Really, You Should Get Dressed

There’s an article making the rounds on the Internet with the come-hither title 9 Businesses You Can Start in Your Pajamas. Apparently, a lot of folks think Nirvana means never having to wear real clothes. 

For several years, I’ve been trying to stop the madness that involves coming up with new words for entrepreneurial activity. In my tracking of all the cutsey names businessowners give themselves, one of my least favorite has to be pjpreneur. I have tried to imagine why that would be appealing to potential clients. Why, I wonder, would I be drawn to hiring someone or buying their product when their major marketing focus is they haven’t bothered to get dressed? Haven’t figured it out.

While corporate refugees willingly dispose of their pantyhose and neckties, starting a business from home should not be an invitation to slovenliness. It matters more than you may think.

The other night I happened to see two episodes of What Not To Wear which both featured women who were musicians and music teachers. One was a cellist in New York, the other a jazz singer in Boston. Neither was enthusiastic about fashion, but both were confident in their musical  ability. After a fair amount of reluctance and resistance, they were transformed. To their amazement, they both reported performing better than they had in the past.

Several years I wrote a piece called Staying Motivated When You Work Alone. Here’s point number two:

Dress to accomplish things. Don’t give in to the temptation to schlepp around in your old bathrobe.  Costume yourself for the work to be done. If I’m being a serious writer, I put on jeans and a sweater; if my duties are mostly secretarial, I wear a skirt and blouse; if there are client calls to make, I dress like a tycoon. 

And, of course, if you provide a service, you may very well create a costume that is appropriate and memorable. There’s only one kind of business I can think of where pajamas might meet that criteria.

 The psychological lift you get from dressing appropriately may be subtle, but it’s important.  You just can’t feel like a mogul in your sweats. Keynote speaker Karyn Ruth White concurs. “It’s easier to ask for a big fee when you’re sitting in your home office looking like a pro. It’s much harder if you haven’t gotten out of your pajamas.”

Of course, dressing for success is different when you’re joyfully jobless, but it still starts with getting dressed.

Portfolio Building, Italian Style

After years of  struggling with the Single Lifetime Occupation career path that everyone else seemed to accept with more ease than I could muster, I gradually came to realize that if I stopped looking for a job and, instead,  created my own, I could include many different activities. That revelation was my personal tipping point

What started out as a quest to relieve my boredom, became much more than an amusement. Building a portfolio of profit centers was not only interesting, it also gave me flexibility, numerous options and was as good for my imagination as it was for my pocketbook. 

The real reward of  this portfolio approach became clearer when I came across a quote from James Dickey. He said, “There are so many  selves in everybody and to explore and exploit just one is wrong, dead wrong, for the creative process.” 

How did we miss that one? It  wasn’t always so. During the glorious time known as the  Renaissance, there was a cultural expectation that the well-lived life was about exploring and exploiting these many selves. Places like Venice hummed with creative activity that found expression in business, music, fashion, linguistics and romance as individuals moved between projects in numerous areas.

Apparently, such thinking lingers in Venice. At any rate, it lingers in the life of Carlo Pescatori whom I met in 2006 when my siblings and I rented one of his apartments for a week. 

Carlo was originally a pharmacist, but when a 500-year-old building came into his family rather unexpectedly, he left his pharmacy to devote himself to turning the property into a business. The building  now has diverse uses, too. Carlo’s parents occupy an apartment on the ground floor while another space is rented to a group of architects. Carlo lives on the top floor while the other four apartments are vacation rentals. 

Carlo’s joyfully jobless life has continued to evolve since we first met three years ago. A recent e-mail from him gave me this update of what’s in his portfolio at the moment.

Venice apartments for rent  keep being my primary activity. Beautiful job but now and then, after 8 years of that, I admit I sometimes feel this as a job I’ll eventually leave. I don’t know when or how. Or why, just a feeling which keeps coming out once in a while.

