Work and Leisure

My co-author Mike Naughton likes to remind people in his talks
around the world about faith and work that “If we don’t get leisure
right, we can’t get work right.”

The immediate conclusion that many people jump to at this point is
that they need leisure time to recharge for work, or to rest so they
can gain that competitive edge. Our leisure time from taking this view
is simply instrumental to helping us build a business or advance in our
careers. But, this is absolutely not what he means by his
statement. Mike has argued that when we look to non-work and leisure
time in terms of “balance” or in terms of “recharging”, we are missing
the point.

What Mike is saying is that we need to pursue an integrated life.
One in which our work and leisure are both guided by the same faith and
passion — toward the same ends. How we pursue our leisure time and how
we pursue our work both help create who we become — in terms of our
character and in terms of our virtuousness. Both leisure and work have
a purpose and give meaning to our lives — one does not simply support
the other.

The Wall Street Journal today reports on a new study that seems to offer empirical support for Mike’s point:

For the study, the five professors surveyed some 4,000
Americans, asking what they did the previous day and then quizzing them
in detail about three randomly selected events from the day. Those
surveyed were asked to rate the three episodes based on feelings such
as pain, happiness, stress and sadness. All this was used to calculate
what percentage of time people spent in an unpleasant state….

The standout cluster was what the authors label “engaging leisure
and spiritual activities,” things like visiting friends, exercising,
attending church, listening to music, fishing, reading a book, sitting
in a cafe or going to a party. When we spend time on our favorite of
these activities, we’re typically happy, engrossed and not especially
stressed.

So don’t view your weekend as a time to vegetate and to simply
recharge for the week. Pursue meaning and purpose in all that you do in
your life.

Seeking Wise Counsel

The topic of my column this week in the Tennessean is the importance of seeking wise counsel throughout the development and growth of an entrepreneurial venture.

Entrepreneurship can be a lonely vocation. It can seem like you are alone when it comes to wrestling with the worries, fears, and uncertainties that are a normal part of owning your own business.
However, such isolation should not be considered an inevitable part of the entrepreneurial experience.
Throughout the life of a business, the entrepreneur should consistently seek advice from people with experience and expertise.

Not All Good Ideas, are Good Ideas

Free markets are neither inherently good, nor are they inherently evil. Entrepreneurial activity is not in and of itself a moral act. The ends that the entrepreneur pursues and how they pursue those ends defines the morality of their entrepreneurial efforts.
There are entrepreneurs who use their gifts and talents to build businesses that provide economic, social, and cultural benefits.
But there are also entrepreneurs who although they may build personal income and wealth, they do so in the pursuit of ends that can actually end up being destructive to society. In our soon to be released book, Mike Naughton and I describe this type of entrepreneur as follows:

But the most enduring counterfeit of prudence are those who confuse being prudent with being cunning. They can be highly efficient, technically competent and have a great sense of timing, but their purpose is only for themselves. To have technical skill without good ends can unleash a powerfully destructive force in society.

Sarah Brown sent along a story from Time that may fall into this category:

…40% to 50% of first marriages still break up. In the spirit of American ingenuity that can find a way to make a buck out of even the worst situations, a cottage industry has sprung up to help people cope with and often celebrate this passage from one part of their lives to the next. “Once divorce gets so common, the human approach is to treat it like another aspect of life,” says sociologist David Popenoe, co-director of the National Marriage Project at Rutgers.

Please know that I do not pretend to know what is in the hearts and minds of the entrepreneurs who have launched businesses in this newly discovered market niche. But, I think that most of us can agree that the break-down of families has been a less than positive force in our society over the past thirty years.
What do these entrepreneurs sell? Here are a few examples from the article in Time:

Business for products aimed at the newly divorced, from greeting cards and postbreakup getaway packages to custom-made cakes and joke gifts like wedding-ring coffins, is booming. New Orleans resident Renee Savant bought a hearse, thinking she would rent it out for over-the-hill-birthday celebrations. But since she began her service last October, the hottest demand has come from clients who want to ride around as they and friends celebrate the death of their marriages. “I would never in a million years have thought the fad would be divorce parties,” says Savant.

