ENTRETUDE

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.

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.

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