ENTRETUDE

Where The Jobs Are

"In the middle of every difficulty lies opportunity."

Albert Einstein

       

       

I’ve read several articles recently about job growth in what has been called the intangible sector of the economy.  This includes jobs related to development of human, intellectual and health capital.  Between March 2001 and December 2007 the intangible sector added 3.5 million jobs to the economy while the manufacturing sector lost 1.8 million jobs.  One of the growth areas in this sector is green technology and businesses.  There are many jobs in this sector that don’t require years of training and expertise.  Boomers, with education and experience, can make this transition relatively quickly.  Education, especially primary and secondary education, is another growth industry particularly in the western part of the country.  Many school districts have special programs for non-certified teachers to get into the classroom and earn their certification.  Community colleges are also seeing an increase in demand for their programs as boomers take classes to prepare for these future opportunities. 

       

Using the principles of Entretude is the way to develop your strategy for taking advantage of these and other opportunities.  You’ll develop a strategy for using your core skills and talents to take advantage of new opportunities.  You are going to use Entretude to be more proactive as well as strategic about the rest of your professional and personal lives.  Are you taking advantage of these opportunities now?  If you are, let us know how you're doing it.

Experience Counts

“There is science, logic, reason; there is thought verified by experience. And then there is California.”—Edward Abbey

There are now more jobs than there were a year ago for every group over 55 years of age—and fewer jobs for every group under 55, according to a recent Washington Post article. It offers a little Entretudinal insight into the value we baby boomers have to offer in times of recession.  It also gives valuable information on where job growth is and will be.  This is the information you need to match what you're good at and do well to the skills and experience that are going to be in demand.

An Example of Entretude in Action

“To follow without halt, one aim; there is the secret of success. And success? What is it? I do not find it in the applause of the theater; it lies rather in the satisfaction of accomplishment.”—Anna Pavlova

Here’s another example of Entretude in action: charting a new path from one successful career to successful social entrepreneurship. Follow this link to the article and post a comment here to let me know what you think of the concept.

The Truth About Style

“

When a woman tells the truth she is creating the possibility for more truth around her.”

Adrienne Rich

I know two women who built a great friendship because one fired the other—as unlikely as that sounds. The longer they worked together the more obvious it became to my friend’s former boss that their styles were not even remotely compatible. Both women are competent, talented and very strong, and that is what attracted them to each other—and what made it impossible for them to work together.

My friend’s style is pure independence—as she puts it, she has “a problem with authority.” Her former boss is a strong leader, and in her organization there’s room for only one leader, so she did my friend the brutal favor of helping her discover that her future was not as an employee—she was too entrepreneurial for such a job.

Eventually, my friend, applying the principles of Entretude, figured out what she was good at, what she did well and what her style was. From those revelations she is now pursuing a successful career as an independent consultant, a career that takes advantage of her Entretude. Sometimes we find Entretude and sometimes it is forced upon us.

Making It Happen with Entretude

We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aid, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn Henry David Thoreau

I know that this blog is for us baby boomers but I read about a young woman you should know about. She doesn't know it, but she's really tuned into Entretude. Read about how she bounced back from losing her job by understanding what she's good at and figuring out what she could do well. She went from being laid off to making over $100,000 a year with her own business. Entretude will work for each of us the same way it worked for her. Have you lost your job?  Do you think that may happen soon?  Read Tya Bolton’s story and let me know how it help you see Entretude in Action.

The Cost of Retirement

“A billion here and a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking real money.”— Everett Dirksen

      

When we think about the financial impact of boomers retiring, it’s obvious that we need a new way of thinking about retirement. If baby boomers stop working and start trying to live off savings and Social Security, the financial burden on society will be huge—much larger than we can afford now or any time in the future. The good news is that it doesn’t have to be this way. Applying the principles of Entretude with a growth mindset will allow boomers to create opportunities in innovative ways by taking advantage of demand for their skills and talents that’s already there. We will reinvent the concept of retirement by creating new and innovative combinations of work, both paid and charitable, and time for ourselves. Are you thinking about what your "Second Act" will be like?  Use the principles of Entretude to plan your future.

