ACbert and I are now 26 days into our month long “relocation” in Utila, Honduras, and I thought it appropriate to share another edition (here’s Part 1) of the joyful oddities of this island paradise.

1) Country Music Serenade

The main grocery store in town is owned and operated by locals, but don’t expect to find any local music playing while shopping. Instead they will serenade your ears with classic recordings of country greats like “Waltz Across Texas” by Ernest Tubb and “Are You Sure Hank Done It This Way” by Waylon Jennings.

2) Cornflakes Meatballs

When I think of all the wonderful ways to consume cornflakes, meatballs and salmon loaf might be somewhere near the never part of my list. But FANS doesn’t think so, so they printed the recipes right on their box. Between Part 1 and Part 2, you’d think I was hating on FANS, but turns out they are a modern company and even have their own website.

3)  Cruising The Strip in a Pimped-out Golf Cart

Utila has one main road with zero traffic signs and no legal driving age. Couple that with the fact that people own Golf Carts to get around and you now know what most of the kids in town do for fun. They cruise the strip in their pimped-out golf carts. Ok, their carts aren’t pimped out, but ACbert and I would love to bring the pictured cart above to Utila and cruise the strip in style…

4) Paloopa our Friend

She’s (actually might be a hermaphrodite) covered in ticks, will bite your feet, go crazy after touching salt water, and might have a mild case of rabies, but if you can get past all that, she’s extremely cute and loving. She comes to check on us 2-3 times a day…every day. She just wants love. This picture is the only time during the whole trip she wasn’t moving so fast that we couldn’t snap a picture! We named her Paloopa on our own because we didn’t know her real name, but yesterday, I met her owner (an expat) and found out her real name is…drum roll…Sally :-/.

5) Avocado Heaven

If I could inject a steady stream of only two food items into my body to live off of, it would be peanut butter and avocados. I love avocados, but in NY they are, at best, $2 per avocado. In avocado heaven, also known as Utila, Honduras, they are just under .50cents for each perfectly rip creamy avocado! You better believe we’ve been figuring out ways to incorporate avocado into every meal.

Between Facebook, multiple Twitter accounts, Google+, Google’s address book, and our internal CRM system for Swift Kick, I have so many different names for groupings of the people I follow, that it was getting extremely confusing to bounce between each network. I know my network is my net worth and it’s paid me back infinity+1, but that only happens when I can access the correct network at the correct time. So I set out to determine a default list of groupings that I could use across the networks. Here’s where I’m at…

PROFESSIONAL CONTACTS:

• Student Leaders
• Student Affairs Professionals
• Alumni Professionals
• Entrepreneurs
• Investors / VCs
• EO Members
• Speakers
• Education PR People
• Other Education Folk
• Other Professionals
• CrowdFunding / MicroFunding Professionals

PERSONAL CONTACTS:

• Family
• Extended Family
• Colberts
• NYC Friends
• Chicago Friends
• College Friends
• Highschool Friends
• Forum Members
• TechStars NY
• Swift Kick
• SuperCamp

ORGANIZATIONS:

• Student Affairs Accounts
• College Accounts
• Alumni Accounts
• Alumni Organizations
• SA Organizations
• CrowdFunding / MicroFunding Organizations
• Other Companies

OTHERS:

• World News / Info
• NYC Happenings
• Randoms

At 11:30am today, I logged into my main work gmail account and got this message…

It’s now 11:05pm and I still don’t have access to my main work email and according to friends who’ve been previously locked out by gmail, it usually takes the full 24 hours to unlock the account. So now I’m looking at 24 hours without access to my main work email on a non-holiday Tuesday. I know this a 1st world problem to be ranting about, but…

In trying to figure out why my account was locked down, I looked back over their five reasons…

1. Nope – well that I know of, I don’t check my Spam folder
2. Nope – nothing more than usual
3. Nope – unless someone tried to hack it without me knowing
4. Tried this, didn’t work.
5. I haven’t done anything new to the account lately

Though no one is going to die over this issue, there’s a real cost in lost productivity. I can imagine if this happened and did end up causing a real issue that Google would have lawyers come knocking.

I want to know why my account was locked down, but all I get is this generic page.
I want to contact Google, but the page only directs me to a community help forum.
I want Google to see I’ve been a user for a long time and, unless my account was hacked, realize this is ridiculous.

