Day 15: Do the Different Thing

Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash

Chris Sacca made his money as an early investor in tech startups like Twitter, Uber, and Instagram. You might recognize him as the Guest Shark on Shark Tank who always wears western shirts.

So how did Sacca get to be The Guy With The Money? Did he invent the internet or win the lottery?

No - he did something you or I could do. He calls it “playing offense.” Psychologist Gay Hendricks calls it “making the Big Leap into your Zone of Genius.”

Moving Out

In 2007, Sacca was living in San Francisco, working as a lawyer for Google. Think you’ve got money problems? Sacca’s first business venture had gone south, leaving him four million dollars in the hole. In 2007 he was only two years clear of paying off that debacle.

He was making the rounds, taking the coffee invitations, doing all the things people tell you you’re supposed to do if you want to be a tech investor. But he was still looking for his first big breakthrough when he made a decision that set him apart from 99% of his colleagues.

He borrowed money and bought a three-bedroom house in the mountains of Truckee, California (Lake Tahoe’s poor cousin). He invited friends to his mountain retreat, people he found smart and creative, and those became his big breakthrough investments. Here’s what Sacca told Tim Ferris about that decision:

“I wanted to go on offense. I wanted to have the time to focus, to learn the things I wanted to learn, to build what I wanted to build, and to really invest in relationships that I wanted to grow, rather than just doing a day of coffee after coffee after coffee.”

Maybe you have a dream, something you want to build. You might tell yourself you’ll go all in - really go for it - once you have it all “together.”

Sacca’s path points in another direction. You can do the conventional thing for years, safe and surviving, maybe even getting ahead a little. But at some point, if you want something new to grow in your life, you have to make space for it. The bigger your vision, the more space you’ll have to make.

It doesn’t have to be a hardship tour. Living in the mountains and inviting friends to visit certainly doesn’t sound that bad, for example. It’s just different than what everyone else was doing. And doing something different opened up space for the unique (and big) vision that Sacca had.

So what’s your vision? What could you do different that would open up space for it?