Does This Mean I’m Napoleon Dynamite?

Today I went to a National Speaker’s Association meeting near Milwaukee. I got to meet and talk to the current President, Scott Friedman. Funny guy and great motivator. He totally gets the “Escape Adulthood” thing and used the term “Adultitis” several times after I shared the concept with the group. We traded books, which was also very cool. He spoke about adding humor to your presentations, but a couple things I took away are applicable to everyone:

• Humor is pain, embarrassment, or stress distanced by time.

• Comfort never produced greatness.

• Don’t make a living, design a life.

The whole day reminded me again how important it is to have a childlike curiosity and be a life-long learner. There are so many opportunities out there to improve yourself and your life, you just have to open yourself up to them. The people who understand that there is something new to be learned from every single person and every single opportunity that life brings your way are the ones who stay young. And become successful.

Another speaker, Dan Burrus, shared another profound point over lunch. He said that everyone is good at a number of things. But he believes that we can only be really great at one thing. Too often, we stray from our “vision path” – we’re we want to be – because we get distracted doing the things we’re good at rather than focusing on the thing we’re great at.

Food for thought.

One of the more striking revelations I had also occurred during lunch, when a few of us got into a discussion about Napoleon Dynamite. It got brought up by a woman at the table after I mentioned that Kim & Jason started when I drew some little cute little pictures for Kim. Recalling how Napoleon drew a picture for a girl he wanted to take to a dance, the woman at the table said, “Oh my gosh, you’re just like Napoleon!”

I laughed as I remembered him showing the girl a drawing he had done, accompanied by the line, “It took me like three hours to do the shading on your upper lip. I think it’s the best drawing I’ve ever done.”

And in the drawing, it looked like the girl had a flippin’ mustache.

I laughed at the comparison until I remembered his next line: “There’s more where that came from if you go to the dance with me.” Considering what has happened since I first drew those funny little pictures for Kim almost ten years ago, I could have easily said something like that to her.

And it would have been true.

You may wonder what if feels like to have such an association drawn between yourself and one of the most infamous nerds of all time…

“It’s the worst day of my life; what do you think?”