(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 — ten 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.

In Defense of Solitude

We modern mortals, like the generations before us, need to be re-set on a regular basis, reconditioned to the natural, non-mechanical pace of the world and of our own souls. Our age-old impulse toward meditation and prayer can itself reveal the intrinsic human impulse toward solitude.

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)

You may also enjoy:

“Pursuing Fortune and Fulfillment with Blogger Extraordinaire J.D. Roth”

“Three Things I Wish I’d Known Before Starting My Own Business”

“How to Go Solo Without a ‘Big Idea’”

“A Message to Those Confused About Career Direction”

“It Is Natural to Need Help“

“I can’t. I’m scared.”

Skyler Dunn, three years older and infinitely wiser, looked at me with a kind smile as I stared nervously toward the water nearly thirty feet below. The surface of Lake Washington had never appeared so green and ominously dark.

It was a brilliant Seattle today in the summer of my twelfth year. I’d long before completed my rite of passage by leaping from “Top,” the white steel diving platform at the end of the Laurelhurst Beach Club dock. But budding hormones now goaded me to plunge headfirst — to dive, like the teenagers.

For an hour, Skyler had been egging me on, in a supportive, sympathetic way — my first one-on-one coaching session. I was thrilled that the bigger boy had taken such an interest in my dilemma.

“You can do it,” he insisted. “Once you’ve dove, you’ll wonder why you were ever scared.”

Again and again he pleaded my own case for me, persistent but positive. After what seemed like hours of agonizing, I edged to the brink of the platform, then flung myself headlong toward the water, moments later bursting with joy to the surface, to return triumphantly to Top for another dive. As Skyler had said, now it was easy.

It’s easy for me to know this now, because I’m a lot older, and when you get older it becomes easier to understand that risk is what makes life fun, what pushes you ahead. I love the Van Halen tune:

Might as well jump. Jump! Might as well jump.

Go ahead, jump. Jump! Go ahead, jump!

My father died a couple of years ago, and your father dying is the universe telling you, “you’re next.” And when you’re next, you start to realize that — given the new big picture you’ve just been handed — few things in life are truly risky.

During my first six-year stint in Tokyo, I talked to a guy who told me how he got started on an impressive business career. It was like talking to Skyler Dunn twenty years later:

“An acquaintance’s father, an electronics company executive, asked me if I could go to the U.S. and research the battery market. ‘Sure,’ I said.”

Ever cautious, I asked if he’d had any market research experience when he made that bold reply. He snorted. “Hell, if I always had to have experience before trying something new, I wouldn’t be able to get out of bed in the morning!”

His confidence bowled me over — and I winced at my own timid thinking. Of course! Just dive, like Skyler said! It’s the thought of trying the unknown, the fear of it that holds us back. It’s not that we’re incapable. We’re all capable of doing what we can reasonably imagine ourselves doing.

What Skyler taught me at the Beach Club so many years ago, and what I keep struggling to apply, now has the clarity of age. So I say: Dive, young man! Dive, old man! Dive!

The secret of reaping the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment from life is to live dangerously.

Frederich Nietzsche

(Tim’s currently on sabbatical; this post appears courtesy of the Soul Shelter archives)

You may also enjoy:

“Recognizing the Opportunity Within”

“Eight Difficult, Outdated Ways to Excel”

“The Merit of Mistakes”

“How To Achieve Even While Losing”

“Why We Should Contradict Ourselves“

The scene was the Bend Venture Conference and the focus was verbal pitches (written business plans had already been vetted by the conference organizers). Representatives from a dozen companies mounted the stage in turn to deliver short overviews of their ventures. Eight were in a “Wild Card” competition wherein speakers delivered their pitches within a strictly-enforced two-minute time frame.

Audience members voted to select the Wild Card a winner, so personality, delivery, and presentation order weighed as heavily as venture feasibility and the entrepreneur’s track record. This year’s Wild Card winner was ADASA, a maker of specialized RFID tag encoders for a technology category that has been poised to become the Next Big Thing for ten years running.

Competing for the grand prize of a $120,000 equity investment were four other companies previously reviewed by the conference organizers and selected as outstanding potential vehicle for investment. Each was grilled post-pitch by a panel of five venture capitalists (VCs), who, along with the conference organizers, voted to determine the winner.

Contestants included Moonshadow Mobile (whose founder assured me the previous evening that I had missed the third great technology revolution), Precision Plant Systems, which offers technology tools for crop management, Second Porch, which enables users to rent, trade, or share their second homes, and Site 9, a hosted collaboration tool provider now generating $40,000 in monthly revenue (and which hardly seemed to need funding).

