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I was past 40 before it occurred to me that I could really be an entrepreneur.

Even the word always seemed to carry so much stress.

Mortgaging your house to make payroll. (And then having the company die anyway.) Dumping an unfair workload onto your spouse. Broken promises to your kids.

And all this to feed an adrenaline addiction that, frankly, I don’t have. I don’t bungie jump, I don’t snowboard, and I didn’t think I had any desire to become an entrepreneur.

That was then, this is now

Looking back, I realize that it wasn’t having my own shop that scared me. It was all of the baggage I carried about the idea of an “entrepreneur.”

(Jason Fried of 37 Signals argues that we shouldn’t even use the word entrepreneur, that we should just call people “starters” instead. His book, Rework, is terrific, by the way.)

For most of my career, I let other people make the decisions because I figured they must know better than me. Maybe they had an MBA, or they earned a ton of dough, or they’d gone through that whole mortgaging the house to make payroll thing.

When I started blogging, I started to meet a different kind of entrepreneur.

Read the entire article at:
http://www.remarkable-communication.com/whats-holding-you-back/

Some of you may have just recently discovered your passion.  It’s burning in your belly and you want to get good at it quick.  Well, here’s a little observation buried in the 2nd chapter of Outliers. This passage talks about results of investigating how much time it took for pianists to attain their expertise…

“In fact, by the age of twenty, the elite performers had each totaled ten thousand hours of practice.  By contrast, the merely good students had totaled eight thousand hours, and the future music teachers had totaled just four thousand hours”

See that? Just 4,000 hours is all that needed for “teacher” status.  Here’s some cold hard truth for you…your audience just needs a teacher. Get to this level first and you’ll attract a huge audience along the way.

That’s 4,000 hours, which you’ve probably already invested.

In case you haven’t here are some tips to get you jumpstarted:

Read the entire article at:
http://pushingsocial.com/7-ways-to-cheat-the-10000-hour-rule-and-still-be-a-better-blogger

I'm a Unicorn!

My hesitation is that it meets at 7am. I’m a web developer that fits that stereotype, so I don’t do mornings. I actually had to take a nap yesterday afternoon. In the balance between business and lifestyle, I just don’t know. My wallet says yes and my body says no. I’ll let you know what I decide.

Two interesting things happened during the meeting. We did an exercise where we had to stand up and tell everyone what animal we were and how that related to our business. Sheesh. I hate that exercise. Beside the “snake in the grass” and “I’m a monkey because I throw my poop.” they were pretty boring.

What was my animal?

Why, I’m a unicorn of course! I give people magic powers.

Unicorn Barfing Rainbows

I figured that when I build web sites for people, using WordPress, they have the power to control their own content. My clients have been excited to have that power. It feels like magic to them, so I must be a unicorn, right?

It all made sense to me, but it was at 7am in the morning…

The second concept that I thought was valuable, even though it had a stupid name, was “power partners”. The idea is that you join with two other people who are complementary to your business. Examples were a financial adviser, a mortgage broker, and an insurance guy. I think another set was a card designer, and event planner, and a photographer.

I think there’s some value to that idea. I’m going to work on finding a couple other people who can complement, and not conflict with, my business here. You might think about other people or businesses that can work with you, so that you can help each other.

I think “power partners” is not a cool name though. I think we should call them “my homies!” instead.

What do you think we should call our “power partners”?

My advice for younger people for the longest time has always been, “Work your butt off.” As I get older I find myself amending it somewhat, to something more like, “Work your butt off doing something you love, something that matters, something that resonates. Don’t worry if you die trying- it’s better to be corpse that once had a go, than a sleepwalker who never bothered.”

Read the entire article at:
http://www.gapingvoidgallery.com/product_info.php?products_id=74

Patrick Bedard

Patrick Bedard wrote a magazine column that changed my life.

