In the film “Wall Street,” a broker who is about to lose his job and perhaps his freedom, is advised that when a person stares into the abyss he takes a true measure of his strength.

Today, I read an article about an entrepreneur who poured his life savings into a home furnishings outlet in a rapidly growing village in the southwest, only to see the economy tank, houses foreclosed and a mass exodus from the town timed almost exactly to the opening of his shop.

In the article, he stands alone in a deserted parking lot surrounding a ghost town strip small, a black hole of sorts sucking in his dreams and all that he has worked for to this point.

The shop is his abyss. What does he see as he stares vacantly at it?

Some years ago, my mother’s common law husband told me a story of his days as an alcoholic, roaming the mean streets of New York’s Hell’s Kitchen. On one nightmare of a day in a broken life marked by chaos, he hit bottom, alone and bleeding on the steps of a church. Rescued by a stranger, he was taken to a hospital to be treated, yes, but more than that, to stare into the abyss.

What did he see?

I am reading now about FDR’s first 100 days and the character traits that guided him to navigate through the second darkest period in US history. His most improbable trait was born years before when as a vibrant and athletic young man of wealth and power, he was stricken overnight with polio. Staring at the ceiling, struggling with the idea of himself as a “cripple,” he looked into the abyss.

What did he see?

In every single human life, there is an abyss. Or two. Or more. It comes in business. In family. In our own sense of who we are, who we are not, the options in front of us, the opportunities we cultivated and those we let slip by.

In a sense, staring into the abyss is often the darkest hour. It cannot be belittled. It cannot be romanticized. It is a true and painful test.

I believe, however, that there are only two visions we can see when we stare into the abyss: endless and hopeless darkness or a tableau of what we will paint with our future once the terror passes.

My mother’s soul mate built a loving life with one of the kindest women in the world. Franklin Delano Roosevelt found a blueprint for becoming President of the United States.

What we see and what we do with the vision, shapes us more than anything in life.

Mark Stevens
CEO

Images courtesy: 1, 2, 3

Early in our lives, we are all handed a book titled “This is the way things are done.”

The dutiful read it and follow it to a T. The wise, the innovators, the change makers read it and then rewrite it with their own version of The Rules.

Recently, I watched a TV feature about a boy whose twin brother died. The tragedy tossed his own life into turmoil and depression. Just as he was spiraling into a point of no return, someone suggested that he visit with a pediatrican.

If the doctor went straight to the book and The Rules of the AMA, the boy would likely be another in a million sad stories today. But the doctor tossed out the book, asked the boy what, if anything, makes him smile. Surprisingly, he answered in an instant: “Baking.”

Without pausing for a second, this MD, this wise and creative woman, suggested that the young man begin baking cookies, furthermore start his own after- school business and to top if off she took $20 out of her pocket, handed it to him and announced herself as his first investor.

Today he is a young entrepreneur, with an accidental business and a new passion for life. I believe he will be a stunning success and make us all proud. I believe he has a rule breaker to thank for that. They don’t teach it in medical school. They shun it.

On the same show, Sunday Morning on CBS, I watched an interview with Van Morrison. Here is singer/songwriter who has thrived for a generation and a half. Who has gained admission to the Rock and Roll Hall Of Fame and was personally inducted into The Song Writers Hall Of Fame by Ray Charles.

But most of all Morrison has been an entertainer who has complete disdain for the Book Of Entertainment. He is an introvert. He does not connect with his audiences. He feels it is more important to connect with his mind and his soul, even when thousands of paid fans are clapping their hands in the audience before him. He refused to attend his own induction at The Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame. He dislikes everything about fame except that it drives people to listen to his music.

There is zero spin in the man. The interview on CBS is painful. But he has made, and continues to do so, extraordinary music. That is his book. That is his rule. If he worried about the star power machinery that comes with every record contract, chances are good the music would have gone silent years ago.

