Today, that vision becomes reality with the launch of Good Life Project™ (GLP) and GoodLifeProject.com.

So, what is it?

GLP is a movement. A set of shared values. A community. A creed, bundled with a voracious commitment to move beyond words and act. First, as a manifestation of your soul. And then as a quest to have the adventure of a lifetime, and to leave the world around you changed.

Good Life Project™  is based on a simple proposition…

People who embrace the 10 Commandments of Epic Business create legendary stories, build world-shaking businesses, earn whatever they need to live well and give well, have way more fun, cultivate high-levels of freedom, touch more lives, leave bigger legacies and, straight up, live better lives.

To build what we’re here to build, we need three things:

1. Knowledge.

We need to learn how to:

• Build a peak-state mindset
• Align who we are with what we do
• Craft hyper-effective business models & growth strategies
• Master the psychology of influence and behavioral change
• Re-envision service, sales and marketing from the position of delight
• Hand craft a deliberate culture of joy and embrace soul as a business ideal
• Do a deep dive into the 10 Commandments of Epic Business

2. Hands-on, Individualized Mentoring.

We all need regular, direct access to a mentor with a proven track record, both of success in business and success in teaching, guiding and mentoring, who takes a deep interest in your success, not just in business, but in life. Someone to provide honest feedback, insights, deep knowledge, hold you accountable and speak truth when everyone around you won’t. And, maybe most important, someone who defines success not just in money and power, but in bigger “good life” terms (joy, fun, presence, lightness, impact, connection and, yes, enough money to live well and give well).

3. Circle of Champions.

We all need a close-knit, like-minded group of people with a deep, enduring connection who agree to support, rally behind, teach, help, inspire and serve as powerhouse sounding boards, collaborators and confidants.

What if you could experience these 3 critical pieces of the puzzle right now?

The mindset and business strategies needed to flourish like never before. The direct input of a trusted mentor. And the support of a small group of driven, compassionate world-shakers and friends?

And what if you could do this while traveling to some of the coolest locations in the Western Hemisphere? Immersing yourself not only in knowledge and support, but a whirlwind of transformational experiences and challenges in some of the lushest and most adventurous places on the planet?

What might your business look like a year from now? After you’ve filled your tank with the knowledge needed to build business on a whole different level, encoded a visionary mindset, and had the adventure of a lifetime with an intimate group of friends that have become your biggest champions? How will that affect not only your business, but your life?

If this sounds even remotely interesting, I’ve made something very cool & fun for you to watch…

And it all starts with a man, a trampoline, and a single question, the answer to which may well determine your success and happiness in business and in life.

Click here to learn all about it out now

(Even if you have no interest at all, head on over and watch the first 20-seconds, it’ll leave a giant smile on your face for the rest of the day!)

Big love, big happiness & big success!

It was a point of inflection. I remember being terrified to hit publish even though, honestly, there weren’t a whole lot of people reading my blog back then. Still, it made me nervous to own the fact that I was very much “in the process” in such a public way. I knew people would want to know what made me write it. Truth is, the emotions behind it have been there my entire life. I still don’t really understand why they came pouring out on that day. It was just time.

But I also always wanted to revisit the words, to bring them to life in a more multi-sensory way. It’s taken some time, but I’ve created this video for you. If you connect with it, I’d love if you’d share it around.

I’ve also added the words below. Enjoy…

Have a Little Faith

To all those who want desperately for me to succeed.

To all those who want me never to experience the pain of failure.

To all those who watch and wonder if I really know what I’m doing.

To all those who stand in judgment, waiting for the other shoe to drop.

To all those who look to me for proof of what’s possible.

To all those who only want the very best for me.

To all those who love me, unconditionally.

I share these words…

Have a little faith.

Have a little faith that I’ll make mistakes, but be able to recover.

Have a little faith that, more often than not, I DO know what’s best for me.

Have a little faith that I have within me the will to rise against adversity.

Have a little faith that I’ll know when to soldier on and when to walk away.

Have a little faith that I will not put myself at unjustifiable risk.

Have a little faith that my heart is in the right place.

Have a little faith that the mainstream path isn’t always the right path.

Have a little faith that I will succeed beyond my wildest imagination, even where those before me have failed.

Have a little faith…and a lot of love.

Now…PASS IT ON!

A lot of heads nodded along in the comments, then TomC chimed in with a comment that you could just tell was driven by a lot of pain and spoke to a very real dilemma. For ease of reading, here it is again:

“Tough to make mistakes when they cost money to make. I, at times, am petrified into complete inaction because I know that the $10 or $20 or $500 is money I cannot afford to lose. Right now, I am trying to buy a domain name. Simple right? Well, first there is the $10 for the name and then the hosting and then the time to create the site and then the time to promote the sight and try to get a top ranking… but what if the name that I choose isn’t the right name? And this applies to a lot of stuff… like what if the copy I write is wrong for this product? Do I still order the brochures… or booklets.

When you don’t have a dime, making mistakes can completely crush you. Then you have to somehow pick yourself up and do it again. It’s a panic attack waiting to happen, all because the $100 you spent on something means that now you have a late payment fee on your credit card which bumped you over your limit… now the mistake has cost you $70 in fees plus the $100 a week of lost work and NO income… and now your wife is furious because you keep trying.

If you can afford to make them, make them… if you can’t afford to make them… What? Wait until you can? Or make them anyway and be prepared for the consequences?

I have the same trouble with self help gurus telling me that the most successful people make fast decisions… I assume that leads to a lot of mistakes. I can’t afford to make fast decisions either… and then the self help guru says coyly… “You can’t afford NOT to fast decisions”. Ughhh

Perhaps writing this was a mistake.”

He brings up a great question. It’s a whole lot easier to take risks, spend time and money needed to get to a place where you’ve figured out how to create amazing things when you’ve got the time and money to spend.

But what if you don’t?

What if every hour spent chancing failure is an hour you currently need to earn the money to pay your rent and keep your family intact? Then what?

In the self-help world, it’s become vogue to offer some variation of “you can’t afford not to do this, so dive in and let the chips fall where they need to.” That’ a pretty tough pill to swallow. I agree, there is a certain amount of irrational catastrophizing that can ride along with the process of risking action and failure. And that needs to be dealt with. In fact, I speak to much of it in my 2010 TEDx talk and my next book.