Thinking the Right Way about What’s Next

“The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.”—Albert Einstein

 

Another important part of baby boomers making the transition to the next phase of their lives is having the right mindset to figure this out. With a growth mindset, you know that you can always learn new skills and acquire new knowledge. You don’t feel like the person you are today is the person you are going to be tomorrow. You’ve learned new skills in the past and you can do it again. Working in a job every day can make you stop thinking with a growth mindset. You may not be challenged every day to grow and develop your abilities because this will mean you don’t fit the job anymore, since it hasn’t changed. This is why many entrepreneurs leave the corporate environment.

Too often we consider not being able to keep going to the same job year after year as a personal failure instead of a signal that we’ve evolved and need to make a change. When you start thinking this way, you’re more likely to start trying to avoid failure instead of trying new things that can help you grow and develop—even if there is a chance of failure. You are a success for constantly trying new things, not because you do everything perfectly. To use a sports analogy, you begin playing the game of life not to lose, instead of playing it to win, even if that means some risk of failure. This is a fixed talent/fixed mindset approach to life instead of a growth mindset. Boomers need to have a growth mindset and see situations where this type of mindset will be nurtured and developed.

An important component of Entretude is a growth mindset. You must believe that your basic qualities, what you are good at, can be cultivated through your efforts at purposeful engagement in your personal and professional lives. That’s why it’s so important to be able to indentify and assess your core skills and talents because:

1) They’re dynamic. They can and should change over time; and

2) If you don’t know what they are, you can’t grow and develop them for your benefit.

Do you have a growth mindset about your personal and professional lives? How do you plan to put it to work for yourself now and in the future?

Boomers Rule!

Always bear in mind that your own resolution to succeed is more important than any other one thing.
Abraham Lincoln

Follow this link to read about someone who really knows how to live with Entretude!

The Value of Boomers in the Workplace

“The first duty of a human being is to assume the right functional relationship to society—more briefly, to find your real job, and do it.”
Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Every day I see another article or hear another story predicting what my life as a baby boomer will be when I reach the traditional age of retirement. I can’t tell from these articles if the authors expect my life after 65 to be wonderful or a complete nightmare. Some believe life’s going to be hard for my generation after 65. These people are taking a conventional approach to this topic. They’re not focused on boomers representing the largest cache of creativity, experience and talent in history. They do not seem to consider that this tremendous resource can’t be utilized if we think about “retirement” as the time when we stop being intellectually challenged and begin consuming our personal and society’s resources until we die. No one can afford that.

Trying to keep boomers in existing jobs or jobs defined strictly in traditional ways won’t work, either. Seventy-eight million people can’t just continue to do what they’re doing, even on a part-time basis. There aren’t enough traditionally defined jobs for the boomers and for the generations behind us. We have to find new ways for us to stay intellectually challenged, using our talents and expertise locally, nationally and globally. We’re going to live longer and healthier lives than any generation before us and we will continue to contribute professionally, financially and philanthropically to society for years to come.

Some people writing and talking about this topic understand that like everything else we’ve touched in the past, boomers will redefine retirement to ensure that our generation’s cache of creativity, experience, skill and insight will continue to be used to benefit us and the world around us.

The Third Principle of Entretude

“True religion is real living; living with all one’s soul, with all one’s goodness and righteousness.”—Albert Einstein

 

“Expect nothing, live frugally on surprise.”—Alice Walker

 

In The Second Principle of Entretude I said your focus statement should include three things:

       ·        your goal;

       ·        the strengths and skills you’ll use to reach it; and

·        the way you’ll work to accomplish your goal.

 

In this post, I’m going to focus on the last item—the way you want to work. You can’t have a good focus statement unless it includes the right choice of how you want to work to achieve your goal. You may choose to work for someone else, be a corporate entrepreneur or work independently. The right choice will make achieving your goal a lot easier because you’ll be in an environment where you’re happy and productive. The wrong choice will make achieving your goal much harder because you’ll never feel like this is where you’re supposed to be.

 

Let’s start by introducing the third principle of entrepreneurship: Match your business to the strengths of your ownership/management team. Determine if this good business idea is consistent with the entrepreneurial and managerial talents and strengths the ownership team can bring to the business. That means, first, knowing what it takes to make this idea into a successful business. Then, knowing if the management team has what it takes to be successful.

