Wow, I’m still recovering from the most insane and amazing four days of my life. (I’m still wiped out. I almost dropped 110 pounds on my head at the gym last night.)

I spent last Thursday through Sunday in Washington, D.C. at the Summit Series DC10. The website describes it as “an an invitation-only event that connects top young minds and inspires a new generation of leaders to succeed in business and in life.” To be honest, I was a little bit skeptical. The concept sounded a bit too out there, but thankfully, my friends and Jeff Rosenthal from the Summit Series managed to convince me it was worth my time. They were right.

Amazing things happen when you put 750 ridiculous overachievers from the fields of entertainment, technology, politics, business, and philanthropy. No one sleeps. No one wants to because everyone is constantly meeting new and fascinating people and engaging them in deep, long conversations. I think I slept 12 hours the entire four days.

This is what happens:

• You stay out until 3 in the morning, then wake up at 8 the next morning, get on a bus and go white water kayaking with a four-time world champion kayaker on the Potomac, one  of the most beautiful rivers I have ever seen. (Thanks Eric for the amazing experience. You’ve inspired me to get back on the water after my shoulder stop peeling.)
  • By the way, everyone was so Type A that not a single person in the group hesitated to go over a 10 foot waterfall within the first hour of being in the kayak.
• You witness an intimate interview with Ted Turner where he confirms something you’ve always suspected—the restaurant business is the worst business in the world.
• You meet and listen to people like Tim Ferris and the entire Summit Series team who have done more than just escape the 9-5 grind and have created truly surreal lifestyles.
• You meet people with amazing missions in life, like 21-year old Tyler “Dogood” Kellog who spent last summer traveling and living out of his car in order to hand out random acts of kindness to people.
• You find people like the founders of Method who like you believe that creating a sustainable world will only happen if we provide people with sustainable choices that are better than everything else regardless of how green they are.
• You participate in a spontaneous 700 person, 30 second dance party. (Thanks Taryn!)
• You connect with people who you know you’ll be friends with for the rest of your life.

I also made plenty of business connections, but that wasn’t really the point. No matter what path these people have chosen, every single one of them is causing change in the world. By surrounding yourself with these people, you cannot help but be inspired.

DC10 has made me think about my life. Lately, I’ve realized that I am being dragged down by far too much. I love the company I’m currently building, and I love the people I work with. More importantly, I love that we’re on a mission to make green building easier and to get rid of products that harm our health.

The experience of building the business is rewarding every single day, but other things in life have been weighing on me. Even before DC10, I knew that a lot of this stress was related to the life I have been living, too tied to physical things and being dragged down by negative experiences and negative people.

There was line that I picked up that stuck with me, “Money isn’t the only currency.” I’ve taken this to heart and have decided to look at life a bit differently, to define success as the experiences I have, the people I surround myself with and the change I help create. Money is great, and it can help with all of these things but no one should be pursuing money for the sake of money. That will just lead to misery.

The result of this is that I’m going to be focusing on a personal project I’ve been contemplating for a while now. I’ll be engineering my life to allow me to focus on the things and people I love and forget about the things I don’t. Ultimately, this should give me more time to focus on my business, relationships and have more unforgettable experiences. I’ll let you know how it goes.

Until next time, when we all refuse to go to bed after the closing party and talk until the sun goes up.

And no, that’s not me in the picture, but it is the Potomac.

Last night, I received an email from an architectural photographer who travels around the country taking photos of buildings, building products, etc. Last year, he traveled to 72 cities. He gets paid to do this because manufacturers and architecture firms hire him to take pictures of their products and buildings. It’s cheaper for them than hiring someone and then paying to fly them somewhere.

This got me thinking. Why don’t I do this for my startup?

Not only do I need to meet people all around the country, it would be great if I could visit LEED Certified buildings around the country. For GreenKonnect, we need pictures of these buildings, and we need to learn about them and write them up. Better yet, we need to convince the people who designed and built the buildings to write them up on our site. We also need manufacturers to add their building products to our database. What better way to do it than in person?

Today, there isn’t anything that should be stopping us from doing this. Wireless internet is cheap, and we run our business from our laptops. Why not hit the road, go to manufacturers, architecture firms, developers, engineering firms, contractors, LEED certified buildings, and Angels/VCs around the country. We could work, sell our product in person and meet with potential investors, all things which we need to do ASAP!

I started looking around at people who decided to run businesses from an RV. Bill Myers wrote an interesting article on people who chose to quit 9-5 jobs and live in an RV. Their cost of living actually went down.

Now, I’m not crazy enough to live in an RV full time. That takes a special sort of person, and beyond that, I’m a city boy. I think we could make our way around the country, visiting most major cities (most places we need to visit are concentrated in cities) in about 6 weeks.

Here’s what we’d need:

• An RV - maybe convert it to use vegetable oil
• 2 EVDO cards (probably go with one from Verizon & one from Sprint in case coverage goes down)
• EVDO router (got one already)
• Gas – I’m leaning toward the vegetable oil solution though
• Food
• Money for campgrounds
• Toll money
• Money to cover fun stuff/activities to keep us from going insane
• Backup money for problems

That’s pretty doable. We can get a used RV for $5k and make improvements pretty easily. (We should be able to sell it at the end of the trip for about the same price.) We could probably even pick up some sponsors to cover a lot of costs, especially green upgrades to the RV such as the vegetable oil conversion. That leaves gas (not if we do vegetable oil), food, campground money, toll money, activity money and backup money. If we’re frugal, smart, and good at hustling this, we could do this for under $20k, maybe less. The press alone could be worth that money.

Upside/Benefits

• Face to face meetings – much more effective than email, phone calls and even video conferencing
• A lot of content for our site
• Mobility – we can change our plans on the fly
• Press (and probably lots of it) – not only could we easily document everything along the way, I’m sure we could get a bunch of press from this pretty easily
• Focus, focus, focus – we’d work on the business 24/7 for 6 weeks

Downsides/Risks

• People think I’m crazy (don’t care about most, but I do care about our users/customers/potential investors)
• Time lost to driving & problems with the RV
• No privacy for 6 weeks
• Disconnected physically from Philly and our advisors
• A decent amount of time “lost” to organize the trip

The only major downside I see is the crazy thing. Everything else is minor or easy to work around. Would this actually have a negative impact on our business? Would investors take us seriously? I think not considering the times and the increasing transparency we’re seeing in the business world. If we could figure out how to make this work financially, and if I could my business partner it’s a good idea, I think this could be an amazing adventure with great results for our business. I think I’d actually get more work done than I do now. The amount of content we’d create for our site alone would be huge!

Please convince me that I’m crazy.