But there are also a lot of practical “on the ground” alternative ways to pursue a craft, goal or process that can make it more humane.

Let’s start with a bit of a reframe. First, making bad stuff is not the same thing as making mistakes. Nobody sets out to make anything poorly, we all strive to hit homeruns on the first try. But in the learning stages, it rarely works that way.

With rare exception, you’ve got to make a bunch of bad stuff in order to build the knowledge and skills to have the ability to make good stuff. So, it’s important to reframe making bad stuff not as a foolish, high-risk pursuit, but rather a necessary part of any quest to position yourself with enough skills and mastery to generate enough joy and/or money to consistently have your effort return way more than your investment.

When you start from this place, it helps frame what you’re doing and why in a way that makes it a lot more palatable. Still, money and opportunity cost can be a huge issue.

So what else can you do?

1. Make more bad stuff on someone else’s dime - Many fields have some variety of either paid or unpaid internships. These can be great ways to start taking action under the guidance of someone with expertise who’s in a position to accelerate your journey and will essentially underwrite your bad stuff. Sometimes you’ll even get paid a bit of money while learning.

And if there are no paid or free internships available, see if you can create your own, find people whose wings you’d like to operate under and ask if you can help them in exchange for the opportunity to learn.

2. Make more “virtual” bad stuff – Instead of spending the money needed to go through the iterations needed to get good at something in real life, see if there’s a way to do a bunch of that either for little or no money online. Are there online tools, forums, training sites, videos, classes that would allow you to either learn your process or give you enough of a knowledge or skill foundation so that once you finally had to make the leap and spend a bit more time or money, you were in a position to start making good stuff a lot faster.

I test product and copy ideas all the time in social media, in the form of quotes, posts, surveys, questions or even sample copy. Or I create a smaller, more discrete group of digital compatriots that allow me to learn and test very quickly and for no money. That allows me to hone ideas, marketing and copy before I ever have to invest more time and money to make, sell or distribute an actual product. If learning without spending money is a priority, there are a lot of ways to do it (or spend very little) by tapping the online world.

3. Make more bad stuff as a group - Find a group of likeminded people who are interested in learning the same thing as you and form a group to share the burden and costs of the learning process.

4. Make someone else’s good stuff as a stopgap – Study someone else’d proven methodology as a tool to accelerate the path to a level of competence that will allow you to make good stuff more quickly, albeit via someone else’s process. Then once you’re enough in the black to be able to take more risks and make more bad stuff in the name of learning and creating on a deeper level, begin that process as phase 2 of the journey.

I’m sure there are many other ideas and approaches that can help relieve the burden of making the bad stuff needed to get to the good stuff. And I don’t mean to make light of the challenge of going through a learning process where there is some cost involved when you’re already having trouble making ends meet.

If there’s no way to avoid spending a bit of money and allocating the full monty of time needed to learn what you want to learn, then adopt a far more deliberate process that allows you to set aside what you need with the understanding that it will require a bunch of bad stuff to be created and it may take you months or years longer than someone else with more resources available to them.

And in the interim, do as much gratis learning online or through internship or even observation in an effort to get the most out of those moments when you finally do have to drop some time and money.

Curious, what do you think?

These are just a few ideas, but you guys are way smarter than I.

Have anything to share?

Push…

Push is generally about the avoidance of pain. It’s the “away from” side of the motivational spectrum.” You’re actively pushing yourself away from either a source of current pain or the perception of an anticipated pain.

So, if you’re overweight and feeling bad about it, stressed and suffering, unable to do what you want because of bodily pain, are in a bad relationship or a bad job, every day brings with it the experience of current, realized pain. You don’t need to be reminded of it, it’s there with you every step. And this can be a powerful motivation, it can push you to act to remove the pain.

The quest to remove a current pain can be an incredibly powerful push toward action. But there’s a downside…

Once the pain’s removed, the motivation usually goes away. Because it moves you from wanting to remove a current pain over to wanting not to experience or re-experience a future pain. It moves you from the quest for a cure to the quest for prevention. All you have to do is look at the lifestyle behaviors of the vast majority of people and the mountain of marketing research from healthcare and pharmaceutical providers to know that people respond far more aggressively to the quest to cure a current pain than they do to the quest to prevent a future one.

Preventative action, beyond teeth-brushing, is and always will be a brutally hard sell.

It’s just the way we’re wired. Even after major health incidents, most people revert to the behaviors that led to the incidents. Not all, but most.

So, the “proactive” push away from a potential future pain is an extremely weak source of motivation. And, though powerful, the push away from a current pain is a strong motivator, but it’s “reactive” motivation – it doesn’t kick in until things get pretty bad. And it generally goes away as soon as enough of the pain goes away.

Does that mean that most of us won’t do anything until we’re mired in suffering?

Not necessary. There’s still the “Pull” side of the motivational spectrum.

Pull…

Pull-based motivation is about tapping the desire to achieve something.

It’s about establishing a quest and taking action not to remove a current pain, but to bring yourself closer to a deeply desired end. Maybe it’s completing a marathon or learning to play guitar. Could be hiking the Appalachian Trail or building a business that changes not only your life, but the lives of the thousands of people it serves. Maybe it’s becoming a chess master or creating a stunning collection of paintings. Maybe you just want to solve a big honking problem or make something insanely cool, because those are activities and pursuits that fill you up.

Pull is about activities and meaningful quests that, by their very existence, inspire action in the name of coming closer to the object of the quest. And the beautiful thing about setting pull-oriented motivational drivers is that they can be long-term, they can have intermediate benchmarks that serve our emotional need for intermittent reinforcement. And, once completed, they can either expand to create a new source of pull to an even cooler place. Or a new quest with an even stronger sense of pull that builds around the foundation of habits and actions laid in the prior quest can be set in motion.

Plus, done not from a place of blind ambition, but rather a sense of presence, engagement and joy, the mere experience of moving along the “pull-spectrum,” regardless of whether you actually hit the quest you’re working toward, can be immensely rewarding.

Death…

I once heard a story about the Dalai Lama. He meditated on death, I was told, six times a day. My first response was, “how morbid.” But, also, “how interesting” and, when framed as an honoring of the impermanence of everything…how life affirming.

