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!

Pin drop…

Beyond the fact that a good percentage of the eyeballs in the rows in front were rolling, it was my first official keynote heckle. I was talking about mindset and entrepreneurship. More specifically, how we need to embrace uncertainty and recognize the creeping emergence of decision-making based not on optimism and opportunity, but on fear and the desire to prevent loss.

My friend in the audience was bothered because he’d assumed that, in a room full of successful entrepreneurs, this simply wasn’t an issue. They all got where they got by taking risks. They were the ones without fear. The idea marauders, innovators and envelope pushers.

And, indeed, when they started, nearly every person there was. But what about now? What about a few years into their ventures?

One of the biggest misses in the entrepreneurial process and mind is the assumption that mindset and willingness to embrace risk and creativity are fixed traits. In fact, the more successful most people become, the more they abandon the very mindset that fueled their success.

I call this the Entrepreneur’s recoil. Here’s how it works…

When you are just starting out, especially if you’re earlier in life and you don’t yet have significant responsibilities, it’s much easier to be hyper-creative, to innovate, put everything you have on the line and take risks. Because you have very little to lose. At least very little that isn’t fairly easily recoverable.

So when you start a business, you adopt a do or die, all-in mindset. You come up with and are open to crazy ideas in the name of creating breakout businesses. And you’re willing to act on them. Because, beyond ego, even if you fail, the fall really won’t cause that much pain.

But, then something happens. You succeed.

You begin to build a real business. You have offices, assets, overhead, inventory and employees. People, families, are counting on you to pay their rent and send their kids to school. Your own family begins to expect a certain lifestyle. And so do you. You get comfortable. And, along with your success, you now have the perception of so much more to lose if you fail.

So, instead of continuing to take risks, your mindset begins to shift into what famed psychologist and winner of the Nobel Prize for behavioral psychology, Daniel Kahneman, calls loss aversion mode.

Rather than being driven by what you can build, create and have, you are overwhelmed by  a fear of losing what you’ve already amassed. Being an entrepreneur, and innovator, an artist or a creator does not make you immune to the often irrational pull of loss aversion. Because, as Kahneman’s research points out, it’s simply a part of human nature.

Two problems with this when it comes to creators and entrepreneurs…

One – The switch from seeking gain to loss avoidance cultivates a strong negative creativity bias that makes us say no to innovative ideas. Ones that come from our own minds, as well as from those around us. And ones that, embraced, could have been key drivers of innovation and growth.

Two – Because we set the tone as entrepreneurs, when we pull back, stop innovating ourselves and rebuff innovation and creativity from employees, we create an idea-killer emotional virus that destroys the very culture that got us where we are. It breeds loss-aversion, fear and scarcity, which is death to innovation and expansion.

So, what do we do about it?

If you’re an entrepreneur, or you work with an entrepreneur or a team charged with innovation, create a monthly mindset circuit-breaker check-up. Take a step back, preferably leave the office and take a few key creators with you. Maybe get out into nature and ask a big question -

“Am I operating from a place of creative opportunity or loss aversion?”

Be honest, and task your team with a “no-repercussion” opportunity to call you out on a shift to a prevent-offense when they see it. Because very often the person least well equipped to notice this shift is you.

Most important, never assume that the mindset that got you here is the same as the mindset that guides your efforts today. It may be. But, for many, once you’re sitting atop a mountain of success, possibility long ago morphed into fear.

When you see that, own it. Then do something about it.

+++

P.S. – I survived the heckling, shared the concept of the recoil, moved on and, after the keynote, spent nearly an hour fielding questions from a healthy crowd of attendees who thanked me for “opening their eyes” to this and other creative mindset phenomena and myths.

Then, I promptly went home, hugged my wife and daughter, meditated…and took a foam Kaboom bat to my couch.

Kidding…kinda!

