is by far our largest project, we still treat it like a startup, and the question for us every single year is 'how can we improve the experience?' Over the past couple of years, the answer to that question has primarily been 'grow the competition'. We wanted to reach even more students, attract more sponsors and publicity, and promote more creative thinking. And for four consecutive years, we did exactly that, growing from 1000 to over 3300 pitches and generating more excitement each time. While that still remains a goal for future competitions, that is no longer the only one. We are now focusing in on ways to improve the students' experience and provide wider value than just the prize money for the winners.

This year we rolled out the inaugural 1000 Pitches Summit in an effort to expand on that focus. In past competitions, students would submit their pitches, a few winners would be chosen, and that was that. While some participants moved forward with their ideas, most simply moved on and forgot about it. Our primary goal with the Summit was to help get students started on the path to developing their ideas further and remain engaged with the entrepreneurial community and resources that are being built here on campus. To put it more concisely, we want the conclusion of the competition to be the start of building ideas rather than the end.

To do that, three objectives were set. First, we wanted everybody there to meet other people with interest and knowledge in similar fields. Until now, one disadvantage of 1000 Pitches vs other ideas competitions like Entrepalooza is that there was no explicit process for talking to others about your idea, building networks or forming teams. Second, we wanted to help students define the next step to take in the process of building an idea based on where they were at that point. And finally, we wanted everyone to get a start on that next step, just to begin building momentum, even if it's small. To that end, we invited as many outside mentors as we could get a hold of, developed 5 workshops based on difficult but useful skills, and did our best to make the event informal and basically get out of their way.

We don't expect or even want everyone to go out and start a business. It's not feasible and it's not within most students' goals. But we do think there is a lot to be gained by learning to think creatively; and that has to be an ongoing process rather than a one-time step. The real endgame for 1000 Pitches isn't the ideas that are created or the prize money rewarded but rather the experience people get by doing it. A lot of people who pitch in the competition aren't planning it ahead of time - students that are part of groups in the pledge program, students we approach at pitch stations and encourage to pitch, etc. But they are forced to come up with something creative on the spot, and those ideas can be great.

There were a number of people I talked to at the Summit who said that prior to that conference they had never even considered pursuing their idea or becoming an entrepreneur; it was just an idea they recorded one day and forgot about until we named it a semifinalist. That's the kind of value we want to provide going forward. The Summit was just the beginning; we have follow-up events planned next semester, each of which ideally builds off the last. If those help just a few people discover something they're passionate about that they had never thought of before, we will be very happy. If, however, the experience can also help a large number of people think just a little more creatively and see the world in a different light, then this whole project called 1000 Pitches will have been truly successful.

Notes on Uncertainty and Letting Go

To my dad, who is prone to believing in the end of the world. Everything is going to be just fine, even if it isn't.

The Modern World

SO APPARENTLY, the future might suck. We could have a global depression. We could have wars, there could be terrorists, people could be poor. Your neighbor could burn your house down. Your dog might die. There might be hurricanes or blizzards, or maybe even meteors, the earth might be heatin' up. You could break your leg. Or both. Someday, if you're lucky, you might just end up dead.

So what.

Modern society could be criticized in a lot of different ways, but in my view the biggest problem it's created is the expectation that life should be comfy, cozy and secure. You'll get your welfare check and your white picket fence and 2.4 cars and then you'll get your pensions and your medications and drugs so that you never feel any pain. That's the default. That's the expectation. And it's a problem.

The problem is not that it's impossible. In fact, we've almost done it. Up until recently, if you lived in America or Europe, or you happen to have a few bankrolls lying around, that's the life you got. The problem is that a comfy cozy life sounds so good on paper but ends up being so weak in the end.

Why are the richest countries the ones with the most depression, unhappiness, suicide, and negativity? The more money you have, the more problems you can simply buy off instead of having to deal with. And dealing with problems is as fundamental to life as joy and happiness. Modern society has tried to skim the cream off of life, taking just the positive and eliminating the negative. People forget that you can't have one without the other. The fairy tale doesn't work when there is peace and no enemies and the princess just walks up to the bored knight and snaps her fingers. Dissatisfaction and anxiety fill the hole where no other problems exist.