 

This entrepreneurial principle gives us the third principle of Entretude: Your focus statement must fit you in all of the most important ways. In addition to being about something you have some passion or excitement for, your focus statement has to fit you: your strengths, weakness(es), skills and attitude toward life. This means knowing your mind and your spirit as well as anyone does. It means understanding how to nurture and develop your mind and spirit every day. It means knowing how to and being able to put yourself in nurturing environments. It means being honest with yourself at all times even if you can’t be this honest with anyone else all the time. It means being brave enough to be happy every day. It doesn’t mean never being afraid. It does mean doing what it takes to ultimately be happy even if you are afraid. It means your future security is in the quantity and quality of your personal and professional experiences, not in how well you fit someone else’s job description.

 

Have you discovered the way you work best? If so, please share your experiences with us. If you aren’t sure you have, please use this and the posts you can link to above to find what is best for you.

The Second Principle of Entretude

“Twenty years from now, you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”—Mark Twain

The second principle of entrepreneurship: Start with a good business idea.

The second principle of Entretude: Start with a focus statement based on what you are good at and what you do well.

The idea or opportunity should be a way to satisfy an unmet need profitably for an extended period of time. It’s also got to be consistent with what your business is good at and can do well. This means you and your team should have some skills and talents particularly well suited to exploit this opportunity.

Applying this entrepreneurial principle to you gives us the second principle of Entretude: Develop a focus statement based on what you are good at and what you do well.

This statement will be the filter for all ideas, decisions and actions you’re considering. This links effort to effort, day to day, week to week, month to month, year to year and life to life. It’s the next step in applying entrepreneurial principles to your life to take control. It’s important to emphasize that this is not the time to decide what you can or can’t achieve. This is the time to look outward, to be sure your focus is a good one for the world you live in or want to live in. This is the time to choose what you really want in life, what you have a passion for, where unexploited opportunities are for you. It takes experience in life to know what you want, because through experience you learn how to make good choices. You are a mature, seasoned professional who has all the experience needed to craft an excellent focus statement.

Writing Your Focus Statement

Craft your statement in a way that works best for you. Make sure it clearly states your goal, and the strengths and skills you will use to reach that goal, as well as the environment in which you will accomplish the goal. Your focus statement could be: I will create opportunities for personal and professional success in all parts of my life using (what you are good at) to (what you do well).

Here are a couple examples:

• I will create opportunities for personal and professional success in all parts of my life, using my creativity, curiosity and insight to become a freelance writer.

• I will create opportunities for personal and professional success in all parts of my life, using my ability to synthesize ideas, information and concepts, to articulate these ideas and insights to groups and individuals in my own motivational training business.

Read, remember and think about your focus statement every day. It’s your first thought when an opportunity comes to you. It is your first thought when you see a chance to create a new opportunity. Only the opportunities that match what you are good at and what you do well are true opportunities for you. Everything else is a distraction.

Have you thought about or written a focus statement for yourself before? If you have, tell me about it and share it with the other readers. If you haven’t, let me know what you think about the idea.

The First Principle of Entretude

Trust yourself. You know more than you think you do. ^___ Benjamin Spock

In Entretude Elements of a Succssful Life, I wrote about the skills and talents you developed during a successful career as a resource that you can now exploit. These skills and talents are a unique opportunity that can be successfully developed using proven entrepreneurial principles. When you approach making decisions in a way that focuses on your skills and talents and not on your position and title, you’re going to discover opportunities that weren’t apparent before.

The first step is to understand and embrace the primary principles of entrepreneurship and how they directly correlate to the principles of Entretude. With each principle you’ll see how applying the same strategic focus to you as a business ensures success—just as it does for a business enterprise.

Entrepreneurship Principle 1 – Know what you and your management/ownership team are good at and what you do well.

Entretude Principle 1 – Know what you are good at and what you do well.

When launching an enterprise, assembling a team with a core set of skills and talents, and knowing how these skills and talents fit together is critical. You know what your team is good at by looking at what they’ve done successfully—either as individuals or as part of another team. Where the team has excelled indicates the business’ best opportunity for success.

