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?

Work life. The business world. So often, jobs and the businesses that provide them are framed as an opposition of sorts — as adversaries compelling us to be someone other than ourselves. That representation is true to a degree: Many people strongly feel that their work and personal pursuits, while both essential to survival, are fundamentally incompatible. Perhaps you do!

Despite this common notion, there’s a place for business lessons in our personal lives. This point was brought home to me last year while editing a now-bestselling book about business models. The book was created to help organizations become more successful — but I was struck by the notion that business model thinking can help individuals succeed, too.

Business Models and Organizations

What does “business model” mean, anyhow? There’s little agreement on a precise definition, but two common explanations are “a blueprint for a business” and “how a firm makes money.” These definitions are general and don’t mean exactly the same thing. Still, both suggest that business models play a key role in business success.

Among its many exciting features — such as its title! — the book I edited, Business Model Generation, provides a more complete definition of “business model”:

A business model describes the rationale of how an organization creates, delivers, and captures value.

In other words, a business model explains how an enterprise provides value to customers — and gets paid for doing so. Specifically, “providing value” means helping customers with a job that needs doing.

The Business Model Canvas

This logic is expressed in a Business Model Canvas, a simple diagram that shows a business model’s nine key “building blocks.” These building blocks include Customers, Value Provided to Customers, and Channels, among others:

Let’s see how the Canvas works by diagramming the business model of Jiffy Lube, a drive-in, quick oil change service company.

Jiffy Lube helps car owners accomplish a crucial but messy, hassle-laden job: maintaining their vehicles. Jiffy Lube helps customers with this important job by quickly and expertly changing oil — and saving them from dirtying their clothes or having to recycle used oil. Customers, in turn, pay Jiffy Lube for the value it provides in keeping their cars running trouble-free.

Here’s a Canvas that shows Jiffy Lube’s business model. It includes Customers (car owners) Value Provided to Customers (keeping cars running trouble-free) and Channels (how value is delivered — in Jiffy Lube’s case, on-site at Jiffy Lube locations):

Seems simple enough, right?

Here’s the key point: Though it embodies crucial organizational logic, a business model is also invisible — an undefined, intangible asset that resides…well, nowhere. That’s the beauty and value of the Business Model Canvas. Drawing the model on paper makes typically unspoken assumptions explicit. And this can help organizations clarify their goals, adjust them to fit changing economic climates, and even provides a method for reinventing themselves to deal with changing needs or to pursue new customers or opportunities.

Business Models Go Personal

Now, here’s some good news for individuals: Just as business model thinking helps organizations transform the status quo into something new and successful, you too can employ the same tools to improve your current career.

Of course, by better understanding how your organization operates, business model thinking can help you perform more effectively at your current job. But more than that, once you’re familiar with the Business Model Canvas, you can use it to adjust or even reinvent your work life.

How?

Simply by thinking of yourself as a single-person enterprise with a “personal business model.”

For example, we all work for others (Customers), helping them complete the jobs they need to have done (Provide Value) — and we do so through various mediums (Channels). Of course, we don’t usually use business terms to discuss our work. (Not if we want anyone to listen to us, anyhow!) But that’s where the Canvas proves useful. When we use its structure and language to help us describe what we do, we open the door to personal and professional innovation.

Last year, for instance, my friend Chris developed a side business copy-editing scholarly papers for university professors. After listening to me prattle on about business models, she decided to analyze her new job by drawing a Business Model Canvas. In the “Value Provided to Customers” building block, she wrote, “improve article readability and style.”

But after pondering Value Provided, Chris realized the job she was doing was something far more valuable: helping professors get articles published in leading scholarly journals. For university professors living in a “publish or perish” world, this was a mission-critical job indeed. Chris raised her rates significantly — and attracted more, not fewer, customers.

Clarifying your personal business model can be an eye-opening experience — or even the first step toward reinventing your work life.

Interested in using these ideas to improve your career? Here are three simple takeaways:

• Learn to use the Business Model Canvas — it’s a simple but powerful tool for both organizations and individuals.
• Like Chris, put your personal business model down on paper to clarify the value you provide to customers.
• Use Post-it notes to change the content of different building blocks and imagine new ways to add customers, serve them through different channels, or boost your “value provided.”

Be Part of a Bestseller Business Model

Chris’s story isn’t unique; anyone can benefit from defining a personal business model. With this in mind, together with the authors of Business Model Generation, I’m now working on a new book about applying business model ideas to personal career development.