“10 Commandments of Biz”

The 10 commandements were about doing business a different way. One that was designed to lead to not just a great career that changed lives, but to the ability to love the work you do in the world, the business you aspire to build and the life you want to live.

And, in the context of the Annual Report, it was a bit of a parting bonus gift, a quick little slice of fun to leave you thinking about how you bring yourself to the world.

While the entire Annual Report took off online (more on that soon, still humbled and grateful, btw), the 10 commandments, themselves, got quite a bit of feedback, and I had a bunch of requests to release them as a standalone graphic to share.

So, for those who missed it and those who asked for it, here ya go…

Because…

Business ain’t just about business, it’s about life!

Chip Conley survived, but this experience was a bit of a wake-up call. One that set in motion a different path. For years, Conley had been a deep student of human behavior and the psychology of success. That interest, along with two decades building his company, led him to write the New York Times bestseller, PEAK: How Great Companies Get Their Mojo From Maslow.

Now, having sold a controlling interest in Joie de Vivre to Hyatt, Conley is back with more thoughts on the human condition, sharing a bit of a radical approach to cultivating the mindset needed to succeed in business and in life. And he’s combining math with emotion in his new book, Emotional Equations.

So I sat down with Chip to find out what this science meets mood approach was all about. Here’s what unfolded…

[FTC Disclosure - You should always assume that pretty much every link on this blog is an affiliate link and that if you click it, find something you like and buy it, I'm gonna make some serious money. Now, understand this, I'm not talking chump change, I'm talking huge windfall in commissions, bling up the wazoo and all sorts of other free stuff. I may even be given a mansion and a yacht, though honestly I'd settle most of the time for some organic dark chocolate and clean socks. Oh, and if I mention a book or some other product, just assume I got a review copy of it gratis and that me getting it has completely biased everything I say. Because, books are like a drug to me, put one in my hand and you own my ass. Ethics be damned! K, you've been warned. Huggies and butterflies. ]

Inspired and humbled by the legendary annual reports of Berkshire Hathaway founder, Warren Buffet, I decided to expand my exploration into a full-blown 2011 Annual Report and give it a theme—”Serve, aspire, transcend.”

As you read the Annual Report, I’ll bring you deeper into my life and what I call my “business engines.” I’ll also share something that’s more personal than ever before. Not so much because I want to, but because to omit it would leave a gaping hole in the context around many of my recent business and life decisions. It’ll also provide answers to questions I’ve been asked, yet have never answered publicly.

So, get yourself a latte and some dark chocolate, this craft is taking flight…

Click here to download and read

And if you find it compelling, I’d be grateful if you’d share it around.

P.S. – The report is formatted as a PDF document, and designed to read easily on an iPad or a computer. It’s very visual, so the file a little bigger than a regular document (around 4MB). It’s also 35 pages long, so if you’d like to print it, just remember to check the box when you print to shrink it to fit the page size you are printing on.

Every year, some established voices get stronger, others weaken and new ones arrive on the scene. Still, much of the recognition for thought-leadership goes to larger “magazine format” or multi-author blogs and larger online versions of print magazines.

I thought it was time to start honoring the individual, often less filtered voices in a more formal way, collect them into one place and share them with the world by creating the first-annual Business Catalyst Awards (BizCats). Collectively, these people provide not only a rich community and valuable insights, they also deliver an extraordinary, real-world, actionable education.

Here were the criteria:

• The BizCats honor leading individual voices who regularly share ideas, tools, strategies, insights and processes that serve as catalysts to the success of entrepreneurs and small businesses over the course of the prior year. Because the focus is individuals, larger “magazine” or multi-author format sites have been excluded. We love the big sites and they offer great value, but this is all about recognizing standout solo voices.
• The nominees were all hand-curated via a blend of my own exposure to them, the input of a small, informal committee of small business, entrepreneurship and marketing experts. There was no public nomination or voting, because frankly it’s become so easy to game things like that (think Mechanical Turk, subscriber lists and calling-in lots of favors from friends), they simply have no value any more.
• There are no numerical rankings, which we all know are worthless beyond bragging rights. Instead, each voice has been given an award for excellence within a specific category.
• Bloggers must have posted at least twice a month. There are, no doubt, great voices out there who post less often, but these awards are about honoring a larger, ongoing commitment to a community.
• If you agree with and appreciate the work that went into selecting the winners, great. If not, that’s fine, too. Shoot me an email if you’d like to introduce someone for me to keep my eye on over the next year as I begin to compile the list for 2013.

