After a brief blogging respite and a busy summer, our work has reached a new stage of development that we wanted to share before going back to our regularly scheduled blog.  Among the highlights to note:

The Life Entrepreneurs Exercises  are now live on our web site.  These exercises, which track the flow of the book, are designed as a free personal and leadership development activity to help you lead an extraordinary life and maximize your impact at work or in your community activities.  When done comprehensively, this set of exercises leads to what we call an Entrepreneurial Life Plan (ELP).  [These exercises accompany the Life Entrepreneurs Personal Assessment, which is designed to provide you with an indication of how well your life currently matches with the framework outlined in the book. Taking this assessment is meant to be a reflective exercise that can help inform your current life path.]

We are now offering a number of exciting and dynamic workshops and webinars  for individuals and organizations interested in life entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial leadership at work.

We are also talking with networks of life and leadership coaches about embedding our frameworks into their coaching practices.  We are thrilled with this development since it will allow us to reach more people.  If you are an interested coach or interested in coaching, please contact us.

We are building out a national leadership development practice  for organizations interested in creating high-performance cultures by harnessing the power of entrepreneurial leadership. 

Finally, we continue to speak to student and professional groups across the country, and have recently established writing partnerships with Harvard Business Online , Inc.com and the Washington Times.  We will be posting summaries of these columns and blogs on this blog, with links to the full articles on the respective sites.

As always, we look forward to hearing from you and continuing the conversation.

[Note that you must register on the site to access the Assessment and Exercises.  If you have previously registered, you will be prompted to log in.]

In response to the blog below, a good friend just sent the following quote from the environmental rabble-rouser Edward Abbey.  Something we would be well served to remember in our busy lives…

“One final paragraph of advice: do not burn yourselves out. Be as I am - a reluctant enthusiast….a part-time crusader, a half-hearted fanatic. Save the other half of yourselves and your lives for pleasure and adventure. It is not enough to fight for the land; it is even more important to enjoy it. While you can. While it’s still here. So get out there and hunt and fish and mess around with your friends, ramble out yonder and explore the forests, climb the mountains, bag the peaks, run the rivers, breathe deep of that yet sweet and lucid air, sit quietly for a while and contemplate the precious stillness, the lovely, mysterious, and awesome space. Enjoy yourselves, keep your brain in your head and your head firmly attached to the body, the body active and alive, and I promise you this much; I promise you this one sweet victory over our enemies, over those desk-bound men and women with their hearts in a safe deposit box, and their eyes hypnotized by desk calculators. I promise you this; You will outlive the bastards.” [from a speech that Ed Abbey first gave to environmentalists in Missoula, Montana in 1978, and in Colorado which was published in High Country News in the 1970s or early 1980s under the title “Joy, Shipmates, Joy.”] 

My reading of Eckhart Tolle’s book, A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose, happened to coincide with the birth of my daughter Anya.  The timing was propitious.  What better time to contemplate life’s meaning and mystery than during the emergence of new life, a moment of indescribable wonder and awe? 

I found A New Earth to be a thoughtful synthesis of spiritual, religious, and philosophical teachings from the ages—from Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, and Taoism to transcendentalism and existentialism, even drawing upon psychology and science.  The book is one part spiritual manifesto and one part social commentary (though much better at the former), touching on not only God and immortality but also childhood, parenthood, television, the media, the environment, emotion, addiction, and more.  Tolle takes us on an expansive journey with the ancients and the moderns, from Lao Tzu, Siddhartha, and the Oracle of Delphi to Milan Kundera, Albert Einstein, and Stephen Hawking. 

He explains that the central problem of our existence is the human ego.  Of course, this claim is not new.  According to Tolle, we fritter away far too much of our lives on superficial matters and concerns (looks, possessions, wealth, status), falling unknowingly into traps set by our ego.  Essentially, we lose ourselves in our mind—in the world of things, thoughts, and forms.  We play a role in work and life whose drama is all about feeding the insatiable needs of that ego, inflating itself at the detriment of others.  He writes, “The ego creates separation, and separation causes suffering,” essentially creating a “background of unhappiness in our lives.”  This has become the primary source of individual and collective dysfunction in the world, from individuals to nation-states and civilizations.  The essential problem is that the ego takes us away from Being, from being present in the endless moment of life in an enlightened state of consciousness.