The work is tentatively titled Business Model You! We figured a book about business models should itself adopt a non-traditional model, so that’s what we’ve done. We’re inviting readers to co-create the book by critiquing draft chapters, voting on design elements, or simply supporting the effort through online forum membership. In exchange for pre-purchasing one copy, each member will be credited within the final work as a contributing co-author (this is a traditional paper book, not an e-book).

This is the same model that made Business Model Generation an international bestseller — you can read about this rule-busting approach in an essay by Jeffrey Krames, the agent who represents us.

Nearly 500 contributing co-authors from 45 countries joined us in the production of Business Model Generation. Now we’d like to invite people with strong interests in career development and/or writing to join us at Business Model You! While we can’t guarantee that the new book will also become a bestseller, if you join us, the odds are in our favor — and yours.

Most important, try drawing your own personal business model. You may find that it helps you jumpstart your career.

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.

Conventional wisdoms are sneaky things. Moderately useful sometimes, they often have a way of eroding confidence in one’s better instincts, even undermining the valid insights of independent thinkers.

Not long ago, while reading through a book of collected interviews with my favorite contemporary filmmaker, the late Anthony Minghella, I felt a fluttery thrill upon finding the following quote:

I think any sane person resists the idea that there is a formal and ineffable structure to films, which is what the Americans have diagnosed as the ‘three-act’ structure. They’ll talk about the problems in the second act, problems in the third act. It seems to me to be absurd that such a liquid form should be calcified into three acts.

The “Three-Act Structure” is a conventional wisdom of American film-writing. It’s referred to, sagely, as “The Form.” And while many a fine movie owes much to The Form (Robert Redford’s stellar Quiz Show comes to mind), Minghella is right. We Americans are absolutely obsessed with a screenwriting approach which is essentially, let’s admit, an industry dogma. The Form, let’s further admit, would more aptly be called The Formula.

Minghella’s words struck home because some time ago I completed my own first screenplay, and subsequently engaged with various industry people in deep and thoughtful conversations pertaining to “plot-points” and other facets of the all-holy Three-Act dogma of The Form.

These industry people had read my screenplay and liked it, but some couldn’t get around certain nagging “issues” in the script’s “structure.”

I was all ears, because I found The Form to be a new and refreshing challenge. I’d read some screenwriting guides about The Form, had analyzed some movies flawlessly structured thanks to The Form, and I was striving to get a handle on The Form myself, all in the aim of improving my script, which was, well, a quiet, quirky little comedy/drama about a father and a son, about growing up, about learning not to be one’s own worst enemy.

My script, in other words, was essentially plotless. It was about relationships. It consisted of a series of small, (hopefully) moving human moments. Characters talked to one another, had memories, felt sad, embarrassed, regretful, unsure, talked to each other some more, and finally came to feel a little bit hopeful, but no less clueless.

My movie ended there. That, in a nutshell, was it. It wasn’t a happy ending, but not a sad one either.

That’s all my movie wanted to be, and in truth that’s all it needed to be in order to live up to itself and my vision for it. Still I listened intently to my professional advisers, wholly confident in their counsel, poised all the while to “fix” the script I’d already revised about a hundred times.

For years, I had heard the gospel of The Form and believed it would be my artistic salvation.

My movie needed a plot. It needed big, unmistakable turning points. It needed a First, Second, and Third Act. That, after all, was The Form. I couldn’t expect to produce a worthy screenplay without abiding by The Form. I wanted to sell this thing, didn’t I? Absent The Form, how could I expect anybody in MovieLand to know what to do with my odd little script?

I must have been nuts—not because I should have known I’d already authored a perfect screenplay (no, though it was pretty good), but because I’d somehow failed to recognize that among my small handful of favorite films, the films that never ceased to inspire me (by Agnes Jaoui, Ingmar Bergmann, Stanley Kubrick, Francis Ford Coppola, Scorsese, and others), nary a one boasted the tried-and-true Three-Act Structure, The Form.

At the top of this private pantheon was Minghella’s The English Patient. I had watched that film forty-three times.

