Managing Abundance

So, you want more. Good for you. You want more time, more money, more stuff, more satisfaction, more life. Great! You strive for abundance which, by the way, happens to be our natural state as human beings. But are you prepared for that? Are you really ready to enjoy what you wish?

I’m not talking from a philosophical, law-of-attraction-ish standpoint. I’m talking from a very practical, day to day approach for managing your future abundance. If you consciously chose abundance and if you achieve it honestly, then you have to be able to actually manage it.

During my life I had several abundance thresholds. When I left home and came in my country’s main town to study, I had virtually nothing. I worked during my studies and I successfully managed to financially sustain myself during that time, and I did it more than decent. During next years I passed over several abundance milestones: from going out of the student’s hostel to rent my own apartment, later to buy my own apartment, and even later to move into my own house. Which, by the way, I discovered I had to clean a lot.

Each time I reached those milestones I faced several challenges. Each time I had to cope with a bigger flow of stuff coming into my life. But it wasn’t only stuff, it was more than that. I realized that abundance can walk into your life by taking one of the following three shapes. There is another one, the 4th shape, but I reserved a special chapter to it, at the end of this post.

1. You can have more stuff: 2 cars instead of one, a house instead of an apartment, more gadgets, more clothes, more things – you know the drill…
2. You can have more action: going to the gym, socializing in a different way, making appearance to new events, doing something completely new – everything that your new status requires from you to do in order to keep it up and running
3. You can be involved in new relationships: new friends, new social positions for you, a pool guy, a maid, a chauffeur, or just new persons that needs your constant attention

Don’t laugh. Or if you laugh just keep reading because this is about you and the abundance you are eager to achieve. It will include all this stuff. It will change your life. It will challenge you at a very deep level. It’s ok to laugh, as long as you’ll be prepared.

Failing to realistically manage your abundance can have unpleasant consequences. You can find yourself overwhelmed and lose track of your possessions, or you can fail in managing your new level of relationships and let your wealth slip through your fingers. Or you can be fooled into a “don’t deserve this because I don’t don’t know how to handle it” pattern, which is even worse than the first situation.

So here comes the practical advice: (more…)

The Making Of An Online Business – The Team

That’s the third article for “The Making Of An Online Business” series, and it will deal with a sensitive topic: human resources. For those of you who came directly here, the posts in this series outlines my 10 years experience in running my own online business. The first two articles can be found here

Start Your Own Business
The Making Of An Online Business – The Projects

and the summary for the whole series can be found here.

It’s About Relationships

The first and most important thing I learned during this fantastic experience was the fact that teams are not at all about results, but about relationships. Too often people are judged for their contribution to the assets of the company, but their real value lies in what they can provide at the relationship level. Maybe they can have skills, but if they are not able to relate in way that would make those skills openly and honestly available, their contribution is lost.

A good relationship means that communication goes well even if the skills are not. You have to be able to communicate your ideas and goals to all members of your team. Even if they don’t have the skills at the moment, they must understand what they have to do. The resources to do what has to be done will come, one way or another.

My team was around 25 people at its peak, with an average of 10-15 people most of the time. Maybe this approach is biased by the fact that my teams were pretty small, but if the relationship factor was so important in such a small universe, imagine how important it will be for a business with 100 or 500 employees.

There are just two main types of relationships you can have in business: the relationships between you, the manager / owner / entrepreneur with your employees, and the relationships they can have with one each other. The first model is radiant, you will be the epicenter and you will basically control what goes out, but the second is more like a graph, a web. Trying to control this web of relationships between your employees is impossible. You can’t really control that.

What you can do, however, is to be sure they all have the same set of attitudes that will make their relationships sustainable over time. All those people must share some core values about the way they relate. And when they face problems, if they have the same attitude toward problems they will eventually overcome the obstacle. But if they have only skills and no common attitude, their skills will be just useless.

The truth is that you cannot really create something on a damaged foundation. No matter how much money you put in, how much technical skills are you pouring in, no matter how much luck you may have at some point. A business is a web of relationships and if this web is broken, you won’t be able to catch your prey. If there are significant holes in this web, you will lose opportunities and spend your time repairing those holes.

