Entrepreneurship & self-employment are the 21st century’s darlings. If people who have never experienced either of them had to create a PSAT analogy question based on the public perception of what working for yourself is like, they would come up with: Entrepreneurship: Happiness:: a) hot: cold b) dogs: cats c) employment: certain death d) air: water You know the drill. We hear ...
Starting A Project Vs. Starting A Business – The One Glaring Difference
I’m sure you hear it all the time. I’m the founder of (insert name of something)! I know I've said it a lot. In fact, here’s all the things I've said I was a founder of thus far in my life: Accelerated Frame BroWTF 30KMillionaire Status Hero Colipera Brushfire Magnet Ignition Lab Nomading Film Festival If you recognize ...
Why We Secretly Love To Fail
You can’t Messiah your way into success. How many articles/quotes do we need to read to know that Trying’s outcome is a non-guaranteed endeavor? No one succeeds instantly because they read a bunch of tweets that told them a Top 10 list for how to do something. If that fact hasn't sunk in yet, then you're not ...
How Do I Pay You?
In an interview with Zane Lowe, Jay-Z talked about improving. At one point he said: “In anything, you have to take your craft seriously. You work on it everyday.” The entire interview is so much more than that but it was his first sentence of this exchange that stuck with me the most. And it’s been eating ...
If A Tree Falls In The Forest, Do You Have To Start A Company To Fill Its Void?
Before the explosion of possibility the information revolution has brought us, the entrepreneurial world seemed like a tough nut to lay your roots into. Everywhere you looked, there was hierarchy, scarcity, and a bunch of old, gargantuan trees looting most of sunlight. So you felt like you had two choices: 1) Be a leaf on a tree ...
12 Dark – But Hysterical – Emotional Side Effects Of Being A First Time Entrepreneur
If our private thoughts could speak, our businesses would crumble. But if we can’t laugh about that, shame on us. If you’re like me (and a lot of my colleagues), you've been in that deep, dark place as a newbie entrepreneur/business owner/movement starter where you’re so emotionally raw from putting yourself out there time and again, that a ...
Why Creators Secretly Hate The Very Thing They’re Building
We the creator love our finished product. It’s our chance to finally point at the once discombobulated, but now neatly packaged thing we’ve been slaving over for months and months. But we the creator secretly hate to share a finished product too. Because it’s also the time when the culmination of days of sweat and stress ...
Losing Is Not Ok
Dear Business Starters and Movement Creators, This capitalistic world we find ourselves in demands competition. It’s part of our ante to sit at the table. Nike competes with shoe companies. Zappos competes with shoe stores. Flip flops compete with shoes. I’m not advocating approaching business like it was Viking Rule circa 1266 AD, but we can’t have it all. We ...
What’s Your ‘Preneur?
America is land of the entrepreneur. And as our 237th anniversary of being a country sneaks up on us, I thought I’d pay a little comedic homage to the entrepreneurial way of life. We ‘preneurs wear many different tactical and emotional hats on any given day. Sometimes we couldn’t imagine ourselves doing anything but what ...
The 3 Words Professionals Know But Amateurs Don’t
Anyone venturing solo in the service economy for the first time has been faced with the dilemma of this question at family get togethers: “So what is it that you actually do?” Damnit...Someone top me up here, please. Since we are oftentimes unsure of what it is that we do (because we’re not actually doing it), our ...