Here’s Minghella in that book of interviews again:

The screenplay of The English Patient was always odd. I remember I sent it to a successful American actress whom I liked a lot, not to be in the film but just as a friend. She wrote back to me saying, ‘I beg you not to make this film –- it has no third act.’ I wrote back and said I didn’t think there was a second act either. It was so far away from the hegemony of the American screenplay –- Act One, Act Two, Act Three –- there’s no way to fit it into that box at all. One of those guys who goes around ‘teaching’ people how to write a screenplay actually uses The English Patient as an illustration of how not to … He’s right, of course.

I looked up from the page, newly awakened. Lordy, it’s shocking to realize the insidiousness of conventional wisdoms. If you’re looking to lead a free and fulfilling creative life, beware “wisdom.”

The funny thing is, I’ve never been a big fan of dogmas—religious, political, or aesthetic. I hear the resounding ring of truth in these words of John Dewey, from his 1933 book Art As Experience:

Impulsion beyond all limits that are externally set inheres in the very nature of the artist’s work. It belongs to the very character of the creative mind to reach out and seize any material that stirs it so that the value of that material may be pressed out and become the matter of a new experience.

Henry James, another favorite voice, also puts it beautifully:

It appears to me that no one can ever have made a seriously artistic attempt without becoming conscious of an immense increase—a kind of revelation—of freedom. One perceives in that case—by the light of a heavenly ray—that the province of art is all life, all feeling, all observation, all vision.

You could say I’ve done my best to go my own way, do my own thing, write my own rules. Yet despite my finely tuned B.S.-detector where artistic ideology is concerned, in this case something had scrambled my instruments, burrowed into me, undermined my self-reliance.

Something had led me to look away from the organic aesthetic demands of my screenplay in search of a formula. (Is this why dealings with Hollywood are so often equated to Faustian bargains?)

Whew. Close call.

Granted, my script may remain nothing more than words on a page. I’ll likely never sell the thing. But that’s OK.

The magnificently talented (and prolific) writer William T. Vollman put it nicely in a fascinating New York Times feature last week when asked whether he was concerned that his new, uncompromisingly long book might cost him readers:

I don’t care. It seems like the important thing in life is pleasing ourselves. The world doesn’t owe me a living, and if the world doesn’t want to buy my books, that’s my problem.

Plot-points or no, three acts or no, I like my script just the way it is.

(This post is from the Soul Shelter archives)

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“On Making Mistakes”

“How to Achieve Even While Losing”

“Two Books to Encourage & Console Creatives”

“A Message to Those Aspiring to Blend Meaning and Money”

“A Message of Improvement From Self-Help’s Founding Father”

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)

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“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)

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A few years ago my back gave out when both my kids jumped on me at the same time. After a doctor visit and x-rays confirming the absence of serious injury, I received the standard issue medical advice for 90% of all back problems: “Take it easy and it will clear up in time.”

I did, and it did, but the experience was a stunning reminder that nothing can replace the good fortune of health. I stared in alarm at a photograph of myself: a sagging-posture “office physique” 40 pounds heftier than what I weighed in college. Without change, my physical condition would slowly deteriorate.

Well, it took time and hard work, but I’m finally back in shape. Though I’d never formally considered how I went about it, after reading Get Fit Slowly, I sat down and tried to distill the key points of my “program.” Here’s what I came up with: Four Simple Steps to Getting Fit (they’re not easy, but they’re simple).

Step 1. Stop eating while you’re still hungry

Most of us are accustomed to eating until we feel full. But if you feel full, you’ve already overeaten. Stop. Think. Chew your food slowly and thoroughly, and pay attention to how you feel as you proceed through your meal. If you attend closely to your eating, you’ll feel yourself gradually filling up. Stop eating when you feel about 80% full (don’t worry, you won’t starve. In Japan, this is known as hara-hachibun: the “80% full” policy—it helps you distinguish between eating to refuel and eating because it tastes good). If you decide to drink alcohol with your meal, eat less food to compensate for the additional volume (remember, stop when you feel 80% full). From the standpoint of losing weight, this 80% rule is the most important of the Four Steps.

Step 2. Weigh yourself twice a day

Weigh yourself first thing in the morning and again before you go to bed at night. Do this not to obsess about results, but to see what happens when you drink a beer late at night, or how constipation or poor elimination affects your weight. Weigh consistently, and you’ll quickly see the results of Step 1 reflected in the numbers. An enormously successful Japanese diet plan consists of doing nothing but recording one’s weight—writing it down in a special journal—several times per day. Paying attention to and becoming conscious of your weight is an extremely effective strategy. Do it religiously and the rest of your behavior will fall in line.