None of that’s going to happen. I’ll go to bed hoping I didn’t miss anything too important in my email and tomorrow morning around 11:30am, my account will magically be unlocked and life will go on.

Really Google? Come on. This is my work account. I’m not forwarding the latest LOLcatz to everyone in my address book. I’m doing work. Work that leads to revenue. Revenue that pays my salary. Salary that I use to…you get the idea.

I have so many things to worry about with growing a business, this isn’t one I need nor want.

Going to bed annoyed. 

No matter what time of day it is and no matter what I’m doing, I’ve always got my business in my mind. Sometimes it’s consuming 100% of my brain, other times it’s 50 or 10%, but no matter what it’s always there. I can be buying garbage bags at the grocery store and while walking down the aisle I’ll be thinking about a new idea for AlumniChoose. It happens everywhere and with everyone. My default is to have it churning in my brain, so if I’m going to turn it off I have to really consciously tell myself to do so.

The up side is that my brain does wondrous things when it sits on a problem for a while. The down side is that I’m never 100% present with the people and things around me unless I force myself to do so. I want to feel bad about that, but it hasn’t hit me yet. Maybe this is an immaturity thing that I will discover once older.

Those who know my wife, know she has a ridiculously amazing writing ability. Just peruse through her Twitter feed and you’ll see what I mean. Her mind is like wikipedia and her pen is like David Sedaris. She can pull out references to just about anything and make it funny. This is why she not only has a collection of online adoring fans, but has also landed her a two page interview in the December Wired print magazine. Though not her first brush with the media (here, here), it’s for sure her biggest. You can’t buy the magazine off-the-rack any more, but if you have a copy, turn to page 94, and you’ll see my lovely, and talented, wife talking about her life as a Ghost Twitterer. Here’s the opening line…

“Think your favorite celebrity posts awfully clever tweets? They’re probably written by Annie Colbert”

ACbert and I are now 17 days into our month long “relocation” in Utila, Honduras, and I thought it appropriate to start sharing some of the joyful oddities we’re discovering.

1) Do You Have a Costco Membership?

Once a week (Wednesdays) a boat arrives on the island filled with supplies from the main land that then populates the various store shelves. The funny thing is that most of the product sent over is Costco brand. On Wikipedia it shows the closest Costco locations are in Mexico, Puerto Rico, and Florida. I can only image someone going to Costco to buy produce for an entire island of people. That’s one huge shopping cart.

2) 1976 Cornflakes

By looking at the box, you’d think it was made in the 1970′s, but this box is indeed a current box that is good to eat. The manufacturers must have just decided it wasn’t worth their time to update the design because, after all, the best designs happened in the 70s, right?

3) The Bootlegged Library

Believe it our not, our tiny little island has a library with books and DVDs you can rent out. The selection of DVDs is actually rather large and fairly current too. But you’ll notice, by the picture, that 90% of the DVDs are bootlegged copies. If your conscious can handle that, then this is a great resource to kill some nights at home.

4) What’s better than Rum? Cola Rum!

I don’t drink pop (soda for my east coast friends), but if you trick me by putting a little rum in there, I’m sold. Yes, that is a straw coming out the top that I drank it with. Free Cuba!

(This was written by request to be included in an upcoming friend’s book)

During my childhood family vacations that took us far west away from the flat plains of Chicago, I used to love rock jumping with my brothers.

We’d find a rock, put a leg back to wind up, jump, and land safely…most of the time. Then on to the next rock.

Usually the jumps were pretty easy and at a length I’d done a thousand times, but occasionally we’d get to a rock that was at a length I’d never done before. My mind would race. “Will I make it? It’s too far. You can do it. There’s only one way to know for sure!” And off I’d jump. At some point, mid-air, my eyes closed and all my focus was on hoping my feet hit solid ground…instead of my face. Success! Off to the next rock I went.

As an adult I don’t physical rock jump anymore, but in growing my business I do mental rock jumping all the time. The biggest difference is unlike my childhood where I could see the rock and how far the distance was, in mental rock jumping, I only have guesses as to how far the jump is, or if there’s even a rock to land on on the other side. This is the entrepreneurial leap. This is the moment when the idea of uncertainty, or the unknown, either propels you forward in a quest to know the answer, right or wrong, or holds you back out of fear.

