ENTRETUDE

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 have 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.

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.

.

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