Viewpoints and Expectations

Turn on the TV and watch the news with me for a bit. Let's see - over the weekend, we had a grandma get murdered, a three car crash on the highway, third quarter financials came out, some new fears have the debt market spooked, something about Iran or Estonia happened, and Congress stuck a thumb up its ass. Now let's get a typical reaction to each of these stories. Granny - 'Oh my gosh, that's terrible, how could somebody do something like that? That makes me so mad.' Car crash - 'Oh that's so sad. Just awful.' Haywire in the markets - 'Oh boy I hope I don't lose my job.' Iran - 'Oh that's so scary! Sheesh why do they have to do that?' Congress - 'Oh they make me so mad. How could they be so dumb?'

Those are all legitimate reactions. A car crash is pretty sad. Losing your job would suck. The world is a scary place. But when you expect these things not to happen, you're set up for disappointment every time. Millions of miles are driven every single day, so crashes are inevitable. Billions of dollars flow around the economy, so layoffs and downturns will happen. Get used to it.

It can also be very difficult to take yourself out of your own shoes. Call a terrorist or a murderer inhuman if you will, but they are just as human as you are, and you'd be shocked at the things every single one of us is capable of in different circumstances. Call Congress a bunch of babies, but you would do the same things if you were there. The structure is set up to reward that behavior, with party lines and lobbyists and government funding and corporate influences. Call Ahmedinejad what you will, but he's not crazy.

You can rest assured that these things will continue in the future. There will always be a million and one things to be scared of and things to be pissed off about, even if the names and faces change.

Living

These things will sometimes affect your life. And there's nothing you can do about it. But can change how you react to it, and that makes all the difference.

If you realize that bad things will happen, if you allow them to happen without diving headfirst into denial or anger or sadness or all three, then you can start to really appreciate the other side of the coin and all the good things life has to offer.

If you got laid off and kicked out of the country and were living poor, would you spend your time being angry and sad or would you enjoy life? There are a whole lot of very poor people who are very happy and content. You can still have friends and family, you can laugh, you can live. If a family member dies, would you spend years in denial and bitterness at the unfairness of life, or would you celebrate their life, mourn the loss and move on? If you die tomorrow, how are you going to react to that?

Basically, if you know the difference between what you can control and what you can't, if you know that people are human and everybody's circumstances are different, and if you can stop from clinging on to expectations and what you have, then life can really improve. It's something I definitely need to work on, but those are my thoughts for today.

Searching for the Soul of Mechanical Engineering

A little over a year ago I switched into ME from Materials Science. I have since insulted myself quite a few times for making that decision.

What is it with mechanical engineering? Isn't it pretty much the first thing that comes to mind when people think about engineering? How does it manage to look so attractive from the outside yet so uninspired and bland from the inside? Basically, you choose mechanical if you aren't cool enough to do anything else. Want to do research? Go MSE or nuclear. Want to do cutting-edge design? Do aero. Start a company? Choose EECS. Run a company? IOE is for you. Save lives? Biomed. Don't have a clue? Mechanical.

ME occupies the vast, lonely space in between everything else. MEs specialize at nothing and share no common dream. It's the beta version, the default setting, the neutral territory. Yet, the more I think about it, the more I come to realize that being exceptionally bland, tedious, unfocused and all around non-sexy might be the real strength of the field.

Depending on who you listen to, there are two basic ways to use education to become rich and successful and do great things. The first way is to find a niche that is valuable and focus solely on that niche until you are one of the best in the world. The second way is to do absolutely the opposite and just learn a bit of everything. If both ways can work, it would seem that just having a plan laid out to use your education strategically is the real differentiator, but that's for a different post. In any case, while most engineering focuses on method 1, ME is the only one definitively planted in method 2.

There is a certain amount of risk in both methods, but the risks are very different. If you choose one focus, you risk two things: first, that you just don't have the skills to become an expert, and second, that you will eventually lose your drive or interest in that niche. If instead you focus on nothing, you risk that you won't have built up enough skills to do anything well at all. The thing is, the world needs both types of people. In order for a project to go well, you need big-picture organizers that can speak everybody's language and relate to all of them, as well as the specialists on the edges who bring the heavy skills.

For where I am at right now, route 2 is clearly the better option. With EGL, I already chose a diversified education over a focused one, and I never doubt joining that club. I'm also quite vulnerable to the risk of losing interest if I pick a niche (see my last post). And, in general I think big-picture people have more freedom to choose what they want to work on at any given time, allowing for more creative and diverse work (things I definitely value). If the price of that is flat, dry, grind-it-out with your bare knuckles coursework in the meantime, so be it. All those fools who chose interesting fields will be working for us someday.

