I tell wonder-filled stories about hope and healing
“I have come to believe that job security is one of the worst things a person can have, especially early in their career. Getting fired gives you a chance to reinvent yourself. All of a sudden you have the whole world in front of you and you can now leap to a career that you may love more.” ~ Nolan Bushnell, Founder of Atari
Tonight on NBC Nightly News, the featured the city of Miami Gardens, Florida on their “What Works” segment. Shirley Gibson, the woman who is responsible for its creation 6 years ago, isn’t one to take responsibility lightly. She was a police officer for 17 years, a small business owner for 15 years, and determined to help build a city that provided its residents, all 110,000 of them, with good quality services. Crime is down 22% and the city is now focusing heavily on improving education. Shirley Gibson is now running for Congress. Despite people who said Miami Gardens would never be because people in that area would never pay for services, residents agreed to double their property tax to improve the community.
Walter Murch, the Academy Award Winning film editor and sound designer of Apocalypse Now and The Godfather among other, gave his observations about film and life to the world through the book The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film. In that book, there is a passage that was recently highlighted by Gretchen Rubin on her blog “The Happiness Project”.
In The Conversations, Murch says, “As I’ve gone through life, I’ve found that your chances for happiness are increased if you wind up doing something that is a reflection of what you loved most when you were somewhere between nine and eleven years old…At that age, you know enough of the world to have opinions about things, but you’re not old enough yet to be overly influenced by the crowd or by what other people are doing or what you think you ‘should’ be doing.”
To read the full article, please visit: http://www.examiner.com/examiner/x-2901-NY-Business-Strategies-Examiner~y2009m6d8-Getting-back-to-9
Over the weekend I was working on a new product idea – testing it out by telling friends, making a simple prototype in my apartment, and pulling together a business case for why this product fills an unmet market need. And in all my excitement and positive feedback, I got scared. Very scared. That little tiny voice of doubt was pumping up the volume.
We have to let this little voice in just enough to inform and strengthen our ideas, though not so much that it dampens our enthusiasm and creativity. This is a fine line and I don’t always do a great job of navigating it. I can get stressed by my doubt and nerves. And then I take a step back. I remember why a specific idea was so exciting to me to begin with. I’m also very lucky to have great friends and family members who always encourage me.
In these times, it is easy to let doubt get the better of us, to distract us and steal our energy. We have to keep our eyes focused firmly on the horizon ahead of us while being mindful of the experience we’ve lived through. This is no time for losing heart, and no time to let doubt undermine our potential.
I’m working on some new product ideas especially for the Chinese consumer market and for some perspective I turned to my close friend, Allan, who was born and raised in Beijing. With his drive and intricate understanding of the markets, I am eventually handing all of my money over to him to manage, and if I ever need a board member, my first call is to him. Allan never agrees with me right off the bat about anything – he doesn’t give me an inch of wiggle room. Allan, in his characteristically curious way, questions me incessantly on detail after detail. And I am deeply grateful for that.
Today, our conversation flipped from Chinese vs. American culture (a favorite topic of ours) to the state of our jobs to future plans and then to social enterprise. While everyone on the planet is gushing about the promise and bright future of social enterprise, Allan is skeptical. Today he forced me to take him through the concept of social entrepreneurship, step by step. The financials, the motivation, the benefits, the short-comings, the operational challenges.
Allan took all this information in and to wrap up, he got to 1 more very simple question and 1 very simple conclusion. Allan’s last question: “Christa, are you okay with having a $7 lunch for the rest of your life as opposed to a $70 lunch like those guys on Wall Street?” My answer: “Yes, I’d prefer it that way.” Allan’s reply: “Good. Then you are a perfect candidate to be a social entrepreneur.” Allan’s conclusion: “Seems to me that there must be some off-balance sheet assets that must be accounted for.” How true that is!
For the rest of the afternoon, I thought about the role of off-balance sheet assets that we must consider in every aspect of our lives; how we spend our time and with whom, our happiness, the amount we laugh everyday, and our sense of purpose are all assets that are tough to value in dollars. And yet, they are critically important – I would argue far more important than our salaries (provided our salaries cover our basic needs). These “other” assets, the ones we can’t hold in the palm of our hand, are the stuff that make our lives worthwhile.
Allan and I trekked up to the castle that overlooks the Great Lawn in Central Park. I was grinning from ear to ear and Allan asked me, “What does that view mean to you?” I looked out at the people relaxing, smiling, and enjoying the simultaneously simple and complex act of being alive. A small oasis of hope in a city that is seeing its fair share of challenges. This view is off-balance sheet assets personified. And from that view, their value is very easy to see.
The photo is from Pbase.com/mikebny
I’ve been thinking about a specific business challenge for quite some time. Running, walking, and travel seem to shake loose creative ideas for me. For some reason moving around, getting out into the world, brings solutions to the surface that I can’t always get by staying home.
For the full article, please visit: http://www.examiner.com/x-2901-NY-Business-Strategies-Examiner~y2009m6d6-Breakthrough-ideas
“Do not turn back when you are just at the goal.” ~ Publilius Syrus, Latin writer of maxims
As often as we seek success, I have been noticing that some people are truly afraid of it. They will spend a lot of time building a goal and working toward it. Reaching a goal can be a frightening prospect. We see this with students who get increasingly nervous as they approach graduation and with professionals who inch toward retirement. What they do has become so much of who they are that they can’t imagine life after their goal.
