Adam McFarland

“For everything you have missed, you have gained something else; and for everything you gain, you lose something else.

-Ralph Waldo Emerson

The word sacrifice is often associated with entrepreneurs. Young business owners like myself often get peppered with questions about making less money or living with their parents or spending less time at the bar with friends, all in the name of their company. As you get older you usually have to deal with paying a mortgage, balancing a marriage, and spending time with your kids.

It’s easy to second guess your decision to start a company. One truth that has always helped me: it is not humanly impossible to have everything in life. There are always tradeoffs with every decision you make, every day, large or small. Some people might look like they have it all together - they don’t. I’m sure you envy Michael Jordan for all of his fame and success…but I’m sure he envies you for being able to take a stroll in the park with your girlfriend without getting mobbed.

We’re in an interesting position with our company right now in the sense that our large development projects are done and DI/TD sales are good enough that we can all take our foot off the pedal just a little bit. From this point on I think we could each work a 40 hour work week (or probably a little less) and the company would still grow. In the 2+ years since I left my job I’ve never quite been in this position. It makes you really, really think about your choices and how you spend your time.

Adam Gilbert did a series of posts about How to Tell if Someone is Full of Shit a while back. His way of finding out what is really important to someone: take a look at their calendar. We all have a finite time to spend on earth and how we spend it tells others what we truly care about.

A lot of people always talk about what they want to do, what they want to accomplish, what they meant to do, their intentions, how they want to change the world and on and on and on.

It seems as though everyone has intentions of doing big things. Clearly, sadly and unfortunately, that’s not the case. Most people are talkers, rather than doers. Let’s face it. It’s a lot easier to talk than do.

In a world where people are moving a million miles per minute how can you actually tell what someone really cares about?

Look at their calendar! It’s that simple.

Your calendar never lies. All we have is our time. The way we spend our time is our priorities, is our strategy. Your calendar knows what you really care about.

I never understand people who work 20 hour days yet preach about how important their family is to them. Really?

I’m not trying to say that running a business isn’t hard or doesn’t require tough decisions (read any random five posts on this blog and it’s evident we’ve gone through our fair share of struggles as a company and that I’ve had many of my own personal frustrations). My point is this: stop saying “what if?” and “I wish I did that”. Think really hard about what’s important to you and find a way to spend time doing that. If you factor that into every decision to make, there’s no reason to second guess yourself. “Failures” are learning experiences just as much (or more than) “successes”.

Every once in a while I ask myself “what if” about an array of topics (business, sports, life, relationships) and I always come to the same conclusion: I’ve spent my time doing what I love most, each and every day. Several times I’ve even written out my “ideal day” on a sheet of paper and each time I realize that it pretty closely resembles my real day right now…how cool is that? Sure there are other things I’d like to do. Sure I’d like a little more work-life balance. But how can I call what I’ve done “sacrifice” when I’ve gained so much in return? Just because what I do is different from what most people do in their twenties doesn’t make it any harder or any easier than the norm. As I age and priorities change, my ideal day will change and in turn so will my real day. In the meantime, I’ve met so many great people and had so much fun building our company that I can’t imagine anything making me happier.

Like most companies we use our business credit cards quite a bit. In turn, we get quite a few rewards points which result in all sorts of gift certificates. A little over a month ago we got a $40 gift certificate to NFLShop.com. No one else really wanted it, and there was a DVD for $39.99 that I did want, so my partners were nice enough to let me use it. I placed the order and when it arrived it was the wrong DVD.

Freeze it right here. In this situation, here’s what we would do: have the customer ship us the item back, immediately re-ship the correct item, apologize profusely, and throw something extra in for free/give them a credit towards a future purchase. If they need the order by a certain date (say to do a detail) we will work with them to overnight them their order…on occasion we even let them keep the wrong order and expedite the correct order. It’s our mistake, and we go above and beyond to make it right with the customer. It’s what any person or business should do: apologize and make amends.