Quick disclosure, because I operate in the entrepreneurship, small business and marketing space, I know many of the people on this list personally. Still, nobody makes the cut simply because they have my phone number. For this same reason, I am excluding myself and my blog from consideration for these awards.

And, now…

The 2012 BizCats:

Top 5 Web Shows

Here are 5 standout small business and entrepreneurship web shows from 2011, along with sample show videos. Notice, too, how different the formats, production value and styles are. Each person owns the way they do it, rather than trying to be the next somebody else. One of the interesting trends I’ve noticed this year, as well, is that expectations about production value are going up. Chase Jarvis’ show is a perfect example of this.

MarieForleo.com - Marie Forleo – Small Business Strategy & Growth. Forleo’s weekly Q&A Tuesday, where she answers reader questions, is a quick shot of small business, often marketing-oriented adrenaline. For a weekly web show format, the comment section is also incredibly active and often full of additional insights.

TheRiseToTheTop.com - David Siteman-Garland – Lifestyle Business Profiles. Siteman-Garland’s interview-driven show expores not only the business strategies, ideas and challenges of online and offline entrepreneurs, but also the lifestyle challenges as well. David is high-energy, with a strong voice and personality, as he says “if you want fluff, go pet a bunny.”

Mixergy.com – Andrew Warner – Tech Founder Profiles. With a strong focus on the tech-industry and online entrepreneurship, Warner interviews the founders of many of the tech-world’s biggest success stories, as well as many other personalities around that community, including top VCs, seed-accelerator founds and more. He is great at asking the questions that make many others cringe, like “exactly how much does the company earn?”

Chase Jarvis LIVE – Chase Jarvis – Creative Business Strategy. Chase is a commercial photographer who bridges the gap between honoring the deep creative jones of your inner artist, but also developing the business, sales and marketing skills needed to not only make great art, but serve a need and generate a real, livable income.

BarefootExecutive.TV – Carrie Wilkerson – Home/micro-business Tips. Working from home with a focus largely on building business online, Wilkerson shares tips and strategies to build a lifestyle-oriented business, often from home or with some degree of flexibility and location independence.

Top 6 Audio Podcasts

Accidental Creative - Todd Henry – Creativity Tools & Profiles – A leading voice in the world of facilitating creativity in business, Henry interviews a wide range of entrepreneurs, creatives and thought leaders with the goal of sharing concrete ideas and takeaways. The profiless and stories are great and often spur ideas that inspire your own creativity and innovation engines.

Small Business Trends Radio – Anita Campbell – Small Business Trends & Profiles – SmallBizTrends.com founder and former general counsel and tech startup founder, Anita Campbell, interviews a wide variety of entrepreneurs, business thought leaders and marketers, sharing tips on operating and growing businesses in the current economy and beyond.

Marketing Over Coffee – John Wall & Chris Penn – Small Business Marketing – Run as a conversation between Wall and Penn with the occasional guest like Seth Godin or David Meerman Scott mixed in, the conversation usually focuses on a blend of marketing, PR and  with a strong emphasis on tech-driven channels and strategies and frequent left turns into popular topics of the day.

Duct Tape Marketing – John Jantsch – Marketing & Entrepreneur Profiles – An extension of his excellent blog (noted below), this interview-driven audio podcast series focuses on small-business marketing with a healthy mix of online, social media and old-school neighborhood and response marketing. Great for businesses of all sizes, but really focused on smaller business.

