Big Thinking
This summer, I’ve had the distinct privilege of coaching 5 students from the Maryland Institute College of Art’s MPS in the Business of Art & Design program.
This week, they’ll present their final business plans, pitches, and slide decks as the culmination of their learning.
As we near the end, each of them want to know if it’s okay if they make some stuff up. Their numbers, their “go to market” plan, their exit strategy.
They say, “Where do these numbers come from? Is it okay if I guess?”
“Sure!” I say. “Business is all about making it up as you go.”
There’s no such thing as a sure thing in business except the results of whatever you’ve tried. And you can’t try anything until you craft an initial hypothesis and perform experiments to either prove it or disprove it.
If you feel like you’re just making things up at the beginning (or the middle… or later), you’re exactly right.
That’s no reason to fear; that’s a reason to celebrate!
As Erica Dhawan argues in a piece on unlearning in Forbes, we must “learn to value process over programs, questions over answers, and influence over control.”
That is not to say that business is a crap shoot. The more your experiment, the more you learn how to make educated guesses. The more you question, the better you’ll be at anticipating the answers. But the biggest mistake you will make is thinking that you’ve learned the answer.
Every new customer, every new product, every new day is an opportunity for surprise. Even the most practiced process can defy all expectations.
Don’t fear. Rejoice.
Big Thinking, New Economy
You’re an individual.
You do your own thing. Your way.
Having a me-myself-and-I business makes sense to you: no committees, no compromise, no commitment, ultimate control.
But could you be short-changing your purpose & greater ambition to ignore the power of a team?
Solo entrepreneurship is all the rage. Its romantic notion of location independence, sky-high profit margins, and ultimate flexibility is alluring. Solo entrepreneurship might even look like your only option if you’re bootstrapping a brand new business: if you can’t even pay yourself, how are you going to share profit with someone else?
At World Domination Summit last weekend, Chris Brogan issued a challenge:
If we are this powerful as individuals, how much more powerful might be we be together?
Chris wasn’t just spouting platitudes. This was a legitimate world domination strategy.
If your purpose is bigger than you (as it should be) and aimed at serving your customers (as it must be), then doesn’t it stand to reason that building a business that’s limited in scope by its very makeup is a problem?
Yes, small can be beautiful. Yes, flexibility is liberating.
I’m not suggesting that your goal should be to create the next Google or Apple. Although, if it is, that’s great! Your goal should be to build the business that makes your purpose a reality.
The question isn’t whether being a “solopreneur” is the right way to go. Is anyone else sick of that word? The question is…
What does the business that will make my purpose a reality look like?
It might be a small, long distance team. It might be a group of friend huddled around a kitchen table. It might be an office or studio at a co-working space. It might be a store front.
Your business might require employees. It might require a team of contractors. It might even require a business partner or a team of co-founders.
But thinking you’re in this alone – and, even worse, romanticizing this notion – is the wrong way to go.
The people who are doing the great things with their businesses are harnessing their networks, the power of paid team members, and the beauty of outside expertise. They may look like a solo act but I guarantee, almost without exception, that they are not alone.
My business has been a small team for 2 years now. This Fall, I’m launching a larger business with a bigger team. Oh, the suspense…
The possibilities are what you make them. There are opportunities for collaboration, expansion, and profit all around you.
***
PS I’ve got room for 3 more Insight Intensives in August. Get 3-6 months of strategy, ideas, and insight on your business straight from my brain. Click here to learn more & apply.
“This was by far the most important investment I have made in myself and my business so far!”
— Meg Ward, Be More Fear Less
Big Thinking, society & culture
I wandered for years wondering if I would “find my passion.” I often worried that I had found it & then let it slip away.
In college, I drifted through different parts of ministry & academia. After college, I research & compared graduate degree programs of all stripes. Even after I decided to strike out on my own, I kept looking for my one true love.
Finally, an idea that filled a need propelled me to action.
Action was the solution.
The danger of looking for your one true love, your one true passion is that there’s an assumption that there is a single purpose to your life and that that single purpose can be be fulfilled by a single interest.
Your passion is not “an interest.”
You have interests – maybe military history, orchids, or gluten-free vegan cookies – and some of those interests may stick with you your whole life. Others come & go. Sometimes your interests cultivate new skills and sometimes they are new skills.
Your interests may be hobbies or you may have incorporated them into your work or career. They may be solitary or things you enjoy with family or friends. You might be categorized or labelled by your interests.
But in the end, your interests do not define you. They are a channel through which you express yourself. Your interests provide focus and context for what drives you.
Your passion is also not “an opportunity.”
No one is coming to knock at your door with your passion packaged in the form of an opportunity, tied with a bow. It’s not a one-night stand that turns into a long-term relationship. In the end, passion creates opportunities; it isn’t defined by them.
