In the Soul Shelter spirit of creative commitment and entrepreneurship, my new book project has carried me into the realm of “micro-philanthropy.” How did that happen?  Long story short, it started with …

A Predicament (or: Necessity is the Mother of Invention)

It’s widely known in the creative community that trends in art funding haven’t exactly arced upward over the last thirty years. And now we see near consensus among forecasts in the philanthropic sector, which show public funding like the National Endowment for the Arts all but disappearing before long.

Clearly we need …

A Vision (or: How I Got Hooked)

Last month I got an invitation to join a leading arts organization known as United States Artists, which bestows $50,000 fellowships on creative practitioners every year. Attending a reception here in Portland to learn more, I found the folks at US Artists coolly, unflappably acknowledging the fact that “historically, public support for the arts and artists is unstable and unreliable.” Cool and unflappable, perhaps, because with the launch of an innovative new Web site US Artists has pioneered an effective way to keep its mission alive in the long run, and to:

• “Foster direct connections between artists and the public”
• “Catalyze new funding for artists”
• “Bring creative projects to life”
• “Build community around the most accomplished artists in America”

The vision behind this Web site entranced me immediately. I and my fellow arts supporters will fight to keep civic backing of the arts however we can. But leveraging the power of social media and the hands-on format of micro-finance to support artists on a project-by-project, tax-deductible basis — well, that’s an idea whose time has come! Let’s call it Democratic Patronage. Which brings me to…

My Project (or: A Writer Makes a Video in Order to Make a Book)

Now in its funding stage at United States Artists, Date of Disappearance, a collection of ten short stories, will appear in illustrated limited edition, hand-numbered and signed, and will be sold exclusively through independent booksellers. (It will also launch a micro-press.)

As far as I can tell, mine is one of the first fiction projects to be featured, and I’m awfully excited to be a part of the USA community. If you’d like to help launch Date of Disappearance by reserving a copy or simply making a pledge, you can learn more in the following video.

Or click over to US Artists to get a first-hand experience of this brilliant new chapter in arts funding, where 200-odd projects (in all artistic disciplines) are currently in development.

You can also help with my project by spreading the word far and wide. Blog it, Facebook it, Share it, Like it, Tweet, link, or embed my video. You’ll have my deepest gratitude, eventually you’ll have a sumptuous, collectible book to enjoy, and you’ll have supported the arts. All longtime Soul Shelter readers know the significance of that!

You might also enjoy:

“You Don’t Have to Be an Insider”

“Do We Need a Cultural Bill of Rights?”

“Why It’s Desirable to Be Eccentric”

“Jump-Start Your Career With a Personal Business Model”

“Two Books to Galvanize Creativity”

“Beautiful, Soul-Affirming Untruths”

So before earning an MBA, consider a do-it-yourself “MPA” — a Master of Personal Administration. Unlike an MBA, which purports to train you to manage organizations, an MPA encourages you to understand yourself and manage your own career. Here are some differences between the two:

1. Organizational business plans versus personal business models

Even though the dotcom meltdown demonstrated more than a decade ago that “business plans” are a lousy basis for entrepreneurial action, MBA programs remain wedded to “business plan” thinking. The MPA, on the other hand, calls for individuals to seek meaningful work by designing and testing personal business models.

2. Big/stable/predictable versus small/chaotic/ever-changing

The “A” in “MBA” assumes a need for administration — people to manage large, stable, predictable organizations. In contrast, the MPA approach acknowledges that work today is messy, unpredictable, and constantly changing — and that small businesses employ half of all private sector workers.

3. Greed versus contribution

The U.S. financial meltdown has exposed greed at its worst — and the dangers of the kinds of financial engineering taught in MBA programs. The MPA calls for learners to do good things for others while helping themselves — the essence of ethical business.

4. Commoditization versus differentiation

MBA degrees are increasingly common and therefore an ever-weaker differentiator in a tight job market. But the candidate with a sound personal business model linked to a clear purpose stands out. As Josh Kaufman writes in The Personal MBA, “Skip business school. Educate yourself.”

So, are you tempted to start studying for your MPA? Where should you start?

