For the last year to the day, I’ve run in the same pair of shoes. I think they cost something like 50 dollars. They’ve done close to a thousand miles. Holes showed up in the toes almost 4 months ago. The bottoms have long been worn smooth. They’ve been chewed on by four different dogs and pissed on by at least one them. Every week since June, they took the train from Los Angeles to Riverside. God knows how many times I threw them in a rage because they were the closest thing to pick up. All I know is that my walls have plenty of skidmarks. I soaked them in the rain and 100 degree heat. I have been known to purposely run through puddles. They’ve never been washed and they’ve definitely never been “put away nicely.” And my feet feel just fucking fine. With this being said, I think it is time for a change, even if my feet do feel fine. I think something like the Vessi waterproof sneakers will be a great improvement to my old running shoes.

Running is a multi-billion dollar industry. This is despite it being the most basic sport in existence. People have fancy heart monitors, energy goo, gym memberships and fucking special running socks. They use two hundred dollar shoes. All of this because it’s a buffer between getting down and dirty and hitting the road. That’s the masturbation that Tyler Durden was talking about. Self-destruction…

I’m not the best at a lot of things. Most of the time, the stuff people talk about makes my head spin and I get confused pretty easily. But I make due with what I’ve got. Arguably, I’m doing a better job than most. I meant to get new shoes a long time ago but mainly I was too busy running to get around to it. I probably would have kept going for a lot longer, getting everything out of what I had available, if someone else hadn’t gotten me a new pair. And really, that’s reason I’ve got three separate jobs that Ivy League grads have gone out for and been passed over or why I’ve got a better Alexa rank than thousands of bloggers with more of a right to an audience than I.

For the next year, stop thinking about all the stuff you need before you can start and just act. It doesn’t matter that you smoke or you don’t have the right shoes or that you’re tired or you’ve got too much school work. If you wanted it to happen, it would happen. Being smart or talented or having the right equipment–none of that is all that rare. But to get up do a thousand miles or punched in the face or write a hundred pages or strike a deal or read a book or make a phone call without anyone telling you to? That’s almost unheard of. So stop preparing and start working, stop talking and start walking.

About 2 years ago, I had this really ambitious idea for how a band could use the internet to completely change how music works. And how they could make a ton of passive income by ceding a little bit of control and abandoning old ideas. I told it one of my friends, someone I’d always thought was really smart, and is response was (quote) “If that could actually work, someone would have done it already.”

And so I went ahead and did it anyway. At 18, I ended up signing a major label musician onto an early incarnation of the idea and launched a site around it. It did ok for a while but I ended up shutting it down about a year later because I hadn’t thought it all through and was an abysmal failure as an organizer and a motivator. Mostly, I learned how all the components worked and where the future was going to a level that frankly, the heads of most labels do not comprehend. And he and I are still friends.

Since then, I’ve been kicking the idea around in my head constantly. I took what Tucker taught me about publishing and leadership and the internet and I wove that in. I took what I learned from Godin about monopolies and marketing and giving up direct ownership and added that in. I took some of the ideas that Mark Cuban threw out a year ago for HDNet and adapted them. I took what Robert said about attacking strategy and the dynamic as confirmation that I was heading in the right direction. Umair’s post about love and math recently codified the core of it. And for the last week, TheExecutive had me break it down and reconstruct so it from its flowery and hypothetical roots into a pragmatic, real product that could be stand-up to the skepticism of an inert industry. It would have been nothing without that.

Then it got pitched to the biggest band in the world on Friday. And the reports are looking good so far. This was just some idea I had when I was running when I was a freshman in college. It could have just been that if I’d listened to my friend who is apparently incapable of thinking of the bigger picture.

Vision is one of the few skills that can’t be outsourced. Do you have any? Or are all your ideas derivative of things that already exist?”It’s like Facebook but for people who love cats.” Are you able to understand where things are going well enough that you can combine converging trends into a cohesive and comprehensive conclusion? “This industry is leading this one, and what we see there will matter for this reason. Here is how we can draft of that energy.” And probably most importantly, are you in an environment that incubates those ideas instead of stifling them? “If you have any ideas, Ryan, now is the time…You’re on the right track, but it’s tell me how and why–not what.”

I’m sure vision has always been important, but today, when we’re no longer just dealing with getting trucks from one state to another or putting asses in seats, it’s just about the only competitive advantage left. You really can’t be more efficient on the internet–websites load at about the same speed and Google is hard to game–so you have to be better at scope, scale and vision. Because really, that’s all you have.

Always quality over quantity. It doesn’t matter how much you end up reading–your collection will never be bigger than a County Branch Library. But the selection can be better–it could be a lot better.