That is against the normal, established human resources techniques and I’m quite aware about that. Every human resources approach focus on skills, and every CV you read emphasize that. I gave up reading CV’s long ago. A CV can only tell you about skills, but not about attitude. And attitude was the main factor for my human resources policy. (more…)

Entrepreneurship As A Personal Development Tool

10 years ago I started my own business. I didn’t exactly know what I was going to do, it was something mainly related to the online thingie that was starting to rise at that time. Nothing clear in terms of business plans, financing, strategy or management but with a tremendous drive to succeed. I guess the main reason behind starting my own business was my unconscious drive to publicly show that I was good at something. For those of you into astrology this might also be related to my North Node in the 2nd house in Aquarius, but let’s not get too technical… Some of my initial motivations had faded during years, some had grown stronger and during this 10 years slice of my life some new motivations appeared. The official ending of my first business was several months ago, when I succesfuly sold it to one of the most important players in the Romanian online publishing. Quite a success, wherever you may look at it from.

That was the end of the business though, not of my entrepreneurship. Ater selling, I turned all of my energies towards this blog which I am building almost from scratch, but with different motivations and metrics. In this post I’ll share some of my thoughts regarding entrepreneurship, business and personal development.

The Definition Of An Entrepreneur

99% of the definitions of a business will have something to do with generating profit. Or with generating steady income sources. Or with creating a more indulgent lifestyle. The entrepreneur is then defined as the guy who’s going to do all of these. And entrepreneurship would subsequently be the action of starting a business. This type of business. Every decent dictionary will tell you that doing business will ultimately have something to do with profit, somehow. Put in some money and at the other end of the business take out some more.

Every guy who has the idea, the resources and the energy to create such a process stream will then be an entrepreneur. I have nothing against this definition, except the fact that it doesn’t really deal with the failure part of this activity. As an entrepreneur you can succeed, but you can also fail. There is nothing wrong with failure. This doesn’t make you less of an entrepreneur. Not to speak about the fact that it doesn’t make you less of a respectable person, one thing that is most of the times forgotten in the modern society.

An entrepreneur is a person who is pushing his own limits toward a new level of personal evolution. Being an entrepreneur is about committing to your creative drive and starting to make reality obey your wish. Being an entrepreneur is all about courage and trust, hope and discipline, inspiration and endurance. It really doesn’t have to do with a successful business, although most of the times the successful entrepreneur will end up with a successful business, too. But one can also fail in terms of business, but still succeed as an entrepreneur. (more…)

Building Different Skills

People are often confused by the abundance of skills I developed over the years. And I guess what confuses them is the apparent spread of those skills over areas which are apparently incompatible or difficult to match together. For instance, if I bring into the conversation with a programmer an astrological opinion on some fact, chances are that I will get a “blue screen of dead” conversation. And if I bring into a fine arts conversation something about programming, I’ll be most likely left alone with that “mambo jumbo” sentence and labeled as an “unsolvable case of geekery”.

The examples above use extremely distant knowledge areas, but the confusion remains even on more closely related activities like business, marketing and sales. A marketing person will expect that I know nothing on entrepreneurship, since marketing guys are usually employed by somebody else in an established structure. And a sales person will expect that I know noting about marketing, since this should be a complete separate activity inside the company.

I can talk for hours with an astrologer only about astrology and have a fulfilling and entertaining conversation. I can do the same with a programmer and share a lot of the newest web 2.0 technologies and feel at ease with that. I can also talk about entrepreneurship and starting a company from scratch and never feel on moving sands with the person in front of me. But the moment I start to bring new perspectives on some topic and use other skills I have for that insight, my conversation partner becomes reluctant.

I acknowledge that I’ve been pretty affected by that. The moment I opened to somebody and let him know that I know more than what he expected, I was rejected. I came to the point that I felt ashamed of what I knew or learned so far. It’s better to stick on one topic of your life and seek only people who can understand you, I’ve said to myself. I do have the need for social acceptance, so if that’s the price to be paid, let’s pay it. Let’s stick with a limited set of skills, which at least will provide me with a comfortable environment and put me in touch with similar people, and bash all those new and interesting things I could learn.