So what did NFLShop do when I called? They told me to ship the item back, but that they only accept returns (not exchanges). They said they would refund my credit card and I could place the order again. Only one problem - I paid via gift certificate. Couldn’t they just ship me the correct DVD once they got my return? Nope - they had to re-issue me a new gift certificate which took about six weeks. A few days ago I got my new gift certificate. Yesterday I placed my order again, and I should finally get my DVD almost 2 months after the initial order.

Hey NFLShop - great job turning a simple exchange into a complex process. Even more kudos for making no effort whatsoever to correct your mistake.

Why do some companies have such a hard time with simple business policies that should seemingly be so intuitive?

One of the more challenging aspects for us with Tastefully Driven so far has been managing the Lifestyle Blog.  Being that it’s a group blog it can take on a different life than individual blogs like this one or the one I run over on SportsLizard.  Both of those blogs have my personality infused into them and I think one of the reasons that they “work” is because there is a consistent voice.  With TD, in one sense it’s tougher because you have different writing styles each post…but that same potential downside is also a huge upside:  you get posts from all four of us (plus one guest writer right now) and each person has their own unique writing style that contributes differently to the community.

Anyway, we’re averaging about a post a day and overall I think we’ve covered a broad array of lifestyle topics in the past month and done a pretty good job of it.  If you haven’t been subscribed, here are a few of my favorite posts:

• The No Excuses Workout - a 20 minute exercise routine that requires only a few feet of space and uses your bodyweight for resistance (video of yours truly performing the exercises included in the post).
• Audio, the Quest for Individual Nirvana - a series of posts by our guest author (and speaker expert) Robert Wayne about the extensive process of choosing a home stereo system.
• 2008 NFL Mock Draft - Greg did a fantastic job of breaking down each teams needs and potential picks for this weekend’s upcoming NFL draft.
• Whey Protein vs. Casein Protein - a post breaking down the differences between the fast-digesting whey protein and slower-digesting casein protein.
• How to Clean and Maintain Your Laptop - a short post and video of how to keep your laptop in pristine condition.
• How to Read 72% Faster in 20 Minutes - the results of a little speed reading experiment I did.
• RSS Explained:  the free technology that will change your life - everything you need to know about RSS.

Enjoy!

Since the launch of Tastefully Driven I’ve been intending to do a post similar to the DI Features and Lessons Learned. But since this project had less “unknowns” there weren’t a lot of “lessons learned” from the programming side. We knew what we needed to do, and it was more about execution than figuring out a way to get stuff to work.

Nonetheless, there’s still a lot of cool stuff on TD that isn’t completely obvious if you just scan the site for a few minutes. So below are my Top 10 favorite things about the site:

10. One Account
When you have a forum on an e-commerce site, I think it’s utterly important to tie the two accounts together. Instead of just throwing up a copy of vBulletin and making the colors match, we took a bare bones copy of bbPress and hacked it apart until we were able to mesh it seamlessly with the shopping cart. Right now the only benefits of this are that you log in once (at the top of any page…another cool feature) and that you have the same username/password across the board. In the future - assuming the forum becomes somewhat popular - this opens itself up to all sorts of interesting social-networking-type opportunities: for example, imagine getting product suggestions (via PM, email, or displayed inline on the site) based upon your previous purchases and the threads you participate on the forum. In 2-3 years this could be how we make that jump from large e-commerce site to “social shopping” platform. It’s a ways away, but we laid the foundation now.

