I’m not gonna “ABC - Always Be Closing”. Instead, I will “AAA - Always Assume Awareness”.
Dropping and picking up the ball
I’ve been getting into doing mindfulness meditation on a regular basis. I’m constantly reminded during those 15-30 minute (or sometimes even just 3-5 minute) sessions of the importance to get back on track. The mind wanders off and drifts into thoughts and distractions. It has that tendency. The practice of mindfulness is to accept that tendency and learn to gently bring the mind back to stillness, again and again. Meditation is hard for someone whose mind constantly bursts with ideas and new directions - but oh so necessary. I come to think about the definition of vipassana - “to see things as they really are”. Only from a still, centered and focused mind, can we respond naturally and optimally to the events and situations that arise around us.
How is this applicable to entrepreneurship? To me, I’m more and more learning not to try to avoid being sidetracked. Sidetracking happens - we will never be able to command our circumstances fully. When it happens, I just see to it that I make a good mental and physical note - whether it’s something I need to deal with now, at all or never - and then I try to get back to focusing at the task at hand. No excess mental bagage - but “externalized distractions” instead of internalized. This is huge. And it’s a constant practice. Try it.
Haven’t Tried Buffer Yet? This Is Why You Should.
I started using Buffer about a month ago. This is what happened to my Klout score. Go figure. And see my simple instructions below the screenshot to learn how to get the same cool effect on your social presence on the web…
You know how you read and see a lot of interesting stuff online, but sometimes you just don’t want to send out too many status updates or tweets at once? I know I can get frustrated when other people “spam” my timeline/twitter feed with just links, links, links, anyway…
This is where Buffer helps - a lot.
About once a day I look through my google reader, the interesting links people tweet, some other sources - and I just queue a few interesting articles up to buffer. On my desktop pc I just use the handy Chrome bookmarklet, and on my iPhone I just open the link in Safari and “send link as email” like this. Easy-peasy!
Apparently it’s already having some sort of effect on my “online influence”, at least according to Klout. What’s more important, though, is that it just feels like a service that makes sense - it allows me to share lots of interesting stuff without necessarily being a spammer/interruptor.
Wanna try? Go ahead and sign up through this link - it helps us both! (Just like dropbox gives you both more space when signing up through a recommendation, Buffer gives us both one more link space - excellent!)
What do you think about this way to share stuff online? Have you already started using buffer? Tell me you thoughts in the comments!
Life’s a pitch, and then you die
The problem with the Internet startup craze isn’t that too many people are starting companies; it’s that too many people aren’t sticking with it.
If something is not happening for you it doesn’t mean it’s never going to happen. It means you’re not ready for it.
Listen To The World With Opinionaided
Opinionaided is a fantastic tool to “hack into the hivemind” and get great realtime feedback on survey questions. Let me describe what it can do for your business with a few paragraphs - after I ran a little test on it last night I can hardly contain my excitement about this genius app. Keep reading to understand why!
I just discovered Opinionaided, or rather rediscovered it when looking through old deleted apps to redownload on my iPhone. The thing is, I’ve been on an app-downloading frenzy lately, monitoring price drops and being on the lookout for useful productivity tools (as well as sales on games that I’ll be, err… playing when I have the time! ;)). But all this digging around in the appstore also reminded me of a few forgotten gems that I’ve been meaning to get to sometime later. Boy am I glad I decided to give this app a proper test drive - I’ve now spent a few hours tinkering around in the Opinionaided community of question askers and responders, and I’m convinced it’s gonna be an important tool to collect lightweight decision-making data when creating Minimum Viable Products (link to Eric Ries’ blog, of course) for my present and future business projects and ideas. Besides, it’s just plain FUN with a great UX design and cleverly implemented gamification mechanics.
Opinionaided Demo from Opinionaided on Vimeo.
How did I start, and why am I now raving so hard about this app? I started by asking this question:
And then I waited. Or rather, I browsed around other people’s questions on my chosen topics “food & drink” (of course) and “business & finance”, providing thumbs up/thumbs down/neutral responses plus a short comment where my knowledge could be helpful. Anyway, after what felt like five minutes (ok, it was probably more like 20-30 minutes) I checked back on my question. I was amazed with the results - I had already gotten FORTY replies with a 60-40 lean towards “thumbs up”, and in addition I had gotten 4-5 comments from people explaining their response with a few words. What I did next was engage in dialogue with all the commenters, thanking them and inviting them to share more of their thoughts. All this comes very naturally in the design of the app - and on it went…
At the time I’m writing this, I have gotten 84 votes on my question including 10 commenters. And what’s the verdict? Well, just go and give your reply here and you’ll find out! Basically, I really recommend you to give the app/service a try. I don’t know how big the Opinionaided user base is, but obviously it’s big enough. You can even segment your responders to target only males/females or a specific age group. It’s completely free - and at the very least it will give you some inspiration on a simple and engaging idea, well executed!