Step 3. Drink plenty of water and take psyllium fiber daily

Drink a couple of big glasses of water as soon as you get up, and after breakfast, drink another big glass of water or juice with a hefty teaspoonful of psyllium fiber (Metamucil is an inexpensive but poor substitute—it has tons of added sucrose). The fiber will fill you up, and—to put it rather undelicately—make you crap like a horse. And no, unlike laxatives, which loosen your bowels through chemical action, fiber strengthens your guts by making them work harder. My doctor recommended this as a way to reduce my high blood pressure, and I’ve been a fiber fan since.

Step 4. Start an exercise routine

This is the least important Step from the standpoint of losing weight, but the most important from the standpoint of becoming fit. Sticking to an exercise routine—just like the routine of weighing yourself, the fiber regimen, and the habit of conscious eating—strengthens your overall program. I got professional help from a corrective exercise specialist, who immediately perceived my biggest problem—poor posture—and designed a trunk-strengthening program for me.

Well, that’s everything I know about losing weight and getting fit, and therefore my first and last post on the subject. It’s all well-known stuff, but I learned the Four Simple Steps by doing them, and they worked for me. Maybe they’ll work for you, too.

(This post is from the Soul Shelter archives. A slightly modified version first appeared at Get Fit Slowly.)

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Before we cue Taps, let’s all step away from the media juggernaut, take a deep breath of reason, and recall a few (just a few!) of the attributes, consistently neglected in the now-daily hubbub, that continue to make the old-fashioned book not only a viable technology, but, well, a profoundly wonderful one we really don’t want to lose.

1 . The book unites delivery device and content. E-readers, drained of battery power, revert to hunks of plastic.

2. The book begets libraries and independent bookstores, irreplaceable bastions of culture and community.

3. The book, beyond cover price, comes with no proprietary fee. Your preferred e-reader sets you back $250 to $500.

4. The book is not an inventory portal, therefore not subject to proprietary restrictions in content; i.e.: Due to licensing or discretionary considerations, Brave New World by Aldous Huxley cannot be downloaded to this e-reading device. (Think this is a joke? See note* below.)

5. The book is not a brand, therefore free from functional limitations imposed by a manufacturer; i.e.: The e-book you’re requesting is not supported by your e-reader’s operating system. Upgrade to our newest e-reader or follow this link to our checkout to download OS-2011.5.

6. The book withstands excessive dust, direct sunlight, splashed soup, or dropped potatoes.

7. The book is hard to eradicate except by fire. Is any e-reading device likely to reach — with zero loss of content — an age comparable to civilization’s oldest incunabula?

8. The book, presented as gift, shows regard for the recipient’s tastes, being a single selection and/or bearing the giver’s handwritten inscription.

9. The book can be autographed by its author.

10. The book, by conspicuous display of title and/or author, occasions conversation between mutually inclined strangers.

11. The book may be safely read in the bath.

12. The book relieves you of the screen in an age of relentless screen-media assaults upon the eye.

13. The book is not an immediate access point for innumerable diversions (e-mail, video games, etc.).

14. The book’s printed editions are traceably distinct, a defense against manipulations of fact or history.

15. The book does not “transmit and receive,” except in mysterious ways. No need to fear an Orwellian eye embedded in the page.

16. The book cannot be “swiped remotely” by the powers that be.

17. The book’s publisher may go broke without imperiling access to additional content.

18. The book, bought second-hand or borrowed, yields up fascinating ephemera: grocery lists, love notes, locks of hair, receipts, etc., bringing the reader into poignant contact with an unknown fellow human being.

19. The book complements your mantelpiece.

20. The book boasts many practical uses beyond communication (as furniture, makeshift stairs, etc.). E-readers — oddly shaped and breakable — are as obsolescent as other computer junk once they quit working.

21. The book is not invariably manufactured in China.

22. The book accommodates ingenuity of format: children’s books, art books, illuminated texts, pop-up books, fold-out maps, etc.

23. The book makes a meaningful heirloom.

24. The book may be safely left unattended on the beach. As gizmo it is not a hot steal.

25. The book is not a shopping cart.

*“Last week…the creators of a Web comic version of the classic novel, called “Ulysses Seen,” said that Apple required them to remove any images containing nudity before the comic was approved as an application for the iPad.” –New York Times, June 13, 2010

UPDATE: June 16, 2010 — Apple recants. Still, a defender of literature this does not make.

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