Last year  I began offering Italian lessons via Skype at Parlo Con Carlo.  I’ll probably look for new students this year: I didn’t push that too much, just wanted to be sure I liked it, so I let it go by itself  for a while.

On a more creative side, I was asked by a musician friend to write lyrics to songs of his. It worked out fine and we finished/published online a couple of them. Tough step for me to take, like declaring that I am good enough at it. All tools are available in order to put a demo together, so there’s some Resistance that needs to be seen there.

New project being born soon, meanwhile: talking to the photographer I have my rolls (yes, still sticking to film!) developed by, he turned out to own a huge archive of negatives of celebrities visiting Venice from late forties to late eighties. No website to sell them online, so I’ve been studying hard how to build one and I’m finally going online with it this month. Its name is StarsinVenice.com. This is the kind of thing involving passion, art, some kind of expertise, luck and good feelings; so I don’t think it’ll fail. And it can eventually run by itself: even better!

Yes, multiple profit centers are an essential power tool for joyfully jobless success. Bella intelligenza!

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If you’d like more ideas about Creating & Managing MPCs, order the audio of my recent teleclass on the same subject. 

 

 

When Disappointment Happens–You Need Tools For That, Too

A reader sent me a message today asking if I’d write about dealing with—and I quote— the heartbreak of starting a business. Would I!  And I’d start by dumping the word heartbreak. Let’s tone it down a bit and call it by its proper name, disappointment. There’s a subtle, but important difference there. Heartbreak stops us in our tracks; disappointment is a setback that invites us to rethink our plans and actions.

As the writer so aptly suggests, we do need tools for dealing with disappointment or it will get the upper hand. So let me begin with a personal experience.

After years of being self-employed, I thought I’d gotten used to dealing with the ups and downs that are part of it. Then a big project was rejected and it caught me completely by surprise. I had been calmly confident that the project would be sold and was stunned when it was turned down. My first shocked response was, “How could he be so stupid?” A couple of hours later I was enraged. I wallowed. I wept. I wanted revenge. It had been years since I’d felt so hurt and for the first twenty-four hours I felt utterly powerless.

Amazingly, within a matter of a few short days, I was on the road to recovery determined that this would merely be a delay, not a defeat. Since disappointment is sometimes part of the territory for any risk taking entrepreneur, I looked back at what I had done that helped me pass through it with such speed. The next time you receive a blow, try these proactive ideas for getting back on your feet as quickly as possible.

 Allow Yourself  Time to Feel Bad

There’s no point in pretending that you aren’t disappointed when you are. Cry, scream, yell if that’s what you feel like doing. Take to your bed if you’re really upset. Rant and rave. Avoid anyone who will try to cheer you up before you’re ready to be cheered. Do not remain in this state one minute longer than necessary.

Call on Trusted Friends

I let several people know that I wanted and needed sympathy. They were all wonderfully empathetic and assured me that I was terrific and my rejector was obviously a creep that didn’t deserve to work with me. They each loyally took my side and let me know that they believed that my project was valid and would find a happier home elsewhere. My spirits began to lift immediately.

I assume you realize that all of my supporters were also joyfully jobless and experienced at dealing with disappointment themselves.

 Feed Your Soul

I came across a quote from Edmund Burke that fit my needs: “He that wrestles with us strengthens our nerves and sharpens our skills. Our antagonist is our helper.” I tried to visualize myself thanking my rejector.

I found I didn’t have enough imagination to stretch that far, but I could visualize him (after my inevitable and very public success) slapping his forehead and saying, “How could I have been so stupid?”  The very thought of that happening accelerated my recovery.

Choose Something Better

Shakti Gawain said that whenever something didn’t work out as she had planned she immediately affirmed that something better would take its place—and it usually did. I have had plenty of personal experience where my initial disappointment was overshadowed by something grander, something I would have missed if I had had my first choice.

As I began to get specific about what it would take to have an even better achievement than my initial goal, I started to relax and get excited at the new possibilities. With that in mind, another round of unexpected events began to occur. This time, however, they were more appropriate than my original plan. I even began to feel gratitude for the original disappointment.

