Tag: entrepreneurship

Success is when risk-taking self asks sensible self “Can we still be friends?”

Ringmaster David Cohn challenged us to a carnival of #fail. What follows is my total cop out.

In life and in entrepreneurship, I don’t believe in “failure,” “failing” or “fail.” I believe instead that we make mistakes. One minute, I am absolutely right and the next I discover I am absolutely wrong.

It is at these “ooops!” moments when the outlook becomes bleak and I see my project, my ambition, my plan as a failure. My life in entrepreneurship becomes a spectacular succession of risk-taking and disappointed aspirations beginning in awkward childhood, continuing through painful adolescence, blossoming in adulthood and now coming to fullness in middle age.

This is when I have to say “Stop!” Risk-taking self asks responsible self: “Can we still be friends?”

The essence of this lesson is contained completely in Todd Rungren’s brilliant and wise song.

LaLaLa LaLaLa LaLaLa LaLaLa LaLaLa LaLaLa LaLaLa LaLaLa LaLaLa LaLaLa LaLaLa

We shake hands and make up. This friendship with myself means I will see the experience as a learning not a failure. To judge a life experience as a failure is to invite a mindworm into your life, one that will swell to monstrous proportions with every inevitable misstep and block your path forward. Banish the mindworm!

This doesn’t mean I shove my less-than-successes under the rug, but it does mean that I accept them fully. Indeed, in private and with special friends, I honor my failures. This is part of entrepreneurship. It also answers my personal question: What is success?

I won’t bore you with a personal story because I believe that no matter what our material success, disappointment in ourselves is too often the human condition. And after long practice I have learned that self flagellation is the root of more disappointment. So although I might fail to change the world’s view so that it no longer condemns “failure,” I can at minimum adjust my own point of view to be friends with myself, and view my seemingly endless capacity to make monumental mistakes with compassion and acceptance.

“To err is human, to forgive divine,” said Alexander Pope. My goal is to extend this divinity of forgiveness to myself and others as much as I can day by day.

“Make no mistake, Let’s end quickly. But can we still be friends?”

The would-be entrepreneurs among us must nurture self love, because it is with passion and self confidence that we beat back the dark times and shake the feeling of being a total doofus. I know this from personal experience and from interviewing dozens of entrepreneurs about their failures and successes.

What I learned from these interviews is that the key to “failing” well is to understand when to quit. You’ve made a mistake, you’re digging a hole and it is getting deeper. Stop digging — now! Honor the work you’ve done and move on. It’s a new day and a new game.

“Fail” with grace. Be delicate with your fragile self. It’s not about being tough. It’s about being real.

“I try to live my life where I end up at a point where I have no regrets. So I try to choose the road that I have the most passion on because then you can never really blame yourself for making the wrong choices. You can always say you’re following your passion. “ Darren Aronofsky

Easy for Aronofsky to say – look at all his success. But look at all his wackiness too. His first movie, “Pi” was about Hasidic Jews, the Torah and the stock market. Sound like a blockbuster to you?

Life really is about following your passion, because life without passion is empty. But don’t kid yourself and think there is only one passion. There are many, as Silicon Valley’s Randy Komisar told me in an interview nearly a decade ago.

And one very important passion for everyone is family and friends.

“Grains of sand one by one, before you know it – all gone.”

Part of being friends with yourself is being there for your friends and family. With their welfare in mind, recheck your professional passion alignment regularly. The entrepreneurship direction that makes sense at 20 years old might not make sense at 30, 40, 50 and beyond.

To add some grist to the mill, and to fortify what might seem a specious argument, I’ve included a syllabus of sorts and some favorite teaching moments.

Yippie! Another failure!
If you are on the entrepreneurial path, I’d suggest visiting the website of my friend, Barry Moltz. Barry’s books and his website are a treasure of insights on entrepreneurship. I coached Barry through his first book and wrote the stories about start-ups in it.  It’s safe to say that our work together on “You Need to be a Little Crazy,” was a humble breakthrough in  discussing the reality of failure.

Kathryn Schulz is a Wrongologist, and she says:

1,200 years before Descartes said his famous thing about “I think therefore I am,” this guy, St. Augustine, sat down and wrote “Fallor ergo sum” — “I err therefore I am.” Augustine understood that our capacity to screw up, it’s not some kind of embarrassing defect in the human system, something we can eradicate or overcome. It’s totally fundamental to who we are. Because, unlike God, we don’t really know what’s going on out there. And unlike all of the other animals, we are obsessed with trying to figure it out. To me, this obsession is the source and root of all of our productivity and creativity.—Schulz from her TED talk “On being wrong” | Video on TED.com

And if you are feeling down, it’s always fun to cheer up with your friends, families and neighbors and don’t forget your online friends. I like to Twitter “You’ve gotta have heart” from the musical Damn Yankees when the Knight Foundation is pruning through its proposals and some are learning that their first volley at entrepreneurship didn’t make it. I especially like Peggy Lee’s version.