The same holds true for you in Entretude. As a team of one, you must know the core set of skills and talents that have helped you do a variety of things well in your professional and personal life. When we think about our successes, most of us think about tasks or specific activities. Our linear thinking takes off from one task to the next and we evaluate our performance based on each separate task. I challenge you to see beyond your individual accomplishments—see what your accomplishments have in common. What is the common thread? Do you have the ability to connect with just about anyone on just about anything? Your common thread could be your ability to communicate persuasively. Can you bring order to chaos? Is organization your innate skill? Do you see the tree while everyone else is still lost in the forest? Visionary?

“Past is prologue.”—William Shakespeare

When you begin to see what core skills and talents you successfully use over and over again—that is what you’re good at. What you do well is the successful application of what you’re good at. This is the foundation for an entrepreneurial life.

Determining what you’re good at and therefore what you do well may not be easy because we are conditioned, from a very early age, to do things and not spend much time thinking about the things we do. Get it done and move on to the next task on your list of things to do. This type of linear approach to life makes seeing what you’re good at, hard, but not impossible. You just have to work harder to find that common thread. So, what are you good at.  Take a look at What You Do Well, What You Are Good At and What It All Means to find out.

Elements of a Successful Life

   

 “Twenty years from now, you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”—Mark Twain

Every day, I hear some comment about baby boomers and retirement: When are they going to retire or how the current economic condition will make it impossible for them to retire—even if they did save money to live on. How the boomers are going to bankrupt Social Security because we’re living longer. What kinds of jobs should or will we have if we must keep working? How can we compete with younger generations in the workplace? How much can we earn? Who will pay us what we’re worth?

Enough!

Now is the time to start taking an entrepreneurial approach to so-called retirement. Retirement as defined by past generations does not exist anymore. Let me repeat that statement for emphasis:

Retirement as defined by past generations does not exist anymore.

Today we need to think about the second half of their lives in new ways. We’ve had success in our careers and we’ve developed a valuable body of skills, knowledge, experience and expertise. These resources make us all entrepreneurs in charge of managing one of the most valuable business and economic repositories in the world today, us. And when you have a valuable business opportunity, the only way to successfully develop and manage it is through tried and proven business principles.

“The opportunity to experience yourself differently is always available.”—Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche

In my previous post, Entrepreneur + Attitude = Entretude, I said that the principles of successful entrepreneurship are applicable to more than starting a business; they can also inform and transform just about every aspect of personal and professional success. I titled the post Entrepreneur + Attitude = Entretude, to show that Entretude is a combination of entrepreneurship principles and an entrepreneurial attitude. In the next series of posts I’ll explore that relationship, starting with the first part of the equation, the principles of entrepreneurship. I’ll share how to use the five principles of successful entrepreneurship to develop your strategy for exploiting all of the skills and talents you’ve developed during your successful professional career. Then I’ll move on to explore the second part of the equation, developing an entrepreneurial attitude. When done successfully, you’ll redefine retirement in contemporary terms by living your life with Entretude.

Show me your Entretude. What are you planning for your second act? Have you already redefined retirement by putting your skills, knowledge, experience and expertise to work your way? Please share.

Meandering to What You’re Good At: A Personal Saga

 

There's only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self. --- Aldous Huxley

In What You Do Well, What You’re Good At and What It All Means, I showed you how to use what you do well and what you are good at to find your personal strengths. In this post, I’ll share how determining my personal strengths helped me find my best opportunity.

As a child, I told anyone who would listen that I wanted to be an engineer. In high school the majority of the classes I took were math and science, almost to the exclusion of everything else because that was all I believed I needed to study engineering.

My high school English teacher, Mrs. M.R. Walker, saw something in me that I was too focused on engineering to see in myself. She kept telling me that I should join the debate team – that I would do this well if I tried. Well I just couldn’t see it, I was too focused on numbers for all this talking and arm waving. It had nothing to do with engineering, how could debating be interesting? There wasn’t anything to calculate! But Mrs. Walker persisted - she hounded and harassed me until I relented. As a member of the debate team I won every single debate I entered. Even in light of that success, of finding something I did well, after a year I quit the team because it took time away from my plan to be an engineer.