For Tolle, spiritual transformation is not some distant abstraction requiring decades of worship or piety.  Rather, it is readily accessible to all who are willing to quiet the incessant stream of thinking and worry, who learn to be still and present in the moment—and open to the unfolding of Being.  I find in this a deep and abiding humility—the universal yearning to be connected to the universe, surely a calling higher than our wish to feel important or to be viewed as extraordinary.

Part of the wisdom here is the simplicity of intentionality: Am I doing what I am doing now for its own sake, or am I actually feeding my ego?  [Tolle writes, “You are present when what you are doing is not primarily a means to an end (money, prestige, wanting) but fulfilling in itself, when there is joy and aliveness in what you do.”]

This book raises a central, vexing dilemma for our time: how to reconcile the modern world we live in with all its complexities and demands with the timeless spiritual realm?  Indeed, how to live?  Tolle writes that “spiritual truth is diametrically opposed to the values of our contemporary culture and the way it conditions people to behave…. The collective disease of humanity is that people are so engrossed in what happens, so hypnotized by the world of fluctuating forms, so absorbed in the content of their lives, they have forgotten the essence, that which is beyond content, beyond form, beyond thought.  They are so consumed by time that they have forgotten eternity, which is their origin, their home, their destiny.”

He goes on: “Make sure your vision or goal is not an inflated image of yourself and therefore a concealed form of ego, such as wanting to become a movie star, a famous writer, or a wealthy entrepreneur.  Also make sure your goal is not focused on having this or that, such as a mansion by the sea, your own company, or ten million dollars in the bank…. Instead… see yourself inspiring countless people with your work and enriching their lives.  Feel how that activity enriches or deepens not only your life but that of countless others.”

It is evident that we have largely embraced the material realm of time, stress, pressure, ego, worry, and hyper-activity to the profound detriment of our spiritual health.  But the spiritual message of “making peace with the present moment,” of “not minding what happens,” and of nonresistance, nonjudgment, and nonattachment does elicit moral and practical dilemmas when we consider the problem of injustice, suffering, and evil in this world.  Tolle does talk about “right action” aligned with the universe’s deeper truths, but is the approach too passive?  Does it ask for too much acceptance?  How to account for the fact that great and good deeds have been accomplished through striving, through righteous indignation that takes suffering and injustice head on?  Is making peace with the present moment enough, or is there more to our inner transformation?

A New Earth makes the case that joy comes not from what we do but from a state of being.  While there is great wisdom in that, I wonder if the truth isn’t closer to a dynamic and mysterious dance between doing and being, where the two harmoniously infuse each other with both joy and meaning.

18 minutes to give the talk of your life.  Go.  This is the challenge that speakers at the annual TED conference take on.  But these aren’t just your average speakers.  These are some of the most creative, path-breaking, life entrepreneurs on the planet ranging from Jane Goodall  to Bono to Stephen Hawking .  Started in 1984, the TED conference aspired to bring together leading thinkers from the three worlds of technology, entertainment, and design.  Today, the annual gathering attracts over 1,000 attendees to Long Beach, California who sign up well over a year in advance.  The format is relatively simple: over four days 50 people are invited to give their 18 minute talk.  

At TED’s main website one can check out over 200 of these talks under the theme of “ideas worth spreading.”  There are dozens worth watching but among my favorites are Amy Tan’s reflection on creativity and the powerful personal journey of Bill Strickland  rising up from inner-city Pittsburgh to create the Manchester Bidwell Corporation, one of the most successful and innovativejob placement programs in the country.  A reader of our blog also alerted us to Jill Taylor’s fascinating story.  A brain scientist who had a front row audience to her own stroke, Taylor lived to tell about it and is now driving her work in highly creative directions due to the enhanced activity of her right brain.

Let us know which ones are your favorites.  The only caution is that this is an addictive resource.  Though it may just be the inspiration to craft your own 18 minute story…

Almost five years ago, my wife and I “eloped” with ninety of our closest friends and family to a small island off the NE coast of Puerto Rico named Vieques.  It was a wonderful celebration of life and love as we said our vows beneath a pair of palm trees overlooking the crashing waves.

