This week I had the great privilege of beginning a new weekly blog about the art and science of hustle on Forbes.

To read the first post about building your network before you need can be read HERE

“The best time to be building your network is when you don’t NEED to be building your network.”

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Enough inspirational thoughts from leaders from around the world and across industries that it made more sense to just share the video than to type them all out.

Worth the 6:05 to see it all the way through.

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Most people learn how to play a new game by having someone who has played before teach them. That is the fastest way to get the game going and then “learn as you go.” But, the fastest way to win, and then likely be called a cheater, is to read the rules.

Growing up, my family played a lot of games. Card game, board games, and guess which word I want you to say games. Each time that a new game was introduced, via birthday present or unsuspecting friend, there was a scramble to understand more of the rules faster than everyone else. Whether it was taking turns reading the side of the box, huddling around the small print pamphlet like it was the Dead Sea Scrolls, or reading all the rules before telling anyone else that there was a new game in the house, the rules were a big part of the indoctrination to the Ellwood family game night.

The reason for the clamor around the rules was quite simple: they tell you how to win. And, when it comes to games, that is the only reason to play. (The “let’s not keep score and just have fun” thing just doesn’t work for me.) The rules lay out what exactly you would do to win faster than others and says that these things are illegal. But, in telling you the things that are against the rules, it also paints the picture of what kinds of things should be paid attention to and the areas of the game that advantages might be acquired.

This weekend, the Sunday New York Times front page above the fold story featured a detailed look into the complex tax planning strategies of the hier to the Estée Lauder fortune.  The headline and the sentiment of the article do little to hide the author’s distain for the ways that Ronald Lauder and his family have structured their finances. Several times throughout the article there are references to his “shrewd use of the US Tax Code.” This is followed by general statements about the complexity of “labyrinth of trusts, limited liability corporations and holding companies” that may or may not have been developed to with their likely favorable tax implications in mind.

Looks like someone read the rules.

Looks like someone else doesn’t like the rules.

And while this article may serve as further proof in the case against the Haves being made by the Have Nots, I took it from a different perspective. What are the rules that I haven’t mastered? What are the advantages that exist in my world that I am not maximizing? What are the angles that I can take in the games I am currently playing that will frustrate others not clever enough to find them?

“If no one is accusing you of cheating, you probably aren’t trying hard enough.” – WinnerTweet

They say it takes doing something 10,000 times before you can gain true mastery of it.

If that logic is true, 922 days after joining Twitter, I can begin to say I am mastering Twitter. This blog post will be sent out as my 10,000th tweet.

To mark this milestone, I decided to take account for what has been shared and sent out over the past couple years and 10,000 tweets. As I looked over all the details I uncovered, here are some stats that I found interesting (to run these stats yourself, check out TweetStats.com and CrowdBooster.com)

Here is what the break down of how far each and every one of my tweets went. Some were retweeted by people with a lot of followers and there for reach a ton of folks. Others were retweeted a bunch of times.

Total reach of each tweet

Even through I joined Twitter in May of 2009, I really didn’t get into it until moving to New York in 2010. Here you can see how many times I tweeted each month over the past couple years. (Average 219/month)

Number of Tweets per month

Another interesting stat that I thought was really interesting was what time of day I tend to tweet. As you can see here, unless I am sleeping, there is a chance that I am sharing something about what is going on in my world. And, this may or may not reveal how little sleep I actually need.  (average tweets/day = 11.6)

Tweets by time of day

Then of course the question of, what the heck am I actually tweeting that much about? Here is a word cloud of some of the top words and hashtags that I’ve sent out over the past 10,000 tweets.

Top words in tweets

There is a very true saying that “what you measure is what you manage.” And, as I look back over this set if data and some of these other points that TweetStats.com and CrowdBooster.com revealed, it begs the question: “What, if anything, should I be doing differently in next 10,000 tweets?”

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I had the itch to play kickball in the park. I suggested to a friend of mine that we should organize a game. He thought it was a great idea and then said, “And we should do it to raise money for a charity!” And, while I am always up for doing a little good, I just wanted to play kickball.

In a recent article on the Harvard Business Review, Dan Pallotta makes the claim that Steve Jobs was the World Greatest Philanthropist even though very little is known of his actual charitable contributions. Mr. Jobs did not have a huge foundation like fellow technology titans like Bill Gates. He didn’t have a foundation at all. He did in 1985 but then shut it down because he didn’t have the time and effort to devote to being the best at giving away money.

“In order to learn how to do something well, you have to fail sometimes…the problem with most philanthropy-there’s no measurement system.. you can really never measure whether you failed or succeeded…So…it’s really hard to get better.” 

In this same article, Mr. Pallotta makes an observation about the crop of recent college grads that are obsessed with “social good.”