9. Integrated Affiliate Program
A lot of affiliate programs make it ridiculously difficult to sign up and create links. Using a 3rd party affiliate software is something we didn’t want to do for Detailed Image and we brought the same system over to TD. Our payout rates are posted for everyone to see, and signing up is really easy: in your My Account page there is a message enticing people to sign up:

If you click ‘Apply Now’ you only have to choose a payment type, click ‘Apply’ and you’re good to go. We also make it super-simple to create links. In addition to a tutorial page, we now display an affiliate link on every single product page for that specific product when you’re logged in:

8. Forum Product Recommendations
When you are viewing a forum topic we display a banner ad of up to five related products at the top of the page. So if you’re in a discussion about caffeine it will “recommend” the caffeine capsules for sale in our nutritional supplements section. Again, this has large potential to be highly customized in the future based upon more than just the forum topic.

7. Personalized RSS Feeds
This is one of the few features that came with bbPress that we kept in tact. Every user can mark their favorite forum threads and then subscribe to a custom RSS feed to track the progress of the conversations they’re interested in.

6. Blog-Forum Sync
One of the other things I saw as absolutely necessary was merging the blog comments with the forum. Each time we post in WordPress, a corresponding thread is opened in the forum. If you click to comment on the post, you are redirected to the forum. Blog posts also pull the conversation from the forum and display under the post just like normal comments.

5. Upsells
Inline upsells offering a 5% discount was one of the most fruitful moves we made with Detailed Image. Average order value went through the roof. With TD we changed the page structure around and moved the upsells up “above the fold”. This may or may not be better - we’ll see.

4. Image Upload System
One of the most time consuming aspects of Detailed Image was uploading pictures. Each picture needed to be re-sized several times, watermarked, and then linked to in the database. For TD, I built an image upload system to automate all of this. After we’ve entered the product info in the database, we can log in to our admin section and upload a 500 x 500 png file and the script automatically re-sizes it, saves it, watermarks the images, and creates the appropriate database relationship. Big, big time saver.

3. Shipping System
Sure, this is basically the same as DI, but it’s the backbone of our company. This system is the single most efficient process we’ve put into place. If we didn’t have it we would have a full time employee processing and shipping orders right now. Each morning we click “Process Orders” in our admin section: the PDF receipts pop up to print and save, along with a text file to import to FedEx Ship Manager, which prints the shipping labels and gives us a text file back with tracking numbers, which we upload to auto-email each customer their tracking info. It’s a 2 minute process whether there are 5 orders or 25 orders (or 250 orders down the road).

2. Design
The design of the logo and the site was all Mike. I think he did an A+ job aesthetically conveying exactly the image that we want our customers to see….especially by differentiating each store with it’s own unique color scheme. The Games store, for example, has an orange color scheme but you still know that you are part of TD:

1. Commerce with Conscience
The icing on the cake for me: we’re donating 5% of our pre-tax profit from the site to local charities with our Commerce with Conscience program. Sure, 5% isn’t much now, but it will be as we grow. We’re choosing new charities quarterly, and the first charity - The Regional Food Bank of Northeastern NY - has been very supportive (I got an email back from the Executive Director, which is pretty cool). Along with participating in events like the Climbing UAlbany Event, we hope this program is how we funnel some of the money we pull in online from all over the country/world back to our community. I anticipate that as we grow we will spend more time personally working with each of our charities so that we give back more than our money - our time and expertise can do equal amounts of good. My favorite part about this program is that it ensures that no matter how big we grow we are giving a corresponding amount back to the community. Target does the exact same program and you see the immense social impact they are able to have because of it. If we can even have a fraction of the impact locally that they do nationally, it will be a huge success.

We’re also all rocking Commerce with Conscience wrist bands:

The bands are included with any order over $100 for free, or can be ordered for $4.99 on the site (with all of the profit from the wrist band being donated).

———

What’s next? I’m a firm believer in letting things settle for a bit before diving back into more development. Aside from a necessary focus on marketing, I’ve learned (the hard way) that you need to provide ample time for data/feedback to accrue before jumping to any conclusions about what you do and don’t need. By the end of 2009 I hope to have expanded the forum functionality with the aforementioned social-shopping stuff and to also integrate some AJAX into the cart in places it can really help (coupon codes and add/update cart come to mind), but other than that changes will be dictated by our users and the data.