The presentations and feedback sessions were entertaining, especially the good-natured pushback up by the VC judges concerning founder assertions. The scene recalled Oscar Wilde’s characterization of lying as “the telling of beautiful untrue things,” for each entrepreneur’s assumption could only be proven true or false in practice. Therefore contestants could only believe in and vigorously assert their beautiful visions, while the VCs could only assess stated assumptions in light of hard, previous experience with similar ventures. It was disheartening to recognize, for example, that Precision Plant Systems — whose crop management solutions are so economically elegant and socially powerful — faces a stupendously difficult, expensive, manpower-intensive task in selling to cost-sensitive small-scale farmers, who can take years to evaluate purchases affecting their land.

But in the end, Precision Plant Systems took first prize, and that somehow seemed fitting. Returning home, we all felt like winners, hopeful that Precision Plant Systems and its CropIQ system will, indeed, evolve into a beautiful truth.

You may also enjoy:

“The Surprising Truth About Why People Become Entrepreneurs”

“How to Go Solo Without a ‘Big Idea’”

“Four Ways to Unleash New Ideas“

“Making Money: The Right and Wrong Questions to Ask”

“How to Create Wealth, How to Keep Wealth”

“ Steve Martin Tells the Story Before the Glory“

“For Entrepreneurs Starting with Nothing, Here’s the Ultimate Strategy”

“Entrepreneurship: Why It’s Not about You“

They say doctoral theses are meant to be written, not read.

The depressing truth of that statement dawned on me while slogging through the writing of my dissertation on business models.

Nevertheless!

I believe business models are important to everyone, personally and professionally, and vow that my thesis on will be readable, if not widely read, and will be useful to businesspeople, if not to academics.

Here’s my definition of business model:

The strategic and economic logic by which an enterprise profitably acquires and keeps customers.

This is important professionally because it encapsulates how the organizations for which we work provide value to both customers and to society. It’s important personally because it helps us conceive of ourselves — in a useful way — as one-person enterprises providing value to various “clients” and to society.

The specific focus of my doctoral research is “international business model portability.” In plain language, the research question is: Why do some business models transfer well to overseas markets?

For example, why has Japanese educational services provider Kumon been successful in every major market on the planet, when few Japanese service firms succeed overseas?

How does one go about answering such a question?

Well, universities prefer robust, scientific approaches to such investigations. But unlike hard science research in a laboratory where individual variables can be isolated, controlled, modified, and measured in carefully planned experiments, the business world deals with a squishy, chaotic, complex, difficult-to-define, changing-as-we-speak entity (“the enterprise”) operating in a chaotic, complex, difficult-to-define-and-impossible-to-control environment (“the natural world”).

Launching an enterprise like Kumon involves a messy, unquantifiable mix of psychology, finance, sociology, politics, anthropology, economics, law, and real estate. And all that’s aside from actually executing the core “job” — whatever a business does on behalf of customers.

The “job” itself — the essence of a given business model — might involve engineering, construction, physical therapy, chemistry, botany, art, computer science, sports, or any of a hundred other different disciplines.

In other words, designing and implementing a business model has more to do with intangible, qualitative uncertainties than it does with tangible, predictable certainties. Call it soul over science.

Kumon provides a good example. This Osaka-based provider of after-school K-12 math and language learning services has achieved extraordinary worldwide success, establishing operations in Africa, South America, North America, Asia, Europe, India, and Australia. It’s a stunning example of true international business model portability: the Kumon model has proven viable everywhere.

Why has Kumon proved so successful worldwide — in culturally, administratively, geographically, and economically distant markets — when Japanese service sector firms generally perform poorly overseas?

The answer, I believe, is simple. Kumon’s Value Proposition — its job — is to help every child reach his or her full potential. That’s something parents everywhere want for their children, and Kumon delivers.

In highfalutin academic jargon: The hypothesis that emerges from my grounded theory approach suggests that international portability depends on the universality of the Value Proposition.

In regular English: Global success appears attainable to the extent that the model touches what is deeply, universally human. One might say that an enterprise’s soul is embodied in its business model.

You may be thinking, Jeez, Clark, did it take you two years to figure that out?

Yes, it did.

So in upcoming posts I’ll share more on business models, their relationship to entrepreneurship, and how business model thinking can jumpstart personal careers.

In the meantime, take a look at my latest book, Business Model Generation: A Handbook for Visionaries, Game-Changers, and Challengers. It explores just about everything you might want to know about business models. A 72-page sampler (approximately 5M PDF) is available now for review.

You may also enjoy:

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

“What Am I Doing With My Life?“

“Entrepreneurship: A Primer“

“The Hazards of a Career, The Rewards of a Vocation“

The tacit business school definition shies away from messy reality

Myths about entrepreneurship, both unspoken and explicit, surround us: Entrepreneurs are hard-charging, street-savvy extroverts. An entrepreneur’s goal is to accumulate massive wealth. Entrepreneurs are psychologically driven to embrace risk. And so on.

