How long is your long run?

The bank robber may have a long run of just thirty minutes. Stealing money today appears worth it because tomorrow is just too far away to consider.

There are organizations and nations that have been around for hundreds of years and expect to be around for another thousand. They have a long run a little longer than yours.

I think we can agree on what the short run is. The question worth asking your brand, your boss or your family is: what's the long run? Most of the time, we err on the side of short.

In case you don’t remember, I really got exhausted doing Brazen Careerist. The pressure was insane and it made me nearly lose my mind multiple times. Now Ryan Healy is running the company in DC, and I sort of miss the startup life — sort of like women endure labor and then a year later they are pregnant again.

So I have been sort of bored and lost all winter, trying to think of what to do next. And then, one night when I was visiting my neighbor, her son propped himself up in his TV-watching chair and told me that he wants me to help him do a company this summer. For his summer job.

I said, “OK, but what do you want to do?”

He said he wants to pave driveways. Like, put tar on them.

So I asked, “How will you get customers?”

“I don’t know. That’s what I need help with.”

“I think you should start out with a list of ways you can get customers and then see which way is conducive to starting a business. So, if you could get customers for dancing on your head, then you should dance on your head rather than pave driveways. The customers are the hard part.”

“So what should I do then?”

So I told him to email me his Myers Briggs type profile and to find a friend he wanted to do a business with. And then to come to my house on Thursday night.

Zach did that. He brought Mitch. Zach is an ENFJ. And Mitch is an INTP. I asked them if they thought of ideas for a company. They said no. I told them they can’t do a company without an idea. Mitch said, “How about a toilet bowl that also has a disposal?”

I guess this would be for high schoolers and their vomit. I wasn’t really sure. But I took the opportunity to explain that if you’re not an inventor, there’s no use thinking about businesses that require an invention.

We talked about how hard it is to think of business ideas. I told them even adults have a hard time, but I’m great at it.  I listed for them three ideas that I thought we could do together.

One was small:  selling ads on my blog for a commission. One was medium but I can’t remember what it was, actually. And one was to produce humane goat cheese.

I recounted for the boys my story about how almost all the goat cheese in grocery stores comes from farms where baby boy goats are clubbed over the head or drowned.

The boys picked goat cheese. I told them it was a big business, and we’d need funding. They liked that. Not that they knew anything about funding. I explained that another day.

I told myself I will send them lots of links so they learn about entrepreneurship. But the boys did not have computers. Further, they do not even get homework that involves computers because not all the kids in the local high school have computers at home. They do research for reports only from books in the library.

Then it occurred to me that they don’t read. They can read, they just don’t read.

“What was the last book you read?” I asked Zach.

He couldn’t remember.  Then he remembered: “The Scarlet Letter, for school.”

“It sucked,” said Mitch.

I told the boys that entrepreneurs read. They have to read. The problem is that if you don’t read you don’t know where to start reading. I decided we’d have to start with reading about sex, to keep them interested. I gave them Dennis Cooper. They liked it. After a while I slipped in articles about entrepreneurship. And finally I assigned them to read Fred Wilson every day.

I'm pretty sure they are not doing that. But they are learning other stuff. For example, we went to a farmers market and I was looking for something to bring home for dinner.

Zach said, “How about some sausage?”

I said, “Jews don’t eat sausage.”

He said, “You say Jew! Isn’t that a bad word?”

So they started coming over once a week for a company meeting and I’d give them assignments and they couldn’t do the assignments because they had to go to the school computer room to get anything done but the school blocked most of the blogs that I sent them to.

This is when I realized the company needed funding immediately: Because I couldn’t work with them if they didn’t have computers. Really, I’d like to buy every kid in our local high school a computer. But I am a practical person.  And I got seed funding to buy computers for the boys.

That was a fun day.

So we’ve all been working on the company, and sometimes, after the company meeting, I talk to them about college. There is no college counseling in their school. No one tells them how some colleges are
good for some kids and some are good for others and choosing a college is about self-discovery. So I have taken it upon myself to also be their college counselor.