With writers, these emotions play out in a strange form. Writers, when close to completing a piece of work will often procrastinate by starting another new piece of work that consumes them, leaving that first project undone. This is procrastination by distraction. There is a great risk of this happening if the main contributor is allowed to determine their own time line.
So what do we do if we see ourselves turning away from our goals just as those goals come into focus? Here are a few techniques to help drive to completion:
1.) Understand that there is always another goal out there. For writers, there will always be more material out there. For students, there is always more to learn. For professionals, there is always a new career opportunity, even in retirement.
2.) Remember that incredible high that comes from achieving a long sought-after goal. While it may be scary to approach it, there is also a tremendous sense of accomplishment and pride that comes from achieving goals. Don’t deny yourself that joy because of fear.
3.) Utilize a buddy. A brilliant friend of mine is delaying the completion of his PhD. He has some valid reasoning for taking as long as he is to complete the degree – the need to work full-time to support himself, for example. However, he is certainly putting off the completion of his degree by distracting himself with other interests. I give him a hard time about it every chance I get, and so do some of his other friends. He needs people to remind him where his sole focus needs to be.
4.) There is something to be said for self-control and willpower. Completing tasks is all a head game. It has to do with strong, conflicting emotions, and the key is to manage those emotions and get them to work in our favor. Fear and anxiety, if we use them properly, can give us a tremendous amount of energy. If channeled through meditation, yoga, and visualization, that energy can be used to work toward a goal instead of running away from it.
The photo above can be found at: http://pro.corbis.com/images/RF243246.jpg?size=572&uid={005D0CD4-98F3-4129-93D1-46B13233B07B}
I arrived home from work today to find a copy of Business Week in my mailbox with the cover story “Innovation, Interrupted” by Michael Mandel. Mr. Mandel can be a bit of a negative Nelly when it comes to the economy. One could argue that he’s not negative just unapologetically honest. Lately, he hasn’t spent too much time talking about the future. He’s mostly focused on the past as well as the here-and-now.
“Innovation, Interrupted” is no exception save for the last paragraph, which gave me pause and then made me smile. Mandel says, “positive Black Swans – unexpected events with huge positive consequences that in retrospect look inevitable…the U.S. could use a few positive Black Swans.” For a minute, I let my mind wonder to what those Black Swans might be. And then it became very clear — we, entrepreneurs, are those Black Swans.We are the ones Mr. Mandel is waiting for.
For the full article, please visit: http://www.examiner.com/examiner/x-2901-NY-Business-Strategies-Examiner~y2009m6d5-Positive-Black-Swans-and-insurmountable-opportunity
The American Express OPEN forum is a great resource for anyone with an entrepreneurial spirit. Today, Scott Belsky wrote a post describing three questions that every entrepreneur should answer. In the past five months that I’ve been meeting and interviewing entrepreneurs, I’ve noticed that they have the remarkable ability to question themselves in an honest, straight-forward way. The most successful ones know who they are – what they’re good at, what they enjoy, and the trade-offs they’re willing to make to bring their ideas to life.
Scott Belsky’s questions are a great start that will help those thinking about entrepreneurship to be honest with themselves about their potential new venture, whether it’s their own company or a new project at the company where they currently are.
For the full article, please visit: http://www.examiner.com/examiner/x-2901-NY-Business-Strategies-Examiner~y2009m6d4-3-questions-that-entrepreneurs-need-to-answer
Seth Godin wrote a great post this morning about boundaries. It reminded me of the boxes that one of my leadership professors at Darden, Alec Horniman, talked about: the boxes we put other people into, the boxes we put ourselves into, and the boxes we allow others to put us into. We do this with our careers, relationships, friendships, hobbies, interests. We take on roles and keep them, and it’s tough to break the behavior patterns we develop in those roles. And we have a real knack for giving people roles in our lives, whether or not those are the roles they want.
To make sense of our lives and keep us from going crazy, boundaries might be necessary. The key is to make them flexible and adaptable. Seth puts it in perspective of a brand, and explains that the brand can be our own personal one or that of a company. He stresses that brand loyalists are much more forgiving than the holders of a brand give them credit for. We have to give ourselves permission to try new things that truly interest us. If we are authentic and sincere in our pursuit of something new, the people who loves us will help us get there.
I’ve never been one for being put into a category. I’ve always felt free to explore different careers and interests, and have made a concerted effort to bring a diverse group of people into my life. From the outside it might seem that I just can’t make up my mind about where to focus my time and effort. A recruiter once said to me, “seems like you’ve spent your whole life exploring.” This sounded like a positive thing to me — apparently he didn’t mean it to be positive!
In actuality I have made a very specific decision to follow my interests wherever they may lead. I’m not exploring because I’m lost; I’m exploring because I’m interested in making the most of my life. I want to be someone with a broad perspective, someone who loves traveling, and new experiences, and meeting new people. I want to make sure that when my time comes, I’ve lived as much life as I possibly could.
My close friends, family, and supporters have been very accepting of this choice. They’ve celebrated my patchwork life with me. With every new experience, they are there, cheering me on and sometimes my life has even inspired them to do something different that they previously didn’t think they do. It’s a personal passion to extend my boundaries and grow my comfort zone, and I’d like to help others do the same.
Christa Avampato 