As I looked up at the fifty-foot tower that I was set to climb and then jump off, I wondered how this had anything to do with marketing. The task was simple: climb the tower, balance yourself on the platform with your partner, and then attempt to catch a bar positioned a few feet out in front of you. This required jumping off the platform and trusting your harness to keep you from falling to serious injury.
I'm On The Left... Overanalyzing
Heights never really bothered me much – jumping from heights, on the other hand, was never my thing. Jumping into swimming pools and lakes, jumping out of planes, jumping on the bed – all these made me nervous. Standing on heights was no problem – jumping was another story. In fact, my first day of swimming lessons in elementary school was marked by the fear of having to jump off the diving board – I remember it like it was yesterday. I had tried to talk my way out of it to the instructors, because I was so afraid to jump into the water. Similarly, the idea of jumping off this very slender tower that was barely wide enough to one of us was not my idea of a good time.
It was the first full day of Journey Of The Online Entrepreneur, a five day conference put on by Nitro Marketing in Dallas, TX, and the whole thing seemed awfully hokey to me – we had “journey names,” (my journey name was “One”) mandatory silence for three hours each day (I never once cooperated), and 7:00 AM yoga every day (I literally fell asleep during “relaxation time”). For the first thirty-six hours of the event, I was in a terrible mood – this wasn’t my comfort zone or even my idea of fun.