Well, there’s no formal curriculum, and no diploma at the end. The first step is to develop a personal business model — a concise definition of your Customers and the Value you provide them, all driven by a Purpose that binds work and personal life. You do this with a Business Model Canvas, which looks like this:

You can find the Canvas and more at Business Model You, where 276 work life wizards from 37 countries are developing the personal business model methodology (thanks to personal branding expert Andres Perez Ortega for his inspiration on the MPA acronym, which I’ve rendered in English).

At Business Model You you’ll also find other resources and experts to help you make the MPA honor roll. Now, that doesn’t mean working on an MPA is easy: One member who uses our methodology in business courses says that “students think making up strategic plans for business is easy, but creating a strategy for yourself is hard — because the personal strategy matters more.”

In fact, I’ll be the first to admit that none of us has actually earned the MPA credential yet. We may never graduate! But maybe that’s the biggest advantage of all. While an MBA costs tens of thousands of dollars for two years of classes, an MPA is free — and the learning continues for a lifetime.

Why not enroll today?

Yes, I am shooting straight here, both about 1) you becoming a contributing co-author, and 2) our new book breaking a whole batch of publishing rules.

Here’s the backstory:

Last year, I edited and served as a contributing co-author for Business Model Generation, a book that turned into an international bestseller — so far, it’s shipped more than 115,000 copies worldwide and sold translation rights for 14 languages.

We didn’t take the usual path to success. In a blog post that explains the counterintuitive reasons for Business Model Generation’s success, Jeffrey Krames, the agent who represented us, wrote that BMG “breaks most every rule of business book publishing.”

Our book did break all the rules. It was:

• Self-published
• Authored outside the U.S.
• Suboptimally titled
• Too expensive
• A non-standard size
• Etc., etc.

But that’s not all. Business Model Generation itself became a living example of the innovative business models it advocates, turning the traditional publishing approach upside down by attracting 470 contributing co-authors from 45 countries — all of whom supported the work by pre-purchasing copies and providing feedback on chapter drafts.

Now, hang on. I’ve been bandying the term “business model” like a high-priced consultant. What does it mean, exactly?

Put simply, a business model is the logic by which an organization sustains itself financially. Kind of like a blueprint for an enterprise.

Given worldwide recession, white-hot international competition, and the U.S. financial market meltdown, companies (along with governments, schools, and other nonprofit organizations) are finding it essential to examine, analyze, modify, or even completely revamp the models by which they sustain themselves.

That’s where Business Model Generation comes in. By creating an understandable vocabulary for talking about business models, as well as a simple, visual tool for sharing those models, our team produced a work whose precepts have been adopted by thousands of companies worldwide. In fact, Inc. Magazine dubbed Business Model Generation one of 2010’s “best books for business owners.”

Readers, here’s your cue.

While working on Business Model Generation, I was struck by how relevant business model concepts are to our personal careers. Even people who aren’t solo entrepreneurs, I realized, can apply business model thinking to their own work lives. By reconceiving ourselves as “single-person enterprises,” we can take four simple, powerful steps toward reinventing our work. The steps are:

• Draw a simple one-page “picture” of your career (see Business Model Canvas below)
• Reflect deeply on Step One and decide how you want your career “picture” to change
• Diagram your new, reconceived career
• Act to make your re-envisioned worklife a reality

The process uses the Business Model Canvas created by Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur:

I came up with the notion of a “personal business model” and proposed to the original five-member Business Model Generation team that we work together on a sister book: Business Model You!

The answer was a hearty yes, and the project is now underway at BusinessModelYou.com.

Please take a look, and if you are sincerely interested in career development, consider joining us as a contributing co-author.

While we can’t guarantee that our new book will also become a bestseller, if we work together with the right tools, the odds are in our favor — and yours.

*****************************

Business Model You! book site

Business Model You! Facebook page

Many thanks to Allie, Lindsay, Chris, Steve, and other friends who sent e-mails over the past weeks, checking in and gently reminding us to write. Now, how to explain ourselves? Mark?

Well, we haven’t exactly been sitting around.

True. We’ve each been sunk deep in our respective core projects. In past months those included completing a new novel, editing a best-selling business book, and finishing a doctoral thesis.

Mark’s too modest, so I’ll tell the latest about his writing: he completed his third novel and immediately won an offer, so the book will be published next year. What’s the new title about, Mark?