As life has charged ahead with the arrival two children (our daughter Maya is three and our son Liam was born just four months ago), a move to Seattle and back to DC, and new professional adventures – Vieques began to seem like a brilliant dream.  Until last week…

In the midst of a family vacation to Puerto Rico, my wife and I slipped away to Vieques with both children.   We were nervous to return.  What if things were different?  What if the reality spoiled the magic of our memories?  Ultimately, though, this is a special place that we didn’t want to recede further into history.  Rather it is a place we want to stay connected to, to share with our children, and, Inshallah, our grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

The ferry ride across from Fajardo was not an auspicious beginning.  The seas were rough and soon our daughter experienced her first bout of sea-sickness.  When we disembarked into the heat and dust of the island’s main town, Isabella Segunda, with two unhappy children we wondered what in the world we were thinking.  But then the memories started kicking in – there was the place we had first met Father Tomas, a Panamanian Priest committed to social justice who had married us.  There was the place we got our wedding certificate.  This tucked away island that had seemed so far away seemed to be welcoming us home again.

Within an hour of arriving, we were bouncing along familiar roads in a beat up rental jeep – delighting Maya with close encounters with the island’s ubiquitous stray horses who graze along the side of the roads.   Neeeeeeeeeighhhh she shouted into the air happily as we skirted on by.  Lunch was at Banana’s an old favorite watering hole overlooking the sea and we wandered down to say hello to a fellow who got us flowers for our wedding – and sold an ice cream to Maya.  Old friendships and new connections. 

We eventually made our way to the Inn on the Blue Horizon – the site of our wedding.  The ownership has changed but when we explained our visit, they welcomed us with open arms.   Maya ran ahead – running through the open-aired restaurant and bar, doing a quick tour of the dance floor where the island’s only band had us twirling until the wee hours, and then down the path towards the ocean where my radiant bride had walked arm and arm with her Dad.

The two palm trees beneath which we had exchanged home-made vows had now spawned their own children – two small palms dancing side by side in the breeze.  As my wife and I stood hand in hand (Maya now climbing down a dangerous cliff towards the water and Liam sweating in his carrier), it felt like we were where we needed to be.  Life has moved on – fast and furious.  But we remain rooted to the important things.  And by reconnecting to the past we were helping to renew for the future where the priorities are clear and the beauty of the world is in abundance.

When I came across the recent feature story in the Denver Post on “mompreneurs” (check it out here), it reinforced our findings on why entrepreneurship is such a growing and dynamic phenomenon today.  These mothers are launching exciting enterprises while raising families, tapping into a deep-seated need not only for fulfillment and contribution but also for flexibility and integration in their lives. 

The article documents “a rising tide of women with little children who have dumped their corporate gigs for startups that let them mind the kids and contribute to the family’s bottom line. They’re marketing from their basements, bringing the little ones to the home office and satisfying their entrepreneurial urges with work that keeps a flexible schedule…. For many of the moms, the mompreneur route holds out the potential for something tantalizing: flexibility.”

A few examples in the Denver metro area:

• Stephanie Carter, a former lawyer who started Wallaroo Hat Co. and has sold $3 million worth of hats in a year, hiring 40 sales reps nationwide. 
• Susan Lyles, founder and president of And Toto Too Theater Company, a nonprofit that promotes women in the arts.
• Olivia Omega-Logan, a former ad exec working 60 hours a week who launched Baby Candy, a store selling clothes for kids wrapped like pieces of candy.  She founded the company when her baby contracted a virus and couldn’t go to day care.

Shannon Henry, a former writer with the Washington Post who co-founded the Cooking with Friends Club, says, “It seemed like the right thing for my life at the moment.  I think a lot of new moms are so in love with their kids, and they want to be in love with their work, too.  But it takes them away from their kids.  I think that’s why a lot of women become mompreneurs.  They want to figure out their lives in a more flexible way…. It’s natural for my lifestyle… for me, my work life and my regular life and closer together than they ever have been before.”

In our book, we interviewed several mompreneurs, including Stacey Boyd, who founded Savvy Source for Parents, Bridget Bradley Gray, who founded Wiggle Room, and Linda Mason, who founded Bright Horizons Family Solutions.  With the latter having 600 centers nationwide, 18,000 employees, and the honor of being named nine times to FORTUNE magazine’s prestigious list of the “100 Best Companies to Work For,” you can see that the mompreneurship spectrum is as wide as it is fascinating.

Other famous examples include the founders of Jibbitz and Baby Einstein.  Mompreneurs now even have their own magazine, club, and blog.

And let’s not forget the intrepid dadpreneurs out there—like my brother, a stay-at-home dad who recently launched his own company called Custom Homes of the Rockies.

Who among us doesn’t want to create an extraordinary life?  Who among us doesn’t want to integrate our life and work in ways that allow us to make contributions and find meaning and fulfillment?  For growing numbers of moms—and dads—entrepreneurship is a rewarding stepping stone to these worthy pursuits.