Breakthrough Business – Michele Price – This weekly interview-driven show covers a wide variety of topics, from leadership and entrepreneurship to the success mindset and social media. Price attracts a broad array of high-profile guests and the long format allows her to go deeper into issues and conversations that often bridge the gap between personal and business.

I Love Marketing – Dean Jackson & Joe Polish – Response-driven Web Marketing. This popular podcast and web show alternates between audio and video formats, so we thought it safest to add it here under podcasts. From two legends in the world of hardcore, response-driven marketing, this podcast covers ideas, strategies, tactics and interviews around accelerated business growth with a strong bent toward direct-response and it’s online evolution.

Top 22 Single-voice Blogs

AVC.com – Fred Wilson – VC-backed tech-entrepreneurship – Posting daily, well-known venture capitalist and co-founder of Union Square Partners, Fred Wilson, offers a wide variety of thoughts, strategies and conversations around tech-driven, most-often VC-backed entrepreneurship. Fred is also passionate about art and music, though, so don’t be surprised to find him threading those topics into the mix.

WhiteHotTruth.com - Danielle LaPorte – Bringing Soul to Business – An author, speaker, business builder, former Washington think tank guru, LaPorte doesn’t just write about the need to allow your business to be the embodiment of soul, she IS that very embodiment. You can feel it literally coming off the page with a strong, spiritual, poetic, yet clearly business-savvy voice and insights.

SocialTriggers.com – Derek Halpern – Customer Psychology – With an unusual blended expertise in the psychology of action/influence and metric-driven measurement, Halpern reveals common myths and gaping holes in online and traditional marketing funnels and shows how to tweak what you’re doing to inspire higher levels of action and conversion among visitors and customers.

AmyPorterfield.com – Amy Porterfield – Social Media Marketing – A former hardcore event and media marketer for Tony Robbins, Porterfield has since done a deep dive into the world of social media, content and community marketing. She posts with a strong focus on developing content and community as a key spoke in the marketing wheel.

IWillTeachYouToBeRich.com – Ramit Sethi – Behavioral Change & Influence. When Sethi started this hugely popular blog, the focus was contrarian personal finance, but it has since shift gears in a major way, focusing more on the psychology of influence, behavioral change and social dynamics in the world of work. Truth is, it was always about that, but now Sethi is more direct about this.

MariSmith.com - Mari Smith – Relationship Marketing & Facebook – Smith built her reputation as an expert in leveraging Facebook for business-building and marketing. But many of her posts go beyond tactical Facebook advice (which she offers) and explore the more important relationships that drive business and how to tap technology to facilitate them.

Seth Godin’s Blog – Seth Godin – Provoking Change, Embracing Art and Shipping – Acclaimed entrepreneur, author, marketer, thought-leader and provocateur, Godin is constantly prodding you to look at what you’re doing, what you’re assumptions are and whether they’re getting you what you want both in business and in life, then offering ideas to explore. Topics range from business to art to publishing.

Both Side of the Table – Mark Suster – Rapid Growth Strategy – Former tech-entrepreneur and now a VC in Southern California, Suster often writes large, in-depth thought and strategy posts on entrepreneurship that draw from his dual experience as both an entrepreneur who sold two companies and a VC in the business of funding and growing companies.

TaraGentile.com – Tara Gentile – Lifestyle Business Reality Check – Gentile has been making waves in the blogosphere over the last year. She explores many of the issues bootstrap and lifestyle entrepreneurs deal with with a wonderful blend of heart and soul meets pragmatic reality check, while leaving you with both things to think about and things to do.

QuickSprout – Neil Patel – Online & Social Marketing – Patel often focuses in on the opportunity for businesses, both online and offline, to leverage social platforms and technologies to gather intelligence and build more effective brands, models and marketing engines. Lots of great tactical information to be found with an always fresh perspective on how to approach things.

