How much do you love them? In the business world, fantastical stories seem especially lauded.
Fast money. Overnight fame.
It just sounds so good, and so easy.
You can’t blame me for wanting it, or wanting to believe in it.
I’m a gambler by nature. After all, I started my own business. I’m all about risky choices. And I can’t help but hear fanciful success stories and want to believe them.
The problem is, I don’t. They’re bullshit.
Dreams made of speed.
Either they’re not telling me the truth, or they’re not telling them self the truth. Either way, something’s not adding up. Something stinks.
I see how quickly and easily history can re-write itself, how time can just disappear, especially when fiction is far more “impressive” than fact.
I understand, and am tempted by, the desire to re-write history. The story of speed, whether it truly applies or not, is a good and enticing one to tell. The media consistently pegs businesses and people who have worked away for 5-10 years as “overnight successes” when their brands do reach the mainstream.
And we eagerly consume such fantastical stories, selling them to our self and others.
They have an easy lure to them. They make our dreams much more convenient.
I want what I want and I want it now!
It’s nice to believe that you just need to want something bad enough. It’s nice to believe that hard work isn’t necessary. Intentions made in haste are what bullshit business dreams are made of.
Dreams made of reality.
Daily you grow, daily you take small steps, and daily you bring your business dreams to fruition.
Great businesses aren’t built on great ideas or great advisers or great publicity or great money, they’re built on great people with talent and character who are passionately committed to a goal. They’re built not on what you have, but on what you consistently do over time.
Slow, sustainable growth stories aren’t as fantastically splashy and glamorous as fast money and fame but they’re real, and the businesses built upon them last.
Time and energy is what your dreams are truly made of. But you probably don’t want to hear that story — it’s a tad long.
If we look at -preneurship as a term used to describe our personal brand, what form of -preneurship best communicates your value?
Entre-preneurship: taking charge of your own business
Literally, the word means: “begin to take charge” but is often defined as the practice of starting a new business. Entrepreneurial behaviour describes investing time and money in the creation and development of a new enterprise.
Intra-preneurship: taking charge within a business
Management Consultant Gifford Pinchot coined the term while exploring the role of spiritual values in business. He later wrote a popular book called Intrapreneuring and the term is now used to describe and encourage entrepreneurial attitudes within companies.
Xerox and 3M are two businesses that have adopted intrapreneurial strategies and structures to encourage creative development of new products.
Inter-preneurship: taking charge within your group
Common of task and project teams that constructively operate across functional and operational lines, interpreneurial behaviour describes a group taking charge for the greater interest of a company as a whole.
Inner-preneurship: taking charge of your own life
The gift of an examined life. Innerpreneurial behaviour describes a person who is self directed in the management of their career, wellness, and financial issues and transitions.
The Innerpreneurial strategy is knowing your Self well and connecting that Self to the evolving needs of your stakeholders.
Conventional economic theory assumes perfect knowledge – of prices, markets and people. From this knowledge it extracts a “rational economic order” – a pattern to explain how economies work and how economic agents (e.g., buyers and sellers) interact. It is a theory that attempts to explain the production, consumption, and transfer of wealth.
Conventional economic (and business) thought focuses on elements from only the physical realm – such as resources, commodities and technologies. It does not extend to the mental or conscious realm.
Conventionally, wealth is seen as nothing more than what we have manifested in the physical realm.
A bigger view of economics
George Shackle was the first economist to challenge that the “algebra of business” is not a deterministic, linear science. He felt that uncertainty was a truth of business and economics, and that “perfect knowledge” of our world and how it works was not “real”.
An economic theory for Innerpreneurs
Shackle saw business as an “originative art” and that the possible outcomes of doing business were “unlistable”. He did not see business as having a set form or result (i.e., x + y = success!). He did not see business as creation of the external world.
Shackle saw the process of business more like “the poet-architect-adventurer who sees before him a landscape inexhaustibly rich in suggestions and materials for making things, for making works of literature, art or technology.”
Shackle felt our knowledge to create came from within our Self, and not from the external world. He felt business and the economy simply could not be understood by using “perfect knowledge” or “rational theories”. He saw that we are not perfectly logical creatures and we do not live in a flawlessly rational world.
Shackle may not have used the term Innerpreneur, but he, like us, saw business (and the economics of it) as the process of tapping into the world of ideas, and from an inner knowing, finding order and pattern to create.
This post was inspired by Phillip Dignan’s thoughts in Secrets of the Wealthy Mind.
You’ll never know how to do it until you commit to what you are doing. Your success in whatever you choose is a matter of commitment.
Your choices are your daily commitment
In my experience, when I completely commit to the what — that something that I feel passionate about — I trigger the how — the means and answers I seek.
By committing to do it and trusting my choices, I find that my needed supplies come to hand. My cash flow doesn’t always instantly increase, as the supplies come in diverse forms, but my opportunity flow does.
My dream is possible when I do the work to make it real. Focusing on the what, the how comes to me.