What I was really good at had started to emerge, Miss Walker could see it, but I couldn’t because I didn’t want to see anything that would take me from the path I was committed to. As President of my senior class, my abilities as a persuasive communicator continued to “sneak out” in spite of myself.

In college, just as I’d planned, I studied mechanical engineering graduating cum laude with 12 engineering job offers in hand. I didn’t take any of them. Instead, I accepted a scholarship to study for a master’s degree in business at Carnegie Mellon University. After earning my MBA I spent five years working in corporate America with the nagging feeling that my educational and professional pursuits might not be the best way to use my real talents. Why hadn’t I taken the opportunity to be what I had always said I wanted to be - an engineer? I had no earthly idea what I was really good at and wouldn’t know for almost another decade.

When my alma mater called offering an opportunity to earn a Doctorate in Business I jumped at the opportunity. I don’t know why, I still was not sure what path I was on - only that the solitude of a corporate financial analyst was not what I wanted for my future, I was still searching for what I was good at. The second year of my Ph.D. program I was asked to teach an undergraduate course in the school of business. My only training to be an instructor was that I had been a student. So, armed only with a text book and an instructor’s manual, the location and time of the class and a pat on the back and “Good luck!” from my department chair, I met the Finance 101 class. When I dismissed the class 50 minutes later, I knew what I wanted to do for the rest of my professional career. I stood in front of twenty-five strangers, taught them what I knew and they actually listened and learned from me. I loved it! Every class I taught got better and every student became a personal challenge. Did I have them today? Could I see it in there faces? Did we connect? Yes, yes and yes! The enrollment in my classes and the proficiency of my students proved it. Teaching is what I did well, but it was not what I was good at.

I didn’t know why I was a good teacher. After several years in the classroom, learning my profession and understanding its various components, I figured it out. What I was good at was persuasive public speaking, connecting with an audience, mastering ideas and information and then sharing that with a larger group. I am skilled at knowing what to say and the best way to say it, not just to classes but to any group about any thing and the larger the group, the better. This is what I was good at. Knowing this has taken me from the classroom, to political office, to consulting – knowing what I do well has helped me be successful in opportunities that play to my personal strengths.

If I had known what I was good at and what I did well it would have made a significant difference in my life. Since I discovered my personal strengths I am more focused. I have more purpose and fewer distractions in my life. I am more selective about what I do in my personal and professional life because I know where I am more likely to find success and satisfaction. Experience played an important part in my being able to finally see what I was good at and what I did well. Being told wasn’t enough, no matter who said it. I had to have enough varied experiences, both successful and unsuccessful, to see it for myself. You have the same portfolios of skills and experiences to reflect on, learn from and benefit from using the principles of Entretude.

This is the primary foundation of Entretude. You can use my four step process to learn right now what you’re good at. It becomes the lens through which you view all opportunities - the ones that present themselves as well as the opportunities you want to create for yourself. Without really knowing what you are good at, you may reach some of your goals but your path, like mine, will be longer and much more challenging than it has to be. By understanding your focus, your path to success is swifter and a heck of a lot more satisfying.

By the way, thanks Mrs. Walker, wherever you are.

Style and Success

Always bear in mind that your own resolution to succeed is more important than any other one thing.  Abraham Lincoln

    

    

Knowing what you’re good at (strengths) and what you do well (skills) is important but how you work - your Style - is critical. Until a client of mine became aware of her “style” she had one disappointing professional experience after another. Even though she was a seasoned, mature, sophisticated professional who was knowledgeable and did excellent work, she wasn’t able to stay with any organization for long. She tried both corporate and non-profit jobs as well as higher education but, after a short time, she’d either resigned or was asked to resign. Each job experience followed the same pattern - initial excitement followed by increasing difficulty getting along with superiors. She worked harder and longer hoping to reduce mounting problems. The more productive, creative and innovative she was, the worse things became. She knew what was happening each time but she didn’t know what to fix or how to fix it. She spent years in this Catch-22 before realizing that the way she worked was as important as the work she did.