Patrick Bedard was an automotive writer and had a column in Car and Driver for over 40 years. He also raced cars and was in the 1984 Indianapolis 500, where he wrecked horribly. He walked away from the crash, but it caused a delay while crews cleaned up the mess and removed the pieces of his wrecked car from the track.

Other drivers were not happy with him. As you can imagine, there’s a bit of arrogance to being a race car driver and they weren’t happy that a “writer” was driving with them. I mean, who did he think he was?

After the race, another driver found him in the pits and went off on a tirade at him. “You’re just a writer! You’re not a driver! Who gave you permission to drive with us?”. He said he thought long and hard about what that guy said to him. After much thought, he realized that no one had to “give” him permission.

He wrote in his column “Permission comes from within”.

I wrote that phrase on a piece of paper and taped it to the inside of my front door, about eye level, so that every time I left my home, I would see that. It shaped how I saw life. I’d like to think it helped make me who I am today.

I’ve been running across a few posts with that common theme lately, or maybe I’m just more aware of it because I’ve been thinking about it.

Crossing The Red Line | IttyBiz

Nothing bad is going to happen if you cross the red line. You’re not going to be named and shamed. You’re not going to be arrested. Naomi’s not going to say, “Well, I’m not going to let you in, but now you have to pay anyway.” It doesn’t work like that. The worst they’re going to do is say no. Most of the time, actually, you run the serious risk of getting what you want.

Read the entire article at:
http://ittybiz.com/crossing-the-red-line/

and then there was this one:

5 Things You Don’t Need To Sell Your Art (And 5 Things You Do)

No one can give the permission you need to sell your art. I totally understand the need for approval – I’ve been there many times myself – but it’s a dangerous rabbit hole to go down.

You see, asking for permission and waiting for approval is a carrot on a stick. Once you decide to chase it, you’re forever grasping. Every step you take is on the back of someone else’s approval and the further you go, the more of it you need.

Not a good place to be.

You don’t need permission or approval to be you and do what you do.

Read the entire article at:
http://lateralaction.com/articles/sell-your-art/

The Problem
Let me be honest with you. When I wrote my book, The Care and Feeding of Search Engines, A Simple Guide To SEO, I was hoping that people would read it, apply it to their web sites and become fabulously wealthy. They would be so happy with what I had to say, and they would love my advice so much, that they would pay a lot of money for my next books.

That didn’t happen.

I got a ton of feedback from people that said this is the most amazing book ever, that this is the first time that they understood SEO, that now they are in control of their SEO.

A few told me that they got the book and maybe read most of it, and they intend to get around to applying it real soon now.

Only a couple people actually ever applied the advice to their sites. The ones that did were successful.

NO ONE has told me that they tried anything in the book and it didn’t work.

The advice in the book is true, but not many people have applied it.

I've got the map. You drive.

The Fear
There’s a fear, deep inside the back of your mind, that causes you to hesitate before you do something that might fail. That fear is the obstacle to being successful. It’s the fear of failure.

In spite of that fear, you need to do what you need to do. Do it even if that voice in the back of your mind is telling you that you will fail and that you will be humiliated. Do it even if it hurts. Do it even if that voice is telling you that you are not good enough. Make a rational choice and don’t listen to the voice.

The Key To Success
The key to success is failure.

If you don’t try, you’ll never fail. The more times you try stuff, the more times you’ll fail. The more times you try stuff, the better chance that you’ll succeed. The key to success is failure.

The real message here is that you need to get off your butt and go out there and make it happen.

I don’t want to give advice or write books for people who are too afraid to do something about it. I want to be with a group of people who want to do what it takes to win, do what it takes to make things happen and achieve the goal.

Is that you?

I can give you the map, but you have to drive the car.

It’s time for a road trip.

The math is magical: you can pile up lots of failures and still keep rolling, but you only need one juicy success to build a career.

The killer is the category called ‘neither’. If you spend your days avoiding failure by doing not much worth criticizing, you’ll never have a shot at success. Avoiding the thing that’s easy to survive keeps you from encountering the very thing you’re after.