Creating Balance Every Morning

Sam Davidson of CoolPeopleCare sent me a link to a blog post that offers “10 Morning Rituals For The Healthy Entrepreneur“. While these can feel a bit hokey at first, it is important to engage in this type of routine. It can be a key element for creating temperance in our lives. Work can so easily become all consuming, especially for the entrepreneur.
Reading this reminds me of the routines that I value that I have let slip a bit lately….
– Quiet reflection or prayer sitting on my back porch early in the morning with my first cup of hot coffee.
– Taking my daily walk with my wife (and our dogs, of course).
– Attending morning mass on the way to work.
Lent is right around the corner. I think I will commit to bringing these things back into my daily routine rather than try to find something to “give up” for Lent.

The Wisdom of Counsel

ideablob.jpg
In the discussions between our Belmont entrepreneurs and the ideablob.com team last evening, the topic centered on the value of getting multiple perspectives when facing a decision — of seeking wise counsel from people with experience and expertise. Seeking counsel is one of the practices that Mike Naughton and I talk about in relation to the virtue of prudence in our book about being a good entrepreneur titled Bringing Your Business to Life (due out later this spring). Prudent entrepreneurs are good stewards of the resources available to them for their businesses, including investment and other start-up capital, employees’ labor, customer trust, and so forth.
Seeking counsel is never more is never more important than when considering whether to launch a new business and how to best position it for market entry. Aspiring entrepreneurs should not seek out only those who act as cheerleaders to their dreams. Find people with expertise and experience who are willing to bluntly tell you the flaws and weaknesses in your plans. My students call this being “Cornwalled” when I offer my honest assessment of their ideas and plans. I always encourage them to seek more perspectives than mine. More than once I have failed to see the wisdom of a new business idea!
One of the things I like about ideablob.com is that it is creating a forum that dramatically widens your circle of people who can offer counsel on new ideas. Many of the people who frequent the site are passionate about entrepreneurship.
Seek wise counsel on your ideas from several people with different backgrounds. Listen to their counsel — never argue. Reflect on all of what you here and look for common threads that you can use to make your idea stronger. It will improve the odds that your idea is really a good business opportunity, that you will position it properly when you launch, and that you will realize the success that you dream of.

Confusing Means and Ends

Entrepreneurship on steroids. That is what I call entrepreneurs who are consumed with raising as much money as they can, as fast as they can. When we confuse the means (raising capital and securing other needed resources) with the ends (building a sustainable business), we see entrepreneurship run amuck.
The goal of entrepreneurship is not simply to find the next big thing to lure venture capital or make a mad dash to a public offering. It is to create a venture that creates income and wealth for the entrepreneur and allows the entrepreneur to pursue other goals in life through this economic activity, be it creating more jobs in a better place to work, offering a better product to the customer, or making the world a little better place. The goal of entrepreneurship should be to build a good business — with legs — that will help build this entrepreneurial economy.
So on this theme I offer you one of the funniest, albeit somewhat depressing due its truth, videos I have seen in a long time: Here Comes Another Bubble v1.1 – The Richter Scale via YouTube.
(Thanks to Bruce Schierstedt for passing along this gem!)

Entrepreneurs as Community-builders

Entrepreneurs today are not only the builders of our new economy, but also have the potential to help rebuild our society and culture. Here is one simple example of how entrepreneurs can be true community-builders sent to me by Ben Cunningham. From Deleware Online (via Crave Online):

[Pedro] Toala was paralyzed in June 2006, when kids tipped over the portable toilet he was using in a Wilmington city park. His spine broke when he fell….
[M]ost of [his] split-level house was inaccessible to a man in a wheelchair. He could not eat dinner with his family or go into the backyard with his son. Just getting in through the front door was difficult.
Early this year, Cher Przelomski and The Planning Factory, a special events company, decided to investigate how they could help the Toala family as a way of celebrating the firm’s 25th anniversary. The group first tried to interest producers of ABC-TV’s “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition.” When ABC officials declined, Przelomski and her colleagues organized their own version.
About 70 contractors and 60 volunteers responded to revamp the entire home and make it not only more accessible, but more beautiful, energy efficient and functional. Pettinaro Relocation provided a furnished apartment for the Toalas to live in until the work was complete.