Then I stumbled upon Steve Jobs now famous Stanford Graduation speech, where he shared:

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

I’ve circled around to the believe that honoring your own impermanence on a daily basis, owning the fact that you’re going to leave the planet and you don’t know when, can be an immensely freeing experience. Saddening at times, yes. But freeing and empowering nonetheless.

Because what doesn’t matter drops away, creating more space to explore what does matter, to take actions and risk pushing the bounds of certainty in name of defining powerful pull-based quests capable of creating magic in both your life and the world around you.

So, I wonder, where do you fall in the motivation spectrum?

What’s driving your current behavior?

Are you happy with your answer?

And, if not…what next?

This post is about something more personal, something I did a bit different in Portland.

Something that helped me reframe an experience that often scares me in a new light…

I love speaking, but I’m always pretty nervous before I go on. Which is why I’m usually nowhere to be found in the minutes leading up to a keynote. Plus, the setting for my talk was the Fields Ballroom at the Portland Art Museum and Chris had titled my talk “Jonathan Fields Reveals His Greatest Work Ever.”

I know, nothing like adding to the pressure than speaking to a group of 500 people in a room that bears your family name, after a weekend of deeply-moving presentations with the promise if revealing your greatest work ever. Easy peasy!

I don’t take much on stage with me when I speak.

One of the things I learned, taking depositions and investigative testimony as an enforcement attorney for the S.E.C., was to distill everything into a few key ideas and take and only a brief reminder of where the conversation needed to go into the room. Usually just a piece of paper with a few key concepts jotted on it.

Doing that forces you to listen, to converse, rather than preach. And I rarely ever hold it or even refer to to once I’m up and running. It’s just my insurance policy, in case I lose my place…or my mind…while on stage and camera.

But, this time, I took something else on stage…

You can see it in the picture above. It was resting on the monitor, right next to my far less important notes.

A heart, drawn for me by my daughter, before I left.

It was a reminder of what really mattered, no matter what happened on stage.

A visual prompt that even if I messed up…in a ballroom with my family name…in front of 500 people…awaiting my greatest work ever…to be immortalized in a later documentary…I’d still come home to giant hugs and lots of kisses.

That the most important role in my life, beyond husband, brother, son and friend, would be unaffected by what happened over the next hour.

And, it was a reminder that the greatest thing I could share with others is that same sense that when you bring yourself to the world from a heart-centered place, everything else is icing.

Some of you may remember that Bryan and I hosted a 90-minute business strategy call in January that had 750 people signed up, quickly maxed out lines out (and saw Bryan blowing participants’ minds).

So, set aside a few minutes to watch Bryan’s talk. He builds up to an extraordinary leadership concept he calls ” holding paradox,” then shares the big idea behind the title of his talk. Be sure to watch to the very end, too, where he asks a question that just might change everything for you…

So, how would YOU answer Bryan’s question?

He’s one of the most ubiquitous people on the internet, a speaker at conferences and events globally and prolific beyond measure. But, did you ever wonder what Brogan is really building these days? What’s working phenomenally well for him? And what’s not? Whether he’s happy? Who he’s trying to help? And how? And what his kids think about it?

If you’d tuned in to his world a few years back, you’d have said, “oh, he’s that social media guy.” But increasingly, Brogan’s been marching to the beat of a different drummer. No so much expanding what he’s about, but liberating, revealing and building around the “other” Chris Brogan. The one that’s about seeing lightbulbs go on in the minds of mom and pop shops and dollars go into their pockets and their kids’ college funds.

Recently, I sat down with Chris to talk about all of these things, with a special focus on his current company—Human Business Works—a collective of small business solutions that Chris is building as a multi-tentacled collaborative effort.

And, I asked Chris some hard questions, the ones above, and a lot more. As you watch, listen to or read his thoughts in the show transcript, pay particular attention to not only what he’s saying, but the very fact that he’s saying what so many others keep closeted. That willingness to come clean with both highs and lows, to be publicly human, is one of the things that endears so many people to Chris and makes him a teacher worth learning from.

Now, it’s time to bring you this weeks episode of Getting Real, featuring Chris Brogan:

———————-SHOW NOTES———————–

Human Business Works is Chris Brogan’s most recent endeavor. It’s focus is to provide, tools, support and strategies for small businesses, often home-based operations, in an effort to help them flourish, especially in challenging times. Right now, the focus is in three areas, Kitchen Table Talks (a community for small businesses to learn and share), 501 Mission Place (a resource for non-profit leaders), and Blog Topics (a weekly newsletter designed to help make it easier for small businesses to create valuable content).

—————UNEDITED TRANSCRIPT—————–

Jonathan Fields: Hello, people of earth. This is Jonathan Fields hanging out with Chris Brogan. Chris, say “Hello.”

Chris Brogan: Hello, Jonathan and people of earth.

Jonathan Fields: All right. So why are we here today? Why are we hanging out? Well, if you hang out in the blogosphere, you already know who Chris is. I don’t need to actually explain it to you. If you don’t hang out in the blogosphere — and a lot of my readers actually don’t, they’re sort of more small business people — you may not know Chris. So I want to introduce Chris and also share what he’s up to in the not sort of directly social media related world in the small business world because there’s some really cool new stuff today. So Chris, I would love you just take a second here and just sort of share who are you?

Chris Brogan: Sure. So I have been in business for a while. My background was in telecom. I was in landline telecom and then wireless telecom. And then for a long time I had been doing this online media stuff, this blogging and journaling and all this kind of stuff. And then somewhere around the end of ’06 I left telecom and started running conferences in the world of video and the impact of internet video on TV and film and entertainment, and this brings me up to now where I’ve been involved in starting a couple of marketing companies, one of them for really big businesses, Fortune 100s and sometimes 500s.

And along the way I really started getting interested in what small business needed and could use for help and how the things the small business could do would be a little more impactful because I was a small business. My company was three people big, and I was always going up against companies that were — their marketing department was three times the size of my company. So I found myself saying, “Wow! There’s a lot of leverage here. There’s a lot of neat stuff we could do. How do I educate and provide tools and smarts for people in small business world that would be useful to them?”

