What’s in the Water?
Guidance for Swimming Against the Stream
In waking up to whiteness, there are questions to answer and ideas to confront. Molly’s insights bring perspective and clarity.
Could selling be the secret sauce that builds community around your business?
Selling and sales can be loaded words when you do what you do for the love of it--but you still need to make a living. But selling can actually create a community around your business, and a core community changes everything.
Fast Focus: Creative Opposition
Opposition is an essential shaper of the creative process, closing off some choices and pointing in new, sometimes completely unfamiliar and unexplored directions. Think of it as putting banks on a river. Without those banks, a river’s flow loses force. Add banks and...
It’s not wealth unless you spread it around
What if you could help fund a micro-business that had the potential to bring prosperity to an entire community? You can do that by making micro-loans. Through Kiva you can lend as little as $25 to tiny businesses and help create opportunity around the world. And now,...
Why Fear Is a Good Thing: Waking Up to Success and Self-realization
There’s nothing quite like self-employment to bring up fear. There are plenty of things to be afraid of. Will anyone hire you? What if they think you charge too much? Are you really good enough at what you do? What if you fail? And will you be attacked if you succeed?...
Open for Business: You Are Here
From May 6, 2002 I love metrics, the process of choosing what and how to measure so that I can track how my business is doing. I haven’t always liked tracking. For me, statistical measures have often triggered perfectionism, competitiveness, and fear. However,...
Crooked lines, artful lives
From July 11, 1999 Photo by trapper keeper via Flickr Summer finally arrived in the Pacific Northwest on July 5th and, as readers of last week’s New Leaf* know, I took advantage of it to cope with the overachiever gremlins. I took them out into the garden and forced...
Come on down: the Accidental Entrepreneurs Community on Facebook
Over the next few weeks I'll be reprinting some oldies but goodies from as far back as 1999. Re-reading this earlier work has reminded me of two things: there is nothing new under the sun and every thought is fresh when we open our hearts. The church says: The body is...
Tending the Seeds of Life Purpose
Last week I wrote about the importance of not-knowing, of hanging out in the mysterious and disorienting space between the person you have been and the person you are becoming. At times like that it’s essential to wake up to purpose, and I don’t mean the kind of life...
Sometimes you’ve just got to not know
On Friday I tried for hours to write this article. I glanced at my notes on various topics, surfed on over to Flickr for some photo love, leafed through books for inspiration. But nothing. Nada. So when it came time to meet Jeffrey Van Dyk by phone I was of two minds....