All work is creative work if done by a thinking mind.
-Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged
Blah.
This week in New York has been nothing but rain. And the greyness of the days has only been matched by the greyness of my small Harlem office as I tapped away at emails and lists of ideas for new services.
Monday and Tuesday were ok, but as Wednesday and then Thursday and then Friday wore wearily on, the color utterly drained out of my week.
So on late Friday evening I gave up trying to work and went for a walk.
I’d just recently finished The Greatest Show on Earth by Richard Dawkins. The next book on my iPod was Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell‘s latest, which I halfheartedly – and then with increasing excitement – listened to as I walked along through the evening mist.
Gladwell’s thesis is that no person of great wealth or fame or genius – the “outlier” of the title – gets that way solely through his own ingenuity or talent. All outliers are, says Gladwell, the beneficiaries of some sort of assistance which helps them rise to glory above their equally talented or deserving peers.
As I walked through the dark streets of New York listening to Malcolm Gladwell talk about Jewish garment workers in the 1920s, a sense of something came back to me. Something that had been missing for many days.
Hard work is a prison sentence only if it does not have meaning. Once it does, it becomes the kind of thing that makes you grab your wife around the waist and dance a jig.
-Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers
That was it. What I’d been missing. Not the meaning, per se, but the tie-in between the actions I am taking today and my ultimate success. The tie-ins between the (tedious, laborious, repetitive) work it takes to start up this business and my ultimate goals.
Goals.
I think it was Pam Slim who said in her book that “hating your boss is not a business plan” and (in much nicer terms than the following) that those people who never go beyond hating their boss end up failing at business.
The people who never have a goal larger than “I want to stop working for The Man” don’t make very good entrepreneurs.
So…
What is the goal of your business? Simply to feed your family? It can’t be just that – working for someone else would feed them just as well. (Better, some months.) To be your own boss? Well… that’s not an end in itself. What would you want to be your own boss for? The goal is probably deeper than either of those two things.
The goal, I’ll postulate, is to create some sort of meaning for yourself. A deeper meaning that involves more than just the work you’re doing – the designing or crafting or writing or speaking or whatever activity you’re getting paid for.
A deeper meaning?
So… why is it that we – you and I – keep going? What is the meaning of owning your own business? Of being an entrepreneur?
Here’s the meaning I’m trying to create with inspirIT:
1. Helping the people the world needs overcome the technological hurdles that are preventing them from doing the things that only they can do.
2. Living our (mine, Greg’s, James’s) values by working with and for the people who we admire, and whose message and/or purpose we support.
3. Giving the people we work with techno-joy instead of techno-fear. Teaching them that all problems are solvable.
Each of these things represents a huge positive change in someone’s life – and, hopefully, in the world at large.
What’s yours?
Do you think of your own business in this way? About the larger impact you’re able to make on the world? About why you started in the first place? Not necessarily about the abstract “meaning of being an entrepreneur” – because I’m not sure that there is one. (And if there is I’m not sure if it’s the same for everyone.) I mean thinking about the meaning to yourself – and the meaning for the world – of your business.
(I’d love to know – please do leave a comment if you’d like to share).
So what the hell is “entrepreneur juice?”
It’s what Malcolm Gladwell topped up for me.
It’s what Pam Slim and Jonathan Fields topped up for me when they spoke together in New York a month ago.
Entrepreneur juice is purpose. Entrepreneur juice is goals. Entrepreneur juice is a feeling of connectedness and efficacy.
Lesson?
Take the time often to reconnect with your soul – and the soul of your business. Not in the cheesy woo woo way, but in the way that’s going to give you that clear vision, purpose, and goal. In the way that’s going to show you how the actions you’re taking right now are – or are not – aligned with those things.
It’ll either re-invigorate you to soldier on with what you’re doing, or it’ll show you what and how to stop.
Or at least it did for me.
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Thanks for this post, Charlotte.
I enjoyed reading it very much. I got a real, visceral sense of your own voice in this post, too.
I’m totally on board with the value of working with and for people I admire. Also, with making the world a better, happier, funner place to live.
Let’s make it happen