Operate, switch on, turn on, start, set going, trigger, set in motion, initiate, actuate, energize . . . ACTIVATE.
Everyone on the planet has ideas. Sorry to disappoint you, but you’re not special because you have an idea. You’re not even special if you have an epic idea.
You must activate on your idea, activate quickly, and activate relentlessly. That is the only way your idea will make you special. Often, even a mediocre idea will make you stand out when you bring it to life, because your sheer audacity to activate your idea right from the start makes you uncommon.
This is the decision maker. This is where the millionaires and billionaires are made. This is where leaders are born and where societal change happens. This is where life becomes extraordinary. This is the good stuff.
In this chapter, we’ll focus on taking action toward career success on extraordinary levels. This won’t come through doing just enough to get by or putting in a normal work day. Your best ride, owning your own time, means having a gladiator’s work ethic.
People view success differently, but the constant is that it comes only through taking action—activating. And we don’t just turn these traits on in a bubble; remember, it’s a way of life. Being a relentless activator will help all the corners of your life, because even in personal relationships and beyond, committing to persevering through hard times and failures or sticking to your vision through thick and thin will ultimately uncover the answers.
I challenge you to think of one instance in your life where you felt proud or accomplished and didn’t activate to get yourself there.
I own and created Ten Thirty One Productions, which single-handedly put Halloween and haunted attractions on the map as a viable business. It was a dark-horse industry that was raking in billions of dollars yet was not being developed the way other billion-dollar industries were being developed.
The day I quit my comfy, fat-cat, golden-handcuffed, lucrative corporate job at Clear Channel Entertainment and Media to develop a Halloween haunted hayride, the president of the company looked at me like I had three heads. In fact, the whole Los Angeles–based staff that I had known for ten years almost to the day thought I must be certifiably, downright nuts. Their knee-jerk reaction lasted for about eleven seconds until they remembered who I was—the girl they had known me to be for so long.
I was the girl right out of college who interviewed relentlessly for almost five months, competing with seasoned veterans for a job I barely understood.
What I did understand was that in Connecticut, the best company in entertainment was Clear Channel, a media conglomerate dominating the broadcast radio industry, so . . . that was where I needed to land. I was the girl who got the job and peaked a year and a half into that job. And I was the girl who wanted to be in a market where I could grow faster. That’s how I got to Los Angeles. But it wasn’t as easy as it may sound. There was really no reason for the president of the Hartford Clear Channel market to give me the job. I was green and right out of college, but damn did I want it.
After a quick eighteen months working for Clear Channel in Hartford, which was considered a medium-sized market, I got to a point where my income started to plateau signaling I may be at the point of maximizing as much growth out of that area as I thought would be possible. I have always been motivated by forward and upward movement, so I knew that if I didn’t activate soon, my passion in my work would suffer, and that has never served me well. I need to love what I do. I learned that the Los Angeles market was a large one and the largest revenue market of all the markets . . . #1.
I decided to start there.
I picked up the phone and called every Clear Channel Los Angeles radio station and scheduled interviews for the four out of eight that responded to me. It took a ton of follow-up to get them to meet with me, but once I finally secured the four interviews, I bought my ticket for the cross-country trek to LA.
Though I was interviewing for the same company for which I was currently working, I chose to keep it quiet. I didn’t want to alarm my current managers just yet. I knew I was valuable to them and my departure would not be a welcomed conversation. But, hey, I was staying with the company. I could have scheduled interviews with competing Los Angeles properties and I didn’t, so my moral compass felt in order.
The trip resulted in a job offer. I was moving to Los Angeles to work for the biggest revenue market in the world.
What happened next floored me.
Upon telling my direct supervisor of my fantastic news, she fired me on the spot.
In fact, a colleague of mine, who also wanted to make the move but had not yet secured a job offer, was also fired on the spot for even entertaining the idea.
Nope. I wasn’t going down this way.
These are the moments that define the “extraordinary path” or the “bold choice.” I had never been fired in my life, and I wasn’t about to let that change.
I tracked down the vice president of the market, Paula Messina, who to me was a reasonable and strong woman. There weren’t many female executives ranking this high in the company at that time, so my hope was that she would be fair and strong enough to care about the injustice.
And I was correct. She was very appropriate to make sure she didn’t throw any of her appointed managers under the bus. She told me to go home early and take a little time off while she worked through it with the manager who had fired me. I got a call two days later, telling me to come back to work.