“Our youth are growing up with the strange notion that the only way to make a big difference in this world, or to be of service, is to work for a nonprofit organization, or become the next Bill Gates and establish a private foundation, or to start some kind of “social enterprise,” often without any understanding of what that means.”

I remember when I graduated in 2004, just about everyone I knew in the business school had an idea for the next best coffee shop. Each and every business plan bore the personality of its author and all but one (check out WellCoffee) never made it off the powerpoint deck. In the same way, I am seeing socially conscious business plans flying left and right these days. Every idea has a social good hook. Every conversation about building something new has some intention of giving back being built into the core mission and P&L statements.  And any time people are thinking about how to make a bigger impact, that is a good thing.

What is not a good thing is when that added layer of good intentions gets in the way of the underlying value that the organization or business was built to create. The point of building a business is to provide a product or service that is of value to the world. If there is good that can be done on top of that, terrific. Think about TOMS Shoes. While it is absolutely awesome that for each pair of shoes that you buy a pair of shoes is given to kids in need around the world, the reason it works is because TOMS Shoes are awesome shoes. If the shoes sucked, I would have bough one pair, gotten my social good credit for the semester, and never bought the next 5 pairs I own.

The energy, excitement, and brainpower that is flowing around “social good” right now is terrific. But, the movement is approaching a tipping point and there is a level of saturation that I believe the marketplace is approaching. In the same way that 5 years ago, there was a significant push to “green wash” the business world and people became immune to noticing, the “good washing” may share a similar fate. Or worse yet, the job and value creating companies that intended to also do good will never get launched in the first place.

Kinda like that game of kickball I wanted to play.Tweet

My better half is from Arizona and has been known to say that “The American southwest, especially Arizona, makes you feel simultaneously powerful and insignificant.” 

This video captures that sentiment perfectly.

(watch this full screen and with the sound turned up)Tweet

“If you didn’t believe it before, and it easy to understand how you might have been skeptical on this point. If you didn’t believe it before you can absolutely believe it now, New York City is the greatest city in the world.” – David Letterman (opening monologue on first show back after 9/11/01)

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Last night, Annie and I went out with one of our favorite couples to The Smith in the East Village.  Our dinner conversation ranged from the insanity of extended families to politics to Bob Ross’ Joy of Painting (happy little trees!) The discussion also turned to the lists that we all wrote down as kids about what we wanted out of life when we grew up. We all recounted the categories and the hilarity of the details that we went into when describing our expectations of the future.   My favorite was the description of the perfect husband though the eyes of a 17 year old: “He must be good looking (if at all possible) and not go bald.”

This morning, still relishing in the glow of the great dinner (think beer battered green beans, bacon wrapped apricots, and a culinary piece of perfection:”Stout Braised Beef Short Ribs.”), I got to thinking: when do we stop writing down what we want out of life with the expectation that it is still something that can and should happen? When do our lists have more to do with this week’s to-dos and less to do with the biggest ideas that we can imagine? When did the lists we make change from our dreams and goals to a detailed account of this week’s groceries and bills that need to be paid?

My favorite book in the world is The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho. Early on in the book main character, a young boy name Santiago, meets a wise king. The king exhorts the young boy to not believe the world’s greatest lie:

“What’s the world’s greatest lie?” the boy asked, completely surprised. The King responded, “It’s this: that at a certain point in our lives, we lose control of what’s happening to us, and our lives become controlled by fate. That’s the world’s greatest lie.”

At a certain point we all run into a brick wall on our way to achieving what we committed ourselves to when we had the innocence of a child. That brick wall, the first failure or set back of our adult life, is the end of their pursuit of the much larger vision they envisioned for themselves before the toils and responsibilities of “growing up” were upon them. That first roadblock is enough of a disappointment for the majority to stop, slow down, and put away their childhood lists. It is enough to convince them to believe the world’s greatest lie.

But for others, like Santiago in The Alchemist, it is just the beginning of an incredible adventure up, over, around, or through that wall.  It is hitting that wall, and the next, and the next, that strengthens our resolve to go through this life with a resolve that we were made for the things of our dreams and the only thing standing between us and the life we’ve imagined is our own cowardice and willingness to turn our backs on the dreams of our youth.Tweet

Somethings can only be learned when you’re outside of your normal surroundings. Some experiences you’d never agree to do if you were home, but because you’re the mindset of adventure you say yes.  When you meet people on the road, knowing they’re also away from home, you’re more likely to become friends.

“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness & many people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men & things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.” ~Mark Twain

This video was recently posted and is a part of a series based on “3 guys, 44 days, 11 countries, 18 flights, 38 thousand miles, an exploding volcano, 2 cameras and almost a terabyte of footage… all to turn 3 ambitious linear concepts based on movement, learning and food ….into 3 beautiful and hopefully compelling short films….. = a trip of a lifetime.”

And it is awesome.

To see the others, follow this link: http://vimeo.com/rickmereki/videosTweet