Anticipation might be the most underrated feeling we’ve got.
Think about the last time you waited for something you actually wanted. The trip you booked months out. The kid coming home. The verdict in a case you’d worked for a year. The waiting was its own thing, separate from the event, and sometimes better. Psychologists who study happiness have found that people often get more joy from looking forward to an experience than from the experience itself. We’re built to lean toward what’s coming.
I’ve been living in that feeling for weeks now. We’re building something at TalkLPnews, and on July 1 we’re going to show you what it is. Not today. Today I just get to sit in the anticipation with you, which honestly is half the fun.
I’m not going to tell you what it is. What I’ll tell you is what it isn’t. No scripts. No sanitized talking points. No approved sound bites. If you’ve followed this publication for any length of time, you already know we don’t do polished PR or wait around for permission to cover the hard stuff. That’s not changing. We’re just doing more of it, in a form we’ve never tried before.
Here’s what I keep thinking about. Every person who ever changed an industry was, at some point, the one in the room making everyone else uncomfortable. The one asking why it has to work this way at all. Steve Jobs got pushed out of the company he founded before he came back and remade it. Sara Blakely built Spanx out of her apartment after every hosiery mill in North Carolina told her the idea was crazy, and she did it without a single business class. The people who move things forward almost never look like safe bets at the time. They look like trouble.
I love that. I love being the one who says the thing nobody at the conference wants to say out loud. I love that we built APEX ourselves so we’d never be beholden to a sponsor deciding what we could and couldn’t cover. Disruption gets talked about like it’s a strategy. For me it’s closer to a personality trait. I’d rather build the thing that doesn’t exist yet than perfect the thing everyone’s already doing.
Reid Hoffman has a line I come back to: “An entrepreneur is someone who will jump off a cliff and assemble an airplane on the way down.” That’s roughly where we are right now. The plane’s coming together. We’re pretty sure it’ll fly.
So no, I’m not telling you what’s coming. I want you to feel the same thing I’m feeling. That low hum of anticipation, the good kind, the kind that means you’re about to find out whether the leap was worth it.
Mark the date. July 1. Come see what we made.