Each myth describes characteristics of a few entrepreneurs, but misleads with respect to most. Entrepreneurs comprise a diverse group of individuals with widely differing motivations, goals, and values.

So as a teacher of entrepreneurship in business school programs, it pains me to confess that my profession, too, has created its own unspoken, yet pervasive, myth of entrepreneurship, one tacitly accepted by many MBA students and faculty.

A formula explicating this myth might read like this:

E = BP + PF

or Entrepreneurship = Business Plan + Professional Funding

Operating under this tacit definition, business schools imply that the central challenge of entrepreneurship is to secure funding from professional investors based on highly compelling business plans. This notion is often reinforced by a sequence of courses and events leading up to a business plan contest, which is the climax of the entrepreneurial journey insofar as it can be emulated within a university setting.

But there are several fatal flaws with the E = BP + PF definition.

First, 99% of all new enterprises worldwide — for-profit and nonprofit alike — never receive a penny from professional investors. In other words, the definition of entrepreneurship implied by business schools excludes 99% of all new enterprises. This bespeaks a certain lack of realism.

Second, robust research studies have demonstrated that the existence of a formal business plan is unrelated to entrepreneurial success. In short, a business plan is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition for success.

Third, there are different types of business plans, each with a different purpose. Investment pitches comprise only one type. More to the point, getting funded is just one milestone near the beginning of the entrepreneurial journey (and the least common milestone at that). It is hardly the journey’s endpoint.

Why, then, do business schools focus so heavily on business plans? I believe there are three reasons.

First, the business plan is one of the few tangible “outputs” students can create in a classroom without actually starting a venture. And teachers need something tangible as a basis for assigning grades.

Second, teaching business plans is, in one sense, easy. There are hundreds of nicely-formatted templates available for free online. Students can download them, fill them in, and presto! They’ve created a “business plan.”

But it’s far more difficult to teach the real work of early-stage venture planning: business model development and validation. One reason is that business model development and validation is a process during which conventional market research techniques, with the exception of expert opinion, prove largely ineffective.

A third reason for teaching business plans is that they make possible activities such as pitch practices and business plan contests, which are fun and exciting. For most participants, though, the real value of these activities lies in gaining presentation experience. In my entrepreneurship classes, written business plans count for less than 25% of a student’s grade.

A more realistic equation for entrepreneurship à la Clark might read:

E = BM + BMV + SE + P + 26X + C (s) + L, where

Entrepreneurship = Business Model + Business Model Validation + Sweat Equity + Partnering + 26 Unknown Factors + Capital (sometimes) + Luck

Messy and chaotic, isn’t it? Just like real entrepreneurship!

So beware the implicit MBA myth about entrepreneurship. And if you’re considering going to business school, choose your program wisely.

You may also enjoy:

“The Surprising Truth About Why People Become Entrepreneurs“

“Entrepreneurship: A Primer“

“Three Things I Wish I’d Known Before Starting My Own Business“

“Know Your Gift“

“How to Go Solo Without a ‘Big Idea’“

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

“Making Money: The Right and Wrong Questions to Ask“

“How to Create Wealth, How to Keep Wealth“

“For Entrepreneurs Starting with Nothing, Here’s the Ultimate Strategy“

“Entrepreneurship: Why It’s Not about You“

“Quiz: Are You the Entrepreneurial ‘Type’?“

“Why a Company Founder Worth $14 Million Took a Beginner’s Class in Entrepreneurship“

— Action cures indecision —

Reader Darcy ’s comment describing her decision to pursue an MBA made me snap to attention:

I started the program because I did not know what I wanted to do or where I wanted to go, but I felt like I needed to do something to progress …

Not knowing what we want is normal. This soul-affirming truth was explored in our three-part series titled A Message to Those Confused about Career Direction. We also examined the common — but misleading — notion of pursuing one’s “passion” as a career, and the idea that multiple occupations may be more appropriate for some.

But what do we do when we find ourselves at a career crossroads, unsure as to our next move?

Darcy has a terrific answer:

I think sometimes taking some kind of positive action, even if it is not clear why you are doing it or if it is even the right action, will help opportunities come to light that you would not have seen if you had done nothing at all.

Unbeknownst to her, Darcy had neatly articulated, more plainly and compellingly than its author, Clark’s Option on Opportunities Theory.

Option on Opportunities Theory, one of Clark’s Rules, says that one must take action in order to create new opportunities. Regardless of whether it is immediately profitable or not, action tends to create new options (opportunities) that one can subsequently “exercise” at one’s discretion. Without action, new options are unlikely to arise.

The value of a new opportunity is rarely quantifiable, but is likely to be significant — and more importantly, unavailable without “exercising the option.”

