How Things Become Awesome!

There is a group on my company’s version of facebook called “the group of awesome.” At first glance I thought what a ridiculous group, but my first instinct was wrong. In addition to the very humorous posts that come up we see lots of things which are all…Awesome. Some end up being cool tricks that others didn’t know (e.g. the button on the side of your cell phone silencing instead of hitting the ignore button) or sharing some amazing videos or pictures that are worth the time to see for yourself. What we don’t see in this group is the journey to becoming awesome, we only see the things that have arrived.

This weekend, marks something that has been nine years in the making of becoming awesome. Some may argue it’s been awesome for some time, but I have high standards. In the summer of 2002, my manager told me stories about his experience in hosting ski trips with hundreds of people and chartering MD-80s. It seemed so easy when he told me. After I stopped salivating over his successful trips, it wasn’t long before I was thinking that’s so easy, I could do that. In a few weeks I was off and running; calling around trying to get huge resorts to host hundreds of people. Looking back it’s amazing how naive I was at the time.

That following March in 2003 I hosted 55 people on my first Tahoe ski trip. This was by no means my first rodeo. I’d organized ski groups before and even some party trips to warm weather destinations. Unfortunately, my goal was to hit 90 people and so I saw the trip as a bit of a failure. It’s good to have high standards, but don’t be so blind to miss a great thing when you are in the middle of it. The feedback from many trip attendees was that they were impressed how things got pulled together and suggested I get a group organized to keep hosting these trips. Thus Papys Adventures was born.

The trips continued. I developed checklists and tracked metrics to be more efficient. I gathered feedback from surveys (formal and informal) from those who came on the trips. I observed things that worked and didn’t work. I learned a lot about people dynamics and that one sour person can be a buzz kill for an entire group of people (solution: a no bitching clause). I also learned that I can’t make everyone happy, but that there are triggers which make most people happy. I found common denominators, things that would produce high return on investment. I also surrounded myself with others who were smarter than me and that allows us to automate a lot of manual labor. I learned that if you want to get large groups the super connectors are a very powerful type of influencer. Most importantly I learned from each and every one of my mistakes.

March will mark nine years since that first trip and this weekend is our 10th annual trip. I never hit that goal of 90, closest we got was 70 in 2008 and this year. We did however host over 600 people on all the Tahoe trips combined and over 1,600 when we account for all the other trips. Success looks very different when you look back on your accomplishments. I had a passion for bringing people together and the strength for organizing events. It was a perfect alignment that I always encourage others to find in their careers. Something my boss left out of his story and something I never expected was the impact on people’s lives from all the new friendships that were formed.

To be clear, I’m not bragging, because the truth is I don’t want credit for those new friendships. I didn’t make them happen. The people on the trip did. It may sound arrogant, but it’s a fact now that Papy’s Adventure’s South Lake Tahoe Trip is awesome. Being awesome takes a lot of hard work which doesn’t happen overnight and you cannot do it alone.