As an agent of change, I spend the vast majority of my time examining why people do things the way they do them in order to figure out how to get them to change their behavior patterns. The trouble is that people often assume their reasons as more valid than they really are.
Learning to understand how I process information has become increasingly important to my ability to manage my career. My early, haphazard career steps were very lucky. Now that I’m older, I have the opportunity to be more deliberate — if I understand how to navigate.
The more I study the Myers-Briggs, the more incredibly valuable information I find. Some of it is very comforting (“I knew I couldn’t be the only one who did that!”) and some of it is very frustrating (“If that’s why I tend to do that, then how do I change this habit?”), but all of it’s useful. Yet one more MBTI nugget made its way my direction recently, and it’s clarified another trend in my life that I didn’t previously recognize.
After 130 years, Ursuline High School in Santa Rosa, my alma matter, is closing. Given my loathing of high school, my general predisposition against sentimentality and my staunch atheism, I am quite shocked to discover that I am tremendously saddened by this news.
My entrepreneurial journey has come to an end, and though I felt some guilt about it at first, the truth is, I’m relieved.
We are now almost officially at our two year anniversary in Austin. I can say, without a doubt, that it’s been an amazing rollercoaster — not one that I ever would have knowingly signed up for, but one for which I am immensely grateful, in spite of its rockiest moments. In the past two years, [ Read More ]
Like many of my peers in Generation X, my parents and my grandparents have never really understood what I do for a living. My parents use the web, so it’s not entirely outside their comprehension, but when it comes to my grandparents: I may as well be communicating with aliens via mental telepathy. Being an [ Read More ]
For some people entrepreneurship is a philosophy. For others, it’s the price we pay for an idea we are passionate about. But what’s the difference? And, even more importantly, why does it matter? I think it matters most if you are in a B2B business yourself. As a business that serves the needs of other [ Read More ]
One of my posts on WorkingPoint was about asking the right questions at different stages of your business maturation — there are some questions that you should ask when you’re getting started, and others that you ask several years in. But what questions matter for today? Jason Cohen of Smart Bear Software posted a follow-up [ Read More ]
Virtualization, globalization and economic changes convert long-time employees into (sometimes reluctant) entrepreneurs.
The single biggest struggles I encounter with entrepreneurs trying to build a business is marketing. Some small business owners don’t think about it; some don’t understand it; some don’t like it; some cling to the belief that it simply shouldn’t be necessary, as long as their product is good enough. One way or another, though, [ Read More ]
I am guilty of a great many assumptions. There are a lot of things that I take for granted — the types of things that come naturally to me, the perspective I have on things, the business insights I rely on, the experiences I draw from — are all things that frequently turn out to [ Read More ]