So I started another company, as if I had nothing else to do, called Human Business Works which — the goal was to help people build sustainable relationship by their businesses. And I’m probably not unlike yourself. I’m not into cutthroat small business. I’m not into simple transaction small business. I’m into the business of repeat sales and relationships and the idea that I’m here for more than your money but that I’m here for making you into a hero and sustaining your well-being.

Jonathan Fields: Right. So let’s deconstruct that a little bit because I really want to understand what Human Business Works is. But I want to come at it from a different angle, and I want to start with who it is that you’re trying to serve. So describe to me, who is this person who you’re reaching out to?

Chris Brogan: Sure. So we kind of have two and on one side it’s Janine. Janine would be this woman at home who has raised her kids, has decided to go back to the workplace, maybe is currently at a cubicle type job and has decided, “This isn’t really for me.” But she’s really good at catering and she’s decided she wants to do a catering business. She’s read E-Myth so she’s already been sufficiently terrified that the world is going to go poorly. And now she’s like, “Okay, I get it. I know it’s hard, but I don’t really know what to do next. And I would love to do it in sort of a modern way as opposed to what I’m getting out of my library, what I’m getting at at continuing ed courses that are being offered at my school. They are out there trying to teach Microsoft Office, and I’ve been told that I need a business on Facebook and whatever.”

So my job isn’t to just take what I know in marketing and social media and showing it in the small business. It’s to equip Janine with understanding of things like if she wants to work with a virtual assistant or not, what it’s like to work with virtual bookkeepers, for example, I use a virtual bookkeeping service. What does it mean to have presence all over the web for your sales outlet, and then how do you mix and match the local and the web stuff together? So Janine is one.

On the other side, I’m also working with some franchise organizations that have thousands of business owners that they’ve hired and they’re looking to equip them with some specific skills. For example, maybe specifically social media type stuff or specifically virtual collaboration tools and things like that. And so those are my two buyers basically are the single solo person who is really just trying to figure things out or somehow who’s had a small business going for a while and wants to take it up a level, and then on the other side maybe franchise owners who are looking to equip lots of people with useful training and information to kind of up their game.

Jonathan Fields: Right. So which is kind of interesting and it kind of evolves in this question of what are the big pain points for these people? I mean you shared some service, okay, this person is doing this but they’ve heard there are other ways to be doing it. They want to do something. And you and I both know that there are two sides to what you can do to build your own business. So for HBS you can try and delight people by giving them a better way to do things, but the better way to do it is really discover what are the big freaking pain points? Where are people really in need? So for these two people, for Janine and for the franchise person, what are they pain points that you’re reaching out to?

Chris Brogan: One of them for sure is how to understand what they know how to do in physical world into the online world. I’m just seeing that they’re not doing very well at converting their online prospects into sales because their website is like an old-fashioned billboard. And I’m finding that there are no conversational elements. There’s no kind of first sale then second sale. My concept of this is getting somebody to say yes to joining your email list is the first sale. That gives you the opportunity for the real transactional sale many times over versus people saying, “Just buy my thing right now.” Well, if right now isn’t the right time, then I’ve just lost you off my hook.

So I’m looking at those kinds of things as some of the main pain points. The other is people like Janine are just not sure where to advertise anymore. They receive calls from the local yellow pages and have been told that’s where to go, the local town newspaper, et cetera, and yet they don’t have even a basic website, they don’t have any information in Google Places, they’re not using the simplest of tools I think to get started. And so I’m really trying to help them with the pain of kind of rediscovering their web presence and not having to spend 5 to 10 grand a month with somebody who’s going to sell them an out of the box solution that doesn’t cost anything like that.

Jonathan Fields: Right. Which is kind of interesting because as you’re speaking I just took three quick notes and then remarkably all start with the letter C and it was conversion, confusion, and cost. And it seems like those are three things which are — I mean you and I both run a couple of small businesses. Those are big things that you don’t want to deal with confusion because it eats up your time, your energy and your money, your cost, your constantly concerned with your bottom line. And conversion, you’re always looking every single person walking through the door you’re trying to — and I love the way that you said that, that most people don’t realize. The first — the move onto your email list is the first sale if you want to call it that and then it’s the sale into a relationship which then turns into something bigger. So did that pretty accurately reflects the major pain points that you feel like you’re serving?

Chris Brogan: I think those are really good, Jonathan. What a great summary of them. And I would say that maybe if I had a fourth C, it might be content because a lot of people have been told that they need to create interesting stuff, they need to write interesting things, but they have no idea what that translates to. And so one of the businesses I rolled out for Human Business Works was called Blog Topics and it was simply for people who are blogging in whatever size of business or even for their personal blog for ideas and writing improvements and whatnot.

Jonathan Fields: Right. So let’s talk about that. That’s a great transition because then I want to move into how you’re solving the problems, and you just bought up one of them, Blog Topics. The Human Business Works is sort of this unusual — it feels like an umbrella organization for a bunch of individual solutions talking to individual people. So tell me more about what the existing solutions are and how they are maybe different than how — these two different people, Janine and the franchise people would normally find their solutions.

Chris Brogan: Sure. So the first two things we launched were educational forum type platforms. We launched one for non-profits called 501 Mission Place where we’re trying to help non-profits and charity organizations understand how better to use the tools of the web to do things like fundraise better, example. What we are also doing with that is showing them and giving them access to other executive directors. They can sort of share mind share and bringing in experts to maybe help them with sort of premium ideas of that nature.

The next one is Kitchen Table Companies which is a small business and entrepreneurial forum. Again, the idea being that come in, join, and learn, and we will just keep giving you information that’s useful at whatever point in the spectrum of small business you’re at. Again, we’re also going to start adding some intense sort of video content around educational opportunities like how to start a virtual assistant business, for example, that kind of a thing.

The Blog Topics is just an offering, an interesting education offering I’m giving right now, but that’s going to move into something where I’m offering a premium newsletter service that allows other people to create similar products for costs so that they can charge $2 an issue, $10 an issue, whatever they think they’re going to get for sending out information that they think is premium content and whatnot. So I started with a need of mine. I wanted to send out premium content that I could charge for and it evolved into the idea of creating a service that I thought other people might need. And because this all fits under the umbrella of tools and smarts for small business, that’s kind of how we keep doing it. And when I do something like this like make this email newsletter service, the idea is, “Hey, you possible small business owner, this is something that might augment and give you new revenue stream.”