Part-love story, part-historical mystery. It follows five generations in an American family, beginning with an immigration in the 1820s, continuing through the Civil War, and concluding in the final years of World War II. Wow, that sounds extremely tedious. But I promise, lots of stuff is left out and I kept only the juicy bits.

You also participated in that wild artist retreat in upstate New York in August. I imagine that involved lots of drunken skinny dipping, orgiastic body-painting, and so forth?

Well, ahem, I had to sign this non-disclosure thing… What I can say is … it was very nice and everybody was, ahem, well-behaved. Also, lots of work got done. But what about you, Tim? You’re even more academically distinguished these days, aren’t you?

I wrapped up my doctorate of business administration (DBA), a daunting task, believe you me. The degree was awarded August 27. My thesis dealt with the question of why some business models transfer more readily to overseas markets than others. As I see it the answer lies in how business models are “culturally imprinted” — and how those imprints affect a business model’s viability outside country of origin.

But you had more on your plate than that.

Yep. While finishing the research, I served as editor and co-author for an extraordinary new book. Business Model Generation is the first book I’ve been involved with that’s sold more than 7,000 copies, so it’s been a thrill (95% of all books published sell fewer than 5,000 copies).

How many copies are we talking? (Author to author here.)

55,000-plus in print.

Whoa, Holy Gutenberg! And overseas?

Chinese, Japanese, Korean, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Swedish, Dutch, and Indonesian translation rights have been sold.

What, no Antarctic?

I wasn’t supposed to say anything. The contract isn’t quite finished.

Remind me to ask you more often about success in one’s writing life. Now, there’s an interesting story behind the way this book was put together, right? You helmed the editing part of a really sharp team.

Yes, the project involved a remarkable entrepreneurial network (about which more later).

Where can I get a copy?

Barnes & Noble stuck their neck out for us: they ordered an average of more than four copies each for all of their almost 800 U.S. stores (that’s unusual for a $35 business book). So please consider buying it at Barnes & Noble — we’d like to support the remarkable commitment they made to us.

You got it. Well, as for Soul Shelter, the way we’ve kept things shuttered here lately, I think we owe ourselves a reminder of why we started this blog in the first place.

We had a wonderful book of medieval Japanese parables to promote, but more important, we wanted to experience this remarkable medium for ourselves.

Right. We wanted an outlet for the ideas we always tossed around between us in regular conversation. But I think it’s become clear that we lack the, uh, stamina of real bloggers.

Are you saying we fizzled?

Fizzled? No! Flagged a little, maybe. The ideas are still there in abundance. The tough part is the regular blogging thing — the format and upload business…

True. It’s safe to say that we are absolutely, positively, incontrovertibly convinced that we will never, ever, be pro bloggers.

You said it. Blogging is hard, incessant work.

Uh-huh, and to be successful, you’ve got to either 1) have good products or services to flog, 2) write about a subject that’s attractive to advertisers, or 3) be so crazy about writing and self-publishing that you’re care-free about any financial return on your efforts.

That’s why with this post, we’re switching to an occasional rather than a regular posting schedule (actually, we made that transition months ago, but hey, here’s official notice).

And how should we define “occasional”?

Let’s just say, stretches of quietude will not be rare.

And quietude is good for the soul!

Yeah, nicely put. Quietude: un-blog-like, but not without soulful benefits!

Meanwhile, the Soul Shelter archives are fully accessible via the categorical groupings in our sidebar, or via the search box on the bottom right side of all full-post pages.

Soul Shelter lives, and more good writing is (occasionally) on the way!

Tim Clark and Mark Cunningham are both writers, and welcome any inquiries. Write to <authors> at this domain.

I was Tokyo for a couple of weeks, working on my doctoral research and seeing family and friends between interviews and writing sessions. One night I enjoyed dinner with Brad, a longtime buddy who’s been in mobile communications for some ten years. He’d lost his job a few months back, and wanted to talk about life, work — and going solo.

“I went to see a recruiter about a month before I got canned,” he said over a Club sandwich at a basement café in Omotesando. “I told him, ‘I know I’m going to get the ax, and want to see if I can find something preemptively.’

“The guy looked at me like I’d sprouted green dreadlocks. ‘Don’t quit your job now,’ he urged. ‘Nokia just let 60 people go, and a bunch of them are showing up here. Stay put as long as you can!’

“Two months later, that recruiter’s company closed down, and he himself was out of a job.”