So what needs to be discovered when passion feels lost?
Passion is movement. Action. Momentum.
Passion is life force. It’s drive. Ambition.
When you ask how to find your passion you are asking because you’ve either lost – or never had – the drive, action, and momentum that creates the big things you desire.
I know this feeling. It felt equally like settling down and giving up.
It feels comfortable.
But work & action in the midst of passion feels reckless. It feels dangerous. It hurts so good.
When was the last night you stayed up all night because you were so excited by what you were working on? When was the last time your friends had to tell you they wanted to talk about something other than your next big thing? When was the last time you practically vibrated with the anticipation of your “work?”
That’s passion. The tingling in your fingertips, the fizzling in your brain.
Your passion may spring up out of a multitude of interests. Or there may be one source of this drive. But, don’t confuse passion with the interest itself.
When it comes to harnessing passion in a venture, it’s not your interest that is most important. It’s the drive. Don’t worry so much about discovering what drives you as the drive itself.
Get swept up. Follow the current where it wants to take you.
And stop looking for your one true love.
Big Thinking
I’m going to call you on a particularly pernicious piece of bullsh*t today. It’s this:
Hope.
Let me explain.
Yesterday I was on call with Amanda Farough, the owner of Violet Minded Design. We were discussing the income & sales brackets her new target clients are in. I was a bit surprised that she didn’t have a quick answer because these are celebrities that you & I both know. These aren’t mystery people and they talk about their earning quite a bit because it’s part of their job!
That was the tip off.
If she wasn’t aware of their sales bracket, then she wasn’t aware of her sales goal.
She let me know she “hoped” for a certain figure this year.
“A hope is not a goal,” I said. “A goal has a plan.”
She wrote that down in her notes.
When you have a hope, there’s no ownership attached to that outcome.
You’re shooting blanks and you don’t even know what your target is.
If you’re operating your business on “a hope,” today is the day to get honest about that fact and turn your hope into a goal that shapes your business for the better. Here’s how:
- Fess up. Admit to yourself that the number, the milestone, the ideal you’ve had in mind is only a hope and not a goal.
- Get real. Is what you’ve been hoping for really what you desire? Is it more? Is it less? Is it different? Understand what you really want for yourself & your business. Often when something remains a hope and not a goal, it’s because it doesn’t represent the true desire.
- State the goal. Turn your hope into a goal by stating it directly & with confidence. Don’t dare use the word hope when you state your goal.
- Work backwards. Now that you have the goal, it’s time to work backwards to create the plan. How many widgets do you need to sell to make the sales number? How many phone calls do you need to make to reach the milestone? How many press releases do you need to send?
- Tell someone else. You are not alone. Your business doesn’t operate in a vacuum. Tell someone your goal and use the same language you used when you stated it yourself. Better yet, fill them in on the plan and tell them how they can help. You’ll take the words right out of their mouth.
See the plan you created when you worked backwards? Those are your priorities. Anytime you are faced with the opportunity for something new & shiny in your business, ask yourself if it helps you accomplish any piece of that plan. If the answer is no, ignore the shiny!
Work that doesn’t fit the plan is busy work. It may need done but it probably needs to be done by someone else.
Work that doesn’t fit that plan is keeping you from serving clients the way you want to serve them and it’s keeping you from being served by your business in a way that moves you – as a human being – forward.
When all you have is a hope, that extraneous, sometimes shiny work, is attractive. Even addictive. It helps you keep the hope a hope and nothing more. It gives you an easy out on what could be true goals. It gives you excuses when you really you have none.
Check & recheck. Is it a hope — or is it a goal?
What hope have you been holding onto in lieu of a goal? Click here to share it on Twitter.
Big Thinking, society & culture
“High tolerance for risk.” It’s a qualification for hedge fund managers, venture capitalists, and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. But you?
Most think entrepreneurship is a relatively risky endeavor. Steady pay checks, job descriptions, chains of command, succession plans, and – don’t forget – the unemployment safety net provides much more of a “sure thing.”
I’ve never thought of myself as being especially risk-tolerant. At the same time, I rarely perceive risk. I have always been a fan of worst case scenarios. If I can imagine the worst case scenario and imagine living through that, how risky could something really be? And really what can’t we live through?
But risk is really a matter of perspective. It is the awareness that, while potential is a constant, our actions have the capacity – and the will – to take us step by step, foothold by foothold, towards our of desires.
What I have learned through my own series of risky actions – buying a business, writing ebooks, transitioning brands, hosting a high end live event… – is that the outcome of any “risky” decision is rarely beyond the scope of my own actions. I will make the calls I need to make, write the emails I need to make, produce the content, close the sale, push through the barrier. It’s the risk – or its perception – that allows me to better understand the capacity of my own will and desire.