I worked with her to develop Entretude and she discovered that Style Matters. We realized that she was a very strong external consultant. She would never be a successful employee. She couldn’t do her best work - what she knew needed to be done, the way she knew how to do it - if she was working for someone who required that things be done without her input. This led her to stop looking for jobs and to start identifying her best opportunities. She signed on with a search firm that recruits seasoned professionals for temporary senior level assignments. This arrangement allowed her to exploit her varied and extensive professional qualifications and to work the way she wanted. It also provided a steady stream of lucrative short term projects as an external consultant. She had the autonomy to excel on a project and then move on to a new assignment. She gained new skills that enabled her to attract more clients. She was a disaster as an employee because her independent nature threatened the status quo of the corporate work environment. As a skilled external consultant, she provides new skills to an organization and clients see her skills, talents and expertise, maturity and sophistication as an asset rather than a liability. As a result of the change from being an employee to becoming a consultant she is finally experiencing success professionally, personally and financially.

My client’s experience is an excellent example of what happens once you know your Strengths, Skills and Style. When you understand and combine the Fundamentals of Entretude you start to see professional and personal opportunities in terms of how well they play to your personal criteria for success. You’re able to stay focused on goals and objectives that are your best path to success in every part of your life.

A Focused Commitment

I'm doing what I think I was put on this earth to do. And I'm really grateful to have something that I'm passionate about and that I think is profoundly important.
Marian Wright Edelman

One way I knew my nephew, KB, was born with Entretude was because he instinctively knew how to focus on his future. He committed, in writing, that one day he would be a successful composer, performer and producer. He then shared that vision with anyone who would listen and everyone who could advance his career. Writing down, reading and sharing his goals kept him focused every day. It kept him energized to achieve his goals and it gave him allies and opportunities that he would have missed had he not been so focused.

When KB signed his recording contract and began writing and performing hit after hit, there were many distractions, many ways to get offtrack and be consumed by his own success. By clearly and publicly committing to his goal to be a successful composer, performer and producer he was better able to keep his eyes on the prize, even in the face of adversity and failure—and both happened.

When his fourth album failed to chart, he was dropped from his record label and written off as a “once was” by most of the music industry. But because he knew his strengths and skills, had defined his own success, committed to it and was focused on it, he knew that his brief popularity as a performer was not the beginning and the end of his career. It just signaled that is was time for a change in strategy.

Writing Your Focus Statement

You can do the same thing by using what you are good at, what you do well and the way you want to work to write your focus statement. It could be: I will create opportunities for personal and professional success in all parts of my life using (what you are good at) to (what you do well) in (work the way I work best).

Here are a couple of examples:

· I will create opportunities for personal and professional success in all parts of my life using my creativity, curiosity and insight to become a freelance writer.

· I will create opportunities for personal and professional success in all parts of my life using my ability to synthesize ideas, information and concepts to articulate these ideas and insights to groups and individuals in my own motivational training business.

Craft your statement in a way that works best for you. Make sure it clearly states your goal and the strengths and skills you will use to reach that goal as well as the environment in which you will accomplish the goal.  Read, remember and think about your Focus Statement every day. It’s your first thought when an opportunity comes to you. It is your first thought when you see a chance to create a new opportunity. Only the opportunities that match what you are good at, what you do well and the way you want to work (strengths, skills and style) are true opportunities for you. Everything else is a distraction. When you’ve truly articulated your goals in your Focus Statement, when you’re committed to it and you use it every day, then you will soon realize that the deal of a lifetime actually does come once a day, because now you’ll recognize each and every opportunity that is right for you.

When It Comes To Success - Strengths, Skills and Style Really Matter

People do not lack strength, they lack will.--- Victor Hugo  

Living with Entretude means creating opportunities using your personal strengths (what you’re good at), natural and acquired skills (what you do well) and then working them with your style (how you like to work). Creating opportunities that make the most of these attributes is how you’ll define and determine success in all parts of your life. You’ve gained insight from the Fundamentals of Entretude. Now we can start to apply that information. In my next few posts I’ll demonstrate how self-knowledge leads to self-determination. To illustrate the process, I’ll use my nephew, KB, as an example (he doesn’t mind).

A Study in Entretude

KB was born with Entretude. He started showing his creativity—what he’s good at—while still in single digits. In words and impressively detailed pictures he created an entire world with unique characters that he called “The Land of Snaboo.” I have no idea where “Snaboo” or characters with names like RaRa Sunkie, Moak, Deefa or Moakie came from, but they were the first steps on the path he used to self-define success.