Jonathan Fields: Right. And it’s kind of fascinating to me too because we both been involved in serving the small business for a long time, small business market. And one of the big challenges that I found is that a lot of the people who would most benefit from what you’re doing in particular are the people who are least likely to be searching for it online. So how do you work with that dynamic?

Chris Brogan: Not successfully, Jonathan. I will say I’m an utter failure right now at the converting offline people. So I’m trying some things. For example, the New England XPO is forthcoming and that’s a big offline physical conference event and I’m going to have two booths there. I have not had an exhibiting booth in years and years and years. I don’t — I mean in the days of squeezy balls I think was the last time I was at it. Now, it’s like win a free iPad or something.

So I’m going to hope to meet this plumbers and pipefitters, these people of the earth that are making stuff with their hands and whatnot and I really explain to them how that online to offline and back again world works for me and just offer whatever services I can. We’ll have some kind of show specials and all that. We’ll do all of the stuff that marketers do at booth events and plus I’m speaking and/or I will yet again have the ear of the people at the Boston Globe and some other places. So I’m just forever hoping that I can get that message to the right place because I’m horrendous at it yet getting the offline people to know I’m there.

Jonathan Fields: Yeah. And it’s a really huge challenge because you look at it — I mean and I’m sort of — have been exploring the same thing with what I do. And the other challenge I think with businesses is that they’re the most desperate, they’re the most in need of help. You’re somebody who can clearly help in many bazillion different ways, but they are also by far the most price-conscious. And every dollar out needs — they need to know that for every dollar that’s going out, they’re going to get a $1.05 and hopefully more back in. And especially when you’re sort of explaining the online world and it morphed and shaped to a lot of businesses they have trouble making that sort of progression in their minds.

I’m curious, have you come up with the same conversation? I’m sure you had many times over. And if so, what have you done to help turn the lights on? Are there major points where you just know you found that niche conversation and people say, “Wow! I never realized that”?

Chris Brogan: It’s a strange switch from really big companies to really small because you would think that really big companies are like, “Oh, we’ve got that money and it’s just lying on a floor somewhere. Let’s just get and shove one and get what you need right out.” But it’s not. I mean I had a conversation with a very large company that was very budget-conscious and I quoted them what I thought was a very small number for a project and they balked and I thought, “Wow! Clearly, it’s tough times for everybody.” So everyone is holding on to their dollars a little tighter.

I do try to show those return on investment kind of experiences especially for a small business because they do care so much about it. For example, in helping them build better websites and better web services, what I’d like to show them is that the small expense upfront of doing it on their own system, building a site that’s easily editable for them saves them a lot of money from having to pay for repeat visits from web developers, et cetera, and allows them a lot more manual control of it. So I try to show them that putting their hands into the work allows a little savings there.

The other thing I do a lot is talking about time savings and explaining how answering their question on the phone is so different than answering it on your site because the site can pick up when you’re sleeping, et cetera, et cetera. Google is indexing all that great information. I try to show them that there’s leverage points and that’s — you’ve interviewed Julien Smith before. Julien co-wrote Trust Agents with me. Leverage was the third big point we made which is, why answer something once when you could try to answer it a million times with one shot?

Jonathan Fields: Yeah. And it’s really fascinating too because I think one of the huge pain points for small business owners is they feel like they don’t have a life. The fortunate ones are the ones who figure it out over a period of years and start to get their lives back right off. But in the early days almost everybody gets completely consumed by the business that’s part of the long trust is as much as we like to go and say, “Hey, life balance, you can just create it at any point.” But it’s really hard to do when the business is new. So I would think that being able to convincingly argue that we can actually give you leverage points where you can get a substantial chunk of your life back. You’re not going to be sitting on a beach sipping piña coladas. But things will be better, would be pretty compelling argument for people.

Chris Brogan: Well, absolutely. The other thing I’d like to say is that it’s great that you’ve picked this physical location and it’s great that you may or may not have some kind of mail order going, but this just extends distribution points, and really one of the leverage that we look for in business is distribution and how do we get into more storage or whatever. Well, the web makes that a secondary thing. You can get into plenty more stores on the web. And I guess I’d like to show that with a smartphone or a decent lap top you can take this, carry on a conversation to other places, and you could be doing it on the airport on the way to Boca Raton for your vacation.

My daughter who is just about nine years old is complaining. She says, “Dad, you know, a lot of times I see you looking over and playing with your cell phone and I really wish you were spending time with me.” And I said, “Well, sweetheart, I’m home a lot more often than a lot of dads. And frankly, when I kind of look down and answer this device, it means I don’t have to be at a desk anymore to do it so I apologize and I’ll be — why don’t I shut it off for the whole rest of the night. But just understand that, that means daddy can bring his desk right here while we’re playing and we can sort of split time, and so that I’m holding many more hours than your typical dad even for a guy who travels all the time.

Jonathan Fields: Yeah, and which is — actually I love that you just said that because I need — I’m about to have — I’ve been trying to figure out how to have that same mode of conversation with my daughter who’s nine, and it’s a great way to sort of rephrase it and actually reframe it that way. So I love that. One of the things that you brought up when you’re describing the actual solutions was this idea of forums, and I know one of the big pain points for small business people also is the sense of isolation. They don’t have people to talk to. They don’t have people. And they’re always wondering, “Am I alone in this? Am I losing my mind? Am I doing things right or wrong? I’d love to bounce this off some way but I can’t pay a consultant.” It sounds like that’s part of what you’re creating in the solutions that you’re bringing out.

Chris Brogan: Absolutely. So Kitchen Table Companies is yet another way for us to make a forum for people to come and talk with peers as also with people who maybe have come a little further down the road than you. And I first had the idea when starting the Third Tribe Marketing with Brian Clark and Darren Rowse and I somewhat infamously got in trouble for writing a blog post about it because my point was you could pay $47 a month in this forum versus my day rate which is $22,000. Well, all anyone heard was Chris Brogan charges $22,000 bucks a day.

Jonathan Fields: Yeah, I remember that.