Of course, embracing risk on the basis of my own merit flirts with the potential for control issues. Yep, got those too. So I balance the knowing of my own actions with the unknowing of what opportunities disaster could bring. And yes, that is quite a happy way to live life.
I know that in disasters there is pain, heartbreak, financial hardship. But there is also revelation and revolution.
A revolution is a way of being that becomes a significantly better way of doing.
– Danielle LaPorte, The Fire Starter Sessions
The perception of risk – of the potential for true loss – fades a way when this balance is understood. The way up is yours to climb. The fall down presents its own glorious uncertainty.
Focus your awareness on the beauty of this balance.
Risk falls away.
You will endure.
***
Today, my friend and partner-in-crime at Reclaiming Wealth, Adam King, is releasing his new book. It’s called Entrepreneurship at Your Own Risk. It’s a personal narrative of risk-taking & shifting perception that is colored by interviews with 7 entrepreneurs, including Jonathan Fields, Mark Silver, and… me!
Pick up your copy today.
Art of Earning, Big Thinking
A guest post by Tara Sophia Mohr, creator of Playing Big.
The story that Tara Gentile told here yesterday is true.
I had come across Tara Gentile via Twitter and was so impressed by her personal story. Then I had a dream that I had done a coaching session with her and it had really helped me.
Yup, a dream.
I wrote her and asked her if we could do some sessions. She said something along the lines of, “Great to hear from you! I can’t imagine I have anything to offer you, but let’s just set up a call to say hi.”
I said: “No, I really want to pay you money. Based on your website, you seem to be very “pro” that whole thing where one person pays another for their work. May I please hire you?”
She persisted. I persisted. After some discussion, we decided to work together.
In her post yesterday, Tara talked about how working with me was a step in her own playing bigger. Believing that she could offer value required defying an inner critic who’d declared she had nothing to offer a woman who wrote for Huffington Post and sported a Stanford MBA.
Her inner critic was very wrong. I’m glad she was willing to question it, because Tara helped me transform my work into a thriving business.
Tara also helped me play bigger. She pushed me to set higher goals for the number of people I could reach, the money I could earn, the partners I could work with. Her vision for me was free of all the stuff my inner critic and limited thinking was telling me.
Together, we looked at my passions and expertise, and discovered what my blog readers wanted more of from me. It turned out that what my audience most wanted to learn was what I most wanted to teach. My biggest passion was their biggest quest: playing bigger. Specifically, how visionary, creative, entrepreneurial women can play bigger.
From there, I developed my Playing Big program – a natural outpouring of all that I already knew from my own journey to playing bigger, from coaching other women, from my MBA training, and from a lifelong passion for helping women share their voices. Over 100 women from around the world – from Dubai to Detroit – have participated in Playing Big, and now an amazing group is signing up for round two.
It’s fascinating to me that for both Tara and I, the presence of another person helped us play bigger. That resonates with one of the big truths I know: we learn to play bigger in supportive community, in relationship.
Okay. On to the fun part.
Because I am such a fan of Tara,
because I am so passionate about fabulous women like you playing bigger,
and because I know that playing big happens because of relationship as well as tools and skills,
I’m sponsoring a scholarship spot for someone to attend her Art of Earning LIVE event Philadelphia.
I’m thrilled to foot the bill, because I know doing so advances my mission: helping brilliant, creative women stepping into their full potential.
If you’d like to enter to win the sponsored spot, ask yourself:
- Are you ready to transform your relationship with earning?
- Do you have the bandwidth to give time mental space to this event this year?
The scholarship covers the $1000 tuition & 3 meals; it does not include travel or accommodation expenses.
If your answer to the two questions above is yes and you can get yourself to and from Philly, please leave a comment below sharing, “What does “playing big” mean for you and your business in 2012? And what do you hope to gain from The Art of Earning live?”
Here’s to your playing big in 2012.
Love,
Tara Sophia Mohr
***
Here’s how it works:
- Post your answer to Tara’s questions in the comments below by Friday, January 20 at noon Eastern.
- Tara & I will pick a winner using good business sense & a bit of feminine intuition.
- The winner will be contacted via email on Monday, January 23. The winner must respond via email within 24 hours.
- No purchase necessary.
- The winner will be announced publicly here at taragentile.com by Tuesday, January 24.
Want to share this your network? Hit the Twitter, G+, or Facebook buttons below or click to tweet below:
Win a ticket to The Art of Earning LIVE & play bigger w your biz in 2012! @taragentile & @tarasophia want YOU: http://bit.ly/y3n4SW
Click to tweet it!