If you live life by the book, you cut off the potential to learn the wonders and powers that we can stumble upon if we are open to adventure and discovery. No matter who we are and the extent of our education, there is far more we don’t know than what we do. We sit on top of the iceberg, often proud of our level of knowledge or expertise, and blind to all that is above and below us.

This Great Recession, as one of my sons calls it, is a crisis, of course, but also proof positive of how little we actually know. The allegedly best and brightest amongst us in finance and economics have no idea how to get us out the problem they caused. Why? Because they are doing it by the book. Looking to Keynes. Pursuing Adam Smith. Studying FDR. But these guys didn’t read the books, they wrote them.

Amongst the rubble of the GMs and the GEs of this 1929 redux, or close to it, or worse than it, will come a new generation of American heroes. Of virtual book burners. Of men and women who reject conventional knowledge, blaze new paths, find new solutions and in the process create accidental businesses and become random millionaires.

You won’t find them at Harvard or in The White House. They’re in the kitchen baking cookies.

Mark Stevens
CEO

by guest blogger Regis Hadiaris

Throughout his life, my Dad taught me that I truly could be whatever I decided to be. His confidence in me gave me the strength to believe in my ideas, challenge conventional thinking, and take risks.

Below are 6 techniques I’ve used to successfully challenge conventional thinking in my life.Unconventional Thinking:

1. Identify and ignore “noise” in your life.
Noise is the unnecessary stuff that distracts your attention and limits your effectiveness: naysayers, gossip, opinions of news media, fear, etc. If you are determined to challenge conventional thinking, you have to train yourself to ignore noise.

I work for Quicken Loans, one of the nation’s largest direct mortgage lenders, in arguably the most challenging time for the financial industry in 20 years. If I listened to all the noise about how bad the mortgage crisis is, I would become paralyzed by negativity and fear. Instead of focusing on the constraints around me, I consciously look for opportunities. Don’t let yourself become a product of your environment; let your environment become a product of you!

2. Don’t recreate the wheel.
I’ve seen companies launch huge new initiatives without ever stopping to ask themselves: “has someone done this already?” Be curious! Instead of blindly jumping into a project, take a step back and think “someone must have run into this situation before, what did they do?”

We recently decided to focus on a particular marketing strategy at Quicken Loans. Instead of starting from scratch, we flew several key people to another, non-competitive company to discuss our plan. Because that company had already executed this strategy really well, the day we spent with them saved us months of trial-and-error.

“Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.”

- Albert Einstein

3. Take a stand.
A couple of years ago, I was leading a project that a senior executive didn’t agree with. He didn’t think the project could make an impact on the business. I believed that it would. We compromised, and he gave me 90 days to prove it. I did, and the executive was proud of the accomplishment.

It can be hard to challenge consensus. But if you truly believe in what you are doing, you can’t be afraid to voice an opinion or do things that others don’t understand. Remember: the thinking that got you where you are will seldom get you where you want to go.

4. Get excited when people tell you “no.”
So many people let others dictate what they can and cannot do. Before they know it, they have lost the ability to be effective. When people tell me “no, we can’t do that,” I immediately think “how can we?”

Every day, I have conversations about ideas that are too hard to do, solutions that are too complicated, and costs that are too expensive. If you attack these situations by creatively brainstorming alternatives, you can inevitably find ways to turn these “no’s” into “yes’s.”

5. Keep it simple like Forrest Gump.
“When I got tired, I slept. When I got hungry, I ate. When I had to go… you know… I went.” Forrest kept life simple. Do you?

At Quicken Loans, we have a “no big projects” rule. Why? Big projects usually mean lots of over-complicated ideas that simply aren’t needed to solve the problem at hand. You can have big visions but still execute them in small chunks. Doing this encourages constant improvement, and helps prevent marketing projects that are out of sync with current business needs.