All in all, we couldn’t be happier with the site we put out. We’re a small team and we did it on an extremely tight time schedule. I’m ridiculously excited to see where this cart takes us over the coming years.

Every once in a while I have one of those moments where I say to myself  “holy crap, I can’t believe this - I’m 25 years old and my partners and I run a company.  We’ve built our own e-commerce platform and have our own warehouse, and we did it without giving up any stock or taking any outside money.  I am living my dream.”  It’s so easy to get caught up in the day to day crap that I forget that sometimes.

Things are going good right now for us.  We weathered the storm of all of the moving expenses.  Our sales have been on the high side of what we were projecting.  The only way we don’t pay ourselves before our June 1 deadline is if we choose not to do so - cash flow is very good.  On a personal level, I’m moving into an apartment closer to the warehouse in a few weeks (cutting my commute in half).  It’ll be my 7th move in 7 years by my count, so hopefully I’ll stay at this place for a while.  There’s some stability after a few years of chaos, and it’s refreshing to be able to focus on my work without it consuming the entirety of my existence.

Dare I say it without coming across as lazy or satisfied:  I’ve finally made it.

I can finally say that without a doubt I can do this for a living.  It’s no longer a pipe dream.  I’m no longer a “lost” kid who left his career to tool around for a while with a business before going back to the “real world”.  This is for real, and it’s so f*cking awesome I can’t put it into words.   It doesn’t matter to me that we aren’t “rich” because that’s not what it’s about to me:  it’s about the experience, it’s about living your life to your full potential without others getting in your way, it’s about building something great with other people who believe in it as much as you do.  All of the ideas I’ve really wanted to pursue - SportsLizard, iPrioritize, Music-Alerts, the shopping cart, etc - I’ve been able to get to market and see what the market thinks about them.  How many people get to turn their “best” ideas into a reality?  Yes, it’s come with a lot of sacrifice, but I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Like most of us, the time in my life when I met the most new people and developed the most relationships was in college.  Lately - for some reason known only to God - I’ve been hearing from and running into a ton of people that I haven’t heard from in years.  It’s been great catching up with everyone and seeing what they are doing.  However, I’ve noticed a pattern - many of them aren’t doing what they want to be doing.  In and of itself, this isn’t a huge deal…as long as you’re working towards what you want to be doing, or what you feel you are called to be doing.

But most of them aren’t working towards what they want to be doing.  They aren’t trying.  They aren’t even thinking about trying.  I’ve spent a lot of time thinking back to conversations I had when I was in college.   I thought back to discussions about passion and drive and determination, and what these friends wanted to do with their lives.  We all had big dreams.  Sadly, in a matter of five years or less most of the people I know have given up on their dreams.  This has nothing to do with being married, having kids, or working a crappy job for a while:  I understand that circumstance often dictates what you do for money.  It has to do with the fact that they’ve given up - you can hear it in their voice.  They are content to not pursue the things I was so sure they’d pursue only a few years ago.  It’s sad and it boggles my mind.  How can they not even try?  How can they not even  take a chance?  Won’t they wonder what if?  Why don’t they just spend a few hours a week working towards their dreams…at night, on the weekends, over their lunch break?  I just can’t comprehend that.  I can’t comprehend giving up.

In the words of the immortal Jimmy V:  Don’t give up, don’t ever give up. 

I’ve said it before, but it amazes me how many online retailers don’t submit their products to Google Base. It’s free, they support a slew of formats (upload products one at a time, upload a spreadsheet, or auto-FTP from your database like we do), and it gets your products shown on Google Base, Google Product Search, and - most importantly - normal Google searches.

