– Robert Rosen, PhD in Just Enough Anxiety — The Hidden Driver of Business Success

I recommend this book for a skim or a deep read.  Issues addressed include self-leadership, organizational leadership, and numerous self-assessment tests to help you see whether you’re in balance or leaning too far (by Rosen’s standards) toward chaos or complacency.  I like that Rosen is a PhD psychologist who studies business leaders and runs a fair-sized organization to help corporations.  It gives him more cred than the average business writer. Available at the Durham County Library as soon as I return it this week.

But Work isn’t the problem for most people I know. Most people I know are perfectly willing to do the work. The more frequent challenge I see is the need to focus what they’re working on so that they’ll get the results they want.

My third year Latin teacher gave me a pin that said (in Latin) “he who chases two leopards catches neither.” She knew what she was talking about (and as testimony to the gift’s aptness, I had to ask her to translate the pin for me.) Chase one leopard at a time and you may soon have a cage full of them. Chase two at a time and you’ll have none.

By the way, this lesson does not apply if your business model is to chase after things like grubs and bugs that you can pick up by hand in quantities sufficient to keep your belly full. If that’s your business model, you don’t need much focus at all. It’s not a very exciting business model (to me) but you’ll survive. On the other hand, if you want to do more than survive — if you want to build something sustainable and interesting — you’re going to be chasing leopards, and that requires focus.

I mentioned this to a friend some 25 years ago when we were in high school. Coincidentally, he was my first Quaker friend, and the Quakers know something about quiet.

Many entrepreneurs get energized by the noise and bustle of each workday. What more might they find if they also put some quiet into each workday?

Discipline is remembering what you want.
Discipline is remembering what you want.
Discipline is remembering what you want.

And, of course, doing what it takes to get what you want.

These are the things on my scorecard, and the first among them is all three.

Today I was talking with some business friends including one fellow who’s trying to decide what to do with the valuable remnants of a business that recently collapsed.  He had many ideas, any of which could be a viable re-configuration of the original idea.  But which ones would be the best for him?

“What do you want?”, I asked him.

“That’s a deep question,” he replied.

I told him what I want from my business.  I want to have fun, do good, and make money.

Turns out that he wants the same thing, along with everyone else around the table.  Fortunately, there’s an ample and ever-growing supply of each.

A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.

- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)

Shaw was a playwright and critic, not an entrepreneur.  But his words are universal.  It’s hard to find a successful entrepreneur or leader whose modus operandi is centered around avoiding mistakes.

The failure to find the right job or to enjoy the one you have creates a special kind of depression.

…An opus is the lifelong process of getting life together and becoming a real person, and it is no coincidence that the word is also used for a musical comopsition or an artist’s total production.  You are also a work of art–alchemists usually referred to the opus as the Work, but they also called it the Art.  You are the artistic designer of your own life, and it is the most important work you will ever do.  You will produce things that will make you proud–happy children, a good huome, a well-functioning society, and maybe even some decent art.  You will become a unique person.  Nothing is more beautiful or more valuable.  but if that potential goes unrealized, you may despaire about life in general.

– Thomas Moore, in A Life at Work: The Joy of Discovering What You Were Born to Do (2008)

I spotted this on the “new books” shelf at the Honnold/Mudd library at the Claremont Colleges. I hope that at least a few students pick this book up and take this message to heart. Better yet, I hope that the Claremont Colleges’ career advisors pick this book up and spread its message far and wide.

If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.

– Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 BCE)

Cicero’s political career was sufficiently distinguished to earn him a place in Western history, but he’s even more famous for his work as a writer and orator.  But it wasn’t a palace and an audience that he thought most important for himself or others.  It was a garden and a library.

When we are tired, we are attacked by ideas we conquered long ago.

- Nietzsche