Lately I’ve been bad at blogging but good at making bill paying revenue and finishing up my first semester as a Ph.D. student.  I’ve been mediocre at spending time with family and friends – but I’m improving in this area.   People talk a lot about balance: living a balanced life, eating a balanced diet, maintaining a balanced workload.  And I’ve tried to be balanced – oh how I’ve tried. 

But here’s the problem.  I’m not convinced balanced works or that it’s even appropriate in every situation.  To me, there seems to be a natural ebb and flow to things.  Sometimes it’s necessary to focus on one or two areas of life for a period of time (hopefully a fairly brief period of time – i.e. weeks or months rather than years).  Other times, it’s easier to dabble in a great many things. 

While definitely unbalanced, I don’t think this is necessarily bad.  In fact I think it might be quite good.  It might even be one of those circumstances when we’re actually being good although we appear to be doing something very bad.  I’m even going to propose that some things, including some truly great things, can’t be accomplished without the type of focus that isn’t possible in a well balanced life.  

So go ahead and enjoy being unbalanced.  I’ve found it does no good to feel bad about it.  Just try not to take it to an extreme for too long. 

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One last note, I think it’s easier (and healthier) to live an unbalanced life when you have a lot of family and friends around to help catch you up in the areas you’ve fallen behind in while you were focusing on something else.

My bookclub recently read The Lady and the Panda by Vicki Constantine Croke.  It’s a biography of Ruth Harkness and subtitled: The true adventures of the first American explorer to bring back China’s most exotic animal.  It’s a great read for so many reasons: there’s adventure, intrigue, romance, science and I even learned some Chinese history.   It’s also well written, although some of the transitions feel abrupt.

Most importantly though, it gives you a sense of what it was like to launch an exploration into the unknown when the world still had blank spaces on its maps.  And guess what, it didn’t seem all that different than launching a new business today.  There’s the idea (let’s bring a panda out of China!) the insight  (Harkin’s decision to aim for a baby panda which would be easier to feed and transport), the audaciousness of the endeavor (a 1930′s New York dress designer venturing into the wilds of China), putting together a team, the money concerns (Harkness did the impossible twice on a shoestring budget), the intrigue with competitors, the camraderie, the doubt, the excitement, the fear, the joy of success and the continual quest to repeat the experience.    

What I’m saying is that I believe entrepreneurs are the adventurers of the twenty first century.  Yes, I know you thought it was the extreme sport people or the astro/cosmonauts or maybe even the reality tv exhibitionists.  But really it’s the entrepreneurs.  They’re pushing back the boundaries of the known and unknown every day in ways big and small.  They’re risking it all on a gut feeling, careful research and tons of hard work.  They’re exploring new ideas and business models.  Entrepreneurs expand our world today, just like the explorers of yesterday.

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My friend Mary Kay and I have been walking at the local zoo (the Henry Doorly Zoo) every Sunday.  Lately it’s been cooler and we’ve been visiting the butterfly pavilion to warm up.  I’ve enjoyed it immensely.  The multitude of beautiful, varied, delicate, fluttering butterflies remind me greatly of entrepreneurial dreams.  Think about it, they’re both unique, erratic, ephemeral and yet hardier than they seem.   

Three weeks ago we saw a terrible site at the exit of the pavilion.  A boy crushed the body of a beautiful butterfly when his parents told him he couldn’t take it with him.   They seemed ashamed of his behavior, but didn’t reprimand him as he threw the dying butterfly down on the path where it fluttered its wings a bit before lying still. 

This disturbing image has stuck with me the last few weeks, popping into my head at unexpected moments.  It’s a powerful image and reminds me greatly of how alarmingly common it is for childish people to squash other people’s entrepreneurial dreams like that little boy crushed the butterfly.  It’s also common for the people around them to not like what they’re doing, but to not call them on their behavior. 

The moral of the tale?  The next time you see someone squashing someone else’s dream, speak up.  And if you’re ever tempted to squash a dream yourself, please pause and remember that little boy and the butterfly.  Is it really your place to kill that particular butterfly dream?

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P.S. The Henry Doorly Zoo is one of the many reasons I love living in Nebraska.

October 28, 2010 was the 124th birthday of the Statue of Liberty

Matt Ridley (author of The Rational Optimist), said it best when he was interviewed on the PBS Newshour    http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/business/july-dec10/recession_08-19.html

For me that [The Statue of Liberty] symbolizes everything  that’s been incredible about this country [USA] in particular and the world in general for 50,000 years.  Which is that, when we’ve let people do what they want, when we’ve let them get on with their lives socially, politically, economically – then prosperity just kind of happens.  People get better off. 

Celebrate Lady Liberty’s birthday and all the lovely rights, freedoms and opportunities she represents. 

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To be happy at home is the ultimate result of all ambition – Dr. Samuel Johnson

I stumbled across this quote recently and have stayed stuck on it for several weeks now.  It seems to be a simple truth, and yet it can’t be that simple or we’d all be happy at home.

I’ve given it a lot of thought and suspect that we lose our way to happiness at home because we forget or never fully explore what being happy at home really looks like.  In fact I suspect that being happy at home has nothing to do with the size or the material contents of our actual physical homes.  Instead it’s more about the people, the pets, the memories, and maybe even the creativity enabling and peaceful resting spaces our homes contain.   

Do you know what makes you happy at home?  Is the way you’re spending your time – your hours, days, weeks, months and years – really contributing to your ultimate ambition of being happy at home? 