Undefined

I ranted earlier in this blog about my frustrations with the 'follow your passion' advice. I believed that it created inaction because a lot of people haven't clearly defined their passion, and that uncertainty halts them in their tracks. I still think that is the biggest problem with the advice, but after talking to some people and thinking about it for some time, I'm going to add one more important one that is interesting to explore further - the problem of definition. Let me explain.

I attended my first career fair earlier this fall. I had (what I thought was) a solid resume, a nicely rehearsed pitch, and a black felt fedora with a perky blue feather. What I didn't have, as I explained in my earlier post, was a good answer to the inevitable question 'so what do you want to work on?' I usually answered with something broad like, energy. That question, I believe, is why I still haven't gotten a single response to all my follow-ups and applications. I realize that I probably should have just picked something specific for each company, but it didn't feel honest. Why? Basically, it's because I didn't want to limit myself.

Any time you have to make a choice, science shows, it generates stress. More choices actually make people less happy, and it's because every choice involves loss in the form of opportunity cost. Sometimes that cost is very small, like when the decision is insignificant or the choices not made are worthless. But in the case of 'what is your passion', making one single choice means saying no to an incredible array of very good options. Obviously nobody is asking you to make that one choice and stick with it forever, but even making it once often involves a lot of opportunity cost. If I had gone to the career fair looking for an internship in, say, the design of automotive brake pads, maybe I would have found it. But it would have shut down countless other opportunities for internships that I would have enjoyed.

The fact that creating a definition or making a choice involves loss applies to a lot of different aspects of life. For example, I was asked in Topics in Leadership class today to come up with a personal purpose statement. Take a second and complete the sentence: 'My purpose in life is _____.' Anything more specific than 'do good things and lead a good life' is inevitably going to be incomplete at best. You can see the problems with this exercise right on the surface - you are limiting through definition your very purpose in life. Does that really sound like a logical or sensible thing to do?

There is a good commercial running right now in which somebody asks a new acquaintance at a tailgate party, 'so what do you do?' The scene flips rapidly through the main character going fishing, playing frisbee with his kid, pounding in nails, climbing a mountain, etc. The guy replies 'Well, I... um, yeah.' Not surprisingly, he finds it impossible to package his life into a neat little boxed up reply.

In many ways this is an application of the Buddhist philosophy that any attempts to define or conceptualize reality ultimately fail. It is impossible to define boundaries around an object or concept and capture the whole picture. A better attempt, although still imperfect, is to use the negative tense. For example, my friend Erik suggested that the best advice you could give regarding passion would be stated 'dont pursue anything you aren't passionate about'. Doesn't have the same ring to it, but doesn't it give off a much more liberating feeling than the positive advice?

I'm going to make a decision here and deliberately not have answers to 'what is your passion' or 'what is your purpose' or anything like that. It feels good to not have to have an answer. But then again, maybe I'm just being picky or stubborn. After all, at some point I'm going to need to just get an internship already.

Notes on Hippies, Ghosts and Pink Floyd

Mother, should I trust the government? Mother, should I build a wall?

For me Michigan has always had this bizarre dualism running through it... on the one hand, its got this history of counterculture and hippie-ness running through it, yet on the other hand, it's such a good school that we'll be able to win at the same game we love to hate. Why should we hate the system if it is set up in our favor? Are we hypocrites if we hang around Occupy Ann Arbor, but later go work on Wall Street?

I lamented the decline of hippies in Ann Arbor after sitting on the side of the highway from East Lansing for a couple hours, unable to get a one-hour ride back to Ann Arbor after the football game with thousands of fans making that drive (many already carpooling). I was disappointed in the city. I had always held out hope that maybe AA was still a hippie town in some sense, despite what is generally a lack of coherent activism on this campus anyways. I would have to think that if this place had any semblance of the 60s left in it, the local Occupy wouldn't have fizzled out like it did. Maybe Wolverines have collectively decided that we'd rather win at the system than destroy it anyways. Maybe we're not hypocrites anymore (?) and yet, it does kind of feel like something is lost in making that decision.

I'm kind of a case study myself in whether or not counterculture and the status quo are actually opposites in every sense; I consider myself to be a self-hating republican hippie. Republican in the sense that I don't think big government or high taxes do anybody any good, hippie in the sense that I think society needs to be as open and fair as possible, and that the most important thing society can do is foster an abundance mindset (which so many Republicans distinctly lack, which is why I kind of resent them and why I'm embarrassed to call myself Republican). Is that a defensible position? After all, isn't the idea of high taxes and wealth distribution founded in an abundance mindset? I don't think so, but at the same time I think that's for people smarter than me to figure out.