And to make things even better, I was asked to stay for three months before taking the job in Los Angeles so they wouldn’t be shorthanded with the extensive list of clients I had grown to manage and be responsible for. They offered me a large bonus if I were to accept. Upon the approval from my new boss in LA, I stayed for three months and signed off in Hartford as a valuable, loved, and missed part of the team.
This was a much different and far better path than having just accepted being fired. I activated. I didn’t just take my serving of “shit pie” and go home.
In fact, remember the colleague I mentioned earlier who was also fired that day? She didn’t activate; she didn’t push the issue, and guess what? She never got asked back, did not leave the company on good terms, and spent the next year unemployed.
I chose this company and I activated to make it happen. I chose Los Angeles and I activated to make it happen. I chose to leave the Hartford market on my terms and I activated to make it happen.
Your path is up to you. I experienced evidence of that, and in each instance like this, my faith in my choices and my belief in my abilities were growing.
I was twenty-three years old and on my way to LA to work for one of the biggest entertainment companies in the world. This would be the move, the choice, the activation that would bring me down the path to a soul-mate love that lasted almost a decade, the path that taught me how to run every facet of a business, the path that would bring financial wealth for the first time in my life, the path that exposed a confidence in myself that would lead to my unreasonable notion that I could do anything . . . live my very best dream life.
I was young and I was new. Many of the big, scary, tenured LA executives barely gave me a nod to welcome me. As I remember, only one girl, who was also new, invited me to lunch and asked me about myself.
Within my first year, I had developed more revenue and received more top performance accolades than anyone on my team. I had an amazing mentor, Michael Jackel, who was my boss, and I soaked up every bit of coaching he would give me. I watched his demeanor; I listened to his vocal inflections; I absorbed his interactions with other managers and important clients. While my tenured colleagues were lunching, I was watching.
This industry was sexy and exciting. Passing Ryan Seacrest in the halls coming in every day to work, Cher, Pink, the Black Eyed Peas stopping in to promote their albums or do private concerts in our offices—this was my workday. I understood how it could get distracting and how it could jade those who have been around it regularly. But this was the hardest industry in the world to get close to, and being around it wasn’t cutting it. I wanted to lead it.
There were several managers in the company, but Jackel was a leader. There was a quality in him that I found infectious and I wanted it. Now, over a decade later, I can finally identify that quality as passion. It is so easy to become addicted to passion. It’s a critical part of the curriculum and we’re going to discuss it more in later chapters, but I’ll start by saying that activating when you are passionate will never feel empty or feel like work. And this is a great barometer for you when you are on the fence about a choice. Passion will guide you honestly.
Jackel was, in his own right, moving up in the company, and if I had anything to say about it . . . so was I. By the time I was twenty-six, I took Jackel’s spot as the local sales manager of the second-largest-grossing Clear Channel property in the country. He kept moving up and I kept moving up. A couple more promotions and, before I was thirty, I was controlling the revenue for multiple Clear Channel Los Angeles properties, which made me the youngest manager in the company controlling more revenue than any other single manager globally. For all practical purposes, I was running a business.
This wasn’t luck. This was pure activation built on a foundation of hard work. I worked for my track record so I could make my own choices and go after them. I didn’t wait for opportunity to knock. Every manager to whom I reported knew I wanted to be a leader. I was a leader whether I had the title yet or not.
You will give yourself a big head start by acting the role to which you are aspiring before you even have it. People will get used to you for that role and, when it’s available, you’ll appear as the natural progression or fit.
My time at Clear Channel was also the time in my life when I met my partner Alyson.
We met when I along with a couple of my colleagues were interviewing her to come work at Clear Channel. She was very impressive, and it was easy to decide that we wanted her on the team. As the interview ended, I remember my boss turning to me and saying, “The two of you have a connection; she likes you, take the lead on this and get her on board.”
I’m pretty sure I loved her the day I met her. We became inseparable. I’d get nervous to see her and excited to go to work. There were times when I’d be thinking about her and she’d appear next to me.
I remember running down the beach in Santa Monica one day by the pier. I had my headphones on, probably jamming out looking like a fool, and I felt someone running right beside me. I turned my head and there she was. She had seen me from off in the distance and had run her ass off to catch up. It was a karmic feeling right from the beginning. I knew she would be a big part of the journey.
My ascension into management was also about the time I started to earn the reputation of “Ready, Fire, Aim,” and that was fine with me. That was a giant compliment, in fact. In an existence where being an activator is how you achieve dreams and the unthinkable, that was the ultimate compliment.
Remember, it means that I’ll take a hundred shots before my competitor’s gun is even out of their holster. And I may miss half of them . . . but that means I hit half of them too.
The scariest part of activating is the fear of missing.