As I listened, I tucked into my maguro tuna garlic steak. Outrageously good. Brad continued.

“That mindset — that your well-being and success depends on an organization — just blows me away. Now that I’m older, I see how I’m the one creating value, I’m the one who makes things happen.”

He went on to detail the events leading up to losing his job, his anxiety over continuing to provide effectively for his wife and children, his unforeseen excitement about being forced to pursue career and personal goals closer to his true self.

Reflective, Brad returned to his sandwich. I told him I got his drift about the “dependency mindset,” and that it often results in too much work time spent resolving conflicts unrelated to operations. Turf battles, personality clashes, political struggles. Those things are a huge part of salaried employment.

“In fact,” I said,  “most office jobs can be done in three or four concentrated, uninterrupted hours of real work or day. It’s the attendant nonsense — plus meetings, administrivia, and commuting — that claims the rest of employee time. The key challenge of blowing all that off and going solo is securing the steady income of a conventional job: the relentless salary that rolls in month after month.”

Brad began describing possibilities for his new, non-employee career. He’d already secured a temporary gig with a mobile content consultancy, enough to carry him through the following month, and now he was looking at combining three part-time opportunities that might equal or even surpass his previous income — all the while letting him focus on areas of greater personal interest, minus the commute, conflicts, and constricted hours of conventional employment.

“I’m starting to see how losing my job has pushed me to a new level of awareness about the nature of work,” he said, bright-eyed. “When you put yourself out there, things start to happen. If you make ten tries, one or two might work out. Make 20, four or five might work out. It’s not like you make ten tries and nothing happens.”

I nodded, recalling my favorite takeaway from Rich Dad Poor Dad: The amount of revenue coming in is directly proportional to the number of communications going out.

Brad paused. “I don’t know why any of this should come as a surprise, but somehow my thinking has changed.”

Time for an epigram, I decided, and quoted from a new book by Kanye West: “Life is five percent what happens and 95% how you react.”

Brad kept talking, and I kept listening. As we parted, he thanked me profusely for the “energizing discussion.” I nodded with a smile. He had energized himself. He’d lost a job, and now was reclaiming his life.

(This post is from the Soul Shelter archives)

You may also enjoy:

“How to Go Solo without a ‘Big Idea’”

“Entrepreneurship: A Primer”

“Know Your Gift“

There are successful entrepreneurs and there are what I call Entrepreneurial Thinkers, people who don’t necessarily start new enterprises, but who consistently pursue opportunity regardless of resources currently controlled (more on this in upcoming posts).

Kuniyasu Sakai is both.

Almost unknown outside Japan, the remarkable Mr. Sakai founded several dozen successful manufacturing companies, then wrote a series of books describing bunsha, his overarching business method (bunsha refers to spinning off growing operations into new companies before they become too big; today we would call it intrapreneurship).

Mr. Sakai briefly drew international attention in 1990 with a stunning article in the Harvard Business Review entitled “The Feudal World of Japanese Manufacturing.”

The article revealed that, contrary to popular perception, Japan’s diversified technology conglomerates are essentially industry overlords heavily dependent on low-status manufacturing subcontractors — like Mr. Sakai’s many bunsha firms — for their much-vaunted technological expertise. Nearly two decades later, “The Feudal World“ still reveals more about the true nature of Japanese industry than many self-styled Japan experts will ever know.

But I digress. Apart from his stunning insights into entrepreneurship and Japanese manufacturing, what I really love about Mr. Sakai is his enthusiastic, jovial embrace of contradiction. Here’s what he wrote in one book:

Occasionally one of my listeners will point out that what I have said at the end of a speech contradicts something I said at the beginning. Or that what I said on Wednesday contradicts something I said on Monday. Or that what I wrote last week contradicts something I wrote ten years ago … every now and then I run across somebody who intends this comment as a criticism of my whole system. The implication is that because my ideas seem contradictory, they must be worthless.

Mr. Sakai sees a world that is often unclear and confused — sometimes even contradictory (as with the perception and the reality behind Japan’s technology giants). But, he asks, should this stop us from living our lives?

… the charge that what I say is full of contradictions is one that has never bothered me. To me, the whole world is full of contradictions and so it is only natural that human beings are full of contradictions. Any system of ideas that is logically perfect in every place and time belongs in the world of mathematics, not the world of people.