Each character had a complete personality and history. KB wrote in great detail about them and what they did in their special world, and he insisted on sharing it all at every opportunity. I got to know these characters far better than I ever wanted to! Everyone in the family was certain that he would be a writer—but he knew better. KB’s writing developed into lyrics for songs when he took music lessons. Gifts like a harmonica from Stevie Wonder and a set of drums from Lionel Hampton fueled his passion, persistence and progress, resulting in a $100,000 plus recording contract at age 16. He wrote and produced music that landed him on Billboard’s Top Ten before he was 18.

Even at a young age he knew that the traditional path to success—college, then a job working for someone—would not play to his strengths, skills or style. His strengths—what he did well—were creativity, keen powers of observation, a passion for self-expression and dedication to self-determination. His skills—what he was good at—were the leading of other creatives collaboratively and synthesizing words and music. His working style required an environment that offered the physical and mental freedom to feed his strengths and skills. KB would not have thrived in the constrained environment of a desk job or 9 to 5 routine. Entretude was the only route this young man could see for himself and his future. To his credit and with the support of his family (more about the importance of family support in posts to come), KB remained true to who he was at his core and used those qualities to define and achieve success on his own terms.

Knowledge and Faith

So, what if you’re not born knowing your strengths, skills and style? Well then, you’re like most of us; you have to learn it. The self-knowledge is there, waiting to be discovered. Whether you know it or not, you’ve had inklings of it. We’ve all been in a personal or professional situation and said to ourselves, “This is just not me.” That’s your Entretude showing. Use the tools in the Fundamentals of Entretudeto identify your strengths, your skills and your style. The determination you need to go from discovery to deployment has to come from your wellspring. We all have inner resources to draw from and—this is important—it must come from faith in your inherent strength and skills, NOT FEAR. Fear will only confuse and restrain you. Know what you’re capable of and with Entretude you’ll find a way to fearlessly create your best opportunities for success.

Style Matters – How To Make the Way You Work, Work

The true way to render ourselves happy is to love our work and find in it our pleasure. --- Francoise de Motteville

Style can be defined as “an impressive flair in the way something is done, especially a quality that suggests a self-confident willingness to exhibit skill or good taste.” As an experienced professional you’ve probably established your own style for a lot of things but knowing what your “working” style is and how to apply it is key to using the principals of Entretude to embark on your second act. Because with Entretude, style matters, it is what enables you to work the way you want to work, be happier, more productive and more valuable to people and groups you work with.

There are two basic types of working styles – Internal and External. Knowing which you are reveals which personal and professional opportunities are best for you.

What You Do Well, What You’re Good At and What It All Means

Wisdom is knowing what to do next; Skill is knowing how to do it, and Virtue is doing it.What You Do Well, What You’re Good at and What It All Means --- David Starr Jordan

You’ve been earning your own living for a while now.. You may held a variety of jobs or positions – perhaps even taken a stab at entrepreneurship. If you’ve achieved some level of success somewhere along the line you’ve developed an approach to solving problems that works. Experience has taught you how to work, hopefully smarter not just harder and, to value quality in your work and your life. In other words, you have skills – valuable skills – and talent that are applicable to more than the job you have or the jobs you’ve had. Your professional skills, your talent and experience will inform your future and in this post, I’ll show you how to assess your professional skills, talent and experiences so that you can use the principles of Entretude to better inform your second act.

A basic principle of Entretude is that your best opportunity is always one that you create for yourself. When you have an entrepreneurial approach to life you build on your strengths and use them to identify your best opportunities. In this post we’ll lay the foundation for that awareness. I’ll show you how to find your personal strengths and then start to use them to base your best opportunities on.

To recognize your personal strengths, you have to know the difference between what you do well and what you are good at. The activities that you do well at are within the things you do every day: earn a living, develop and maintain relationships and interact with other people; you seek, retain and share information; negotiate, direct and schedule your actions and the actions of others - these seemingly mundane activities are opportunities to do a variety of things well.