I’ve seen many talented and hard-working people who aim so diligently that they aim or think themselves into inaction. It’s a bit cliché but the simplicity of the quote “the only shots you’re guaranteed to miss are the ones that you never take” is the essence of its effectiveness.
I know “it’s not that easy.” Guess what? It really is that easy! Take the shots. You’re going to miss sometimes but what is the alternative? Mediocrity at best? That’s probably okay for many people, but I’m guessing that if you picked up this book and are still reading, that it isn’t good enough for you. It certainly isn’t good enough for me.
The dirty little secret here is that once you miss, the fear of missing starts to fade. Once you experience a failure and bring yourself back from it, the fear of failure starts to become less paralyzing. Walk into the fear and I promise you it will never dictate your path again. You must use your “miss” or your “fail” as a piece of data. Study it, break it down, and understand it. Then, take another swing with the new information. The fear of failure will no longer stop you from activating.
I have failed and failed big.
Ten Thirty One Productions—TTO—was founded in 2009 with one attraction called the Los Angeles Haunted Hayride. I was still employed by Clear Channel at the time, which is so incredible, thinking back on it now. I can’t believe they allowed me to launch a giant Halloween attraction while they still employed me. I was even able to convince them to let me advertise it on our eight Clear Channel Los Angeles radio stations. And to add more shock and awe to the irony, the Clear Channel sales team was tasked with going out and selling sponsorships to my event. I think I must have underestimated my sales skills.
By this time, I was becoming burnt-out with the corporate environment and had felt like I had gone all the way up the ladder but wasn’t learning what I needed to in order to stay engaged. I didn’t feel like I was really growing anymore.
Halloween was rolling around, and every year I decorated my house to an obsessive degree. Each year, Alyson and I noticed more and more children coming through our yard display. We also noticed their parents mingling in our front yard and many of the kids going through the yard attraction more than once. We counted over three hundred children and it started to occur to me that Halloween just might be a big deal.
Could this make money?
Instantly, I started to research the industry, and it wasn’t hard to find out that this was a six-billion-dollar business at that time. Now, it has grown to $8.4 billion.
For a market the size of Los Angeles, I was beyond shocked at how underserved it was for Halloween activities. I have loved Halloween my whole life, and spent my entire childhood going to haunted attractions and, more specifically, haunted hayrides. I could not get enough of them. I would wait for hours to get on the local haunted hayride in town, and then scour the area to find other haunted hayrides. I had always wished for a haunted hayride in Southern California but year after year . . . no luck.
A lightbulb appeared over my head as I discovered the revenue behind this holiday and the lack of girth it had in a city the size of Los Angeles.
I had wished for a haunted hayride every year, and now we would have one.
I didn’t wait; I didn’t think myself into inaction; I didn’t let anyone talk me out of it.
I activated.
I woke up and created a list of all the parks with trails and woods in Los Angeles County, got in my car, and physically inspected all the sites. I was in permit negotiations two weeks later. I had no idea how I was going to pay for this as the ice-cold reality of expenses started to strike. However, I wasn’t going to let someone else do this before me. Alyson and I went to a few of our very close friends and asked them to invest. None of them are independently wealthy people, but they believed in us. They believed we wouldn’t lose. Some of them asked their parents for the money, some of them used every last penny of their savings, but somehow they each scraped up the money to buy 1 percent of our new business.
We approached many potential sponsors as another revenue source. It’s really hard to sell a sponsorship for an event that has no track record and no large corporation behind it adding validity. We just kept pounding the pavement and finally secured an auto sponsorship from MINI Cooper for $75,000. Using what we had in our savings account, combined with the sponsorship funds and the small investments from our friends, that very next October, LA got its first-ever haunted hayride.
The Los Angeles Haunted Hayride has become a Hollywood Halloween icon.
This doesn’t sound like a failure because we haven’t gotten there yet.
Activating my idea brought this company and LA Haunted Hayride to fruition. It has been the biggest game changer of my life. My dream life was upon me.
The Hayride didn’t make any money in its first year, and there were many giant obstacles with permits and political bureaucracy standing in our way at every turn. But even with the uncertainty of whether the LA Haunted Hayride would grow into a viable business, I took a giant leap.
I resigned from Clear Channel after a decade. It was the only company I had ever known. The company where I was born and bred a corporate protégé and felt safe, secure, and comfortable was now in my rearview mirror. It was a hard decision for anyone in my life to understand except for me and Alyson.
Being comfortable wasn’t a good thing, and I didn’t need anyone else to understand. I had chosen my path and now I’m walking down it . . . not halfway down . . . all the way down.