Last week I had them doing college research until almost midnight. I’m worried doors are closing for them and I want to keep them open. The boys worked hard trying to learn differences between schools. I wished I could do more, but really, they have to learn it themselves.

So I said, “Do you guys want me to make you cookies while you’re working?”

The boys doubled over laughing. They say that this was the line the teacher at school used when she was seducing high school boys.

I worry that the town thinks something is wrong. The town wonders how I can have a company valued at more than a million dollars when the company does nothing. The town thinks, “Why would she want to spend so much time helping two boys?” The town thinks I’m up to no good, I’m sure.

So I have a new company. And it’s funded. And I love that I’m doing a farm-focused startup since I live on a farm. And I love that I’m helping goats. And I love that I found these two kids to take along for the ride.

You'd think that it's the most important thing in the world. Homecoming queen, student body president, the most Facebook friends, Oscar winner, how many people are waiting in line at the book signing...

Popular is almost never a measure of impact, or genius, or art. Popular rarely correlates with guts, hard work or a willingness to lead (and be willing to be wrong along the way).

I'll grant you that being popular (at least on one day in November) is a great way to get elected President. But in general, the search for popular is wildly overrated, because it corrupts our work, eats away at our art and makes it likely we'll compromise to please the anonymous masses.

Worth considering is the value of losing school elections and other popularity contests. Losing reminds you that the opinion of unaffiliated strangers is worthless. They don't know you, they're not interested in what you have to offer and you can discover that their rejection actually means nothing. It will empower you to even bigger things in the future...

When you focus on delighting an audience you care about, you strip the masses of their power.

In the flip of a switch, a thought, we all have the capacity to be happy in this moment.

As we cultivate our life, our beauty becomes as much about what we are creating and doing as it is about our appearance.

What it takes to move past anything is to simply realize that your obstacle is unimportant, and that it can be dismissed.

When it comes to email, ignorance is bliss.  That’s why if you’ve got something important you want to make progress on, I have these four words for you: Don’t check your email. As soon as you get up, work on something important for 30-45 minutes, and only then check it. If you can stand it, wait even longer.  Some days I don’t check email at all until after lunch…Any new information you get can cause you to get distracted. I can’t control everything, but I can control my own self made distractions.

‘Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends…. Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts.’ ~Henry David Thoreau

Post written by Leo Babauta.

We are not consumers. We are people.

We are not living lives meant to earn money in order to support a shopping habit, or a large home and two cars, or lives of luxury eating and entertainment.

We are not living to support the corporations. And yet, if you were to take an objective, outsider look at our society, it would seem that we are.

We spend our childhoods — precious years that are far too fleeting — in schools geared to give us the best chance at getting a job. We then graduate and are highly pressured to go to college (getting into large debt in the process) so we can have the best chance at getting a good paying job. Then we claw at each other for the coveted but limited good paying jobs, and the winners are rewarded with big homes and SUVs and nice clothes (and lots of debt to go with all that). The losers are stuck in menial jobs they hate, envious of others they see on TV with luxury lives, eating cheap fast food and consigned to shopping at bargain outlets.

Either way, we find our path as consumers. And everything is solved by consumption — when we’re stressed, we shop. When we want to be entertained, we buy the entertainment. We buy our food in packages, we fix our failing health by buying exercise clothes and equipment. We fix our debt by buying personal finance books and taking out a second mortgage.

Our lives are beholden to our shopping habits. We are slaves to corporations, doing work we loathe for stuff we don’t need.

What if we could break out of it?

What’s the alternative?

The funny thing is, there are millions of alternatives. But we’ve been so trained to believe there is only one way, that we can barely imagine something different.

What would life be like without advertising, shopping malls, online shopping, working for large corporations, wearing large logos all over our clothing, having Apple logos over every device we own, watching movies and television shows developed by large corporations and made for the masses?

It would be quieter, maybe, with more free time. Without having to buy so much, we would work less. What a revolutionary concept! And yet it is: developments in technology have not resulted in less work, but more (a must read: Bertrand Russell’s In Praise of Idleness).