 Don’t Forget This

Imagine a novel or movie which goes like this: once upon a time, someone started a business. It was an immediate success. They lived happily ever after.

That’s a story that would be boring to read and just as boring to live.

Want to Grow?

 

One of my favorite things about the holiday season is hearing from people who have been busily making the world a better place. This past week, has been filled with all sorts of reconnections with people I don’t hear from on a regular basis.

 

There was a newsy Christmas card from Marty Marsh sharing his adventures as an RVing entrepreneur. A hand written letter came from a woman I’ve never met thanking me for telling her about Make the Impossible Possible. Besides the cards and letters, there were several fascinating telephone conversations with fellow entrepreneurs. 

 

Although I thought I already had plenty of holiday spirit, these encounters added to my cheerfulness.

 

On Saturday, I had a fun Skype chat with Maureen Thomson. I hadn’t talked to her since she moved from Denver to the Oregon coast. Not only did she fill me in on how much she was loving her new home, but her wedding ceremonies business, Lyssabeth’s, is booming too. 

 

It was thrilling to hear about the growth of Maureen’s business, of course, but since I’ve been tracking her progress for a long time, it wasn’t a huge surprise. 

 

The surprise came a few hours later when I got an e-mail from Mark Anthony, a fellow I’d encountered years ago in Minnesota. Mark and I had met briefly when he invited me to keynote at a home business conference he organized. After that, we’d kept in touch sporadically, but not regularly. I knew that he had moved to Las Vegas, but we hadn’t really been in touch here. 

 

So, of course, I was curious to hear what he had on his mind. He contacted me to tell me that he’d written a blog post called An Open Letter to Barbara Winter. Of course, that got my attention and I promptly checked it out. I urge you to do the same. Mark’s story contains a startling confession…and a reminder that if we’re growing a business the learning never ends.

 

Change of Plans

Like many people, I have a lengthy pre-holiday To Do List plus all the normal things that fill my days. Today I was planning to pick up some packages that have been languishing at my post office, but when I stood in the long, long line for ten minutes without any movement, I abandoned that project. 

Next on the list was to write a new blog post about another way to Close the Gap. After reading Seth Godin’s blog post, however, I abandoned my idea and now urge you to get your very own free copy of his brilliant ebook What Matters Now. This may be the best gift any entrepreneur could get this year. And it’s loaded with wise words from wise people. Pay attention, and you’ll find even more ways to close the gap for yourself.

Oh, and then pass it on.

Signs of Commitment

 

Even before Paul McCartney’s Chaos and Creation in the Backyard was released, critics were glowing using words like adventurous, melodic and emotionally complicated to describe it. That hasn’t been the case with the 19 other albums he’s done since the Beatles broke up 35 years ago. McCartney acknowledges that his body of work has been uneven. 

 

”Since the Beatles, I’ve approached making records every which way,” he says. “A lot of times it’s a real casual thing. Do a few tracks a day, have a bit of fun. Normally I kind of say, ‘I’d like to make a good album.’ This time there was motivation, determination. ‘I’m going to make a good album. I’m going to, and that’s that.” 

 

To accomplish this, he hired producer Nigel Godrich, who refused to let him stay in his comfort zone. It took two years to put the album together, partly because McCartney plays most of the instruments himself. 

 

The critics aren’t the only ones happy about the results. At the start of a new round of concerts, McCartney says, “It’s be great not to be out there with a crap album, singing songs I don’t care much about.” Sounds like Sir Paul has rediscovered the power of commitment.

 

Excellent results are never accidental. Without commitment, our creative powers are scattered and our ability to attract support and resources dries up. Of course, it’s possible, as millions of people demonstrate, to go through life getting by without ever committing deeply to anything much at all. 

 

In their insightful book, Money Drunk, Money Sober, Julia Cameron and Mark Bryan call money (and money difficulties) the last addiction. They identify five kinds of money dysfunction, including one they call the Maintenance Money Drunk. This is a person who grows increasingly  bitter or numb from the inability to pursue or even identify their dreams.