If that's true, maybe there is still hope for Ann Arbor. There's an old-school block-M logo on a cornhole board that lives on our wall in the apartment... I never really pay attention to it normally, but draws my attention as I sit listening to Pink and Led every once in a while. Something feels right about it, like this living nostalgia that carries on connecting present to past. Maybe there is something to be said for tradition? Ghosts of hippies past, perhaps, wandering this town from the Stairway to Heaven shop to little apartments where rock is played and self-hating hippies live. Too bad they can't give me a ride next time I need one.

Tell Me About It

Being involved in entrepreneurship here at Michigan, I get to hear a lot of people talk. I've heard from million-dollar CEOs, serial entrepreneurs, student start-up masters, you name it. I estimate I've spent probably about 100 hours, if not more, listening to these people both in person and online recordings. I've pretty much heard it all. And quite honestly, at this point I'm getting kind of sick of hearing about it.

Here's how the vast majority of these speeches go:

'Well, you know, I've been different ever since I was born. I was a crazy kid. Yeah, that was me. When I went to college, I met these other crazy kids and we came up with some crazy ideas. We didn't realize at the time just how crazy we were, but you know what, that was a good thing because if we knew how crazy it was for us to try that, we would have never done it. So we were stupid and crazy, but we did it anyways. When we told people what we were doing, they called us crazy.

But we did it, and it was sooo hard. Sooo damn hard. You have no idea how hard it was. Seriously. We failed like, 18 hundred million and a half times. Maybe 19, I'm not sure. But I learned soooooo much. Sooo damn much. You have no idea how much I learned. Seriously. And it was sooo crazy what we did. Sooo damn crazy. You have no idea how crazy it was. Seriously.

So I have three key take-home points for your. Write these down, because they're really really important. I wish somebody had shared this with me, because I didn't know these. First of all, you gotta find your passion, man. Pash-shun. That one, singular thing that gets you so cracked-up effing excited you give yourself hernias and intestinal bleeding just thinking about it. You have to be that excited about it. Second, you gotta learn how to fail. Fayl-yur. You are gonna fail so hard and so often that average people would probably rather kill themselves with staple guns and hot sauce than fail that hard. Finally, you gotta talk to people. Like, everybody. Net-werk-ing. You should pretty much be best friends with the world. You're doomed if you don't.

Alright, now go do something! Just go do it already! You know that one thing you always wanted to do, ever since you popped outta your momma you said to yourself, dammit I need to go do this! Yeah, that thing! Go effin' do it already! Every second spent waiting is a second spent wasting away. Get out of here and just go do something. Thank you all for your time. Oh by the way, I'm really rich too.'

These speeches sound great the first time you hear it. You feel so inspired and awe-struck, you end up ruining your week by spending it daydreaming up your own success story. It's so satisfying and so easy to do. But I think these types of stories have a lot of problems built in, and may end up doing more harm than good. Let me explain.

Let's start from the top. First of all, the only people we ever hear from are the raging success stories. Nobody ever invites a failure to come up and talk about their story. There is a massive survivor bias built in to this whole network that skews perspectives about entrepreneurship. 'I became wildly successful by following these steps. Follow those steps too.' The trouble is, that doesn't always work. There are so many intangibles and external influences that factor in to the success or failure of a venture, and often the speaker doesn't even realize it. I want to also hear from the people who crashed and couldn't pick themselves up off the floor, whether it was their fault or not.

Second, I'm sick of hearing about how unbelievably awesome you have to be in order to be an entrepreneur. We make these lists all the time... Visionary, dedicated, passionate, leader, creative, innovative, persevering, on and on and on. You know what, nobody is all of those things. And a lot of those things aren't inherent traits. The only thing these lists accomplish is putting entrepreneurs on an even higher pedestal (as if it weren't high enough already). When speakers go up on stage and yak about how mind-blowingly difficult their thing was to accomplish, and how they had to have all of those puffy traits and more, it just further distances those E-Deities from the rest of us. That only makes people less likely to start and far less confident in themselves that they have what it takes.

Third, stop giving us these clichéd lists of what to do next. Follow your passion! You know how many people I know who have found their one single-minded passion at this point? Very very few, myself not included either. This is a very big point that a lot of entrepreneurs don't understand: a lot of people just don't know yet. This whole follow-your-passion thing sounds great on the surface, but let me explain how it puts the rest of us off. Passion doesn't develop out of nothing. It's not like you can wake up one morning and all of the sudden say, 'I want to develop recuperative energy systems for drivetrains!' and leave it at that. That takes a lot of time to develop, and it involves a lot more factors than just your heart rolling the dice and saying, 'let's do that'. So for those of us who don't have a confident answer to 'what's your passion?', and there are a lot of us, the statement 'work on that thing you are passionate about, everything else is a waste of time' translates as 'don't do anything.' Because if we are trying to decide whether or not to start a project and the key question is 'are you passionate?', then the answer is no, and passion never develops.

