ENTRETUDE

Youthful Passion Still Has a Purpose

A recent post on the blog Men with Pens offers some valuable insight into how choices we made early in our lives might still inform our passion and purpose.  Though the post is directed at younger freelancers it may be even more relevant to those of us farther removed from our school days.  A reminder of the potential we saw in ourselves then that may be just as relevant now.  Let me know what you think.

Living Your Life With Entretude: Action Step Two – Staying Focused

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

The second action step for Entretude is: Start with a focus statement based on what you do well and what you are good at.

The business 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 do well and what you are good at.

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 also the time to reach outward and collaborate with others who can add a new innovative perspective to thoughts about your focus statement. 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.

Be consistent - 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.

Living Your Life With Entretude: Action Step One – Know Your Core Skills And Tallents

The Eight Elements of Entretude help define the concept and link it to proven elements of successful entrepreneurship.  In the next series of blogs, I’ll introduce the three action steps to living your life with Entretude.  With each step, you’ll see how applying principles of successful entrepreneurship will ensure success for you too.

Entrepreneurship Principle 1 – Know what you and your management/ownership team do well based on its core skills and talents.

Entretude Step 1 – Use insight and awareness to know the things you do well and how they helped you develop  your core skills and talents, what you are really good at.

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’s best opportunity for success.

The same holds true for you when you’re thinking and acting with Entretude. As a team of one, you’ve got to 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 us 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 and develop empathy with others quickly. Can you bring order to chaos? Is organization your innate skill?  Do you see the forest while everyone else is still looking at the trees? Are you a visionary?

 

“Past is prologue.”—William Shakespeare

  

When you know the core skills and talents you successfully use over and over again, you’ll know 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.  So, what are you good at?  Use the concepts of Entretude to find out.

Entretude Element VIII: RESPONSIBILITY

Responsibility is personal and professional accountability. Entrepreneurs are responsible to their customers, employees, family, community and industry. As an individual you are also responsible to and for more than one person or for more than just one thing. Your goal is to find a way to be accountable to others but to also be accountable to yourself and the goals you have set for your life and your own success.

Entretude Element VII: CONSISTENCY

Consistency is about standards. In an entrepreneurial enterprise, your goal is to deliver to a customer a reliable experience that keeps them coming back because they know what to expect. The same is true of your approach to life with Entretude; your goal is to attain and maintain a particular standard in whatever you do. You don’t deliver less and you don’t accept less, either.

Entretude Element VI: INNOVATION

 Innovation is the act or process of creating or introducing something new. As an element of Entretude, innovation is the process of using information about yourself and your environment to create new opportunities based on what you’re good at, what you do well and how you work collaboratively and productively with others. Boomers have a wealth of experience and skills. Our challenge is thinking about what we know, what we’ve experienced and what we can do in innovative ways. That’s where you’ll create new opportunities for yourself. When you think innovatively, you bring your history and your future goals together to come up with new ideas and ways of doing things by thinking about yourself and your accomplishments in ways you haven’t before.

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Entretude Element V: COLLABORATION

To be successful in business and in life, you must engage in mutually beneficial relationships with people and organizations. Success has never been and never will be a solo effort or achievement. As an element of Entretude, collaboration means working with people and organizations you can help and that can help you achieve mutually beneficial goals. Real collaboration begins with the same question: What can I do for someone else?—not: What can someone else I know do for me? Being of service to others is more of a benefit to you. Whatever effort and resources you expend will come back to you many times over.

Entretude Element IV: AWARENESS

Personal awareness is having knowledge of yourself and your environment. It is the kind of awareness that comes from observations and your experiences. Successful entrepreneurs know what effect industry trends and the business and economic environment will have on their success now and in the future. As an element of Entretude, personal awareness means that you must have knowledge and understanding of what impact the things you influence and the things that influence you will have on your personal and professional success. Enhanced personal awareness is just one of Entretude’s real benefits. It is the beginning of a process of information and transformation that changes the way you think about yourself and the world around you forever.

Entretude Element III: FOCUS

Focus is concentrated effort or attention on a particular thing. Like a business needs to stay focused on its mission, its raison d’être, you’ll need the same kind of concentrated effort when it comes to planning and implementing activities, strategies and tactics that move you toward achieving your goals. Focus is also how you set your priorities. You decide in advance what’s most important and what you’re willing to give to attain what you set as your goal. Focus is what keeps you balanced and moving in the right direction instead of wandering in the wilderness, which we’ve all probably spent a bit of time doing.