 

They write, “One of the telltale symptoms of the Maintenance Money Drunk is the phrase ‘I’m going to,’ heard over and over again without action toward the goal. We often say that the greatest gift of solvency is learning how to turn a wish into a goal. And action is the difference between someone who is really going to do something and someone who is just wishing.” 

 

It’s exhausting to be a Maintenance Money Drunk and it’s exhausting to be around one. Commitment is the catalyst that propels us to take action—and break the cycle of apathy that keeps us stuck.When McCartney said, “I’m going to,” he got busy writing songs. 

 

There’s a foolproof test for commitment that goes beyond any verbal claims of commitment: look at your calendar and your checkbook. Are you spending your time and money in ways that back up what you’re truly committed to? It’s only when you bring your spending into alignment with your dreams that good things begin to happen.  

 

Commitment gives us direction, but it doesn’t guarantee ease. As Paulo Coehlo so eloquently reminds us, “Too often we decide to follow a path that is not really our own, one that others have set for us. We forget that whichever way we go, the price is the same: in both cases we will pass through both difficult and happy moments. But when we are living our dream, the difficulties that we encounter make sense.”

Getting Rejected? You’re Not Alone

 It is often the last key in the bunch that opens the lock.

                                Stansifer

 

 

I am not the only one who loves  Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos.; classical music stations report that listener surveys always list them as a top favorite. Did you know that this perennial favorite began life as a huge failure? The Concertos were written as an audition for a commission Bach hoped to get with the city of Brandenburg, Germany. Amazingly, he lost the competition. No one seems to remember who the winner was.

 

Bach is not the only creative soul, of course, whose work met with rejection before success came along. Writer John Grisham sent his first novel to sixteen agents before one of them agreed to take him as a client. That agent submitted A Time to Kill to twenty-six publishers before one bought it, bringing out a meager 5,000 copies. Since that humble—and humbling— beginning, Grisham has topped the bestseller charts with every book he’s written and has millions of copies of his books in print around the world.

 

While history is full of stories of early defeat that turned into astonishing success later on, there is no record of all the good ideas that got put away in a drawer after encountering a first rejection.

 

I once had a student who had created a nifty product that she was certain would be snapped up by a huge travel company to give away as a gift to their clients. When they turned her down, she was furious. Her basement is filled with unsold inventory which she has never tried to market in other ways. She remains stuck in her early—and only—rejection. Her timid retreat is not unusual.

 

Sadly, this woman made the classic error of deciding in advance that acceptance could only come in one way. That’s a formula that is doomed. If the prospective client or lover or friend turns us down, we may lose sight of the fact that our true goal was to make a sale or have a romance or build a new relationship. We forget that our goal (and our self) is just fine. We simply made the mistake of picking a dancing partner that didn’t want to dance.

 

I once heard a sales trainer declare, “You gotta learn to love rejection!” I think he overstated his case. Few of us are so hardy that we can love being turned down. There’s a big difference between those who accept rejection as part of the success process and those who avoid it at all costs. Despite all the evidence that rejection is a universal theme in every success story, fear of rejection seems to be a powerful deterrent for many who will do almost anything to avoid the discomfort of being rejected. As it turns out, life’s grandest prizes are rejecting them.

 

The next time that fear of rejection stops you from tackling a dreaded task, remind yourself that the anticipation of rejection is almost always worse than the reality of it. All of us have known those agonizing times spent before we proposed marriage, made a sales presentation or gave a talk. Yet on those occasions when our worst fears were realized, the experience wasn’t nearly as horrible as imagining it had been.

 

While I still don’t love rejection, I have a clearer perspective on it since encountering some profound advice from writer Barbara Kingsolver. Although it’s aimed at writers, it’s equally appropriate to anyone going after a dream. Kingsolver says, “Don’t consider your returned manuscript rejected. Consider that you’ve addressed it, ‘To the editor who can appreciate my work,’ and it simply came back stamped, ‘Not at this address.’ Just keep looking for the right address.”