What a relief to hear such an accomplished person say this! Maybe a writer’s task is to articulate truths readers believe are forbidden.

Here’s Brenda Ueland in If You Want to Write:

… remember always that the true self is never a fixed thing. And do not try to be consistent, for what is true to you today may not be true at all tomorrow, because you see a better truth.

‘Nuff said. Let us march forth, and gladly contradict tomorrow what we say today.

(This post comes from the Soul Shelter archives)

You may also enjoy:

“The Soul of an Entrepreneur, the DNA of a Business”

“Know Your Gift”

“The Surprising Truth About Why People Become Entrepreneurs“

(This is a special guest post by writer and Soul Shelter friend John Bardos)

I recently turned 40 years old, just sold my small business in Japan, and am about to embark on a nomadic lifestyle with my wife. We have no particular destination or plans. We are just going to go.

I had a successful business that offered a decent income on 30 hour workweeks with three months of vacation per year. What would make a sane person give up that security and stability without another income source? I don’t claim to be sane, but the ultimate answer is that life is short.

When my wife and I first started our business everything was exciting. Money was tight. We were worried about how we would get customers. We experimented with many different prices, ways of advertising and constantly adjusted everything. It was nerve-racking and a lot of work but it was the happiest time of our business and life.

When customers came more easily and our bank balance started growing, our time become more valuable. We stopped caring about delivering increasing amounts of value for our customers and instead started to focus on minimizing our work and maximizing profits. Relationships and connections with real people slowly turned into business transactions. We used to celebrate new customers. Then we started thinking of them as necessary nuisances.

I changed from being an entrepreneur to a manager. I love being an entrepreneur, but I hate being a manager. We had a good decade with our company, but now we’re managers, and it’s time to move on. More money and more things can provide fleeting happiness, but the challenge of overcoming obstacles and creating something from nothing made memories that I cherish more than anything.

Japan is a fantastic country and we definitely plan on returning regularly, so it is not the country we are leaving. The quality of food, richness of the culture, and overall safety are unrivaled anywhere else in the world. I don’t view our journey so much as leaving Japan, as simply striving for change.

Coming to the Japan for the first time almost 13 years ago was one of the scariest and most exciting things I’ve done in my life. Life is meant to be lived at the edge of precipices. That’s what keeps everything challenging and interesting. There is no better way to get that adrenaline rush than to move to a new country and fight for a way to earn a living. I need that tension in my life again.

Everyone asks what we are going to DO. My answer is, “we are going to travel.” Of course, the “DO” they are referring to is the “what do you DO?” variety. They want to know what I am going to DO for work. We are still all defined by our jobs. In that sense, I am going to DO cool projects that interest me. I love to work, so I’m not after a life of leisure. I’ m also not rich, so I will likely have to earn some money, sometime in the future but I have a modest amount of savings and investments that can sustain us for several years at least. I’m going to work on projects that I want to DO.

I guarantee, though, that I’ll thoroughly enjoy everything I choose to focus on. This entrepreneur has turned vagabond, and it’s time to journey on, destination unknown.

Entrepreneur-turned-vagabond John Bardos blogs at Jet Set Citizen.

You may also enjoy:

The Value of Travel: One Household’s Mild Manifesto

In Defense of “Aimless” Learning

You’ve Gotta Jump

What Purpose Work?

Entrepreneurship Hints From Overseas

Hazards of Career, Rewards of Vocation

What the Seeker Ultimately Discovers

One of my favorite tunes from decades past is Whip It, by the technopop unit Devo. I used to play Whip It in a cover band (along with Uncontrollable Urge), and it always made partygoers jump to their feet.

Back then, I could hardly have known that I would later run into Devo founder Mark Mothersbaugh at a Tokyo art show, or that years after that, I’d be referring to Devo in a blog.

But here I am, facing a daunting task (designing and executing doctoral research) and I find my mind casting back to days of playing music, and drawing on the wisdom so neatly described by Devo’s lyrics.

Some listeners thought Whip It is about kinky sex; it’s actually about problem-solving:

When a problem comes along, you must whip it.
Before the cream sits out too long, you must whip it.
When something’s going wrong, you must whip it.

Now whip it! Into shape. Shape it up! Get straight!
Go forward! Move ahead! Try to detect it. It’s not too late! To whip it! Whip it good!