Take the example below (click to view full size screenshot). When someone searches for Men-U Healthy Face Wash, a product we sell on Tastefully Driven, Google automatically recognizes the query as a product search and displays Google Product Search results above the natural results. Sure it’s below the high performing PPC ads, but those people are paying for those impressions/clicks. The natural results have been organically grown over the course of years with expensive and time consuming link building and on-site SEO. All I did was spend 15 minutes submitting a product feed last week. As an added bonus Google gives you impression/click-through data for products listed (imagine how cool it would be if they did this for organic results?). Seems unfair huh? Take advantage of it while it lasts…I know we are.

Sometimes it takes me a while to do things I know I should do. Case in point: in October I read this fascinating feature in Inc. Magazine about Pandora entitled Pandora’s Long Strange Trip: Online radio that’s cool, addictive, free, and-just maybe-a lasting business.

Pandora has developed a proprietary method to analyze music–Westergren calls it the music genome–that lets users create online radio stations generated by the software’s recommendations. Tell Pandora your favorite song is “Casey Jones” by the Grateful Dead, and within seconds it will create a station–Casey Jones Radio–that streams nonstop songs from artists such as the Youngbloods, the Byrds, and the Beatles, along with stuff you might not expect, like R.E.M., the Jam, and Tom Petty. It’s undeniably cool and completely addictive, but Pandora has never quite found its footing as a business. Indeed, the company has been through an almost unbelievable number of setbacks, a series of blows that would make the most determined entrepreneur throw in the towel. Westergren has run out of money, which forced to him to lay off his entire staff (except for those willing to work for free). He’s been rejected some 350 times by venture capitalists. He has faced bankruptcy, haggled with anxious creditors, and been sued by employees. Deal after deal has fallen through at the last minute.

Sounded pretty cool to me. So what did I do? Completely forgot about it after I read the article…until this morning when I forgot my iPod at home. I’m the only one in the warehouse right now, so I randomly thought of Pandora and decided to give it a shot.

After entering about 10 of my favorite bands I started listening. The first few songs were from the groups I entered. Then it happened: for the last two hours they have not missed once - every single song has been either a group I like (but didn’t enter into the system), a song I like but had forgotten about and don’t own, or a song I never heard before from a group I’ve never heard of but liked. Amazing.

When I clicked the ‘why did you play this song’ tab for one song it said: “based on what you’ve told us so far, we’re playing this track because it features hard rock roots, a subtle use of vocal harmony, minor key tonality, melodic song writing, and dirty electric guitar rifts.”

Sure, if you say so. Next time someone asks me what kind of music I like I know what to say

Last week for the first time we listed our products for sale on Amazon.com. I put up about half of the Tastefully Driven catalog because products must have a US UPC code to be on Amazon and some of our detailing products and supplements do not have UPC codes. The entire process was a complete pain in the ass (at least compared to Google Product Search and Yahoo Shopping) and the whole time I was saying to myself “this is a waste of time and money”. Amazon charges $39.99/month and 15% of the purchase price, which eats into profit quite a bit. On top of that, Amazon is a price-driven marketplace so you really need to have the lowest price if you want to get any sales. For that reason, let’s just say it’s $39.99/month and 20% of the purchase price.

Is it worth it? My first thought was hell no. George convinced me to try it for a month or two and then go from there. Before I even finished uploading all of the products, we had our first sale. Since then we’ve had steady sales via Amazon and have even run out of a few products due to volume from Amazon.

But what about our profits? Well, here’s the thing: you don’t have any marketing cost associated with putting your stuff on Amazon. The products literally sell themselves just because of the shear mass of people buying stuff everyday. There’s no sales process or customer service questions to deal with. The sale just comes through and we ship it with an Amazon invoice in it (and of course some coupons to entice them to shop on TD). I’d say our average product is $30 - 20% of which is $6, meaning we end up selling a $30 product for $24. Most of the time, I’d say we spend more than $6 of marketing expenses (including sales related customer service) on that same product when we sell it through the site. When I look at it that way, I feel a lot better about it.