Chris Brogan: They didn’t even in any way look at like what I was saying and I was like — I was so proud of myself. I was like, “This is great. It’s 1/122 of the cost of whatever I said, but then I had arguments about how much I charge and how that’s crazy. I do charge $22,000 a day and I do it for an important reason. My days are very valuable to me and if you think — you need a day of my time then I’m going to charge what it’s worth for a day of my time. However, for $47 bucks you get an entire month of my time and you get a month of hundreds and hundreds of people who are small business professionals who are looking to connect.

So I think that’s an amazing pitch but it’s forever stunningly on deaf ears because they get stuck on the wrong part. But, Jonathan, like you said, so many people are just out there feeling like they’re by themselves. I mean yesterday, my COO was sitting here in my office with me yesterday and I just got hit with this feeling of, “Oh, my gosh! I’m doing this so wrong,” and I don’t know who to go to. So I mean to me I just go back into the forums and ask, “Has anyone ever had that realization that you’re spending way too much money and making way too little?” It’s the same for me.

Jonathan Fields: Yeah. And I mean I think it’s just invaluable part of what you’re doing and I think there’s also an interesting element to — because people always ask, “Well, there’s got to be a bunch of forums out there. I could just go to online for all sorts of different things.” So what’s the difference and what’s — and maybe it was Seth Godin when he started really talking about Tribes company years back said that a sense of exclusivity, that privacy actually changes the dynamic.

It changes the conversation. It changes the trust dynamic within — when it’s gated even if it’s — I mean honestly like the very solutions you brought forth whether it’s part of Human Business Works or they’re a tribe, to me as a business owner, the cost is ridiculously low. But the point being that it’s really — it’s a token. What you’re saying is I’m willing to put a tiny bit of money to get into behind a gated community where there are real conversations and there is respect and privacy and intelligence.

Chris Brogan: That’s it. I mean one of the reasons to charge is for people to contribute and to participate. One of them is to cover our server costs and all the other things that we’re doing. The other is that we go where the money and we go where we’re devoting our time. And so to ask for just a small amount of money out of several hundred people is affordable to me. First is getting on a plane flying somewhere charging some one group 22,000 bucks. You mean this is a way that I could spread it out a lot more.

And I say that as if Kitchen Table Companies is led by me. Joe Sorge is really the guts and heart behind it. He has funded many different restaurants. He’s been an entrepreneur one kind or another for over 20 years now. And Joe lives in Milwaukee and owns several restaurants and just recently merged into a deal where he acquired even more restaurants. And so he is in the startup phases of two new restaurants right now as he’s writing all this stuff, and so Joe makes the forum much worthwhile. And me showing up every now and again is just a little bit of sprinkle on the cake.

Jonathan Fields: So tell me, you mentioned one of the things that’s been a really big challenge for me that wasn’t working to a certain extent. So you’re trying all sorts of different things. What’s really working phenomenally with what you’re doing right now?

Chris Brogan: Oh, wow, that’s a great question. I would say there’s a few things. I mean Blog Topics is working better than I ever imagined. I was amazed that so many people wanted it and that so many people keep replying that they’re finding value in it. And I’m very humbled by this because people — like the response when I launched it was, “Oh, my gosh! He’s $10 a month for ideas on how to read blogs? What a jerk. I can’t believe he’s doing this.” And blog posts flew and angry tweets flew and more people complained and more people signed up and I’m just — I’m getting so close to 500 buyers right now and I’m thrilled. And let’s just do math here, 500 buyers at 10 bucks a month, that’s 5 grand a month for one weekly email where I pour my heart and my writing abilities into it and trying to help educate other people to write.

On my side I think it’s equitable. On the other side people are paying 10 bucks for 40 plus ideas a month. It seems like a match made in heaven. So that works well. What else is going well is we’ve started buying and building some software and we started coming up with some things that would be useful to people. We built a web — a simple website creation methodology that uses WordPress as kind of the engine of it but it has small business people in mind. And so we build a kit that helps with that. That will launch soon. The newsletter thing is going to work really well.

You catch me in an interesting time because the forums are interesting and they’re working well, but what I wanted to do is I wanted to have tools and smarts for small businesses. And so my tools have not come out to the public yet but I’m getting to play with them and I’m excited because I just think that it’s going to help with conversion and confusion, cost and content.

Jonathan Fields: Very cool. I like that. So let’s zoom the lens out a little bit now, and I know we just have a couple of minutes left. So I want to ask some bigger pictures of it. I know you’re a big fan of Donald Miller’s sort of whole approach of framing your life as a story. A big question for you, what story do you feel like you’re telling right now?

Chris Brogan: Wow! I am telling the story of someone who at least externally seems successful in all that he’s done with his business for the last couple of years and who has the eye and the attention of a bunch of people in at least one marketplace, the social media space. And I’m saying that it’s not good enough. I’m saying that working with really large companies wasn’t good enough for me and as much as I really love big companies, I will see one again on Monday afternoon. There’s not the same sense of satisfaction as helping the Janine that I mentioned earlier as this mom who is coming back to the workplace for an example, to find her own spark and to really — and really nurture that and make that grow.

So hopefully my story is the story of promoting other people, growing other people’s capabilities, and really equipping them with the tools to take on their destiny. I don’t need to be the hero anymore. I really just need to be the mentor that helps rise up a good lot of people.

Jonathan Fields: Right. I love that. And it kind of segues really well into the last thing I’ll throw at you which is that we’re both dads, we’re both entrepreneurs, we both work, and our kids see we’re around a lot and we both know that what you do has so much bigger impact than what you said just like when we were kids. In your mind, what are the big lessons that you’re hoping you’re passing down to your kids in your actions as this?

Chris Brogan: You know, that’s a huge thing for me because neither my wife nor I were very traditional students. She was a lot better student according to the paper and I was a lot more precocious. So I really had to teach my daughter from an early age. I mean she learned sooner than me that she kind of had more control than you’re supposed to and I think that — I’ve had a teacher that were clever — where she has to kind of throttle her clever so that she can actually learn the lesson and basically learn classical before you play jazz. And I would say that — I mean neither of my kids is going to have a traditional work experience. I have no doubt at this. My daughter runs the risk of it but I think she’s too precocious and impetuous. And I think my son, he’s got that sort of crazy Einstein mind. He’s ultra smart but forgets to wear his pants. So neither one is destined to be a cubicle farmer as near as I can tell.