When a good time turns around, you must whip it.
You will never live it down, unless you whip it.
No one gets their way, until they whip it.

Maybe because I played Whip It so many times, and maybe because I happened to meet Mothersbaugh in person, something about the song struck me deeply and stayed with me over the years. While pondering my approach to daunting tasks recently undertaken, I came up with seven steps that have worked for me. Take a look, and see if they might work for you, too.

1. Abandon Either the Task or the Result
Read The Underachiever’s Manifesto and know that it’s okay to give up before you start. You don’t have to set the world on fire. Undertake the task only if it’s truly meaningful, and you have the time, energy, skills, and psychic bandwidth to handle it. Sure you want to proceed? Then abandon attachment to the result and immerse yourself in the process. The value of completing Daunting Tasks lies in the journey theretoward, not in the end state of accomplishment. Still on board? Then on to Step 2!

2. Start Now
Start right away, “before the cream sits out too long.” Immediate action, even baby steps, generates momentum and confidence.

3. Enlarge Yourself
In your mind, make yourself bigger than the task. You are huge and powerful: you look down on this puny job like a towering giant who twiddles trees like matchsticks. Grab your Daunting Task by the, er, family jewels, and squeeze until he begs permission to shrink to a manageable size. Grant such permission. Now kiss and make up. You’re friends, but you had to show who’s in charge.

4. Brainstorm a Quick & Dirty Plan
Quickly write down a strategy for dealing with the Task. Don’t think hard about it, just jot down whatever thoughts come into your head. Write badly and don’t edit. Later, look over your notes and rearrange the order of your thoughts. Try to see how the job might be broken down into manageable sub-tasks.

5. Draft or Rehearse
Based on your notes, write a draft plan for accomplishing the Daunting Task. Alternatively, if it’s a job interview, presentation or the like, “rehearse” the task: shut yourself into a room (preferably with a video camera) and let ‘er rip. Who cares if you sound goofy or your draft plan reads terribly? By blurting out the words you need—whether on paper or by voice—you’ll start to understand what you want to say, and perceive the gaps in your plan. And by blundering through one “dress rehearsal”—sloppy as it may be—you’ll feel like you’re 50% of the way home. See how your confidence has jumped?

6. Be Confident and Be Friends
You can do it! View your task as a challenge, a job, a project—anything but a problem. Thinking of something as a problem from the get-go immediately positions you to fight the Daunting Task rather than collaborate in achieving the promise of its purpose. Remember, you bought into tackling the job during Step 1. So be friends with it. Let the challenge of your work create curiosity rather than despair. If you feel stuck, read a book on the subject, or seek out and approach an expert for advice.

7. Do First What You Want to Do Least
Clark’s Rule About Priorities (CRAP™), the first of Clark’s Rules, says Do First What You Want to Do Least. It’s based on the difference between urgency and importance. Even though you’re friends with your Daunting Task, somehow you may find it easier to start each day by responding to e-mail, browsing the Web, and accomplishing little, “urgent” errands. Resist the temptation. Stick with the important task: the Daunting Task.

Finally, celebrate the process as much as the end result by treating yourself as you pass through major milestones. You’ve earned it!

The foregoing is hereby formalized as Clark’s Axiom Regarding Daunting Tasks (CARD TASKS): Abandon either the task or attachment to the result. Earlier this week, Mark put it beautifully as “Think Progress, Not Completion.”

As always, read the disclaimer, and be advised that Clark’s Rules may apply only to Clark, who can barely follow them himself. Here are a few others you can check out:

“Clark’s Law of Work” (Attractiveness is inversely proportional to compensation)

“Clark’s Communication Potency Theorum” (The power of communications improve exponentially with proximity, either physical or psychological)

“Clark’s Option on Opportunities Theory (COOT^TM)”

(This post has bubbled up from the deep blue Soul Shelter archives)

This month we ring in Year Number Three for Soul Shelter! Hard to believe we’ve been around so long already — we’ll soon be grayhairs by the standards of the Web.

We’ve grown Soul Shelter slowly and gently these last two years. Every step of the way we’ve sought to make it unfailingly inspirational, helpful, fun, and informative. Now we’d like to ask you, Dear Reader, to help us celebrate our third year.