Finally, I have serious problems with the amount of guilt-induced time pressure that gets thrown around. So many speakers, competitions and events conclude with that sentiment, and it's destructive. The trouble with that is, as MPowered knows, most students are quite simply not ready to be entrepreneurs yet. But nobody else seems to recognize that. All we hear is how many resources there are here, what a great opportunity we have right now, how much better it is to do entrepreneurship while you're still young, etc. And if we aren't starting businesses right now? Well, then, we are wasting all of those resources, all those opportunities, all that time. That layer of guilt doesn't feel good sitting on the brain, and it certainly isn't going to help us do what we need to do. Opportunity is a relative term. Sure, an experienced entrepreneur might foam at the mouth over the prospect of having the CfE, MPowered, the Tech Arb, etc at their disposal, but that's because the timing is right for them. They have the skills and are in position to make use of it. Most of us aren't. It's like when old geezers say 'youth is wasted on the young'. What does that accomplish? And when it does happen that a student becomes a successful entrepreneur, we sure as heck will celebrate it, but I think everybody in this community knows underneath that a little part of us dies when that happens. They listened. They took advantage of those resources and opportunities. You... didn't. Hmmm.

All I'm trying to say with this is that maybe we need a little bit of a paradigm shift here, to use a fancy word or two. I think MPowered is moving in the right direction with this. The most value to students happens when entrepreneurs aren't put on a golden pedestal, when passion isn't a test that has to be passed, when a dose of realism is put into the inspiration machine, and when we allow people to start things on their own time frame and their own terms instead of yelling at them to do it. When we as students stop being just an audience captivated by fantastic stories of larger than life people, when we stop doing these little things to appease our conscience that tells us we need to be doing something, only then can we start to make wholesale progress as an entire community rather than just showing off our stars.

Things I Think About When I Run

This is one of those days when you can taste the air, just after the rain stops and the leaves on the ground are still soaking. They give off air that tastes so clean you can't help but breathing deep. It's like making tea using maple, oak and birch leaves, or like a hookah without the smoke. It has to be one of the only natural decay processes that smells crisp and fresh. I love running on days like this, if for no other reason that to be able to breath harder.

The world is going to be changing soon. I don't mean change in the obvious way that the world is changing continuously; I mean that the way we live will be very different in the very near future. This is not a rational thought, although I could probably come up with a thousand reasons why, it's just a feeling that has been building strength in my head for quite a while. Quite honestly I don't know what that change is even going to look like, if my gut is correct, but I don't think I'm alone in premonition.

More people than usual in the Arb today, especially for today being so cold, breezy and wet outside. It's a shame that running requires your full breath. I would talk to everybody here if I could. The people that come to the Arb, me included, come here to clear their heads... to get away for a moment from the forced motion of life and taste the unforced motion of nature. The river. The wind. The chipmunks, which are out in force today. I wish I could press a big pause button right now. But my calves are firing in sync and I'm not stopping.

As I recognize the strength of that 'premonition' feeling in my gut, my brain is rationalizing it. Is that because I'm an engineer? Or because I'm a guy? Or just because I'm a human? I don't know. That's a thought for another day. Regardless, I see what I'm feeling. And oddly enough, it's all around me. The leaves and acorns are falling and being carried away by a swelling river. Old trees are dying and falling. Some of the animals won't make it either; the rest are getting out of town. It's the natural cycle of things.

The sun is setting, the temperature is dropping, and my muscles are tightening up. I make a push to get up the long hill on the path back home. Somewhere overhead the hospital's helicopter is flying around. I catch up to another runner going up the hill a little slower. I glance over; she's obviously running on fumes, probably having run a lot further than me. This hill only gets steeper as you go.

The natural cycle of things. Renewal. I believe the human world is at a point of renewal. We've been here before. Old systems are showing obvious weaknesses while new ideas fall like seeds and acorns, ready for spring. It's the economy. It's politics. It's the way people think about the world. The spring that began with the Baby Boomers has had its summer and is on its way out. That generation turned over the previous aging system, injecting values like humanism, corporate responsibility and accountability into the workings of the modern world. I believe the world is due for another round of just that. The snow is already falling.