Elliott Bisnow - Make No Small Plans: Lessons on Thinking Big, Chasing Dreams, and Building Community

Weve all been told that big ideas are impossible. Start your sentence with I know this sounds crazy, but I was thinking and youll be cut off before you can even explain your vision and why its revolutionary.

The purity of our dreams gets corrupted when it meets the reality of other peoples experiences. Its not going to work, they say. Its not the right time. We dont have the money. Somebody else could do it better. And if its not someone else shooting you down, we often do it to ourselves, dismissing our own ideas before even uttering them out loud. And yet most great businesses, products, and causes were deemed completely absurd and impractical notions at the outset.

Were here to tell you that theres never a bad time for a crazy idea. But theres also never a good time to start a business; we certainly didnt begin ours during one.

Summit Series was originally a conference series and a community of young, ambitious thinkers trying to begin their professional lives in the aftermath of the global financial crisis, both burdened by the instability of this new world and blessed with the opportunity to create something new in its wake. Over the coming decade, it would develop into a multi-disciplinary festival, attracting international leaders, pioneering entrepreneurs, and creative luminaries. But at the start, everyone told us we were crazy to dream that big.

In our early twenties, we lived in a house belonging to one of our grandmothers in a Florida retirement community, sleeping in bunk beds and on couches. Later that year, we were the first organization to connect a group of entrepreneurs to the Obama administration during a White House event focused on policy changes to support start-up founders. By our mid-twenties, we had chartered a fourteen-story ocean linerthe youngest people in history to do so, wed later learnand created our own floating city for a weekend. Before we turned thirty, we had bought North Americas largest ski resort, Powder Mountain, on ten thousand acres of pristine Utah wilderness, and began turning it into a permanent home for our community.

How did four young dreamers with zero relationships, zero experience, and two college degrees between the four of us quickly rise to hosting luminaries like Richard Branson and Quincy Jones? We are not billionaires. We hold no patents. We are not geniuses or household names. We are simply four friends: Elliott, Jeff, Brett, and Jeremy.

Some people are destined to invent. To invest. To run for office. We have always had the burning desire to create impactful gatherings and build a community of entrepreneurs, creatives, and makers. We wanted to introduce them to new ideas. To inspire them. To help them succeed.

Historically, if you were a young writer or editor after World War I, you knew you could find Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce, and Gertrude Stein at the Ritz in Paris. If you were a young musician in the sixties, you knew that Diana Ross, Stevie Wonder, and Marvin Gaye were setting the world ablaze from Motowns offices on West Grand Boulevard in Detroit. And if you were a young entrepreneur in the decade of innovation that emerged from the rubble left by the greatest recession in a generation, you knew that the people at the heart of that revolution could be found at Summit Series.

The strength of our organization stems not from its four founders but from the hands of the remarkable community, connected by a common, insatiable desire to create, to share, and to nourish their best selves. Summit Series simply gives them a place to gather, collaborate with one another, and expand their minds, ideas, and friendships.

Over the years, those creators included everyone from Amazons Jeff Bezos to actor and founder of the billion-dollar Honest Company, Jessica Alba. Hundreds of thought leaders have imparted their wisdom, such as business titans like Mark Cuban and Ray Dalio, media mavericks like CNN founder Ted Turner, and mindfulness gurus like Ram Dass and Eckhart Tolle.