Unicorn Free – Amy Hoy – Humane Entrepreneurship – A contrary voice in the world of tech-entrepreneurship, Hoy shares a blend of personality laden (read “often NSFW) posts about building business slowly, methodically and decidedly un-start-up-like, without VC simply because, gulp, you love to do what you do and you can be paid well to do it without killing yourself or giving up a part of your dream.

Productive Flourishing – Charlie Gilkey – Sanity for Creative Entrepreneurs – Charlie started out sharing his unique synthesis of productivity strategies and tools for micro-entrepreneurs with a decided creatie bent, but his writing has evolved to more deeply explore and offer highly-actionable insights that expand beyond productivity and offer a dynamic framework for getting ideas out of your head and into the real-world.

Escape From Cubicle Nation – Pam Slim – Career Evolution & Bootstrapped Startup Strategy – Slim brings a certain sense of grounded, real-world spirituality to the process of exploring and then building a business around a deep interest, with a strong emphasis on doing the personal work needed to align what you build with who you are.

DuctTapeMarketing.com - John Jantsch – Small Business Marketing – With a strong focus on measurable marketing for small businesses, especially referral-driven lead generation, Jantsch does a great job of bringing practical tips and strategies into a mix with easily-accesible technology that often tends toward the productivity and management side of entrepreneurship as well.

Art of Nonconformity – Chris Guillebeau – Purpose-driven, Location-independent Entrepreneurship – Known by many for his quest to visit every country in the world in 5 years, Guillebeau has also built an extraordinary, location independent business while traveling the world. He shares his business insights along with notes about travel hacking on his blog. A great resource for those looking to build a location-independent, purpose-driven business.

Creativity Unbound - Edward Boches – Former Chief Creative Officer and current Chief Innovation Office at legendary Mullen creative agency in Boston, Boches writes about the evolving face of entrepreneurship, branding, advertising and the creative process. Often taking positions counter the industry, his posts are filled with insights about the shift in marketing from messaging to engaging, interacting and delighting.

ConversationAgent.com – Valeria Maltoni – Maltoni is a seasoned business strategist who has worked with companies of all sizes, though her insights are relevant to everyone from startups to global leaders. She brings a direct, often provocative viewpoint that raises questions, deconstructs popular business happenings and really makes you think.

Terry Starbucker.com – Terry St. Marie – Practical leadership – Living a double-life for years, former COO of a large cable-company, Terry St. Marie, operated under the online alias of Starbucker and became known as the co-founder of SOBCon. Then his company was sold last year, freeing him to focus his energies on writing about small business, entrepreneurship and leading with heart. Great, simple reminders and strategies.

ChrisBrogan.com - Chris Brogan – Social Media & Small Business Strategy – Over the last 3 years, Brogan’s evolved from being a leading voice in social media to becoming an advocate and solution provider for small businesses. You can see this both in his blog focus and in his work as the founder of Human Business Works, especially local mom and pop operations.

Successful-Blog.com – Liz Strauss – The Human Side of Business – With a long history in brick and mortar business and publishing, Strauss offers a blend of business wisdom with a strong emphasis on relationship building, purpose and simultaneously honoring what’s great in life. She’s also the co-founder of SOBCon, along with Terry St. Marie.

Smart Passive Income - Pat Flynn – While Flynn’s blog and podcast are ostensibly about generating a variety of business engines online, he shares ideas, specific tactics and insights that benefit entrepreneurs and small businesses across the board. He also reveals the details of his revenue every month, so you can get a very real sense of how each approach is working.

TheSalesLion.com - Marcus Sheridan – Blogging for Business – Marcus write with a very easy-going, conversational style and a focus on online community-building for the specific purpose of creating a channel that will help drive business. I also love that, like me, he comes from brick and mortar entrepreneurship, and brings that sensibility to his insights.

Wrap Up.

That does it for the 2011 BizCats. And, now a challenge. Follow as many of these voices as is practical for you for the next 30 days. The small business, marketing and entrepreneurship education they deliver collectively is really quite extraordinary.