It would be more focused on people instead of stuff. It would be healthier, as we would (likely) move more, get outdoors more, eat less fast food and more real food.

That’s all idealizing, of course, but it’s an alternative I could see happening. We’d have to break free of the consumerist mindset first.

Steps to Freedom

We must first become more aware of what has been done to our minds. When we watch an ad on TV, in a movie, on the web, what urges does this bring up in us? Why are we watching the ad in the first place? Can we avoid it?

Watch less TV. Avoid malls and shopping. Block ads on the web (and yes, I’ve heard the arguments about stealing money from content producers, and I’m not convinced — I make money without ads).

Buy less. When you have urges to buy, consider whether it’s a true need or just a desire. Learn to be content with life as it is, rather than wanting to buy things to make it better.

If there’s something you truly need, consider borrowing it, or making it yourself, or finding it used. If you buy it new, try to buy it from a real person rather than a corporation — a small businessperson or craftsperson. It might be more expensive but cheap turns out to be the most costly of all.

Get creative. Find free forms of entertainment. Form a cooperative of creatives and workers rather than a corporation. Pool resources, form libraries for everything.

Learn to build things and sew things and cook and grow. It’s ancient technology, but it still works. It’s simple and it’s all we need.

Eschew the values of the corporations, of consumption and desire.

Become free. You deserve it.

‘There must be more to life than having everything!’ ~Maurice Sendak

Photo by Fey Ilyas

By Jillian Davis

I read a wonderful post on this blog recently about we don’t FIND our passions, they come THROUGH us: Our passions are already there. (See: Forget About Finding Your Passion)

This is very, very true.

I was reminded of this over the weekend while teaching a workshop on finding your passion and creating income from it.

We were in the portion of the class in which I did some *laser consults* from the front of the auditorium. I was helping one man come to understand his true *Passion*. In fact, he was close, because he already knew that he wanted to be a Professional Speaker. However, he couldn’t choose WHICH of many topics he wanted to speak on.

I put it to him square: “What would you do with your life’s work, if you were going to die tomorrow?”

He was taken aback. He deflected. Said if he were to die tomorrow, he’d go air ballooning.

So would I!

So I tried again: “If life were compressed into 24 hours, and you could make a the impact of your life in that time, what topic would you speak about?”

“I’d help people understand that they can lose a serious amount of weight and keep it off for good, because I did this myself,” he said.

The man was incredibly slim and filled with light, so I imagined he’d be GREAT at his job.

He started to speak some more. I heard him say “But I….”

I stopped him. I refused to let him go on because I wanted him to look and see and really HONOR the statement he made. He was getting ready to dilute it. Perhaps he was going to think of some other topics that were equally exciting to him. But he didn’t choose those first, did he?

“That’s it!” I said. “You HAVE your Passion! You said it! That is IT!”

He let me sky-write his passion on the chalkboard.

We all try to muddle our instincts. We second-guess our gut, our heart, and the personal knowledge-base that we spent years accruing. Possibly we have too much information at our fingertips. We think that there’s some other ‘thing’ outside of ourselves we could be doing.

No. It isn’t that way. If we stop and listen to ourselves, and make strong statements right from the most central place where we dwell, we can trust our navigation. We can trust where it leads us.

Yes, I know you like many things.

Yes, I know you can do many things.

And yes, you will have to flesh out and develop your ‘thing’. After all, we still don’t know how you will find the work or create the work that allows you to express your “Thing’.

But you have your thing, it was born in you and has been expressing THROUGH you for a long time. Give it primacy. Give it love. Give it the honor of your total attention. All things will be born through it.

I’m giving you a metaphorical timer. You have 5 minutes. You will pass into the ethos tomorrow and all that will be left behind is your greatest gifts, changes, and shared love. What is yours to share, with whom, and using what?

Write it down.

Now go make it happen.

Author bio:

Jillian Davis runs a creative career consulting business. Her talent is doing JAM sessions to amplify your unique, Godhead-given talent. Her web site and blog can be found at www.jillianjdavis.com