 

You might want to memorize that.

You Can’t Grow a Business if You Refuse to Grow

About the time I was planning to move to Las Vegas, a workshop participant named Pat Egan suggested that I should meet his mother. Like me, she had grown up in a small town in Minnesota, was an author, entrepreneur and enthusiastic traveler. Now we live in the same part of Las Vegas and Sharon Wegscheider-Cruse has been a favorite lunch companion ever since.

 

On Saturday, Sharon stopped by to give me a copy of her upcoming book (out November 2), Calling All Women: From Competition to Connection. It’s a terrific book of advice and inspiration gleaned from her years of working with people around the world. 

 

The reason I got an advanced copy is because Sharon had invited me to write the foreword. As I reread what I had written, I realized that I was talking about something that’s equally important for entrepreneurial success, although it’s not much discussed in conventional business books. Here’s a bit of what I have to say about that overlooked part of the journey.

 

Long after my formal schooling had ended, I first encountered the term “personal growth.” Up until then, I had assumed that once I reached adulthood, I had finished growing and that was that. I was immediately fascinated by the implication that growth could continue. Those two little words carried hope. The end of dead ends. Stretching. Discovery. Becoming. Wider horizons. Beginnings. 

 

Despite my eagerness to explore, it was difficult to find materials and teachers that could help me on my journey. At the time, both books and seminars were written by men, for men. Apparently, women were either unteachable or disinterested. I decided to ignore the lack of attention to my gender and adapt ideas and concepts from the existing material. Although I operated in secret, I came to think of myself as a card- carrying self-help junkie. 

 

Books and seminars were only the beginning. The real work was done in my day-to-day life, but the real work is never done. There’s always another path to explore. As time went on, the notion of lifelong growth took root and I simply assumed it was something that would be a daily part of my life. I came to see that the rewards of such a pursuit were greater than I’d realized. Actively pursuing personal development not only adds another dimension to life, it may, in fact, prolong it. “People don’t grow old,” says Deepak Chopra. “When we stop growing, we become old.”

 

So what does it take to keep growing yourself? One prerequisite for success is a willingness to change. Recently I came across an article I had written about change. I pointed out that change comes in two different packages and it’s necessary to tell them apart. There’s Imposed Change, which is the kind we can do nothing about. Taxes get raised, fashion designers insist we stop wearing willow green, or road construction makes travel difficult. On the other hand, there’s Instigated Change. That’s the kind that we think of as improving our lives because we have chosen it. Best of all, we can instigate change at any  time we want. 

 

Why does personal growth matter in running a business? Quite frankly, our business grows or stagnates in direct proportion to how much growth or stagnation we’re allowing into our lives. Our own business is also a terrific laboratory for putting what we’ve learned into practice. As Paul Hawken points out, “Being in business is not about making money. It’s a way to become who you are.” 

 

How wonderfully synergistic!

Lessons in Doing More With Less

As fascinated as I was by Paul Hawken’s The Magic of Findhorn, I had no idea when I read Hawken’s early book that he would become one of my favorite entrepreneurial gurus. That didn’t happen until I stumbled upon his 17-part PBS series, Growing a Business. Sometime in the late 1980s this visionary program became a Saturday afternoon ritual for me and my friend Chris, who would call from Connecticut to discuss the latest installment and what we’d learned. The series, written and produced by Hawken, introduced us to all sorts of innovative entrepreneurs including Ben and Jerry and Yvon Chouinard. We were dazzled. The companion book for that series remains one of my all-time favorite books on creating a business that’s an extension of who you are and what you value.

 

Hawken, best known as the co-founder of Smith & Hawken, the mail order gardening tools company, was an early player in the natural food industry, opening a store in Boston when he was barely out of his teens. Today, he spends his time writing and speaking about the responsibility of business in caring for the environment. His book The Ecology of Commerce is a popular textbook in colleges around the country.