The more intriguing question to ask - how important is profitability? Consider two online web businesses who both sell blue widgets…nah, blue widgets is played out, let’s say they sell the same high-demand DVD player, which is the only product they sell. Their cost on the DVD player is $50. Suggested retail price is $100. Company 1 sells it for $99, while Company 2 sells it for $80…becoming the low-cost leader for the product.

Assuming all else is equal, Company 1 will profit more (24% more) per unit. I know a lot of people who would rather be Company 1. They want to profit as much as they can per unit. But if the product is in high demand, it’s already being sought out thousands of times each day via product searches like on Amazon, Google, Yahoo, and a slew of other ones. Those searchers are likely solely buying based upon price - if your site doesn’t totally suck you’ll probably get the sale every time if you are Company 2.

Now - for funsies - let’s say that each company profits $100k for the year. Company 1 sells 2,041 units (x $49 profit/unit) and Company 2 sells 3,333 units (x $30 profit/unit). Again, I think that a lot of people would rather be Company 1.

I disagree. Here’s why: Company 1 has the advantage of less customer service and less work packing/shipping, but has the disadvantage of having to work a lot harder for each sale. In reality, a lot of that $19 difference goes away when you factor in the time/expense of marketing a product when selling it at the same price everyone else is. Company 2 spends more resources on packing/shipping and servicing customers, but minimal time marketing because the sales just come to them. Company 2 also gets purchasing discounts and shipping discounts because of their extra volume. In addition, they cycle through inventory faster…meaning they don’t tie up money/space with inventory that isn’t going to move fast. Over time the advantages of Company 2 are more valuable to me: it’s easy to find warehouse workers and customer service reps relative to how easy it is to generate sales. Generating sales is the hardest thing to do in the world of business. If I find a hands-off way to drive sales AND can turn over inventory faster by doing it, I’ll gladly sacrifice some profitability.

Think about it from the outside as a venture capitalist or someone trying to acquire your company. Taking the example to the extreme, would you rather have a company that ends the year with $100k in revenue, $10k in expenses, and profits $90k (a web design company could look like this) OR would you rather have a company with $10 mil in revenue, $9.91 mil in expenses, and also profits $90k? They both profit the same at the end of the year. But the second company has far more cash passing through their hands and because of that revenue they will be able to secure outside financing (bank loans, private investments, venture capital, etc) easier because their cash flow will allow them to manage their debt. The company is simply more valuable because they generate a lot more revenue.

I’m not sure if this is intuitive or counterintuitive to people or what. All I know is that it’s been on my mind a lot lately, and profitability is becoming less and less important to me.

*side note: salaries are being factored into our expenses whenever I discuss expenses, so breaking even is just fine with me for now. In addition, this does not mean that we aren’t constantly trying to improve our processes and systems so that we can maximize our profitability. I’m solely referring to pricing and how it impacts the bottom line…not all of the other factors that contribute to the bottom line of a business.

It’s a weird feeling that I always get around this time. Every single time I’ve launched a new site or project I’ve felt the same thing, best described by a post I wrote back in 2006 just after the launch of iPrioritize:

From my limited experience as an entrepreneur, I’ve come to the realization that the day after the launch of a new business or product is a weird one. The initial excitement and relief of the launch has been replaced with a realization that you have exactly zero customers. Now, maybe for some people this doesn’t happen the next day, but I’d say something’s wrong if you are still celebrating your launch a week later.

I woke up in a weird mood today. I had that “holy crap, how am I going to get people to start using my site and eventually buy my service” feeling, despite the fact that I have a well-thought out marketing plan to execute. I suppose that I get this feeling because marketing is such an inexact science.

For the past week I was in sort of a post-launch-work-life-funk. All day long I’ve felt anxious and unsatisfied (not typical at all for me) and I’ve questioned if I/we have done everything we could have done to make the site great.

