99U & Executing

This week, I attended the 99U Conference in New York City. It is an amazing festival, where some of the sharpest creative minds in tech and design meet and discuss executing their inspiration. It features themed talks, workshops, exhibitions along with many other helpful tools to help push the attendee to start making, and to start making with purpose.

The entire event was engaging, and getting to meet people from all over the world( 3 different continents ) , doing all types of things, is very energizing. I didn’t get much sleep through the entire thing, connecting with people of that caliber was a shock to the system and I couldn’t get enough. Executing small ideas during the two and a half days came off easy.

All well and good, except now I find myself back in my same apartment, around the same habits, and the same people in my normal life. The magic source has gone, and one thing I painfully learned last year is that the magic will follow right along with it if you don’t make changes to support it.

How do I continue the momentum? I have come up with 3 ideas.

• Emailing everyone I met from the conference – If we met there and you are reading this, expect to hear from me often. I want to help push you towards your goals and I want you to force me to answer some uncomfortable answers about mine.
• Being More Transparent – This blog will catalog more of my work, and who I am. I have tried to compartmentalized a ton in my life, but I am seeing the flaws in that. So, if you see me slipping, feel free to just tweet me WHAT ARE YOU DOING,ADAM! First, that will freak me out :-)…but then it will get me to the right state of mind – uncomfortable and ready to execute.
• Accountability Partners – I found 2 during the conference. I now have I have 3 total. It will be an interesting experiment seeing how those three sessions go each week. Watching other people do what they need to do will get me going.

I would like to build on everything I got from that conference. Execution is the hardest hurdle to get over. But, as I learned this week – “Execution is the start of the idea.” Now we are off to the races