Making the box bigger
Funny things happen in dialogue. I was interviewed by a student in entrepreneurship for her thesis, and when asked the question whether I was an “out-of-the-box-thinker” I replied like this:
“Rather than thinking outside the box, I prefer finding ways to make the box bigger - that is, expanding the frameworks and the playing field.”
I hadn’t really thought about it like this before, but to me the sentence above kind of sums up my view on lateral and integral thinking. When it comes to having an entrepreneurial attitude towards what’s new, different, unknown, mysterious and even strange or weird… I always want to be able to go beyond the initial response of surprise and awe or even shock, into a state of exploration and embrace.
When Ken Wilber talks about holarchic progression of organisms and organisations, his elegant term is that each further level of development “transcends and includes” the former. I guess I just had an epiphany about what that feels like in the smallest, most incremental sense - because expanding our boxes is something we can strive for in small steps at a time and not only in a “quantum leap” way.
What are your thoughts on this?
Everything Must Start Small…
… and some things are better off if they stay small, too.
Scalability is the hottest thing you can say when pitching your business to bigtime VCs or promoting growth in entrepreneurship in political circles. Of course we want to paint pictures of ourselves building empires and becoming ultra-rich. (“A million dollars isn’t cool. Wanna know what is? A BILLION dollars” like the Justin Timberlake-played character says in that movie).
I’m relieved, even elated, when I read words of reason like the following, from the blog of Justin Vincent:
The absolute truth is that each and every one of us can build a business that can support us. We don’t need to build a million dollar business to survive. We just need a regular paycheck. Just like the paycheck that we already get working for someone else, except it’s a paycheck we pay ourselves.
If you build a micro business it means you’re your own boss, you make your own rules, you live life on your own terms.
If you genuinely have the spirit of an entrepreneur inside of you, it’s perfectly possible to build a $10k/month webapp business that can set you free.
… and this post will mainly act as an informal prelude to my following writings, in which I report from a few important conferences and other knowledge-heavy events I’ve attended recently. My mind is buzzing, so stay tuned!
Brian Klemmer - The Legacy of a Compassionate Samurai
“Life is what happens while you’re busy making other plans”, some people say. One person who didn’t only have (as well as constantly execute on) a plan for his own life, but also a plan for the impact his life would have through and beyond his life, was Brian Klemmer, founder and company leader of Klemmer & Associates. He was a true compassionate samurai.
Brian passed away two weeks ago, unexpectedly at the age of 61.
Brian Klemmer was one of my first personal mentors and teachers in the field of personal development - and probably the one person who has had the biggest individual impact on my philosophy of success, business and life. His energy, passion and authenticity shone through his actions - on the speaker’s stage, in his stance towards his fellow humans, and in the way he built a business with integrity and huge vision. He had formed and lived according to a 500-year plan of fighting “for a world that works for everyone with no-one left behind”.
The principles he taught were tried and true, and he conveyed them effectively using stories, metaphors and great passion on stage and in the written word. For a useful and actionable overview of the basics of “Klemmer philosophy” I warmly recommend his book “If how-to’s were enough we would all be skinny, rich and happy”. It has a lot of Brian’s humor - yet it’s direct and authoritative. It’s a simple read - yet the messages are profound and worth returning to for many readthroughs.
I wasn’t a close personal friend of Brian’s, more like “only a student”. But he implanted something special in each and everyone of his students, I’m sure. I cherish a memory from attending his Personal Mastery weekend seminar, and for some exercises/homework assignments we were to pair up in “buddy pairs” to hold each other accountable and be sure to follow through on commitments. Brian graciously accepted to be my “buddy partner” when I asked him, and that certainly helped me to apply myself completely when I was about to miss those personal goals of mine decided upon at the seminar - so much so, that I focused on the task in a new way and then just blew past them with a rush of accomplishment. Brian was that kind of inspiration.
I’m sad that you’re gone, but you leave an awesome legacy behind. Me and many others will carry on the torch of the way of the compassionate samurai - this I’m committed to. Rest in peace, buddy.
Hi! My name is Niclas Johansson, and I'm entrepreneurial (I run my own startup, having been into sales / biz dev / micropreneurship since 2001). And this is my blog.