There is a lot of great new music out these days.  One band that I am particularly fired up about is named I See Hawks in LA.  Their new album, Hallowed Ground, is their fourth and shows their ongoing evolution as a group (I’ve been listening to them since their inception since their lead singer, Rob Waller, is an old friend).   Solidly grounded in a country-western tradition but laced with some grit from their adopted home city of Los Angeles, there is a lot here to like.  Imagine a bit of a mix between Josh Ritter and Emmylou Harris (with a little George Thorogood thrown in for good measure).  These guys also have a following in Scotland and Ireland and this album was cut following a tour to the old country which shows up in songs like The Salty Sea.  If it sounds like an eclectic mix, it is.  And definitely worth checking out.

There is never a better time to be a life entrepreneur.  Every day there is a new idea or article sparking this conviction.  Right now, for example, I’m sitting on a train to NYC and just read an article in Fast Company about the company Ning.  The cover story  outlines Ning’s “viral expansion loop” business model.  Essentially, it has created a platform that allows users to create their own mini social networks and then invite other users to join.  Deeply passionate about your local minor league baseball team and want to connect with others who share this passion?  Then create your own site using Ning.  Ning monetizes this growth by placing very targeted ads on each of the newly created sites (called Ning nets).  And grow it has.  As of this reading, the company is reporting more than 230,000 Ning nets – up from 60,000 a year ago.

Viral expansion is not new – just think about free email provider Hotmail which exploded to 30 million users in just 30 months.  But what makes Ning notable (besides being co-founded by Marc Andreesen from Netscape fame), is that this concept accelerates our ability to build highly personalized platforms based on our interests and passions.  Importantly, it also DRAMATICALLY reduces our cost of entry.

Have a dream of starting a charter school in your community?  Want to gauge interest in a new public school by other members in your community?  Want to connect with others who have done the same?  Rather than sketching out the idea in a static document and then reaching out piece-meal to neighbors through email and flyers – you can now build a site dedicated to this concept and then invite others to join.  They, in turn, can invite others to join the conversation and a community is born.  Rather than being restricted to your immediate network of friends – the viral nature of this concept allows you to rapidly create a diverse network of people who become invested in the idea and want to help it succeed.  The positive network effect is born and what started as a distant dream can quickly become a reachable reality.

Sites like Ning can’t provide you a clear sense of who you are and where you want to go – the foundation of the entrepreneurial life path.  But once you start figuring this out and waking up to the vast amount of opportunities on the horizon, there has never been a better time to create a shared vision of an exciting new future and making it happen.

Lately we’ve been giving talks to students on college campuses.  The question arises: what does life entrepreneurship offer students as they plot their career paths?

Let’s start with the common traps that students fall into as they set out on their first jobs.  First, they walk a path that others have chosen.  Whether it’s to obtain their parents’ approval, gain the acceptance or admiration of their peers, or please a mentor, they set valiantly off on someone else’s career path and only later come to realize that it may not be right for them.  Sometimes years or decades down the road, they stop and wonder: How did I get here?  Why did I choose this path? 

Second, they stick with the first path they came upon.  They commit too soon.  They start telling all their family and friends about their respectable decision for a career path and then all of a sudden, they’re locked.  According to the late Peter Drucker, “The probability that the first choice you make is right for you is roughly one in a million.  If you decide that your first choice was the right one, chances are you are just plain lazy.”  Yet, some people dutifully continue marching down that path. 

Why is that?  To begin with, the switching costs are high.  We earn salary increases and promotions.  We develop expertise and a network.  We are needed in our roles and appreciated for our contributions.  Most importantly, we adopt the persona of our work, with our whole identity sometimes subsumed by what we happen to be doing (even if it’s the wrong thing).  

Third, we postpone happiness.  The common view one generation back was that work was something you did until around age 65, or earlier if you’re lucky, and then you retire and enjoy life.  So we sacrifice today to obtain happiness tomorrow.  Or we just take this brutal job today with these brutal hours “for our family” with the comforting notion that it’s only temporary and that we’ll pay our dues now and start doing what we want in five years, or ten, or…. The problem is that we get into the habit of postponing happiness and those glory days never appear.

These are common traps, but what to do about them?  What is needed is a psychological holding environment for career experimentation and change, recognizing that our path is likely to be winding and cutting ourselves a break for not having all the answers out of the gates. 