And, if you’d like to bring other voices to the attention of the community, feel free to share away in the comments. We’ll keep a list to follow and consider for next year’s BizCats.

Here’s to a year of wonder, growth, compassion, service and, yes, profit, impact and success!

As I write this, the TinyBuddha account on twitter is closing in on 240,000 followers and it’s adding some 230 new followers…a day!

The rapid uptake on twitter led Lori to launch a wildly popular communal blog, TinyBuddha.com, a Facebook page with 70,000 likes and now a hot-off-the-presses Tiny Buddha book.

I was fortunate enough to get a review copy and really enjoyed it. But I was also curious about the progression of the Tiny Buddha brand, what led Lori to make to leap into booklandia and what’s driving her these days.

So I did what I normally do. I asked her. And here’s what unfolded…

1. You’ve been building a tremendous community on twitter and your blog, and at a pace that pretty damn stunning. Why a book? And why now?

I knew from the beginning I would eventually write a book, and things fell into place nicely when publishers started contacting me to review some of their other titles.

I wanted to write this book specifically because it touches upon almost all of the themes that writers (and I) explore on the site.

I’ve published stories from more than 175 contributors, and I’ve read comments from thousands of people who also communicate what they’re going through and struggling with. They always come back to the same universal issues—letting go of pain, finding meaning in life, choosing happiness, creating positive change, maintaining healthy relationships, living life to the fullest, and accepting uncertainty.

I thought it would be interesting to ask questions about these topics on Twitter and then shape the book around those insights—so that’s exactly what I did.

I also shared my own experiences in grappling with these big issues. I did that because anyone could write a book about these topics theoretically. My reflections come from my experiences, so it seemed fitting to share them.

2. Why does Tiny Buddha, the brand, exist? Who is it here to serve and how?

When I started the community blog, my main intention was to write and publish stories about applying wisdom to everyday life, especially since we live in an information-overloaded world where it’s much easier to gain knowledge than it is to utilize it.

My hope was to create a space where we all feel comfortable being open about what we’ve been through and what we’re going through, what we’ve learned and what we’re learning, so we can help ourselves and each other.

Tiny Buddha exists because we all have something to teach and something to learn. It’s a place where we can know that we are not alone—and that if we’re willing to be honest, we make a tremendous difference in each other’s lives.

3. What about for you? What does it do for you?

Tiny Buddha does exactly that for me! As I explored in my book, I spent years isolating myself in shame, thinking there was something wrong with me. Now I know we all have a choice: to hide alone or heal together.

The quote that best embodies my mission with Tiny Buddha is “If you light a lamp for someone else, it will also brighten your path.” Tiny Buddha brightens mine.

4. You get incredibly revealing in the book, at times sharing stories about your life that are gut-wrenching. Yet, you don’t go to that same place on the blog or anywhere else I’ve seen online. Why? And why was it important for you to do it here?

I’ve actually touched upon many of these stories on the blog. It’s just spread in tiny pieces over two and a half years of posts!

I’ve shared my stories this way, in bits and pieces, because I’ve tried to shape Tiny Buddha around the community, so that it’s about all of our stories, not just mine. For this reason, I didn’t detail any of my personal experiences on the About page, which explains the site’s mission. However, I realized pretty early on with the blog that I wanted to be vulnerable in my writing.

Vulnerability can connect us on a powerful level, because there are so many feelings we all experience, but might be hesitant to discuss. When we don’t open up to each other, we hold the weight of these experiences alone—and there’s no reason to carry that burden when we can instead come together to help ourselves and each other.

Not everyone will relate to my specific experiences, but everyone can relate to the universal struggles—and that’s really what my book is about. We all live our lives around the same questions, and we all need to be able to identify and utilize the answers that make sense for us individually. We can do that most effectively if we’re willing to be honest with ourselves.