Here’s the original assignment from DigiDave.
What: A failure in your life (personal or professional) that has lessons. It must be your failure and you must take responsibility. But this will be a safe space to discuss our failings and what we can learn from them.
The Details
We talk about ‘failure’ a lot in the online journalism community. It can be a bit of a buzzword. “Let’s fail early and fail often” is a motto I personally have adopted. But the true value of failing is if we can share the lessons learned. We probably do this all the time without knowing it – but rather than try to condense our lessons into 140 characters, let’s create a safe space this month to discuss a failure that others can learn from.

Passion – it’s on the ceiling!

First Published in Sally’s World, April 2003 www.worldwit.org

By SALLY DUROS

In the 80s, we worked hard. In the early 90s, we worked smart. In the late 90s, we worked fast. But now, firmly established in the first decade of the new millennium, we are working all three, but most of all we are working passion.

Today many of us have switched careers or spun out of traditional organizations into smaller more intimate ones – maybe even our own. It’s a realignment of values – we are giving up what doesn’t matter for what does matter. In seeking to live from our hearts in our work and personal lives, we are responding to the irresistible tug of passion.

When passion is present, we don’t stop simply because something goes wrong. We feel the pain, yet we keep going. Having passion doesn’t mean that we will succeed. It simply means that our endurance and resilience are boosted by the power of our authentic presence. Working from passion might improve the likelihood of our success, while most certainly changing our definition of success.

But don’t mistake drive for passion. Drive is a push, not a pull. It takes us away from, not into our hearts.

Sometimes I can’t believe what a wonderful life I have because as a writer and a journalist, I often get to experience mind meld with fascinating and insightful people. Because of a book project that I am working on, I had one of those conversations the other day with Randy Komisar, author of The Monk and the Riddle: The Art of Creating a Life While Making a Living.

Komisar, who is a long-time practitioner of Buddhism, integrates his life and his work with a powerful core belief: Time is short. Don’t squander any of it. Invest your time in only those things that are important.

We were talking about passion and its role in start-up business. Komisar believes that women are better at recognizing and following passion than men are.

I agree.

To live from passion, you have to listen to your intuition and be open to hearing the beat of your personal drummer. Komisar says that women are more open-minded than men in this way, in part because men are slotted into the breadwinner role that women have traditionally been excluded from.

“Women – it’s the other side of the curse, the curse being that they’ve not had the opportunities,” Komisar says.” Women because of that are open-minded about finding what matters. They are empowered because they are disempowered in the traditional sense. Women are much more creative, I think, and much more courageous in terms of looking for those things that really matter.”

“If you think about it, (passion is at the core) of the traditional dilemma of being the super mom,” Komisar says. “You have your family and you have your career. What you see (in the struggle) is balancing two passions.”

“Most of the women involved in the dialogue about balance of life and career are involved because they care about both, because they have passion.”

Men are suffering more than women in this equation, Komisar says.

“Talk to a 50-year old man about what he wants to do next, and he looks at you (lost) … I”ll play golf. There’s no dimensionality. Their whole identity is in one thing.

Komisar, who teaches classes in entrepreneurship at Stanford, says he has learned much from students pushing against his ideas. He now more fully understands the multiplicity of passion. You may have many passions, and you will follow different passions at different times in your life.

Personally, I have been giving passion free rein in my work for a while now. I can attest that it’s difficult, financial lunacy, and often lonely. But I can also attest to the breathless creative flow that occurs when I and my passion are working side by side. There’ s nothing like it.

Except maybe this.

When I was a 10-year-old kid, I and my best friend of the week would do shoulder stands on my living room couch and imagine that we were walking from room to room on the ceiling. We would step over the tops of door frames, whose structures formed little barriers between the rooms, creating an archipelago of ceiling space, and walk from island to island, checking the treasure that laid in the bowls of the glass light fixtures.

Maybe it was the blood rushing to my head, but I used to wonder if my friend were seeing the same thing I was seeing as we explored the upside down world. I would fantasize that I was inside her brain, looking out from behind her eyes, walking on the ceiling from room to room, until it was time to go and I walked down the walls and out the door and across the street to eat dinner with her family. I would be me, but inside her head for just an hour or two, just long enough to understand what it was like to be her.

I haven’t learned yet how to get inside the mind of another, but I have found the next best thing – the wisdom I am exposed to in a great interview and the fact that I can pass it on to you. What could be better? That’s passion!