What you are good at is the engine that drives what you do well. It is the reservoir of personal skills and attributes that you draw from over and over again, combine with each other and build on each time you do something well. The challenge is to understand what those personal skills and attributes are – what you’re good at - and how they drive what you do well. Without this self knowledge it will be difficult to develop and capitalize on your best opportunities – the ones that you create for yourself.

Here’s an easy four-step process to help you determine what you’re good at and what you do well:

1. Make a list of ten things you did well or skills you acquired/improved in the last twelve months. They can relate to work, personal relationships, community activities or things you do for fun.

2. Write down one to three other skills, talents or experiences that helped you do each of the ten things well, like getting along well with or motivating people, speaking persuasively, developing a vision or making plans for yourself or others, explaining ideas clearly, combining ideas in innovative ways to come up with new thoughts or putting a personal twist on a mundane task. Your talents could also be more general - determination, willingness to work hard, discipline or selflessness.

3. Identify the skills, talents and experiences that appear:

• If a skill, talent or experience appears more than four times on your list, it’s a strong indicator of what you’re good at;

• If a skill, talent or experience appears between two and four times it is closely related to what you are good at;

• If a skill, talent or experience appears less than two times - these skills are skills you don’t use very often.

4. You’ll now use these skills, talents and experience – what you’re good at - as a filter through which you view what you’re doing now and what you would like to do in the future. When you consider an opportunity - list the skills and talents necessary for success. If more of those skills and talents are on your list of things you’re good at – that is a good indication that this opportunity will probably be something you do well. In other words you’ve identified something that it may represent your best opportunity.

Now you know what you’re good at. Your next step is to determine the best environment in which to put these talents to work.

See how this worked for me.

Entrepreneur + Attitude = ENTRETUDE

The thing always happens that you really believe in; and the belief in a thing makes it happen.
Frank Lloyd Wright

My name is Granville Sawyer, for nearly three decades - as a business consultant, university professor and mentor– I have studied, researched, taught, interviewed, worked with, launched and counseled entrepreneurs. I also come from three generations of entrepreneurs. These talented and self-actualized individuals helped me discover how the principles of successful entrepreneurship are applicable to more than starting a business; they can also inform and transform just about every aspect of personal and professional success. That is the foundation of Entretude.

This blog is for those of us in our second act – the Baby Boomers. We are approaching or we’ve already ventured into what has traditionally been the age of retirement. Well like everything else we’ve ever touched – we’ve been game changers from the very beginning and now our generation is redefining what retirement means.

Life is demanding more of us than it did of the previous generation. Our outlook and our obligations are demanding and different. Some of us are still employed, some are looking for new professional situations and all of us - given the current economic situation – are trying to figure out what’s next.

We have decades of experience, multiple talents, maturity, insight, wisdom and years of productive life ahead of us. My goal for this blog is to show my generation how to use Entretude to re-define the rest of our lives – our second act. I’ll share my personal experiences with you as well as information and insight from other baby boomers who are integrating an entrepreneurial attitude into all aspects of their lives - work, play, relationships and community. Together, we’ll give you the tools to become more proactive and empowered and less reactive and protective.

You’re In the Driver’s Seat

“If you don’t know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.”—Yogi Berra

Entretude is not a road map, a manual or a miracle. Entretude facilitates a very personal process that challenges you to make cogent, conscious decisions about your future. Entretude challenges the prescribed approach to work, life, age and occupation - specifically for our generation. The old model for middle age was not designed for who we are and offers no clues as to what our second act is supposed to look like. Recession, job shrinkage, the housing crisis, the economy and overwhelming uncertainty are pretty good indicators that for most of us, the old model is just not an option.

A few times each week I’ll share information and the insights on Entretude. I’ll introduce you to talented people who embrace, understand, engage and inspire - those who walk the Entretude walk and talk the Entretude talk. From them, from me and with your vital input, we’ll explore ways to use Entretude to develop your second act.

A New Road, Better Resources and Better Results

What you get out of Entretude is directly correlated to what you’re willing to put into it. This can be your personal navigation system - your journey, your destination. You travel a road of your choosing with the top down, the sun is shining and the wind is at your back. You’ve mapped out your future and you’ve decided where you’re going, how far, how fast and what the scenery will look like when you get there.

Let’s get started.