Jonathan Fields: God! I love that. And which kind of like just circles me back to — okay, last question for real here. When I start talking about parents and dads and stuff like that I confer but — which brings curiosity to me because it’s kind of a question that I ask on a pretty daily basis which is what takes your breath away these days?

Chris Brogan: Wow! Besides a good punch to the belly which nearly nine-year-old daughters always wanted to give, I would say that honestly it’s just that feeling of somebody saying, “I really didn’t believe that I could do this and I did it.” And I don’t know. I could never grow tired of having people tell me that story. Whether or not it had anything to do with me I’m forever thrilled that they’ve told me that story and shared it with me. So I’m always thrilled when somebody says that they’ve accomplished something they just didn’t think was going to happen to t hem.

Jonathan Fields: That — love that. All right. This has been — I mean I love learning about what you’re up to. I also love — for me it’s been really helpful because I have a deeper understanding of what Human Business Works is right now and where I think it’s going. I’m sure people want to know more. How can people find you or Human Business Works throughout the –

Chris Brogan: My designer, Josh Fisher, did an amazing job of reskinning HumanBusinessWorks.com, so come by and look at its orange beauty and see if there’s something good there.

Jonathan Fields: Cool. Awesome. Thanks so much, Chris. I appreciate it.

Chris Brogan: Jonathan, my pleasure. Thank you.

——————–END TRANSCRIPT——————-

Simple sterling silver with four words etched around the outside in the oldest known language, Sanskrit.

What are the words? The four immeasurables from Buddhism—Loving-kindness, Compassion, Appreciative Joy and Equanimity.

I think about them a lot, each serves as a constant reminder of how I strive to live in the world. It would be nice if I didn’t need to be reminded. But, like you, I’m human. I have nice days, and not so nice ones.

And that’s the point. The immeasurables are intended to be the focal ideas of meditation within the larger context of life, touchstones to bring you back to an understanding both of what matters and how truly interconnected we all are.

BuddhaNet offers:

…life is interdependent. In order to be happy, one needs to cultivate wholesome attitudes towards others in society and towards all sentient beings.

The best way of cultivating wholesome attitudes towards all sentient beings is through meditation. Among the many topics of meditation taught by the Buddha, there are four specifically concerned with the cultivation of loving-kindness, compassion, appreciative joy and equanimity. These four are called the Four Immeasurables because they are directed to an immeasurable number of sentient beings, and because the wholesome karma produced through practising them is immeasurable. The four are also called the sublime states of mind because they are like the extraordinary states of mind of the gods.

By cultivating the wholesome attitudes of loving-kindness, compassion, appreciative joy and equanimity, people can gradually remove ill will, cruelty, jealousy and desire. In this way, they can achieve happiness for themselves and others, now and in the future. The benefit in the future may come through rebirth in the fortunate realms.

I’ve also spent a lot of time exploring what might happen if you leaned on these principles not just as touchstones for a fulfilling life, but as guiding tenets in business.

What might happen if you built the culture of an entire business around the four immeasurables?

1. Loving-kindness

In the context of life, this is often interpreted as the wish that all others experience joy and happiness. This usually starts with a focus on those you know or have some connection to, then extends to a meditation for joy and fulfillment for everyone. Sounds lovely, but c’mon…really?

Isn’t this a bit too woowoo for serious business?

Yes, it’s very woowoo. Doesn’t mean it also won’t make for an insanely effective and transformational business-building experience. So, how might you bring this to business?

Maybe you’re a benevolent mogul, a bootstrap entrepreneur, a surf lifestyle artist or, hey, even a social media consultant. In each of these scenarios, traditional business teaching would have you in opposition to your competitors and even at times your clients and prospects. Selling someone would be about getting the best possible deal for you. Winning in business is about dominating. And success is about winning under that definition as often as possible.

That approach may well give you much perceived power, toys and wealth, but to what end?

Will it make you happy? Will it make you feel good about who you are, what you bring to the world and what you’ll leave behind? Will it allow you to genuinely walk through life in a state of contentment?

And, will it build the culture and good will that will drive the world to rally around your business success?

What if you did it differently, leading not with the quest to dominate and take, but to raise as many ships as possible? Even ones you don’t even know exist yet?

Artisanal firebowl sculptor, John Unger, calls this the Zillion Sum Game. What if you worked with equal fervor to bring the experience of maximum joy to everyone you came in contact with? Not by taking, but by helping and giving?

What if your core metric wasn’t earnings, but elevation?

How much more do you think others would begin to rally to support you, your business, your quest in a way that might never happen if it were driven solely by “take-based” metrics? What would the secondary effect on earnings be?

And even if there wasn’t direct, measurable reciprocation, how much more fun would it be to spend your days brainstorming cool, new ways to inspire more joy and more happiness in more people?

2. Compassion

The Dalai Lama was once asked if he feared anything and his answer was that he feared losing the ability to have compassion for the Chinese. If you know the history between the countries, that’s a pretty mind-blowing statement.

But, it’s at the root of your ability to understand then serve the driving needs of others, especially those perceived to be “in opposition” to you. And to do so in a way that not only far better meets what they really need out of an interaction, but structures that interaction in a way that makes both parties feel like they’ve won.

Before you begin any conversation, sale, negotiation or transaction, step back and, to the extent you can, try to place yourself in the role of your counterpart. Create a detailed avatar of them, their lives, struggles, history, desires, pains and elations, personal pressures within the organization.

Then close your eyes and visualize yourself as them. Take yourself through a day. How do you experience their fears, desires, aspirations? Are you even capable of feeling, seeing or hearing them? If so, how does it feel? How does the sensation fuel you?

The more capable you are of feeling these things, of understanding then cultivating a sense of compassion for those the business world view as your opponents, the better a position you’ll be in to cut past all the B.S. and have a real conversation about how to create something together that not only gives you both what you need, but creates enough new value to uplift those who weren’t even in the room.

