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.

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 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.

.

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 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

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.