6. Be effective, not busy.
My team completed over 1,100 internet marketing projects last year alone. While that’s an impressive accomplishment, I’m most proud of the impact those projects made. Every single thing we do has a legitimate business reason, or we don’t do it. And every morning we meet to discuss the thing we can do that day to be the most effective.

Every person on my team has (literally) hundreds of things on their to-do list. Our concern is not getting them all done. Instead, we ask ourselves, are we working on the right things, right now? Once we focus on being effective, instead of being busy, we automatically get into
a mental mode of challenging conventional wisdom.

Try one of these techniques, and you can take an ordinary day and make it great! Try them all, and you will hone your ability to challenge conventional thinking.

Regis Hadiaris is a marketer, blogger, speaker and innovator known for unconventional ideas and impressive results. He is the “Leader of Leaders and Pursuer of WOW!” on the marketing team at Quicken Loans, the nation’s largest online mortgage lender. His blog, Dot Connector, is a popular destination for ideas on being more successful at work.

When I was a young man, I met ice cream impresario Tom Carvel: widely credited as the entrepreneur who created big league franchising.

What struck me most about our conversation was that Tom’s first store was an accident: when his truck broke down on a road in Westchester, NY, and he lacked the funds to repair it, he started selling ice cream from the spot where he was stranded. He was smart and flexible enough to recognize that his original business plan wasn’t as good as the accident he had stumbled on to …..and he let the latter drive his success.

Levi Straus. Nike. Gatorade. Craig’s List. All more or less accidents
or experiments that turned out to be major enterprises. There is such a convoluted irony, a staggering twist of fate, in a guy who decides to create a superior running shoe with a waffle iron, succeeding at it and then turning that track meet tinkering into a global business.

There is a profound life lesson embedded in this syndrome. Sometimes, many times, more often than we give credit for it because to do so would toss out the rules and violate the convention that empowers so many of the guardians of the status quo – the lack of planning, of wrapping everything up in a ribbon, is the true driver of exceptional success.

Instead of holding life close to us and seeking to pull all of the levers in perfect synchronicity, sometimes we are better off -more successful and exhilerated-letting life run away from us and seeing where the jet steam can and will take us. Like a kid on a beach watching our kite do the kind of aerial acrobatics we could never engineer on our own, we need to let the wind do its magic and marvel and learn from it.

The other day, I observed the absolute worst salesperson I have ever had the painful experience of watching, try to make a sale. She came to the scene of the crime with a carefully scripted pitch in mind and as much as she saw that it was the wrong pitch for the wrong prospects, she refused to listen, to stumble on to an opportunity to sell her product in a different way, to have an accidental success, to watch her kite waltz through the afternoon sky.

She was opposed to accidents. Immune to them. Determined to stick to the script. She advised us that she was a Harvard MBA, that we were the equivalent of poorly informed misfits and she wasn’t going to find a way to sell her ice cream from a broken truck, thank you, no matter how much we were cheering her on to do just that.

We wanted to buy her product. We wanted it to work for us. But she refused to help us fall in love with what she was selling. She was a Harvard MBA. She didn’t deal in love.

History is replete with accidents that evolve into epics. When Abraham Lincoln was running for President, he was an accident of a candidate running against pillars of the nation raised by writers of the rules, of the conventions, to win high office and preside over the nation.

When Lincoln and his adversaries arrived at the Republican Convention, it was the accident who walked away with the prize and the same accident who would construct an administration of men he could not easily control, so that he could watch them invent solutions for a plagued nation. Men of soaring ambition and substantial intellect. Men who might rush past him in the jet stream.

Precisely what Lincoln prayed for. Abe knew he needed a plan to save the Union. And an accident.

As you construct your companies and departments, as you help to guide their evolution, as you preside over your life, welcome the accidents everyone tells you to beware of.

Mark Stevens
CEO

There are rumors swirling around Wall Street that Steve Jobs is dying. The Street cares because Jobs is the driven genius behind his miracle of an American wonderama company.

