Fresh thinking

Yes, successful entrepreneurs are expected and encouraged to be dedicated, focused, even consumed by their ventures, 24/7. But they're also expected to be sharp, unfettered and creative thinkers capable of coming up with innovative solutions for the marketplace as well as more mundane issues like punching up your presentation.  Are there things we should/could be doing to keep the creative juices flowing? 

In my view, there's one simple directive to help keep the noggin fresh and peppy: get out.  In all possible ways.  Get out of your office (or your garage).  Get out some evenings to do something other than hanging out with your team in a bar over beer and chips.  Get out of reading the same old, same old, and mix up TechCrunch with the Economist or vice versa.  Get out of your chosen field and meet people in others, and if you're very much in the left brain world, make it a point to get to know folks in the arts.  Mostly, get out of your comfort zone and do something different fairly often.

Which brings up the obvious point, not all entrepreneurs think that they need to be creative - they'll leave it to the design guy or the marketing gal.  There are many entrepreneurs who believe they're done being creative as they came up with their business idea and now they should just focus on execution.  But execution draws on outside the box thinking too.

An example is a possible new market niche for us, an idea that came to me when I was sitting at the Startup Conference in Mountain View a few days ago with a friend who wanted to check it out (I attend one of these occasionally as part of my 'getting out').  Funnily enough, the keynote speaker, Dave McClure, started off by pretty much calling all the entrepreneurs there losers for attending a conference instead of being busy building their companies.  It is a totally valid point on how to use your time, or not.  These events may be worth attending if you're just thinking of starting a company, and want to know what others did (no live-streaming video of yourself - Justin Kan already did that.)  But my expectations are pretty much to hear something different and maybe meet someone I wouldn't have otherwise met - an unusual mental break for a few hours.  Best of all, it worked!

There's another hot new book being pitched to entrepreneurs - Jonah Lehrer's 'Imagine: How Creativity Works'. (Side note: seriously, how does one keep up with all the reading and still accomplish something?  Sure, it's part of keeping your brain fresh but your time is limited.  Realistically, the best one can do is to skim blogs to pick and choose the few books that resonate.)  Anyway, there's a listen-worthy interview with Lehrer on video here.  He provides a well-reasoned approach to creativity, offering some hope that creativity can be cultivated and you can keep it going even as you get older - you don't have to lose it. 

Choose to be more creative.  Shaking up the brain is good, but you need to care enough to want to zumba. 

Finding Balance in Life is Work

Now, here's a topic that affects only the privileged - work-life balance.  Think about it, it is an issue only for those who have the luxury of choice on how much they work or don't.  I'd written about this a while ago (yes, this topic is also frequent fodder for bloggers, writers and researchers) in what I thought was a cleverly titled post 'The work of life' in which I mused about our cave-dwelling forebears whose view of 'life' was more about avoidance of death than finding time for a family dinner.  Fast forwarding about fifty thousand years, today, for most people the world over, a work-day and its duties are clearly defined with little or no flexibility in it (as at Foxconn).

I'm writing about this again as I read a recent HBR post 'Entrepreneurs don't need work-life balance' which made me conclude that we're going about this the wrong way.  Previously I'd written about how to manage being a committed entrepreneur who wishes to meet all personal responsibilities, not just the ones in his/her company.  Now I'd like to step back from minor coping tactics, however useful they may be, to take the long view, a more philosophical one - and not just for entrepreneurs, but any of us who is lucky enough to be able to even to have the option to adjust our work schedules.

Mahatma Gandhi is credited with the quote 'Happiness is when what you think and what you say and what you do are in harmony'.  Less poetically, I believe it is when you are in harmony, or in balance - balance being something you experience, not achieve.  Equanimity is an even better word for it.  And equanimity comes when there's no guilt or stress or regrets - all those unbalancing feelings that come with thinking you should be doing one thing while you're saying/doing another.  As in having promised to be home for dinner but going to a mixer your investor invited you to in the last minute, or going on a long-planned ski weekend with a best friend and fretting about not being onsite for a product release.  These get to be stressful because you're thinking you're doing something for others (and failing in it), when in fact all the choices you make are for yourself.  You enjoy your work, you enjoy family and friends, you want to be physically and emotionally fit and you want it all - without conflict. 

Can it be done?  You bet.  But it takes work to get you and your life in balance.  Plan your life blocking out as much time as you think you'd like/need for all components that are important to you (for sure, if you're an entrepreneur, work's going to take a mega-chunk of it).  When conflicts arise, bring your values to the fore when making your choice.  Again, it should be yours, not anyone else's - after all, you're one of the privileged few that can afford that.  Also add a dash of pragmatism - be where your presence makes the most difference.  If you feel balanced with the result, you know you've made the right choice.  And one more tip, once you've made the choice, forget about the alternative - that way lies the wobbly woe of unbalance.

Exit signs

Entrepreneurs are probably one of the most 'advised' groups out there.  There's oodles of advice on how/why/when one should start a company and how to keep it going (though the going gets tough on that one).  But presumably entrepreneurs need to be told how to know when to pack it in because there's advice out there on that topic too.

Recently I read a much-commented guest post by Mike Troiano on the OnStartup blog, titled 'Be Captain of Your Destiny, Not Prisoner of Wishful Thinking', which listed five indicators which should convince an entrepreneur that it is time to admit that his idea doesn't work and exit.  While those criteria are worthy of consideration, I do believe that a true entrepreneur is not in the game because of a single idea, but because of a vision.  And if one idea doesn't work, it is highly likely she'd adapt and make it something else.  If you read the post, make sure you read the comments, especially the one by 'V' which I think is more in line with those of an entrepreneur who doesn't 'roll over and die' quite that easily.

In my view entrepreneurs have one sure-fire sign that it's time to move on - when the money runs out.  As long as there's money, and, even more importantly, as long as there are customers, the entrepreneur is still in the game. An example of this tenacity is a friend of mine who's helping her husband in his startup.  The idea is his, but they're partnering on the effort, especially in taking turns bringing in income, and they've been working at it for quite a while.  They'd run into various roadblocks, including the  'great' recession, and every time they reached out to customer prospects, or pitched to investors, they learned things that got them to re-tool their product and adjust their market position, and they've done this multiple times.  After many months, I got to meet with my friend a couple of days ago when she told me that they're in launch now. The product looks promising and their prospects are exciting.  This appears to be the real deal. 

One of my early posts was about a VC wondering when to hold on to a company, and in my view, it was when you could see the founder/entrepreneur still engaged and still passionate about making it happen - it was  'know when to hold' without being hung up on the 'know when to fold'.  Entrepreneurs who have a vision about a problem that needs solving, are willing to change their ideas on how to solve it, but don't give up on the vision, unless it is something they didn't care for that much in the first place.  Someone who's an entrepreneur by conviction, not an entrepreneur by convenience, would rather detour than exit if at all possible.