Sure we must choose wisely—and for the right reasons.  But when you’re twenty and in college and lacking much professional experience (if you have any at all), that’s hard to do.  So let’s posit that most of us won’t hit the jackpot and figure it all out right up front.  And that our career path—and life path—will be winding.  One of the themes we heard from the people we interviewed—all successful business and social entrepreneurs or leaders—was that their path made more sense looking back than it did looking forward.  Many were surprised by where their path took them.  None ended up in the exact position he or she envisioned way back when. 

That argues for building flexibility into our planning and thinking.  That’s what I mean by the right psychological holding environment.  We need to make decisions based on an elegant combination of what our head dictates makes sense and what our heart reveals to feel right.  Most important, I think, is the latter.  We need to evaluate with brutal honesty how things are working out—after giving it a fair shake—and listen to our gut without having overcommitted by adopting that work persona and subsuming our identity to the current job or our current role.  Does this feel right?  Am I leveraging my strengths and deploying my passions? Am I making meaningful contributions?  Through an iterative process of action and reflection—with a heavy dose of searching conversations with loved ones, friends, and mentors—we can begin to find our direction in life, the wide swath on the horizon that we can steer toward and feel like we are on a true path. 

Second, we must “own” our career path.  That begins with planning with our whole lives in mind, as Aristotle urged us to do, and discovering our core identity: What are our values?  What do we want in our relationships?  What will our legacy be?  News flash: career planning = life planning = career planning = life planning.  Our work and life must be integrated pursuits, grounded in a solid core identity that fits with who we really are and what direction we want to head with our lives—a choice that is ours to make (or delegate or duck). 

Owning it also means “managing up,” if we happen to have a boss, and specifying clearly what we’re hoping to do and learn, as well as remaining “switched on” to opportunities for advancement and growth.  That also means evaluating and tweaking our career path in an ongoing process.

If we are contemplating a career change, sometimes we fall victim to the assumption that we can think it through perfectly.  New research is indicating that we should instead “craft experiments,” taking action in small ways to gain valuable exposure to fields of interest before jumping in head-first.  When we’re ready, though, we must be willing to jump off the train we’re on in order to find a truer path.

Sometimes plotting an extraordinary career path means allowing ourselves to try things and see what happens.  Allowing ourselves to not have all the answers.  To go down a path and discover that it was a road to nowhere.  To take risks and be unconventional.  To listen to our inner muse.  It’s more art than science.  It’s a messy process.  But the price of not getting our hands dirty this way is too often a life of regret, a career path that’s respectable but not remarkable, productive but not true.  Which will you choose?

Recently Randy Pausch, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University, posted a video of his last lecture online, along with an accompanying article.  Check it out here—and also here for an abbreviated version of his lecture. 

What makes it especially poignant is that he was told last year that he is dying of pancreatic cancer and had only months to live.  The lecture is actually a “message in a bottle” to his children.  As a father of a young daughter, I get where he’s coming from.  Here are a few gems from his remarkable missive:

• Dream Big: “Give yourself permission to dream. Fuel your kids’ dreams too.”
• Dare to Take a Risk: “Experience is what you get when you don’t get what you wanted. And it can be the most valuable thing you have to offer.”
• Always Have Fun: “I came to an early realization. Each of us must make a decision…. Am I a fun-loving Tigger or a sad-sack Eeyore? It’s clear where I stand.”
• Ask for What You Want: “Ask. More often than you’d suspect, the answer you’ll get is, ‘Sure.’”
• Look for the Best in Everybody: “I got this advice from Jon Snoddy, my hero at Disney Imagineering. ‘If you wait long enough,’ he said, ‘people will surprise and impress you…. In the end, people will show you their good side. Just keep waiting. It will come out.’”
• Make Time for What Matters: “Time is all you have. And you may find one day that you have less than you think.”
• Let Kids Be Themselves: “Because I’ve been so vocal about my childhood dreams, people have asked me about the dreams I have for my own kids. As a professor, I’ve seen how disruptive it can be for parents to have specific dreams for their children…. Kids, don’t try to figure out what I wanted you to become. I want you to become what you want to become.”

When I was in college myself, I took a class called “Theories of the Good Life.”  In it, we not only surveyed what the great sages and civilizations have said about what it means to lead “the good life,” we also learned from poets, novelists, and people on their deathbeds about what it means to really live.  It was a potent reminder of the importance of making the best use of the lives that we’ve been given, and of thinking about our purpose in life and the legacy we hope to leave behind. 

What will your last lecture be?