Thus, when one is unsure what to do, action — almost any action — furnishes the cure. Action cures indecision.

I’m struggling for a snappy ending here, and can’t think of one. So I’ll close by saying thanks, Darcy, for the inspiration, and for an important reminder about the remedy for career uncertainty:

Action cures indecision.

You may also enjoy:

“What Am I Doing With My Life?”

“Recognizing the Opportunity Within” or Cunningham’s Corollary to Clark’s Construct Concerning Corporate Compensation

“A Message to Those Confused About Career Direction”

“Are You an Amateur? Why Not?“

— Discerning online wheat from online chaff —

While reading the September 2009 issue of Wired magazine, I was reminded of a chat with a young acquaintance some years ago.

At the time he was working for one of the world’s highest-flying “Internet” firms, but for a number of reasons was considering a career change. He said, though, that he wanted to remain in the “Internet industry.”

That statement gave me pause, and I started to consider whether there was even such a thing as an “Internet industry.” I decided that there is — but only in the same sense that there is also a “telephone industry.”

If you wanted to work in the “telephone industry,” you would need to be specific about whether you aspire to work for a carrier, a telemarketing services company, a call center, a switch or PBX manufacturer, and so forth. All of these occupations could fall under the “telephone industry” moniker. But there is no “telephone industry” in the same sense that there is a pharmaceutical industry, for example.

It’s the same with the Internet. You could work for a professional services integrator, a data center, a Web design shop, a carrier, a voice-over-IP service provider, an e-tailer, or an Internet-centric startup. But where is the “center,” so to speak, of any so-called “Internet industry?”

There is none, it seems to me.

In my view, the Internet is not an industry. Neither is it a media channel or a business platform. It’s simply a global communication tool that 1) enables the delivery of digital files, and 2) largely eliminates the variable costs associated with communications. That’s all.

Granted, that’s a lot. The Internet is, of course, extraordinary — and very, very important. Nevertheless, it’s hardly the be-all and end-all of human civilization.

Such thoughts came to mind as I peruse Wired, a magazine I find both useful and annoying: useful, because I learn things needed for work, and annoying, because I don’t buy its digital triumphalism, its “the Internet is everything” attitude.

The latest issue’s cover story, entitled “The Tragedy of Craigslist,” while informative and well-written, is particularly rankling. In it, Wired takes Craigslist to task for “refusing to evolve.”

Wired claims that craigslist is “old-fashioned” and that its Web site is “a wreck.” Worse, according to Wired, craigslist is guilty of “corporate isolation” and “refusal of excessive profit.”

Well. Few things are worse than being old-fashioned, of course. Even I, a card carrying member of the AARP, agree with that.

But unlike Wired, I find it exceptionally easily to quickly find exactly what I want on craigslist, precisely because there are nothing but text-only links, neatly and logically organized. And I don’t see how craigslist’s refusal to disclose earnings is any different from Facebook’s refusal to disclose earnings. Finally, “refusing excessive profit” would seem to deserve admiration, not disdain.

Yet by Wired’s own definition of success — massive popularity – craigslist blows away every other service on the planet.

Craigslist enjoys more traffic than eBay or Amazon.com, yet operates profitably with only 30 employees (as opposed to eBay’s 16,000 and Amazon.com’s 20,000 +). According to informed observers, craigslist may generate revenues of $100 million this year. On a per-employee basis, that would undoubtedly make craigslist a thousand times more profitable than either eBay or Amazon.com.

But here’s my real beef with Wired’s hipper-than-thou putdown of craigslist: craigslist is the world’s most useful and helpful Internet-based service (I think about 30 million users would agree with that statement). Every day it helps millions of people accomplish real offline tasks in their local communities: find jobs, places to live, hire, buy/sell/barter, connect with each other in a thousand different ways.

Facebook — the sugar water of the Internet — is great for wasting time. And Google is terrific for document searches, word definitions, checking the weather, and printing driving directions.

But only craigslist helps me find good tutors for my kids, hire people for jobs, give young people a great place to live, solicit bandmates, and find compatible work partners (like Mark, Director of Fulfillment here at Soul Shelter).

Craigslist founder Craig Newmark has created the world’s most popular, successful, and profitable “Internet business” (so to speak). Yet, apparently because his values center around offline community-building, disregard for wealth, and concern for participatory democracy, he has earned the disdain of Wired, the self-appointed arbiter of how the Internet should properly evolve.

Fortunately, tens of millions of devoted craigslist users seem to share a far more humane, soul-affirming vision of the Internet’s place in a world that, after all, remains decidedly offline.

You may also enjoy:

“Is the Internet Dangerous?”

“To Recharge, Unplug”

“A Song for the Unsung”

“Presenting … the Intravidual”

“When Connectivity Breeds Loneliness”

“On Slowness”