 

But the advice Hawken dispenses is in sharp contrast to much of the business writing out there.  He says, “When I started the natural food business in Boston, my knowledge was scant. I did the best i could and began reading everything I could lay my hands on…The more I searched, the more confused I became. I began to doubt that I was in business at all. I seemed to be doing something entirely different. I get that same feeling today when I read most of the standard business literature. I believe that most people in new businesses, and some in not-so-new businesses, have the same problem. They don’t feel connected to the conventional wisdom…as if a small business is just a flake chipped off the larger corporate world.”

 

When it comes to entrepreneurial advice, Hawken is a vocal advocate for bootstrapping and believes that hands-on learning is one of the great gifts of operating on a shoestring. Here’s an example of how Smith & Hawken put those ideas into practice. Hawken writes:

 

We did it ourselves or not at all. I never thought much about this in-house advantage until 1985, when a friend launched a new catalog company. He started with an initial mailing of 500,000 catalogs (our first effort had been 487), which he hired a large company in Dallas to create. My friend and I were having lunch when the subject of production costs came up. I asked him how much he spent and he replied nearly $100,000 for production alone. He noticed me choking on my dim sum and he asked how much my last catalog had cost (by this time Smith & Hawken was up to about 1 million circulation). I suggested we break the costs down.

 

His photography cost $25,000. Ours cost $4,000.

His copywriting costs $12,000. I did all of ours.

His layout and design team ran $25,000. Our in-house labor came to $6,000.

He paid $15,000 for typography. We paid $2,700.

He paid $5,000 for a stylist. I asked who or what that was.

He paid $82,000 in total. Our catalog cost us $12,700 for the same number of products and pages.

 

It’s not coincidental that my friend’s company is not in business today. He got further faster in the beginning because he had more money to spend, but he thereby forfeited a critical amount of self-education and development.

Why Is It Taking So Long?

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 does it take so long to see progress? Before you declare failure, consider these reasons:

° Idea needs tweaking. You start a new project thinking your customers are retirees and nothing happens. Then you begin getting inquiries from golfers and shift your marketing to reach more of them. That’s a classic example of right idea, wrong market. Here’s where some Joyfully Jobless friends can be helpful, showing you options that you missed. 

° Need to grow into the bigger vision. When things aren’t working out, many people think there’s something they must do, but often it’s something they must be that solves the problem.

The best reason for dreaming bold and following through on that dream is what we become as a result. If we’re not willing to acquire the skills and mindset of our best self, and invest time in getting there, our ultimate goal will be stalled. Eventually, it will disappear.

° Missed a step. Here’s where impatience can get in the way. Trying to jump from Point A to Point L doesn’t work. When a project is in limbo, retrace your steps and see if you left something out, something that needs to be included to produce the final result.

° Miscalculated the time it would take. I can never decide if it’s naive or arrogant to think that we can predict the timeline of something we’ve never done before. An old proverb says, “Going slow does not prevent arriving.” That’s a good proverb to recall as you inch ahead.

° Ahead of the market. It’s not unusual for a new idea to take time to catch on. If you’re offering something that hasn’t been available before, the marketplace may need to learn more about the benefits they’ll receive or, even, rethink an old notion. Sharon Rowe is a perfect example of that. In 1989 she started importing reusable shopping bags. She was about 20 years ahead of time. Today, however, her Eco-Bags Products is a multimillion dollar operation.

° Divine intervention. Deb Leopold runs First Class in Washington, DC. The day after the tragic Metro train crash, she told her Facebook friends that she’d been detained at her business the previous evening because CNN was there to do a story about a class she was running. Had she gone home at her usual time, there was a possibility she’d have been involved in the accident.

All of us can look back at things that were disappointments that turned out to be blessings. The trick is to start looking for the gift in a frustrating situation to see if it’s pointing us in a better direction. Sometimes what feels like a detour is actually a call to eliminate ambivalent commitment.