[MMA Alert - This approach might not work so well if you're a cage-fighter]

3. Appreciative Joy

Appreciate Joy has this wonderful tie-in with a Yiddish word—naches—which, like most Yiddish words has no really good translation, but it’s the feeling you get when you see good things happen to someone for whom your wish for success is so pure, you feel their success as your own. There is no jealousy or contempt, no sense of you being on the losing end of a zero-sum game. You genuinely feel like their win is yours.

I felt this when my friend Gretchen Rubin’s book, The Happiness Project, hit #1 on the New York Times bestseller list and when my buddy, Chris Guillebeau’s book exploded onto amazon. And of course I feel it every time my daughter or any other member of my close family succeeds at anything meaningful.

In business, the quest is to cultivate enough of the first two immeasurables to be able to experience that sense of appreciate joy or naches when those around you succeed. Even when they accomplish what you’ve been desperately trying to accomplish without success. Because, in accepting that sense of interdependence, you come to a place where you understand their success is yours.

You replace envy with ecstasy.

That’s a tough thing to imagine, especially when you see the world around you as competition. Which is why you get to make the choice…are they really your competition, or are they just another part of you?

Are you better off wracking your brain to figure out ways to beat them, or would your potential for growth, success and elevation be greater if you spent that same energy figuring out how best to collaborate?

4. Equanimity

In the context of the four immeasurables and business, this is really about looking at everyone as being your equal, without attachment to relative position or worth. It also means inviting the possibility that every person at every position is your teacher. And that can be tough, especially for those who perceive themselves as experts, thought leaders and success-stories.

What could a janitor teach a Nobel physicist? What could a short-order cook teach a global CEO? What could a child in the playground teach a world class athlete? What value could these people be to each other?

Answer – everything, if you’re willing to open your mind the notion that everyone is not only your equal, but your teacher.

Leveling your sense of status and attachment or non-attachment across all people is a brutally hard concept for most (me included). And it’s not about the need to be or feel superior as it is about the fact that our brains are biologically wired to experience elevations in status and “the right” relationships as deeply desirable. They trigger dopamine shots that make us feel better and want more.

The challenge, I believe, is to acknowledge and work with our history and biology to cultivate the sense of one-ness through the above three states that allows that same biochemical/spiritual sense of uplift to be triggered not only via increases in relative status and connectedness, but also by increases in the status and connectedness of others relative not to us, but to themselves. Starting with those you know, then extending to those you’ve never even met.

So, what do you think?

Is this just some ridiculous Utopian fantasy or a viable approach to next-generation business?

What might happen if you started with just one of these, gave it a try for a month?

It was early. 7:30am.

The only people in the waiting area were me and, sitting across, a mom in her forties and her son, a wiry kid with glasses who looked to be about 11.

He was still in his pajamas, squished into the chair playing his Nintendo as his mom filled out her forms.

I guessed she had nobody else to watch him that early, so she dragged him down to play video games while she went in for her scan.

The tech came out, called my name and theirs. We all got up and followed him inside.

Walking down the hall, the kid asked how long it would be.

About an hour and a half, came the answer.

Well, that’s better than 2, said the mom.

The tech handed me a gown to change into and I entered my room.

Minutes later, I stepped out wrapped in hospital blue.

The boy was in the room next to mine.

Changing.

His mom whispered to the tech.

“You don’t ask him anything about what’s on the forms, right?”

The tech looked at her. Confused. “Excuse me?”

Even more quietly…

“I don’t want him to know what he has.”

She’s a writer, teacher and intuitive business strategist who blends transformative energy technologies, the magic of story, and grounded spiritual practice with pragmatic entrepreneurial principles. She’s also the author of How To Rule Your World From The Inside Out: The Art Of Inner Leadership.

With gratitude for her voice, enjoy…

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A few weeks ago, Jonathan invited me to write a guest post for his beloved blog. I sit down to write, and am overwhelmed by love.

Love surges in my throat. Pressed back by a wagging Finger of Doubt.

“You want to write about what?” says Finger. He raises one semi-elegant eyebrow.

“Love,” I whisper, looking down at my shoes. “I want to write about love.”

“You realize this is a business blog, right?” Finger adjusts his tie and frowns. “Business. Not love.

“Write about how to make brilliant decisions. Or about intuitive strategies for creative entrepreneurs. Write about productivity and procrastination. Be practical. Be useful.”

I think: Finger of Doubt loves me. He doesn’t want me to blow it. But he doesn’t get it, either.

“Love,” I say, glancing at him out of the corner of my eye. “Everything you’ve suggested? It’s rooted in love.

“Brilliant decisions? Love. Intuitive strategies? Love.

“Productivity, procrastination, presidential gravitas—love, love and love.”

Finger sighs. Shrugs. Wipes a speck of dust off his impeccable sleeve.

Glides off to take care of business.

And I pick up my pen to write.

Here, dear Readers of Jonathan’s wonderful blog, is my love-letter to you.

You are beautiful! So beautiful, I could sit and gaze at you all day and drown in wonder as night falls and Time dissolves.

You are magnificent.

You hold the sky as lightly as a bubble in the palm of your hand.

You, my friend, are the light that shines through the tender green of this leaf and brings eternity into focus.

You are the restless power of the sea, and the yielding boundary of the shore. You are the freedom of wild geese on the far horizon.

You turn your elegant head and the Earth spins on her axis.

You are all that is Necessary, and Sufficient.

You dream the stars from their home in the belly of the Earth.

Your circle of inner selves is the crown that shelters, the lap that cradles.

The bead of sweat on your fingertip nourishes the whole, hungry world.

What will you do, with all this power?

Who will you be, when you see your true reflection?

Come visit the Pool of Remembering with me.

Even a puddle will do. Come, see your true reflection.

Everything conspires to show you your Self.

Everything conspires to make you visible.

Will you rise on the horizon in the Land of Wagging Fingers?

Will you become a Pool of Remembering for them too?

Write the truth of your being on your body. With your naked finger. Write:

I am beautiful!

I am magnificent!

I am you! And you! And you!

Write it! Sing it! Say it!

I am love. We are love.

Our business—O, our business is love.

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Hiro Boga recently launched her digital program, How To Rule Your World From The Inside Out: The Art Of Inner Leadership. You’ll find Hiro online at HiroBoga.com & on Twitter @HiroBoga.