But I confess I wasn’t able to do this. Although I did my best to succeed in limiting myself, I failed miserably. The dryness of such a life was simply unbearable. Limiting myself to only one major skill was just unconceivable for me and unfulfilling, at least. (more…)

GTD One Liners: Under-Promise and Over-Deliver

Well, it’s been quite a while since I haven’t touched my GTD one liners folder. Yes, I do have a GTD one liners folder, which is in fact a part of a journal. As you already may know that, I use Mac Journal to blog and, sometimes, to implement some GTD techniques for blogging. Today it’s time to talk about another GTD one liner, and that should be: under-promise and over-deliver. If you haven’t read any of my GTD one liners posts, you can always start by browsing the GTD category on the blog, find them on the top posts page, or just read my last GTD one liner post.

And, now, about under-promise, and over-deliver. I found this simple 5 words statement extremely rewarding over the years. As you already understand, this might not be at all GTD related, if you think a little bit. It might be applied wherever you feel you have to stretch your personal capacities. In business, in relationships, in creative writing. Every time I managed to keep up with it, meaning every time when I under-promised and over-delivered, I created something out of the ordinary.  Here’s what I learned by trying to apply this simple statement in business and in personal development.

Don’t Create False Expectations

First of all, by following this simple rule, you achieve something extremely valuable, and that is related to expectations. You won’t create false expectations to those who you relate, and that’s already a huge advantage. Because most of the people are driven by expectations. They create an inner universe, and then they try to adjust the reality to what’s inside. They have expectations that needs to meet, in order to maintain an inner feeling of security. The more expectations they meet, the more secure they feel.

If you don’t push your words too far, and keep your promises under what you actually deliver, you will directly influence other people expectations. You will help yourself to adjust to what they expect from you, and help them enjoy the results of your work more. Not to mention the fact that, from my experience, you always work in a less stressful environment when other people expectations are on the moderate scale.

Don’t Play for Less, Be Generous

Most of the people which whom I discussed this approach had a question regarding faking. If you’re promising less, then why do more? It’s not something you fake here? If you know from the beginning that you can do more, why settle for less? Just to impress the other guy?

Well, you don’t know from the beginning you can do more, that’s the trick, and this is how the statement should be applied. It’s not about faking, it’s about a sense of commitment and support. You know what has to be done, you know you can do it, and you communicate that in a very transparent way. But you keep the game on the safe side. You take only 75% of the job and grant for it. And then you deliver 100%.

Deliver over your promise it’s not playing for less than you can do, it’s about being generous. Every time you go over what you can promise you add some more energy to your actions, you influence in a very subtle way the energy field between you and the receiver. It’s like making little presents that people doesn’t expect. It’s about the simple fact that you can bring not only effectiveness in a dry and business related sense, but some joy and happiness.

Go Over Your Limits

Another interesting consequence of this statement, is that it can push you beyond your personal limits. Let’s say you’re in a context where you can’t settle for less. You’re somehow forced to take all the 100% of the job and to vouch for it. But then, stretch over your limits and deliver 110%. That’s where the beauty and power of this statement is. It makes you do more and more, in a generous and growing way.

Even if you promise 100% of something, take it internally as only 90%. You might not know from the beginning if you can do more, but somehow on the path of doing you’ll find a way, I assure you. Even if the current environment only gives you room for the initial promise, go over your limits and try to do even more than that. Even if you go over the promise with only one tiny percent, it will make a huge difference.

Don’t Lie

Telling lies doesn’t work. Never. Hiding your real capacity from other people will eventually lead to diminish your capacity for real. This is not about lying, is about being transparent. To you, and to the one for whom you’re delivering. It’s like saying: ok, I know I could do more, but under this circumstances I can only grant for this amount. And then just do more. That doesn’t mean you’re lying, and I assure you it will not be perceived by the other part as a lie, It will be received, most of the time, as gift. And valued like this.

And making gifts is one powerful way to express your generosity, your joy of life and your conscious growing to happiness. Getting Things Done is not always about business and closing the door to your office after a busy, although completely processed day. Most of the time, Getting Things Done will help you keep your promises to your closest ones. And, if you’re following this simple one-liner, go beyond your promises and over-deliver.