If you:

• appreciate Soul Shelter’s perspectives
• find yourself awaiting your weekly Soul Shelter epistles
• have ever caught yourself reflecting — offline — on something you read at Soul Shelter

and/or …

• believe we’ve delivered on the Soul Shelter pledge “to provide a stabilizing, reliably worthy alternative” to the breathless chatter of the blogosphere,

then snap on a bright party hat on our behalf and help us make some celebratory noise: Share us with your friends, Tweet us, Stumble us, Digg us, Forward us, Facebook us, link to us, add us to your blogroll, make us your homepage, and otherwise spread the good Soul Shelter news. We’d love to widen our fold, and what better route to new but long-destined readers than through our faithful current ones?

And allow us to thank You, our loyal visitors and subscribers. We’re in your debt. Without your valued readership and comments, we’d have shriveled long ago.

Today, to further mark our anniversary, we offer the following Soul Shelter round-up. Here’s a Best-Of from our first two years — nine posts of which we’re particularly proud. Maybe you missed them the first time around, maybe they’re a good place to start for any new  readers you’d care to point our way.

And maybe you’d like to add your own favorite Soul Shelter post to the list?

Enjoy, and here’s to the good year ahead.

A Message to Those Aspiring to Blend Meaning and Money

Too often, pay doesn’t parallel passion. Fortune falls behind fulfillment. Money and meaning are mismatched. What’s a seeker of reasonable balance to do?

You Don’t Have to Be An Insider

I’m living proof that one needs no golden key or inside connections to pursue the work one most desires. If you find doors closed against you, set your shoulder to them. Push.

Losing a Job, Reclaiming a Life

That mindset — that your well-being and success depends on an organization — just blows me away. Now that I’m older, I see how I’m the one creating value, I’m the one who makes things happen.

Are You An Amateur? Why Not?

Here’s a wonderful but much too uncelebrated means of personal fulfillment and life enrichment: the learning and doing of a thing purely for the love of it — otherwise known as amateurism.

The Rainbow Vanishes

I wanted my kids to understand that someday, all too soon, it would be their father lying before them, cold and lifeless. But they didn’t understand. How could they, when I was just beginning to understand?

The Risk of Happiness

There comes a time when one must recognize that the pursuit of happiness, in its multifarious forms, will always involve a feeling of risk, of embracing a financial or emotional unknown (or sometimes both at once).

Coffee Breakthrough

Dave proudly displayed his brand new, Swiss-made, fully automatic espresso machine, for which he’d slapped down a cool $945. It must be nice to be able to afford a high-end, fully automatic espresso maker, I mused aloud. Dave’s response snapped me to attention. ‘Actually, I can’t afford not to own one.’

The Value of Travel — One Household’s Mild Manifesto

Travel means engaging a larger world, not merely retreating from the one we know. Travel means joining in the human experience.

Time to Give In, Time to Give Up

Suddenly, all bets were off. … Everything was canceled. It was the beginning of Portland’s biggest snowfall in 40 years.

Derek Sivers had a problem.

As the leader of a successful touring band, he needed a way to make his CDs available to fans everywhere, all the time—not just at concerts.

But Derek and his group were unattached to a major label, and big sellers like CDNow and Amazon required bands to have in-place agreements with large distributors. What was a hard-working, independent musician to do?

Derek decided to set up his own modest online sales channel, and soon friends from other bands were asking for help selling their music. Within a couple of years, the store, renamed CD Baby, was distributing the work of more than 90,000 artists. To date it’s paid independent musicians more than $70 million.

At Derek’s invitation, a couple of years back I visited CD Baby’s cavernous headquarters near Portland International Airport, and was knocked out by the depth and conviction of his entrepreneurial vision. Over the past month we caught up by e-mail. Following are excerpts from the conversation.

- Making a living playing music must have been deeply satisfying. Describe the moment you understood that CD Baby would become a full-time job and your focus would shift from playing to business. What went through your mind as the scale tipped?

The big thought was, “Oops! Well … as long as I’ve accidentally started something, and I don’t need the money, I might as well be really utopian about it.”

That’s when I decided to give CD Baby a real DNA that was not about making money, but all about being a distribution deal dream-come-true from a musician’s point of view. I considered it a utopian experiment more than a business. I was really surprised when it made money anyway.