And yet we market and work and connect and create as if just one failure might be the end of us.

Read the entire article at:
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2010/04/failure-success-and-neither.html

I once had a sales job doing cold calls to sell advertising on phone book covers. I never made much money at it, but I learned very valuable lessons that I’ve used ever since.

I learned that I made one sale for every 3 calls. It just worked out that way.

It hit me that I shouldn’t be afraid of making the call, afraid of rejection. I should LOVE rejection because it meant that I was one step closer to a sale. More rejections equaled more sales. If I can get rejected twice, I’ll make a sale on the next one.

It got to be a game, to try to see how many rejections I got. I was happy when I got them. Store owners would be amused that I was so happy when they told me no.

Are you afraid of failure? What one thing would you do if you weren’t afraid?

I’ve talked to my wife about it and we have ideas, but I’m really not exactly sure what it is or how to describe it. It seems to be fear.

People are afraid of failing is my best guess.

What are you afraid of? What is holding you back? Please leave a comment and tell us your thoughts. I really want to work through the issue.

Here’s an excerpt from an article I found.

Successful people see failure as an acceptable risk.

This is one of the hardest shifts to make, but it’s the most important ones.

Habitual action-takers and bigger-game players understand that failure is part of the process, that for  every stellar success there will be a their fair share of lukewarm events and more than one embarrassing  flop.

Yet they keep the bigger picture in mind.  They understand that the biggest failure is not to try (guaranteed zero results) and that failure gives them at least a chance of success.  They also understand that there’s no such thing as a perfect person, ever.  Even the greats have their black marks.  In fact, the greats have plenty of them.

This is a big shift in thinking for most people who are stuck in worry mode. Successful people understand that there will be plenty of failure and potential embarrassment baked into the process, so it’s not a big scary thing.  It’s just something to go through and minimize, kind of like taxes.

So yes, successful people are afraid of failure, but it’s a manageable fear because it’s built into the process.  And because it’s acknowledged up front, it’s possible to compartmentalize it.

For worriers, inaction equals safety, which is nice because you don’t lose anything.  For action takers, the idea of inaction is a huge loss in terms of opportunity cost.  They know that if they take enough action, and they’re constantly evaluating their strategy, they’ll come out ahead.

So to sum it up, successful people say “Failure is part of the game.  Let’s get it out of the way because there’s some raging success waiting  to happen in there somewhere.”

Read the entire article at:
http://www.thelaunchcoach.com/why-worry-keeps-you-poor-and-how-to-fix-it

Victoria standing next to some ''art'' found on Jalama Beach

Now, counterbalance “she’s nice” against the image of managing a large department in a huge corporation. To survive in the huge corporate world, you need to be a cutthroat political animal, right?

I once mentioned to her that she wasn’t political. She disagreed. She said that she was VERY political. She told me that she had helped so many people and done so many nice things for so many people, because she was nice. She just wanted to help.

She also knew that if she ever needed anything, she knew the right people in the right places that would do anything for her because she helped them in the past.

Did I mention that she’s also very smart?

I read this post below and had to link. This seems to be a recurring theme among blogs that I read and friends that I have.

The people who are successful in life are the people who give. Love is the key to success.

This is not a feel good, bubble gum philosophy. Love is a very political act. You want something? Give it away and you’ll be overwhelmed with what you get back.

“How can I get more for myself?” The more in question varies: interest, customers, website traffic, subscribers, money, whatever—but it always relates to an increase in focus on the individual.

There’s nothing wrong with any of those things. I’d like more too. But motivations can be interesting predictors of success. The more that we want tends to come along when we give more, but when we give because we want to receive, it doesn’t always turn out so well.

If it sounds complicated, it’s not. Here’s the secret:

Some singers want the audience to love them. I love the audience.
-Luciano Pavarotti

Read the entire article at:
http://chrisguillebeau.com/3×5/luciano-pavarottis-secret-for-online-success/