The difference this time is experience: I’ve felt this feeling before and it’s always gone away as soon as things start to pick up and I realize that our months of development were justified. Tastefully Driven has been shipping out 2-3 orders a day, which is fantastic for a nine day old site. I’ve got to remember that we’re in this for the long haul and we don’t need $50k months right off the bat to be having success. I knew this all along - it was part of our plan, but I still got the same anxiety. So I started asking myself WHY.

I think I was wrong back in 2006 - it’s not at all because marketing is an inexact science. It’s because you downshift yourself from going balls out to launch a site to a more steady, long-term marketing strategy. It’s a massive life change that’s akin to switching from being a sprinter to a marathon runner.

For months I was pushing with everything I could to launch the site. Since I knew it was a short term thing, I could work 15 hour days and push aside other aspects of my life. The “rush” was always there because I saw us rapidly achieving goals that brought us closer to the ultimate goal: launch.

Now, I’m doing a mix of things that will bring some sales right away (PPC, product syndication, etc) and things that will bring in sales months/years from now (blog posts, forum posts, videos). Programming goes from exciting features to mundane maintenance, with the occasional exciting feature a few times a year. The ultimate goal is thriving over a period of years, something that’s much harder to get motivated for.

I KNOW from experience that what we’re doing is right and will work. I also know because nine days in things are going about as good as they possibly could (from a sales standpoint and from other important metrics). I feel like a puppet-master who knows exactly what strings to pull at exactly the right times - a skill that only comes with experience.

That said, it’s still a major life change and those take a while to adjust to no matter how confident and prepared you are. The rest of my life that I set aside for a few months now resurfaces and I’ve got to deal with the things that will allow me to live a more balanced life so I don’t burn out - I’ve got to ensure I finish the marathon and that means working a bit less and doing a bit more for myself.

After about a week I feel like I’m getting into a new “groove” and am beginning to find my place. But man, I’m happy we aren’t planning on starting any new sites for a while - even though I knew this funk was probably coming it still sucked.

I’ve never actually heard another business owner talk about this, but I’d imagine it’s a somewhat common feeling for anyone that sells out for something for a short, intense period of time.

I’ve never been the world’s biggest Tiger Woods fan. I respect him, am in awe of his athletic ability, and admire his work ethic. However, I’ve always thought he came across a bit too ‘rehearsed’ and not ‘real’ enough…kind of like Michael Jordan. Nothing wrong with that I suppose, but in sports, business, and in life I tend to look up to people who are a little more transparent and strong in their convictions.

All of that said, his interview this week with Scott Van Pelt for the ESPN Sports Center Sunday Conversation was fantastic. Slowly but surely (likely because of his marriage, child, and death of his father) it feels like he’s showing a little more of his true self, which I find refreshing.

One sequence in particular stood out as particularly interesting to me. It shows the type of desire and focus that you need to be great at anything in life:

SVP: “You have 64 wins on the PGA Tour, a fortune in the bank, how do you fight the human nature that says ‘I’m going to hit the snooze button today, I’m gonna take my foot off the gas, I’m just gonna coast for a while.’ Where does the hunger inside of you come from?”

Tiger: “I don’t know how you can think any other way”.

SVP: “There’s no….what would allow you to be satisfied?”

Tiger: “Hmm - win more.”

SVP: “So the 64th is…it feels as good, as fulfilling, as the 1st, the 2nd, the 33rd?”

Tiger: “God yes. Oh yeah”.

SVP: “So there’s no point when you can sort of put the feet up on a Tuesday afternoon and say ‘Today I’m not going to the gym’.?

Tiger: “No. Because the next…that’s…I look at life as: the greatest thing about tomorrow is that I will be better than I am today. And that’s the way I’ve always lived my life. So I have no understanding why people do hit the snooze button because you have a chance to become a better person, become - for me - a better athlete…all the different things you can do to become better for tomorrow. Why wouldn’t you take advantage of that?”

You can check out the full interview on the video below: