We are taught, from a young age, to exist in the middle.

Everything in moderation. Don’t be a tall poppy, nor a shrinking violet. Good enough is good enough. The middle way, middle-class, mid-tier. That’s where we want to be. Not so big that we get cut down, and not so small that we can’t stand up. Just, you, kind of, well, average. That’s the goal.

Build a career that’s okay, not amazing, not terrible. Launch a company that’s cruising along, not struggling and not leading. Build relationships that are, well, “solid,” not empty, nor deeply passionate.

The middle—the coasting life—that’s where life is meant to be lived. That’s our aspiration.

Except that it’s not. With rare exception, the middle is not the easier, most comfortable place to be, but rather the hardest to sustain and the least rewarding on nearly every level. Sure, it protects you from the anxiety of growth and the stress of survival, but it also ends up feeling like the worst of both worlds.

This is true in nearly ever domain in life. But, if presents itself in a profound (and often massively painful) way in the world of careers, especially entrepreneurship. So, let’s use that as our example.

Let’s take starting and building a business, for example. You start with an idea. You test it and people respond. They’re digging it, and so are you. So you begin to put resources and effort into it. In the beginning, it’s just you, maybe a partner and a few people working, in no small part, out of love and for the cause.

You get to a point where things are humming along. People want what you’re doing. Maybe it’s just you and an assistant. If you have a team, it is small and tight and everyone does what’s necessary. You work hard, but nothing’s overly complicated and you’re only growing your costs when your revenue covers it. Everything is optimized, capacity is fully-utilized, you’re generating a nice bit of income, living well and contributing meaningfully to the world.

Many people can (and probably should) stay in this place. You can live an extraordinary life here, do great and meaningful work. Sure, there are always day-to-day grumbles and things you have to fix, but for the most part, life is good.

I call this phase “Simple Grace.”

For many, it’s wonderful. But, for others, at some point, we fall prey to the Relative Success Virus. We judge how successful we are, and how good our lives are in relation to those around us. And, without fail, the comparisons we make are to folks who are earning a lot more or have built something substantially larger that is affecting a lot more people. And, fulfilled as we may be, we convince ourselves we should be playing a much bigger game. We choose shallow and wide over narrow and deep. Whether we should or should not, that’s a conversation for another time. For now, let’s just say, you catch the virus and decide, “oh hell no, I’m not staying ‘small.'”

So you begin to ramp up in preparation of a push to grow.

You need more, and maybe different people. Ones who’ve got more operating experience and who will also need to get paid more. You start to hire and pay people to help you get to that next level. Your counting on them to create the bump in growth and sales needed to first cover their salaries and then exceed them. But, you’re not there yet and you may not be for some time. This adds a new level of chronic stress to your work and life. Breathe in, breathe out.

For the first time, the word “financial runway” enters the conversation.

You’ve got a certain amount of money in the bank to pay your new staff. If they don’t help you grow, they have to go and that might put not only your vision, but your entire business in jeopardy. Plus, it would just plain suck. For them, and for you. So, you work even harder than before, and push your new team fiercely because much as you want to be all chill and love everyone up, you also know, every minute of every day, you’ve got a drop dead date in your head. A Monday, Tuesday or Thursday in the not too distant future where you’re going to wake up with no more money in the bank.

Along with the new people and capacity comes the need for new and better solutions, new systems, processes, relationships and technologies. This includes management protocols, sales training, marketing strategies, financial controls, talent development, information management and training, along with manuals and policies.

On the one hand, the buildup is a necessary foundation for scalability. It sets you up for growth so that, if and when you reach that next level, you don’t utterly melt down. It becomes your new sustainable plateau, setting the table for a potential new experience of ease, but at a much higher level of operation.

Until you get to that next level, though, even if a high-level of automation happens along the way, getting all these people, products and systems developed and in place is often brutally hard, fraught with missteps, implosions and real hard costs. And, all the while, you’re racing against money and stress clock.

It puts fierce pressure on resources and amplifies complexity. You’ve got all this new capacity, but not enough new business to utilize it and, in turn, generate the money needed to pay for the people you’ve brought into the fold. Translation, massive amounts of money going out, not enough coming in yet, things constantly breaking and stifling levels of stress and sleepless nights.

This is the point so many founders end up taking outside investment. Not so much because you want to, but because you can’t breathe any more. You bounce almost violently between being pumped at the prospect and proximity of that next place and feeling like you’re drowning in stress and complexity. Visions of curling up in a ball and binge-watching Phineas and Ferb dance through your sleep-deprived, stress-addled brain. And, now more people are looking to you to take care of them. Your job is, in no uncertain terms, to not run and hide.

You’re stuck in the utterly untenable space between Simple Grace and Sustainable Complexity. It’s a glorious, catastrophic and sublimely consuming cocktail of possibility and pain.

I call this place the Unfortunate Middle.

Tech entrepreneurs often call it the dark night of the soul, which coincides with the part of Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey, where you’ve committed to the grand adventure, left the ordinary world, everything becomes hard, you’re being tested fiercely and haven’t yet found the answers, allies or the way back home.

This is a place that exists purely for the purpose of forging you. It is a place that is designed to be moved through. Yet, far too often, it’s the place you end up settling into. Never doing what’s necessary to propel yourself forward into Sustainable Complexity, buoyed by structure, resources and momentum, or release yourself back into the lightness of Simple Grace.

The Unfortunate Middle becomes something of a “set-point.” You just keep reverting back to it, no matter how much pain living in this place brings with it. You dwell. And toil. And suffer. And, every day, you die a little more.

This same spectrum—Simple Grace, The Unfortunate Middle and Sustainable Complexity—isn’t just about business, it also is about every domain of life. Careers at the top have extraordinary benefits. Careers devoted to simplicity and craft bring extraordinary benefit. Those in the middle are often defined not by the best of, but by the worst of both.

Relationships that stay simple and light can add joy and fun, without the baggage of commitment and complexity. They are relationships that are about Simple Grace. Relationships that grow out of a fierce commitment to self-discovery, and building pathways and mechanisms for conversation, connection, engagement, understanding, support and joy can become astonishingly nourishing sources of meaning and life that have moved into a place of Sustainable Complexity. And, then there’s that massively fraught middle ground that tends to be marked by a whole lot of conflict and strive, the relationships that stall out in the Unfortunate Middle.

The Unfortunate Middle, in fact, defines far too much of the daily experience of far too many. Not because we want it to, but because we don’t know how to get to the other side. And, because, while it’s relatively easy to settle into a place of Simple Grace as a solitary creator, maker, lover or leader, nobody…let me repeat that…NOBODY…gets through the Unfortunate Middle alone.

You need people. To hold you. To guide you. To work with you. To collaborate and co-create with you. To, gulp, even lead you. And, that means, you also have to surrender, to be vulnerable and to welcome others into your adventure. Or else, you risk subsisting somewhat mercilessly, often for years, in crush of the Unfortunate Middle. Until either you give in, fall apart, or the thing you’ve sacrificed so much to create simply crumbles under it’s own weight. Because, as we know, this not a place to be inhabited, it is a place to be passed through.

So, my invitation, today, is this…

Ask yourself, in which of the three domains are you dwelling? In work, in your relationships, in your health, in life?

Simple Grace, Sustainable Complexity or the Unfortunate Middle?

If it’s Simple Grace, that’s fine. We all need some of that in our lives. And, if you yearn to make the leap to Sustainable Complexity, ask if you’re willing to endure the journey through the Unfortunate Middle. Are you equipped, emotionally, physically. Do you have access to the resources and people needed to make it through? And, are you willing to step into the space of vulnerability needed to receive help, if and when you open yourself up to asking for it?

If you’re in that oft sought-after place of Sustainable Complexity already, congrats. But, know too, that this is not sustainable indefinitely either. There will come a time when you are tasked with moving to the next level or contracting.

There is no sideways in business, realtionships and life, only expansion or contraction.

And, when that happens, you will re-enter a different, yet equally challenging Unfortunate Middle. Own it, expect it, prepare for it. Both on a personal level and by ensuring you’ve surrounded yourself with the right people.

If you find yourself currently operating in the Unfortunate Middle, know that this is a place that must exist, brutal as it often is, but must also be moved through. First ask if you still want what’s potentially on the other side. Knowing what you now know, you may or may not. There is no judgment either way. But, being honest about the answer is do-or-die.

If you do not, start thinking about what might need to be done to move back to a place of Simple Grace. If you do, ask yourself if you’re equipped with the resources and people, both in your venture, and outside it, that you will need to get through this gauntlet. AND, ask if you are willing to be vulnerable, own your unknowing, ask for help and then receive it. Then make assembling those who can guide and support you a priority.

Each of these phases comes without judgment, just the simple reality that they are moments along a path. How far you are willing to travel is a decision only you can make.

Question is, where are you now, and what, if anything, might you do about it?

Something to think about as we all move into a new season, filled with aspirations, plans and the desire to do more of what we’re here to do.

P.S. – To listen to this on audio, click here now.

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Founders & entrepreneurs: you don’t have to do it alone! Growing a business, creating an “emergent vision” for everything from a product or service to an entire venture, then building it into something real, can be a brutally lonely process. Nobody does it alone. We all need people to guide us, to offer wisdom and advice, to hold us up, to journey along with us. That’s why I’ve created a powerful new Conscious Business Collective called The 108.

When you become one of the 108 founders invited into this new alliance, you no longer travel alone. You are a part of a fiercely committed group of visionaries, all working together to create game-changing ventures, while helping each other rise. As of March 1st, there are only about 25 spots remaining. After that, we’ll close registration until 2018 Learn more here, then get your application in now!

The post The Unfortunate Middle appeared first on Jonathan fields.

“Conscious” entrepreneurship–building a business that doesn’t just serve a consumer need and generate profit, but also makes a bigger difference–is even harder. Because it’s not just about money, it’s about unleashing expression, connection and potential, and making meaning. Helping others rise.

I’ve worked with hundreds of entrepreneurs and companies, across the spectrum from pure profit-driven to pure mission-driven and everything in-between. Over the years, I’ve seen the same company-killing mistakes made over and over. Especially, when it comes to conscious businesses, there are five that really stand out.

I thought I’d share them below, with the hope that bringing them front and center will help you both see and understand them more clearly, and more importantly, avoid making them and/or fix the ones already “in play.”

Here are 5 things conscious entrepreneurs do that destroy what they’re here to build:

1. Overgiving.

As conscious business founders or those who aspire to start conscious ventures, we are driven not just by the desire to build a sustainable company, but by the desire to serve, to help and to make meaning. That is amazing. It is a defining trait and the world needs more of this ethos.

But, this same lens on what we’re building can also create a fierce urge to “give away” as much as possible in the name of service. This seems like the conscious and service-driven thing to do on the surface, but underneath, you end up gutting the resources and financial viability of the business and making it brutally hard to sustain. You also rapidly suck your and your team’s emotional and energetic reserves dry. Until, eventually, you’ve given so much away, there’s nothing left to give, no business left to run.

It’s a bit like the parable of The Giving Tree, except our goal is not to give ourselves away until we’re gone, but rather to build a renewing source of generosity and service that sustains itself, supports us and never runs out.

When we over-give as a conscious business, we end up “serving it away.” And, instead of building a viable enterprise, we end up out of business.

Solution: Finding the balance between being of service and taking care of business is not easy.  But, it is critically important if you want to build a sustainable engine of expression and impact that makes a real difference for a long time. So, create mechanisms to serve as “giving reality checks.” Use a blend of hard metrics—revenue, expenses, resources, inventory, cash-on-hand and cash-flow. Then, add in soft-metric—personal energy, cognitive and emotional bandwidth, social currency and more. Note when either is trending low and take decisive action to adjust course.

2. Presuming Pain.

Whether we’ve already started a conscious business, or we’re in the planning stages, we’ve got to have a customer and a clearly-defined problem that is causing a specific pain that your business or product or service solves.

Problem is, all too often, we think we know the problem, we believe we are crystal clear about the pain it is causing and know that our solution will get rid of both. And, because it’s not unusual for us to launch a conscious business in response to either us or someone close to us having suffered this same problem and pain, we rely on personal experience to validate the problem and pain.

Thing is, we are sometimes right about the problem and pain in our lives (yet often ignore the deeper “real” problem and pain), and often wrong about the problem and pain in other people’s lives. Even if “we were them,” not too long ago. Because problems and pain manifest uniquely in each person. So, we need to go beyond our own personal experience and find those like us, or those we feel are currently experiencing the problem and pain, and…wait for it…actually talk to them. We need to validate our assumptions about the problem and pain, how it manifests in other people’s lives and also uncover the conversation they’re having in their heads about it.

For conscious business founders, we’re often so driven to help, and so often see ourselves and our struggles in others, we want to move inhumanly fast, to rush past or entirely bypass the validation phase. But, failing to test and validate our core assumptions about problems and pain, before building around them because we think we know what people need and want, that is a massive mistake.

Solution: Get out of your head and into the world. Your personal experience may well inform your understanding of the problem and pain in a very substantial way. But you may also have big blind spots. Better to become aware of them early on, and adjust course, than find out after you’ve already invested huge amounts of time and money.

Find where the people you seek to serve gather, then reach out and conduct a series of well-structured interviews. If you already have customers, interview a sample of them AND then go and interview those you’ve spoken with who have NOT purchased your solution as well. Note where your assumptions have been validated, refuted and everything in-between. Then adjust how you move forward based on this new data.

3. Story Blindness.

We know in our souls what we’re here to do. We know our mission. We know our “backstory,” the thing that fuels us to do something that matters. We know the people we want to serve, their pain, their needs, hopes and desires. And we know we’ve figured out a way to help. Or, at least, we’re on a path to figuring it out.

It resonates so deeply with us, we just assume “it’s so obvious, everyone will get what we’re doing and why, rush to support us and buy what we’re selling.” Conscious business founders often assume this even more than traditional founders. Because the story is so visceral, personal and the cause so deep, we think “how could anyone not automatically see it, get it and want to participate in it?!”

Except, they don’t. And, they won’t. Because we’ve discounted the critical importance of knowing how to tell our story in a way that leads to clarity, demand and support. I’ve seen this in entrepreneurs across all spectrums, they massively underestimate the importance of messaging and storytelling. They’ll often just “wing it,” creating terrible copy for websites, emails, catalogs, social channels, brochures, decks, pitch-letters and more. Then, they’ll be left wondering why nobody cares and they’re failing mightily.

Effective storytelling and copywriting are mission-critical growth levers, yet they are also simultaneously the most undervalued, underinvested skills in the world of entrepreneurship. They are far more often slapped together at the last minute, then experienced as points of failure instead of the engines of growth they could and should be.

This is an even bigger miss for conscious entrepreneurs, because our stories and message, properly crafted and shared, are often so much deeper and more compelling than more traditional “consumer goods” businesses. We have that rare opportunity to rally people to get behind something bigger.

It doesn’t matter how well we know our customers, how pure our intentions are and how good our solution are if we don’t know how to tell the story of all three, along with why we care, in a way that cultivates understanding without effort, urgency, desire and action.

Solution: First, own the critical importance of storytelling, influence levers and copywriting in your path to success. Then, do a quick, intuitive story-audit. Look at the language, in whatever your primary medium is, that you’ve been using to tell that story, to move people to action, and ask if it’s doing justice to you, your mission and your desire to make meaning. If it is, that’s fantastic, it is also a rarity. For many conscious business founders, it is not only ineffective, it is doing real harm by confusing and even pushing away the very people you seek to both serve and rally to help you.

Be honest. If your story/copy isn’t working, time to make a decision. Either invest in cultivating skills in this area yourself OR set aside the resources needed to bring in the best professional possible to help you. I’ve spent more than 15 years developing my storytelling, influence and copywriting skills and the impact on both my business and life has been immeasurable (I’ve also discovered that I love teaching these topics, which has become an extra bonus for me, as well).

4. Mission Creep.

We want to build a business that helps people, that lets us feel fully expressed and connected AND also flourishes financially. To do that, we also need to do something challenging. We need to say no to a whole lot of people we can help. We’ve got to narrow our focus as much as possible, at least in the beginning, and serve as specific a need as possible. This is critical, because it lets us not only focus and preserve our resources, it gives us the ability to tell one story to a specific community with a specific need.

For many entrepreneurs, who often have what I call “entrepreneurial ADD,” this narrowing can be a huge challenge. They all want to serve the biggest market possible. For conscious entrepreneurs, it’s often an even bigger challenge, we are so service and mission-driven that we see need, pain and possibility everywhere we look and we have ideas we believe can help. We want to do them all, at the same time, under the same umbrella.

So often, this leads to what I call “mission creep.” A well-defined starting mission starts getting more piled onto it until, over time, it ends up a jumbled calamity of ideas, agendas, initiatives, values, beliefs, products, services and campaigns that become massively overwhelming and spread resources so thin that everything suffers and nothing ever gets “done enough” to matter. Eventually, it all just collapses.

Mission creep dilutes resources, destroys focus and kills growth. It’s the old parable about the wells. We end up drilling a hundred wells that remain shallow for life, never a one yields water, instead of drilling one that hits paydirt, then leveraging that success to fuel the next and the next.

Solution: Do a quick mission-creep audit. Ask yourself what is the most fundamental expression of your mission. What is the narrowest expression of a community or individual you seek to serve? What is the most focused way to help them? Then, ask how that compares to the full-breadth of what you are doing now.

The gap is your mission creep. It is the space where you need to then look at each piled-on item and make a more deliberate decision. To decide what to say yes to, and “not now” to. It’s not that you’re giving up on all the other potential pathways and people, it’s just that you’re saying, “now is not the time.” Because “yes to many,” means an inevitable “no to all,” when the pursuit of all leaves you out of money, time, resources and business. 

Stay focused, until you have built the structure and resources to begin to add in a more deliberate, conscious and considered way over time. Think serial, not parallel. It’ll help you succeed and also eliminate a lot of stress along the way.

5. Lone Wolfing.

There’s this mythology in the world of entrepreneurship. The lone visionary. The radiant, driven savant capable of making astonishing things happen. We idolize them, write about them, make movies in devotion to them. Except, with rare exception, it’s a complete illusion.

Truth is, in business, just as in life, nobody does it alone. Nobody succeeds in a vacuum. Peel back the illusion just the slightest bit and you realize, all those legendary lone geniuses were only able to do what they did because they were surrounded by visionary people on multiple levels.

If they need people, guess what, so do we. Not just because entrepreneurship can be brutally isolating and lonely, but because the right people make us not only better humans, but more successful founders, builders and meaning-makers. So, who are those people?

We need teachers and mentors to show the way, help correct course, avoid missteps and shorten the distance from idea to impact.

We need champions to hold us up when we stumble (and we will, more than we’d like) and reconnect us with our vision and deeper drivers when we get lost in the smaller picture.

We need crusaders to hold us accountable when we most want to bail (which inevitably is a heartbeat from our next big move), and continue to act when things get hard (and they always will).

We need parallel-playmates, building their own ventures alongside us, sharing in the emotions, questions, struggles and triumphs that bond us for life and let us know that we are truly felt, seen and understood. Because we are them, and they are us.

And, we need a safe container to gather, drop the facade, get real, do the work and know we’ll be seen, heard and supported.

Solution: #FINDYOURPEOPLE!!! Haha, I know. Not so simple. It’s taken me many, many years to find mine. A big part of that was that I didn’t understand the various people and roles that needed to be present. Start by looking within your community, online and local. Make a list of who you know, or would like to know. You may find some hiding in plain view. Then again, you may not.

The challenge for conscious entrepreneurs is that we tend to be a bit of an outlier, even within the entrepreneurial community. Because it’s not just about money for us, it’s about meaning, purpose, expression and potential. It’s about building not just a business, but a life.

The wrap-up.

There we have it. Five major potential stumbling points along the path to conscious business growth, along with five big solutions.

Whether you’re in the very early stages, or years-in looking to correct course or jumpstart growth, each of the five can either be a major point of failure OR a powerful growth lever. This is a great time of year to reflect on where you’ve been and where you want to go in 2017. It’s a window to get real, own your past and envision and plan your future.

So, spend some time with each of the five. Look at them as invitations to be honest, own your stumbles and your wins. Then commit to doing what’s needed to transform struggle and stuck-ness into momentum and success in the year to come.

With a full heart and much gratitude,

Jonathan

The post The 5 Saboteurs of an Entrepreneur appeared first on Jonathan fields.

I hadn’t spent a lot of time in southern California, especially along the coast. So I’d never heard of or experienced the phenomenon known as the marine layer, or June Gloom.

It starts in late spring and often lasts through July or even August these days.

Clouds form over the ocean, then sweep onto the coast forming a dense, cool fog that settles low to the ground. Hugging everything, it wraps the day in mist and shrouds the sun, leaving a grayish light to fight its way through.

Some days, it burns off later in the afternoon. Often it just lingers all day.

Here’s the thing about the marine layer. When you’re in it, especially as an East-coaster who has never heard of it, you just assume “hey, it’s a bit sucky outside. That’s the weather today.” Nothing to do about it, just bundle up and endure the gloom.

But, that’s not quite accurate. There is something you can do about it…

Walk a few blocks East.

Turns out, the marine layer, dense as it is, is actually quite narrow. It hugs the coast so tightly that if you walk or drive just a few minutes inland, you often emerge into blazing sun and a fierce jump in temperature.

You realize, everywhere else, the weather is quite stunning. The fog wasn’t “the” weather, it was just the weather where you chose to stand.

Thing is, you need to know this thing called a marine layer exists, before you can even think about how to get out from under it.

You need to know, the fog is not the world, it’s not even the state or the town or the neighborhood. It’s simply the spot you’ve chosen to stand at this moment. No longer just a matter of fate, but rather choice.

Kinda of similar to life.

So many of us live in a marine layer of our own creation. A haze of mediocrity, settling, disconnection and dysfunction. Not because we want to, but because we never knew there was the possibility of anything but.

We never knew the haze was not the world.

If you have no idea that a life of blazing sun, possibility, love, radiance, redemption, elevation, exaltation, meaning, joy, expressed potential, vitality and connection exists just outside the fog, you’ll do nothing to find a way out of the haze and into the blaze.

The quest becomes more challenging, too, when you realize, unlike California’s coastal sliver of a marine layer, a greater part of the entire world is blanketed with the haze of resignation, futility and complacency.

You may have to travel further, mine your reservoir for greater faith, work harder and longer to emerge into the warm glow. If you’re already close to the edge, it may not take much. But if you’re deeply embedded, it may well require the mounting of an odyssey.

In self-help-land, it’s not vogue to acknowledge the realities of the effort that may be needed to awaken into the sunshine of your life. Or the fact that it’s near impossible to get there alone.

I’d rather be honest than vogue.

And, now I’m off to find a sunny spot to write…

On a hazy winter day in Gotham.

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GLP Immersion Update – Only a handful of spots left. If you’d like to spend the next 7-months with me, an intimate family of gifted mentors and conscious co-conspirators, working together to make amazing things happen in business and life, please do not wait to get your application in! We begin together on March 1st.

The post The Haze and the Blaze appeared first on Jonathan fields.

You start with an idea, then turn it into something real, build a business around it. And all is well with the world.

But that’s the wrong approach. Because entrepreneurship, in the wild, doesn’t work that way.

What really happens is you get an idea, it may have some nugget of viability, maybe not. You dig deeper, do research, flesh it out, create prototypes, get feedback, dirty-test interest and value, find out you were dead wrong. So you start over, come up with a new variation, refine it, tweak it, put it into peoples’ hands, learn it’s even more off-course. You curse, kick, scream, fret, whine, run, meditate, breath, sing, dance, whine some more and try again.

Somewhere between iteration numbers 3 and 1,003, you either get proven so wrong that you realize the heart of the idea just didn’t have legs, or you get proven so right that everything starts to click, people show up, trade value for what you’ve created and you start to build something real. Until it all breaks again. Which it will, because even successful businesses and ideas outgrow the structure, processes and even people who gave rise to them.

Entrepreneurship isn’t a discrete event or even a project. Truth is…

Entrepreneurship is a practice.

One that occasionally yields mondo rewards early in the process, but far more often reveals the fruits of your labor in bits and pieces that add up to gorgeous awakenings, rewards and impact over time. One you commit to. Until you don’t. Just like artists, athletes and any other person pursuing a level of mastery in any field.

And that’s something a lot of people miss. Entrepreneurship isn’t just about moments of insight or killer technical skills. It’s about building a level of mastery over the very process of entrepreneurship. Over your ability to plan, but remain open to serendipity, to act without perfect information, to read social dynamics and move people, to harness resources, think in ways others don’t and see things nobody else sees. Some of that comes naturally to some people, most, if not all, is trainable over time…if you’re willing to invest the effort.

San Francisco entrepreneur and founder of the famed Samovar Tea Lounges, Jesse Jacobs, knows this firsthand. He’s lived through it, building his business into three locations, globally-sourced product and online retail and more.

I had the opportunity to sit down with Jesse to talk about his remarkable journey in this week’s episode of Good Life Project. We dive deep into the concept of entrepreneurship as a practice, what that really means and how it unfolds in real life, especially when you’ve borrowed yourself into business and have a family in the mix.

Click here to check out this week’s episode with Jesse now >>>

If you’d rather listen to the mp3, just subscribe to Good Life Project and you’ll get instant access to the mp3 vault.

With gratitude,

Jonathan

The post Entrepreneurship As A Practice appeared first on Jonathan fields.

See so clearly the possibility beyond the haze.

Breath it in. Live it out.

Long enough for its essence to bind your DNA.

It becomes you. A vein opens.

Then you transmit.

Pure. Unadulterated. Jazz.

You cannot create change in others.

Until you embody the truth you seek to inspire.

Transcendent. Tethers on the dock.

Even then, you don’t deem.

You feel. You live.

You channel.

You radiate light.

You hold the door open.

We fly. You and I.

The post Helping Others Rise appeared first on Jonathan fields.

An hour each way. No cell-phone. Nothing. Just me, my backpack and a path that wound across a bridge from Da Bronx to Manhattan, through the woods, along a river and through a park.

Walking instead of driving, I lost nearly two hours of writing, to-do-listing, emailing, social-media-izing, conference-calling, outlining, building, designing and whole bunch of other getting stuff done yadda yadda. That’s hardcore productive time. Gone. Poof.

Pretty damn stupid, right? I mean I”m a busy guy. No time to waste. A launch deadline this week, people to serve, a legacy to build.

Wrong.

Because in the mindful window opened during my walking, not only did I get my exercise in, not only did I drink in a stunningly gorgeous fall day, not only did I absorb myself in the meditation of life as it unfolded and ramped my cognitive abilities and mood…I stumbled upon two awakenings.

One, a realization about movement, stillness and clarity and a very cool visual demonstration. More on that in a future post/video. And, two, an innovative solution to a seemingly intractable business challenge I’ve been grappling with. Something that kicked off a cascade of secondary realizations that may well lead to not only a substantial shift in the way I am building my professional path, but also in the experiences, products and services I create for others.

Last week, I talked about the power of embracing The Thrash.

This week, it’s about The Space. The moments of “in-between” that we increasingly fill with tasks, often enabled by the near-impossible to escape umbrella of digital connectivity. All in the name of supposedly optimizing productivity. Getting stuff done.

Thing is…

Life’s not about getting stuff done, it’s about getting the right stuff done.

It doesn’t matter how productive you are if the ideas you’re building on don’t represent the best you have to offer.

And the best you have to offer rarely ever comes when you’re filling every nook and cranny of mind-space, every waking moment of every day.

Genius comes when you disconnect from tasks and reconnect to source. Click to tweet

Kill the space, kill the dream.

So, a question and a challenge:

1 – How can you build a deliberate digital pause into your day?

2 – Will you commit to doing this in writing, here in the comments, for the next 30 days?

The post Embrace The Space appeared first on Jonathan fields.

It needs to go on. But most visionaries don’t talk about that “dark” time. Because it’s not sexy. It doesn’t feel good or look good to others. Nor do the great creators tend to get any public attention until after the thrash yields a clear enough vision for them to become unwavering pulled toward a quest. The spotlight loves heroes and legends, not WTFs…

We feel bad when we’re in the thrash because all the luminaries we place on pedestals seem to have their stuff so together, seem to be so insanely focused on the one and only thing that matters. And dammit why can’t we be them? Thing is, those same people thrashed mightily before arriving in a place of mission. And they will again.

The thrash needs to happen. Hiding the conversation around this part of every visionary creator’s epic journey makes those currently in the thrash feel inadequate. You look at your heros and assume “they never thrashed, so what’s wrong with me?” Straight up fiction.

At some point in your journey, you’ve got to create a specific vision to hold in your mind and give you the intention and purpose, something for the Universe to respond to. But you also need to allow yourself the time to do a lot of tinkering, trying, experimenting and messing up in order to even get a sense of what the elements of a vision that is strong enough to fuel unwavering daily action are. And, here’s the scary part, that process can last for years.

The challenge while you’re in the the thrash is to understand:

• There is great and necessary value in this process
• Every great creator goes through it, and
• Inaction is not an option

Thrashing is not about wallowing, it’s about acting, succeeding, failing, observing and adjusting, expecting a lot of things to not work and being okay with that, because it’s the only way to get to what will work. For you, for the problem you seek to solve, the delight you want to deliver and for those you seek to serve.

Instead of hiding it, embrace and exalt the process of trial, error, funk, success, stumble and grace. Own it, and ask for help. And do it with structure, intention, consistency and movement.

Failure is only failure when it doesn’t move you forward. Click to tweet

In the comments below, if you’re in the thrash now, stand up and claim it. Tell us what it’s about. Maybe someone in the tribe can help.

And if you’re on the other side, share how you got there?

The post Embrace the Thrash appeared first on Jonathan fields.

What an amazing person, company and and experience. But that’s for a future post.

This is about something Bob shared with me after I stopped recording and asked a personal question.

Since selling my last business and turning most of my creativity to the digital word, I’ve been missing something. Making stuff I can see, feel, touch and look at. Yes, book’s count and I’m insanely proud the one that’s about to come out. But I miss getting my hands dirty.

I also play guitar and love the physical form of acoustic guitars. There’s just something utterly sensual about a beautifully-crafted guitar. So over the course of this year, I started researching what it would take to learn to build them. You can do apprenticeships, buy kits, take courses or read books. I learn best by doing, so I figured I’d jump into a 2-week course that looked very cool. That was 9-months ago and somehow life keeps getting in the way. Or so I thought.

So, I asked Bob what he thought I should do.

His answer, “go and make a really bad guitar.” Stop waiting around, go buy a kit and do it. Today.

The first one, he said, will be bad. Maybe really bad. But you’ll learn more making one bad guitar than you will waiting to do something and then taking a course that teaches you how to do it right. You’ll understand a lot more about the “why” behind good and bad building, and that’ll put you in a radically different position to do it better moving forward.

Dohhh. Palm to forehead moment.

In the nine months I’ve been waiting for the right time to do the course, I could have made one really bad guitar, a second kind of bad one and maybe even a third half-decent one. Meaning the the one I would build next just might be pretty sweet.

Thing is, Bob’s advice wasn’t about guitars.

It’s the same in writing, painting, sculpting, hacking, designing, building businesses.

The best way to build a kick-ass X is to immediately begin the process of building any X, knowing full-well there will be a lot of bad ones that need to be made on the way to “OMG that rocks!”

There’s a lot of emphasis on trying to accelerate the path to success by spending a ton of time studying the methods of those have succeeded before us in the hope that we’ll be able to avoid many of the mistakes they made. And, there is a certain logic to that.

But, what it doesn’t take into account is the fact that the thing that led them to be able to do what they do is that they, themselves, messed up, over and over and over, and it was that repeated intimate relationship with the mistakes that led to a deep enough understanding of “why” it needed to be done differently that led to their success.

Knowing how to do something “right” lets you more easily recreate the success of those who’ve come before you. But it doesn’t give you the knowledge and depth of experience needed to eventually go beyond what they’ve taught you. Because you’ll likely never understand, fully understand on an experiential, emotional and intellectual level, what went wrong along the path of those you’ve chosen to learn from. And how those things factored into what they are teaching you is the “right” way to do it.

And there’s something else. You’ll also only be learning their right way to do it, which may well not come close to being the best way to to something. But you’ll take it as gospel and, along with the fact that you don’t really understand why they do it the way they do, it’ll kill your own personal exploration of better approaches.

You wont get the admittedly potentially terrifying opportunity to build your own methodology from the ground up. Nor will you benefit from the visceral “why” that allows you to not only get to that same place (albeit it a bit more battered and bruised), but also to have the ability and reservoir of experimentation that lets you not just replicate another’s success, but take your own success beyond the place that a simple knowledge of how others succeeded before you would have left you.

So, learn, what you can, but at the same time, get your head out of the classroom and start making more bad stuff. Because…

There’s no greater accelerant along the path to genius than a flaming trail of crap.

Now, excuse me while I go order my first-ever guitar kit…and up my homeowner’s insurance.

+++

For those who missed it earlier this week – the new trailer for my next book Uncertainty went live. And the response was, well, go see for yourself…

The post Make More Bad Stuff appeared first on Jonathan fields.

Time away. Room to process, synthesize, allow connections between seemingly disparate parts to effervesce out of the ether of the mind.

Genius is the offspring of the in-between.

But, increasingly, technology is removing the in-between.

We don’t just walk in contemplation, we walk, talk and type.

We don’t just drive, we drive, talk and every time we stop the car, we check, tap and reply. Red lights, the bain of a life-long quest to get “there,” have now become a sought after opportunity to catch up on any communication that may’ve arrived since the last red-light…5 blocks ago.

But when we fill in all the organic in-betweens with texting, e-mailing, DMing and updating, we unintentionally kill the a critical step in the ideation process—percolation and contemplation—and along with it go creativity, innovation and despite your opposite intention, productivity.

So, why do we do it?

Filling in the in-between, we say, lets us get so much more done. Wrong.

Hyperconnectivity gives us the perception of getting more done, it makes us feel like we’re doing more, because we’re using every free moment of every waking hour.

There is often a huge chasm between being busy and being productive.

Hyperconnectivity requires a massive volume of switchtasking, which destroys true-productivity and efficiency because every time you page through your various modes of connectivity and respond to different prompts, you lose focus. To regain that focus requires a certain amount of time and cognitive effort.

Put another way, there is a ramping cost every time you switch gears, then return.

So when you spiral through every known mode of communication hundreds of times a day, you may be busy as hell, but you damn sure aren’t productive. At least nowhere near the level you could be. You’ve just created the illusion of productivity.

By the way, if you’re wondering if that’s you, here’s an easy test:

Next time someone asks what you did at the end of a day, if you know you were crazy busy but you can’t immediately pin-point a small number of substantially-meaningful accomplishments, critical insights or measurable forward movement…let alone recall any tasks beyond “oh I answered a lot of emails, put out fires and had a bunch of meetings…you’ve very likely fallen into hyperconnected lost-sock land.

All of which begs an even bigger question…

If hyperconnectivity really isn’t about efficiency and productivity, like we claim it is, what is it about?

Two things:

1. An insanely addictive phenomenon called intermittent reinforcement.

Intermittent reinforcement is a behavioral pattern where repeated reinforcement of a behavior over times programs your brain to crave more and more opportunities to express that behavior. It mirrors addiction and, in fact, may well trigger chemical dopamine releases in the brain quite similar to those triggered through chemical addictions.

In the context of mobile notifications, Kevin Hoffman described it beautifully:

Every time your phone vibrates to alert you of the possibility of something interesting, exciting, or even mundane (but new) – your brain is getting what psychologists call a “Dopamine squirt”. Over time, your brain links the phone vibration, ring, or the “new SMS” tone to a brief release of dopamine. You feel this tiny little rush of excitement that feels like adrenaline every time your phone vibrates, jingles, rings, or otherwise begs for your attention. Since this is dopamine we’re talking about, you actually suffer mild withdrawal symptoms when you are away from your phone or your phone is idle/quiet for a long period of time. You get fidgety, anxious, bored, etc.

Intermittent reinforcement annihilates will.

Hyperconnectivity has become one of the purest forms of intermittent reinforcement ever to exist. Which is a bit horrifying, because in addition to pulling us away from activities and relationships we claim to hold dear and degrading “real” productivity, it all but eliminates the opportunities for disconnection that are crucial in the creation of great art, business and life.

But, that’s not all…

2. Enter the Zeigarnik Effect.

I’ve written about this before in the context of chronic non-finishers:

Legend has it, famed Russian and psychologist and researcher, Bluma Zeigarnik, was sitting at a café in Vienna when she noticed that her waiter could remember the details of a large order perfectly until that customer was served. Once served, the order literally vanished from the waiter’s memory.

Through further research, Zeigarnik discovered that people, in general, will remember the details of most any task until it is completed and then, remarkably, forget much of what unfolded. Moreover, once begun, there is an underlying psychological drive to complete the task.

So, between the process of remembering what needs to be done and enduring the constant tug to bring a task to completion, every unfinished task stakes a claim to a small piece of our memory and short-term cognitive abilities.

It stands to reason, then, that the more we begin and the less we finish, the more chronically occupied our minds become. Beyond feeling stressed, frazzled and overwhelmed, this can also lead to impaired thinking, problem-solving and creativity. Not the most pleasant state in the world.

What Zeigarnik also discovered is that once a loop has been opened (a task or conversation begun), we become increasingly compelled to complete it. It creates an urge, a pull, to finish what was started.

How does this relate to hyperconnectivity, productivity and creativity?

Simple. Every time we begin a conversation by text, email, twitter, Facebook or Google+, it’s like we’re opening a new loop. One that, until completed, compels us to want to finish the conversation. To keep checking and responding until the loop has been closed.

Problem is, in a hyperconnected world…the loops never close.

And if they ever do, the space created is instantly filled by countless new loops that overlap and stack like an eternally-thickening linguistic lasagna, consuming the mental juices needed to do great work, create genius, divine solutions and get stuff done.

Along the way, we eviscerate both the downtime needed for insight and the consistent focus needed to accomplish much more than being busy.

Indeed, left unchecked…

Hyperconnectivity has become a form of productivity decimation and intermittent creative destruction.

The post Creative Kryptonite and the Death of Productivity appeared first on Jonathan fields.

Push…

Push is generally about the avoidance of pain. It’s the “away from” side of the motivational spectrum.” You’re actively pushing yourself away from either a source of current pain or the perception of an anticipated pain.

So, if you’re overweight and feeling bad about it, stressed and suffering, unable to do what you want because of bodily pain, are in a bad relationship or a bad job, every day brings with it the experience of current, realized pain. You don’t need to be reminded of it, it’s there with you every step. And this can be a powerful motivation, it can push you to act to remove the pain.

The quest to remove a current pain can be an incredibly powerful push toward action. But there’s a downside…

Once the pain’s removed, the motivation usually goes away. Because it moves you from wanting to remove a current pain over to wanting not to experience or re-experience a future pain. It moves you from the quest for a cure to the quest for prevention. All you have to do is look at the lifestyle behaviors of the vast majority of people and the mountain of marketing research from healthcare and pharmaceutical providers to know that people respond far more aggressively to the quest to cure a current pain than they do to the quest to prevent a future one.

Preventative action, beyond teeth-brushing, is and always will be a brutally hard sell.

It’s just the way we’re wired. Even after major health incidents, most people revert to the behaviors that led to the incidents. Not all, but most.

So, the “proactive” push away from a potential future pain is an extremely weak source of motivation. And, though powerful, the push away from a current pain is a strong motivator, but it’s “reactive” motivation – it doesn’t kick in until things get pretty bad. And it generally goes away as soon as enough of the pain goes away.

Does that mean that most of us won’t do anything until we’re mired in suffering?

Not necessary. There’s still the “Pull” side of the motivational spectrum.

Pull…

Pull-based motivation is about tapping the desire to achieve something.

It’s about establishing a quest and taking action not to remove a current pain, but to bring yourself closer to a deeply desired end. Maybe it’s completing a marathon or learning to play guitar. Could be hiking the Appalachian Trail or building a business that changes not only your life, but the lives of the thousands of people it serves. Maybe it’s becoming a chess master or creating a stunning collection of paintings. Maybe you just want to solve a big honking problem or make something insanely cool, because those are activities and pursuits that fill you up.

Pull is about activities and meaningful quests that, by their very existence, inspire action in the name of coming closer to the object of the quest. And the beautiful thing about setting pull-oriented motivational drivers is that they can be long-term, they can have intermediate benchmarks that serve our emotional need for intermittent reinforcement. And, once completed, they can either expand to create a new source of pull to an even cooler place. Or a new quest with an even stronger sense of pull that builds around the foundation of habits and actions laid in the prior quest can be set in motion.

Plus, done not from a place of blind ambition, but rather a sense of presence, engagement and joy, the mere experience of moving along the “pull-spectrum,” regardless of whether you actually hit the quest you’re working toward, can be immensely rewarding.

Death…

I once heard a story about the Dalai Lama. He meditated on death, I was told, six times a day. My first response was, “how morbid.” But, also, “how interesting” and, when framed as an honoring of the impermanence of everything…how life affirming.

Then I stumbled upon Steve Jobs now famous Stanford Graduation speech, where he shared:

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

I’ve circled around to the believe that honoring your own impermanence on a daily basis, owning the fact that you’re going to leave the planet and you don’t know when, can be an immensely freeing experience. Saddening at times, yes. But freeing and empowering nonetheless.

Because what doesn’t matter drops away, creating more space to explore what does matter, to take actions and risk pushing the bounds of certainty in name of defining powerful pull-based quests capable of creating magic in both your life and the world around you.

So, I wonder, where do you fall in the motivation spectrum?

What’s driving your current behavior?

Are you happy with your answer?

And, if not…what next?

The post The Truth About Motivation: Push, Pull and Death appeared first on Jonathan fields.