A common trait shared by the successfully self-employed is their willingness to mobilize the resources at hand. You won’t find them stalling, making excuses about not being able to move ahead for lack of funds, equipment, experience. It’s a practice we can all adopt. Here’s an exercise that can be duplicated in all sorts of [...]
Soul Acrobats founder Alvin Tam uses acrobatic exercises to help people break through their fears. He also challenges his own fears in other ways. When I read this piece he wrote, I knew I wanted to pass it along. Alvin agreed. Here’s his story.
Every now and then I will do strange experiments to push my [...]
As I was running errands the other morning, I heard an author on public radio talking about how unwieldy suburban life is. He also talked about the environmental and psychic impact of long daily commutes and suggested we need to rethink how we live and work. “But owning a house in the suburbs is the [...]
One of the qualities that successful entrepreneurs share is the capacity for paradox management. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the need to be both patient and impatient at the same time. Impatience is necessary to keep things moving, but it carries a danger with it and can lead to quitting too soon.
So why [...]
My fantasy vacation would be a long train ride (perhaps across Canada) accompanied by a stack of books I’ve been meaning to read. Of course, I’m never without a book–or several–in some stage of completion. Since summer is a downtime for parts of my business, I take advantage of that by upping my reading. My [...]
Anyone who notices business names knows that finding the perfect one can be tricky. Most names are serviceable and a few are showstoppers. Seldom are they as provocative as the one I noticed in Bath, England. The sign that grabbed my attention said, “Jolly’s Funeral Directors.” I can only assume that Jolly is a family [...]
In her delightful book Educating Alice, author Alice Steinbach writes that as a child her family remembers her pestering them with questions. She explains it this way: “Given my insatiable curiosity and intense admiration for Nancy Drew, my future plans hinged on entering the detective profession. I saw myself as Nancy Drew aging into Miss [...]
There are numerous ways to became an entrepreneur. If you’re Italian, you might be born to it. Just as homes stay in the same family for generations, Italian businessowners commonly pass their enterprises down to their children. If your family made wine, there’s a good chance that you’ll make wine. Even some Venetian gondoliers are [...]
A talented and creative young woman I know, who currently lives in Madison, posted a message on Facebook that said, “Wishing I weren’t so hooked on Boulder so I could just move to Minneapolis instead.” I promptly responded saying that since I had lived in both places (and since I was going to be seeing [...]
Every Wednesday my suburban newspaper shows up in my mailbox. I always look forward to reading it since the editorial staff seems to think that the most fascinating folks in our community also happen to be joyfully jobless.
This week there’s a story about a woman who decided to turn her parents’ home into an art [...]