Really I think the timing was just right. The world needed it, and nobody else was doing it. I was reluctant and actively fighting the growth of it, so when it grew anyway I knew it was meant to be and just accepted my new role in the world.

- I love what you just said: “a DNA that’s not about making money.” I’ve never met a single successful entrepreneur who began with the primary goal of making money. Every one had a higher purpose. What’s your take?

People or companies that are only in it for the money seem to have a metaphorical odor. You might end up patronizing their business anyway, but feel kind of icky about it.

People or companies that are really doing it for the love of the subject seem to glow. You like doing business with them. You smile more often. You feel better about it. And that’s why you end up telling your friends how wonderful they are, and that’s why those companies do better.

People who truly love what they do are more likely to put that extra effort into excellence than those who are only in it for the money. The difference between “really good” and “passionately excellent” can be massive, and take a lot of maniacal work to achieve.

- CD Baby took off shortly before the explosion in digital music sales. How have you adapted?

We didn’t simply stick to CDs. As soon as iTunes launched, CD Baby became their biggest supplier of music, via our Digital Distribution program. Today iTunes is our single biggest source of income.

But we still sell CDs because people still want them. My original vision was to help the artists, regardless of how the music medium evolves.

- That vision clearly offers irresistible value to your customers, because CD Baby now serves more than 200,000 artists. What’s next for CD Baby? And what’s next for you personally?

On CD Baby’s tenth birthday, March 2008, I announced that I don’t work there anymore.

I’m more of an entrepreneur than a manager. I enjoy experimenting and inventing, and know that others can manage much better than me. So, in order to free up my time (and mind) to create new services for musicians, I completely stepped out of CD Baby. Good scary challenge.

After reading The Art of Learning I was thinking of mastery: committing yourself to years of achieving mastery of one single thing.

My first thought was computer programming, but that didn’t feel fulfilling enough. I enjoy it, but only as a means. Then I realized the thing I could really commit myself to a lifetime pursuit of mastery is entrepreneurship. It satisfies me on every level—much more for personal and altruistic reasons than financial.

- Wow. That’s one big hunk o’ learning.

But—what the hell is mastery of entrepreneurship? Starting one successful company? Ten? Or is it something else entirely? There’s no championship, no finish line, especially since happiness is a crucial barometer.

And if entrepreneurship is about creating a new company, then focusing on that means starting a company, achieving proof of success, but not getting involved with ongoing management after that, since management is a different skill. The focused entrepreneur should then start a new company.

As for what’s next—I have so many plans for new companies and services, but nothing worth talking about yet since they don’t exist, and we all know how plans change between paper and reality. In fact CD Baby was only meant to be like PayPal—processing credit cards for my friends—but it turned into an online retail and digital distributor. So, I’ll just quietly launch my new ideas and watch them morph into whatever my customers really need them to be.

- You’ve produced a terrific new illustrated book (6M PDF), that, while targeting musicians, offers tight, offbeat advice any entrepreneur can use. I love your bullets: “Proudly exclude some people,” “Be an extreme version of yourself,” “Well-rounded doesn’t cut it,” and “Call the destination and ask for directions.” Tell us how the book and illustrations came about, and your goals for the work.

Thanks! For the illustrations, I just found a friend-of-a-friend named Heather Q in Portland. She and I sat together at a bar coming up with ideas that might illustrate each point (“This one’s about things getting easier once you do the initial work. How can we illustrate that? Hmm … How about a guy pushing a heavy boulder up a hill, and he’s almost at the top?”). Then she would go sketch out the ideas and come back for the next revision. She’s great.

Honestly I had no goal for the book. I didn’t want to sell it. Just spread it out there freely in hopes it’d help some fellow musicians.

Between every line of the interview, Derek confirms surprising truths about entrepreneurship. I’ll share more in future posts, but here are today’s big takeaways:

It’s Not About You

Entrepreneurship is not about you struggling to break through, you making the grade, you overcoming the odds, you getting rich. It’s about helping others achieve their goals: enabling others’ satisfaction, helping others earn a decent living, helping others succeed.

But it Starts with You …

… because the best place to discover the seed of a new business is at your own workplace. What problems do you face? What’s annoying? Solve that and you may have a business. My friend Jay calls it “scratching the self-serving itch.” And if you serve yourself effectively, you may serve many others well, too.

(This post comes to you from the Soul Shelter archives)

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