Big Day

It was a big day for my company today. About 8 months ago, a friend and I started a hospitality consulting company. It's gone through a quite a few growing pains in this short amount of time. We've changed focus. We've fired and hired personnel. But we also came up with one big idea that seems to have started the ball rolling. Today was the day we unveiled it to the general public and it went far better than we could have hoped.

I don't want to turn this blog into one big ad for my business. There are far too many blogs doing that. I want to keep this blog pure in the sense that I only want to use it to address issues that interest or concern me. Because of that, I'm not going to get into the details of my business right now. Nor will I get into the specifics of why today was so huge. But I will say this. There's no better feeling than coming up with an idea from scratch and seeing it come to fruition. To see what only existed in your mind existing in reality is an incredible rush. Execution is the biggest high there is, I think.

I was asked today how I came up with the idea. The question caught me off guard. I hadn't thought about how I came up with the idea. It came to me while having Chinese food at Ton Kiang. I had been rereading Aristotle's Nicomachean ethics and my head was filled with Aristotlean-type questions. I had applied Aristotle's precepts to many things in my life and it had always brought me success. I used his methodology to increase my ability to learn martial arts. I borrowed liberally from him when I came up with a hand-to-hand program for the U.S. Marine Corps. It's pretty clear that I've never had an original thought of my own. Anyway, I just applied his principles to drink and through some trial and error, we came up with something that really created quite a buzz today.

This idea, in and of itself, is pretty cool but what makes it really great is that it has allowed us to develop relationships with people we would never have had a chance to work with before. This little idea has opened up some huge doors and now it's just up to us to take advantage of them. Maybe, I'll talk more about my business in the future. I don't want to jinx it.

But for right now, I just want to enjoy today's success. I remember what Kawano Sensei told me when I won my first tournament as a little kid. He said, "Boy, you're champion for today only. Tomorrow, you're nothing again." So today, I'm a success. Tomorrow, I'm back at it again-- trying to prove I'm not just taking space on this planet.