Below is a picture of one of the spots in which I’m most happiest at home.  Nearly every day this space  allows me to be productive and creative while still interacting with the pets in a way which isn’t distracting but still makes them feel loved. 

I have something to confess.  I have become fascinated with other people’s business stories.  The seeds were planted when I saw “Julie and Julia“ while still in the midst of running my first business.  I am a big Julia Child fan and was surprised (and yet comforted) to realize she and her two co-authors argued over royalty distributions.  If the great Julia Child couldn’t create without encountering bumps in the road, how could I expect to do so?

However, my fascination fully bloomed when I recovered from my meeting with the successful (and really very kind) Lincoln businessman who quizzed me unrelentingly about my first business and then explained that everyone has at least one bad business experience in their life (click here if your memory needs refreshing).    

So you can imagine how I anticipated seeing “The Social Network.”  My bookclub had even read “The Facebook Effect” the month before so I had an inkling of what to expect.  However, I was still surprised.  Not by the movie so much, but by how my fascination shifted afterwards. 

It may not seem amazingly insightful to you, but then you may not have yet experienced the hazy fog that can envelope you when you start a businesses.  There are so many unknowns and so many wrong steps that can be taken.  So many decisions to be made and so many people saying so many different things (and even the same expert saying absolutely opposite things in the same breath).  Most of all, there is so much work (physical, mental, emotional) that needs to get done at the right time – and the right time can be one of the unknowns.   And there is so little restful sleep or time to think… 

As I sat in the dark after the movie, not really seeing the credits or hearing the chatter around me, all I could think was that everyone had a little bit of the truth, but that every one of them believed they had all of the truth.  No one was completely right or completely wrong.

I have been trying to completely avoid all the noise associated with the start-up fog, but I think the real trick is to make and take and brutally defend the time to be quiet so you can better discern and piece together the bits of true and useful information for moving the business forward.  In other words you remove yourself from the start-up fog so that you can make more sense of it and discern the bits of truth when you return to the fog.  How you do this I’m still uncertain. 

Like I said, you probably won’t think this is very insightful if you’ve never experienced startup fog.  When you do experience it though, I hope you remember this idea.

Looking back, I don’t know how I could have demanded the time in some situations to think before taking action.  I do suspect that it would have been easier to make the demand if I’d had more sleep and more confidence. 

Which gives me hope. 

Here’s an image from my last experience with physical fog.  Traffic was reduced to 20MPH on a 55MPH state highway. 

For the record, my new fascination is strategies for coping with start-up fog.  Let me know if you have any thoughts…

Two things happened recently.  First, a professor told me that he thought I was really brave to make the transition back to school (at my age was sort of implied).  Then I stumbled across this quote from E.E. Cummings:

It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are.

The thing is, I think they might both be wrong.  Rather than courage and bravery, I think it might first take fear.  Fear that you’ll be more miserable not making a change.  Fear that you’ll slowly die (creatively, intellectually, emotionally and yes even physically) doing the same job year after year.  Fear that the world will be missing something wonderful because you wouldn’t get off your butt and create it.  Fear that not changing will end up being harder and more difficult and more gut wrenching than the change process itself. 

Besides, can we really be courageous without fear?  Does it qualify as bravery if we’re not at least a little afraid?  Can we grow into what we’re really capable of doing if we don’t fear the consequences of not growing?   Fear is an impetus for action.

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Or can your fear

actually help you

move forward?

I did a lot this summer, but the biggest thing was probably starting my doctorate studies in Public Administration at the University of Nebraska at Omaha’s School of Public Affairs.  

It’s been exciting, but also a bit of a transition into being a full time student again.  I love all the new ideas and the new perspectives they allow me to have on old projects.  They’ve also given me a lot of new projects including joining a team that’s writing a policy manual for a county department. 

I suspect future posts will dwell a lot on balancing school and business development, as well as what new ideas have me amazed, excited, stumped or overwhelmed that particular week.  Hold on, the fun has just begun…

We’ve struggled with the flu at my house during the last week.  The dog got sick and then the cat and I got stressed.  It’s been unpleasant and I’ve had enough of cleaning floors. 

On the positive side, it’s led to a lot of thinking about how all sorts of things are contagious – including ideas and skills such as entrepreneurship. 

Seriously, I think people might catch entrepreneurship.  Well maybe not catch it in a viral sense, but in the sense of “Hey, if my silly neighbor and idiot brother-in-law can both have an idea and sell a product or service, then I bet I can too!”  Or “Hey, I think I can do what my friend is doing in her basement only with this other product that I know more about!”

And when enough people start thinking this way, a whole physical region might get a reputation for being entrepreneurial.  Which would draw more infected or want to be infected people to the area. 

The question is how do you intentionally spread the infection?  And how do you spread the infection most effectively?  How many typhoid Marys do you need and what exactly do they look like?

I suppose the real question is whether you’re contagious enough to spread the ideas and skills to transform others into entrepreneurs.  In other words, are you an inspiring innoveer?

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I have a little dream and it looks something like this:

How I think about my work is indistinguishable from the way I think about my needlepoint or cooking: here is the project I’m involved in.  It is play.  In this sense all my life is spent in play – sewing or needlepoint, or picking flowers or writing, or buying groceries. – Diane Johnson

Is this impossible?  It has been for me so far.  But I continue to hope, work and dream with this destination in mind.

Below is one of my favorite pieces from Patricia Scarborough, a Nebraska woman who seems to have mastered the combination of work and play…

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