Entretude Element II: STYLE

Style, or the way you work best, makes your personal and professional insight much more powerful and useful. Style is defined as the way you perform a task that is distinct, and is not directly related to the task itself. In other words, how you do things, not the things you do. Just as a business needs to be in the right market to be successful, you have to be in the right environment to be comfortable, productive and successful. That’s why style is a critically important element of thinking with Entretude. You’ve got to know what you’re good at, the things you have done well and the right environment for your personal and professional success. When you know all of these, you start to see professional and personal opportunities in terms of how well they play to your 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.

Entretude Element I: INSIGHT

Insight is the ability to see clearly and intuitively into the nature of a person, situation or subject. That starts with you. Just as a successful business owner knows the internal strengths and weaknesses of their management team, personal and professional success today requires that you clearly and intuitively know what your own core skills and talents are. What you use over and over again to do many things in your life well, is what you’re good at. They are the core skills and talents that have evolved over time. They don’t change quickly and they aren’t always easy to see, because using them is just a part of you—almost automatic. You often use these skills and talents without thinking. To be successful in today’s environment, you must become aware of what these skills and talents are and know how to use them to your maximum benefit.

The Eight Elements of Entretude

A lot has changed in our lifetime and there’s more change ahead. We came of age when you got an education with a certain career in mind, did that job and later retired. Now that notion of work and life is obsolete and the workplace will never be like that again, not for us and not for the generations to follow. The concept of retirement is no longer about when you stop working; it’s what you plan to do next. Success is now self-defined. You can’t expect someone else to tell you when or if you’re successful.

We’re experiencing a Cultural Change worldwide—what I call a “C-Change”^©. This C-Change is not something to be feared—our generation has never been one to back down from a challenge—it’s an opportunity for us to brand our future the same way we did our past. As Boomers, we’ve been entrepreneurial in our approach to everything from the beginning, and in our second act, in the midst of this C-Change, success and life require us to keep that mindset, with a little more attitude.

That is the essence of Entretude: Entrepreneurship combined with attitude. This way of thinking about life and work uses the principles of successful entrepreneurship to inform and transform your personal and professional life from reactive and protective, to proactive and empowered. Entretude is not a road map, a manual or a miracle. Entretude is a way of thinking that facilitates a personal process. This process challenges you to make assertive, conscious decisions about your future so you can challenge the usual approach to work and life, to better fit a world where the definitions of life and work have forever changed. It will propel you ahead of the crowd.

To put structure to this idea, I’ve developed eight elements that help you approach life with Entretude. The elements are listed below and are explored in more detail later. I’ve taken tested and true characteristics of entrepreneurial success and crafted them into specific elements that shape the way you approach the opportunities that will continue to present themselves in life. Entretude is not about the mechanics of starting a business; it is about getting the most out of what could be the best years of your life—while enjoying the process.

·                              You could sit back and let life wash over you.

·                              You could let the next generation put you out to pasture.

·                              You could let the media define who you are or ignore you altogether.

But that’s never been our style. We’re Boomers, the greatest repository of knowledge and experience in the world, and our continued success requires life with an entrepreneurial attitude. It requires Entretude.

THE ELEMENTS OF ENTRETUDE

·               Insight

·               Style

·               Focus

·               Awareness

·               Collaboration

·               Innovation

·               Consistency

·               Responsibility

Entrepreneur + Attitude = ENTRETUDE

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

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.

Entretude – From This Phase Forward

To be what we are, and to become what we are capable of becoming, is the only end of life

Robert Louis Stevenson

 

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.

I've been working on this blog for about a year to develop a way for those of us in my generation—the Baby Boomers—to continue defining for ourselves what we'll be in the next phase of our lives. Because my approach to what and how we Boomers deal with our future is based on a unique premise, I was on my own; there were no other blogs on this topic to learn from and I was a blogging newbie. I had to create original content about a unique concept while I learned about blogging. So, most of the time, it was plan as you go and go as you plan, and keep going.

During this process, the world changed for Baby Boomers and everyone else. The economic crisis has forced many of us to take a very different view of the future. Job security isn't secure anymore, retirement won't—can't—mean what it used to and at every turn we're being told how limited our prospects are. I don't believe that for a second and you shouldn't either.

What we're looking at is a new way of thinking about ourselves and our lives. Who knew that Entretude, my approach for doing that, would be so relevant right now! The old model is broken and it is up to us to adapt a new way to make maximum use of our skills and talents in this new and developing economic climate.

Because of what I've learned over the past year and because of how the people and the environment I'm blogging for and about have also changed, I'm reintroducing Entretude with an updated approach that makes the concept even easier to understand and apply. In the posts that follow, I'll talk a bit more about the concept of Entretude and show you how the eight essential elements of Entretude will form the basis for your successful life from this phase forward.