The family was able to move back into their remodeled home in time for Christmas.

Is Passion for Your Business Enough?

I have had several conversations over the past couple of weeks about the role of passion in new entrepreneurial ventures. Indeed, a good business model is never enough to carry you through the adversity and tough times that entrepreneurs almost always will face in their new ventures. And the career literature is full of the term passion these days. Experts encourage people to seek a career path that “ignites their passion” and helps give their life meaning.
I agree that passion is an important element in choosing the right venture to pursue. For those regular visitors to this site, this part of the “me” part of assessing opportunities that I often write about.
But I have some concern that many are taking the importance of passion and meaning too far — to an almost unhealthy extreme. If unchecked, seeking meaning for your life from your business can lead to the kind of workaholism that many had hoped to avoid with an entrepreneurial career.
All of this discussion reminds me of a post I wrote a while back that might be worth another look….

What do farmers do? They farm. What do designers do? They design. What do managers do? They manage. What do entrepreneurs do? Well, they…..
Those who start and build businesses engage in a career that has no simple verb to describe what we do. Entrepreneur is a noun. Entrepreneurship is a noun. Entrepreneurism, a newer form of the term, is a noun. Entrepreneurial is an adjective. But, as you remember from 8th grade, adjectives simply describe nouns.
Entrepreneur comes from an Old French word (a fact that I still find hard to accept) entreprendre, which means to undertake. So it started as a verb, but now is a noun. As a side note, I am glad we did not take the literal translation of the French term to refer to those who start businesses. Otherwise all of us who are entrepreneurs would be known as undertakers instead.
So why is Professor Cornwall going into a long, and rather seemingly trivial diatribe? Am I finally becoming the doddering old academic we see mumbling to himself, shuffling across campus?
I assure you there is a point to all of this.
I have been watching the crusty old journalist (another profession that is not a verb), Dan Rather, go ungraciously and rather defiantly off into the sunset of his life. His career as a journalist is clearly behind him, but he won’t give it up. And then it came to me. His understanding of who he is is defined only by what he does for a living. He defines who he is as a person by the career he has pursued. Without his career he has very little else. Without it he is lost as he has nothing else in his life that has any real meaning.
We have seen others fail at retirement. Lee Iacocca could not stay retired as a corporate executive (noun). Magic Johnson and Michael Jordan could not stay retired as athletes (noun). For all of them, what they did for their work defined who they were as people.
Careers can do this to us. If we are not careful, they can consume all that we are. And what gets lost? Our families, our friendships, and even our souls.
If we are to become all that we were put on this Earth to do, we have to temper the temptation to become consumed by our work. We need to resist becoming the noun of what we do for a living.
Work hard at being a spouse. Work hard at being a parent. Work hard at worshiping God. Work hard at being a friend. Work hard at being a good citizen in your community. And yes, work hard at your vocation. None of these alone can fulfill our humanness.
One of the risks of using nouns to describe what we do in our work is that it can reinforce the tendency we all have to get carried away with our work. I loved starting a growing businesses (most of the time, at least). I love teaching and writing. It is indeed a blessing to love what one does for a living and joy the hard work that goes along with it. But, with every virtue there is a vice looming in the background. Although hard work is a good thing, it can be taken to excess and become a vice if it keeps us from all the other things we should be doing with our lives.
American society does not make this any easier. I am reminded of the lyric from a jazz record from the 1980s that said, “Everything in moderation, and moderation is the first to go.” We have become a culture of excess.
This is particularly true for the entrepreneur. We seem to create folk heroes out of entrepreneurs who expend Herculean efforts to achieve success in their businesses. And while this is good to a point, if entrepreneurial success comes at the expense of our marriage, our families, our faith, and our friendships, it is a hollow victory. If all we have at the end of our lives is our wealth, if that is all we leave behind, that is not a life well lived. As the old saying goes, “you never see a hearse with a luggage rack.”
So here is what I am going to commit to: I will help to find us a verb to describe what entrepreneurs do. It has to be catchy, like the term entrepreneurship, so that people will actually use it. And if they do, maybe that will be one small step toward no longer defining those who start businesses only in terms of that activity. We can be, and should be, so much more.