I jump a lot, but leap only once in a while. I love the quest of the unknown. It’s exciting, and unlike with real rocks where I could end up in a hospital, the damage of mental leaps is only what you allow it to be, and for some people it is far worse than anything a hospital can fix.

My latest leap was to start another web tool called www.alumnichoose.org. It was expensive both in upfront costs and in opportunity costs for not focusing my energy elsewhere. I did the usual market testing that one would expect for a new idea and all signs pointed to a green light. So I put my leg back, wound up, and leapt. I’m still in the air today.

All my data, research, and vision shows me that there’s a landing rock on the other side, but I won’t know for sure until it actually happens. But here’s the trick. It may never happen. I may never fully feel solid ground and so in-flight becomes my new ground. All the sudden everything changes.

By not needing to worry about my landing rock, I can more freely, and happily, enjoy the never ending quest of the unknown. Now I find myself leaning into the uncertainty I encounter, with my eyes wide open, because in flight is the exciting part, it’s where life happens.

Speaker friend, Jon Vroman, asked me this question on Facebook, and since it’s something I’ve actually thought about a lot, I knew it needed more than just a Facebook response.

Going back to the beginning of my college career, I had this idea planted in me that I’d find “the one.” Not in terms of love, but in terms of mentors. I’d have “the one” teacher that, almost like an awe inspiring alarm clock, this person would show me a whole new world I’d never seen before. I waited, and waited, and waited, but “the one” never happened. Well it almost did.

He was an older adjunct teacher for my intro to entrepreneurship class at Aurora University. He’d created and sold multiple companies. He truly seemed like my “something from nothing” hero.

On the first day of class, he filled us with motivational war stories from the front lines of entrepreneurship. I couldn’t get enough, I was in awe and knew there was no where else I was interested in being. Then it happened…

We were in a discussion about who should sit on a board of directors and my newly minted hero said, “for me it was always filled with men because there just wasn’t a need to have women in the boardroom.” My head sank. The whole class went up in arms.

Turns out his views on women were from an era gone by and no one told him. To his credit, he did actively listen to the criticisms of the class and by the end of the term he had changed…a bit. But the damage was done. My hero was no more.

Beyond him, no one else came close to being “the one” for me.

I continuously hear people talk about how a specific person changes their life forever. As if it were some magical moment where this perfect image of a person came down from above and it was meant to happen. Maybe I need to keep waiting because it makes me feel like I missed out on something in my life.

In the mean time, I’ve built up an amazing support group of people, and networks, around me. Theses are people who individually each have something that is awe inspiring to me. But as well have flaws and things that I know I don’t want to emulate. Put each individual piece together and then I’d have “the one.” It’s piecemeal on my part and maybe that’s ok, because no one is perfect by themselves. We all have our flaws.

Which brings me to my final note on this topic. I know some people I’ve connected with look up to me in awe and use my life as inspiration (or maybe I just think they do). And I’ll do my best to be their “the one,” but they should know that I come with my flaws too. I hope that what you like about me doesn’t blind you from my flaws and you piecemeal the best parts for your life instead of an all or nothing approach.

I lied, one more thought. This is also why I don’t find myself gravitating to any one religion or way of life because in each I find the pieces I like and pieces I don’t.

I’m on the last few days of a month long sprint to build the V1 of our new product we’re launching called AlumniChoose. Today I woke up at 7am and worked almost solidly till just a few minutes ago. With breaks for lunch and such, that’s almost a 14 hour day. The past month has consistently been 10-14 hours days. All of it in preparation of making sure we hit our V1 launch date of Jan 16th. By launch, I don’t mean send out the press release. I mean I have a team of beta schools that I’m working with who will test and give their feedback. From there, we’ll assess next steps in terms of development and marketing. My eyes are red and tired and my body will collapse on the bed tonight just like it has for the past month, but the crazy thing is, I can’t wait to wake up the next morning and do it again.

Blogger James Altucher challenged his readers to create a list of the ten things that make you happy. Here’s my list…

1. Spending time with my wife
2. Spending time with my family
3. Building things people value
4. Building financial wealth
5. Spending time with friends
6. Reading (learning)
7. Traveling for pleasure
8. Being active (soccer, hiking, etc)
9. Daydreaming
10. Connecting with student leaders

Bonus list…

1. Writing my blog
2. Meditating
3. Networking

What would you put on your list?

In person time with my family is the best, but not always possible.