Without Steve, Apple would slide into mediocrity. A GM of technology. And with that ugly demise, its shares would free fall. So the Street cares that the man who is still a boy wonder may be dying.

And he is.

But before you rush to call your broker, so is everyone else. Ok. Ok. I know that’s not a very cheerful assessment of life but I can tell you I am usually a cheerful person. But my state of mind has no impact on what is for many, one of the most painful facts of life: that death comes with the package and the moment you are born you start to march to your demise. (Look, I didn’t invent this crazy system, so resist the urge to shoot the messenger. It’s just the way it is.)

No one is spared. Not Lincoln, Ghandi, Einstein, Mozart, Socrates, Curie, Garbo, Monroe . Nor will you. Just like Jobs, you are living and dying.

Now, there is a silver lining here should you choose to embrace it. While you are alive, the possibilities before you are limitless. You can soar through the days or the years and make magic happen during the time you have on this precious earth.

Allow me to suggest a few options, all of which I am pursuing, to make your life a concerto and your death, well just something that happens after you finish playing your piece:

* Take the elements all around you and seek to shape them into something greater than the sum of their parts.

* Go someplace you are afraid of, face down the fear and then revel in the new strength you have found.

* Spend time alone, talking to no one and instead using all of your creative and intellectual energy to make yourself wiser and more complete.

* Mentor someone who wants to learn from you….and encourage them to race past you in their level of achievement.

* Learn from a mentor who has shown you, in one way or another, that they are wiser than you.

* Rid yourself of all adversarial relationships. There is no place for this in life.

* Take your career to another level. Invent something. Create something. Look at what you have done to date as simply part of a continuum, an upward trajectory.

* Do not care a whit what others think of the way you live your life. It is, after all, yours not theirs.

Truth be told, Steve Jobs is living to a far greater degree than he is dying. Same for the millions of unknown men and women who are making a personal epic out of life and don’t give barely a thought to the final act.

Mark Stevens
CEO

We tell ourselves such wonderfully crafted, artfully presented, seemingly bulletproof lies.

But they are lies nevertheless. And then we swear to them. Such as the belief that we need a certain thing. A sale to a major client. A love interest. A first-place finish in a given contest.

We don’t need any of these things. Want them? Fine. Aspire to them? Sure. But need them? Absolutely not!

One of the keys to maximizing the joys of life, to extracting its beauties,
to waking up every morning with a zest for the day, the future, the promise of what is to come, is to recognize that nothing and no one is a must have.

Nothing is necessary.

This liberation allows us to move on from loss to gain, from mistake to success, from failure to fresh start. Because we recognize that what we told ourselves we had to have, was just a myth dressed up as reality.

An entrepreneur I met some years ago told me he spent a year in terrible depression because he lost half the money he had made in building a world-class business. Chucked it in a dumb, highly-leveraged bet on exotic stock options. And that sent him into a tailspin, sitting alone in movie theaters, pining for the So Very Important money that wasn’t really that important after all.

He still had half his wealth. He still had his wondrous mental powers. He still had his entrepreneurial DNA. And for a year he wasted it on self-pity believing he needed something, had to have something, was not complete without that something.

All lies he told himself.

All lies we all tell ourselves.

When we recognize that the So Very Important is Really Unimportant, we can forego worrying about its loss and look much faster and happier to the future if and when it is gone.

The rear view mirror is a peak only into the past. The windshield is a portal to all the wonders, the discoveries, the joys, the successes yet to come.

So often I hear people in business tell me they don’t want to start a project for fear it won’t work. It is, they tell me, too important to fail.

Does that mean the US never should have launched the Manhattan Project? That Obama shouldn’t risk the run for the presidency? That Google shouldn’t have tried to build a search engine?

I guarantee you that if you have the drive, the guts, the determination, the imagination, the dreams – the ever So Important is simply a leaf blowing away in the wind.

Mark Stevens

CEO