5. One of the unique things in the book is how you weave answers to questions shared by your twitter tribe. So, there’s a bit of a crowdsourcing/co-creation element to the book. How was this experience for you? And how do you feel about the notion of content crowdsourcing and co-creation?

It was an amazing experience, though I have to admit it had its challenges! I collected nearly 1,000 tweets—and then I had to narrow them down, categorize them in a way that made sense, and contact all of those people to verify I had their permission to publish their responses.

I love the idea of crowdsourcing in this way because I believe it gives any work a greater sense of depth. It becomes more than just one person’s stories, opinions, or research; instead, it’s shaped by a community of people with varied perspectives and sets of experiences.

That’s one of things I enjoy about running Tiny Buddha a community blog. Many of the posts explore similar topics, but different perspectives resonate with different people.

6. What’d I miss? What should people know that I didn’t ask?

You didn’t miss much! The only other thing I’d like to share is the “Life’s Hard Questions” contest, which I’m running until January 15,2012. Anyone can enter by submitting a photo of themselves displaying the hardest question in their life at lifeshardquestions.com.

The winners will be chosen at random, though there will be a special prize for the most creative. The prizes include a Canon DSLR camera, two Kindles, and 10 free copies of my book. It’s just another opportunity for people to get involved and share a little of themselves.

+++

[FTC Disclosure - You should always assume that pretty much every link on this blog is an affiliate link and that if you click it, find something you like and buy it, I'm gonna make some serious money. Now, understand this, I'm not talking chump change, I'm talking huge windfall in commissions, bling up the wazoo and all sorts of other free stuff. I may even be given a mansion and a yacht, though honestly I'd settle most of the time for some organic dark chocolate and clean socks. Oh, and if I mention a book or some other product, just assume I got a review copy of it gratis and that me getting it has completely biased everything I say. Because, books are like a drug to me, put one in my hand and you own my ass. Ethics be damned! K, you've been warned. Huggies and butterflies. ]

Now, a word of caution…

Being open to outside opinions and data does not mean “surrendering” your intuition.

It’s important to invite feedback, but it’s also mission critical to maintain enough of a strong sense of independent vision and leadership to know when the whole damn world has got it wrong and you’re the only sane person in the room…even if that means you’re viewed, for the moment, as the bastion of lunacy.

Every new paradigm breaks an old one.

And the people who create, push, massage and shape these new constructs are inevitably viewed as nut-jobs, at least in the beginning. In part, because new paradigms necessarily unseat long-held “comforting” beliefs, and along with them the long-seated creators of the last big paradigm. And often, entire institutions, bodies of work and worlds.

Disruption is the seed of evolution. And innovation its spawn.

This causes pain both to those who find solace in the way things are and those whose reputations and often livelihoods are based on preserving the status quo. So, feedback in the guise of pure opinion is often unwittingly (or quite intentionally) motivated by the desire to avoid the discomfort of disruption.

It’s your job to prod people into a zone of exploration and experience they didn’t know they were missing until it dropped into their world. Starting with yourself.

So, yes, feedback is an important element of creation. But not all feedback is valid, not all data is useful and not every person, however brilliant, well-read, hailed and regaled or purportedly endowed with the omniscience and good taste to be right all the time matters in the context of your creative process.

Between banal and genius lies a morass of opinion, most of it wrong.

Witness this fascinating study reported in E. D. Hirsch’s The Schools We Need and Why We Don’t Have Them:

Students have long believed (on good evidence) that if the same paper is submitted to two teachers in two different sections of the same course, the paper is likely to receive two very different grades. In 1961, Paul Diederich and his colleagues proved that this student belief is no myth. When 30 student papers were graded by fifty-three graders (a total of 15,900 readings), more than one third of the papers received every possible grade. That is, 101 of the 300 papers received all nine grades: A, A-, B+, B, B-, C+, C, C-, and D. Diederich also reported that

94 percent [of the papers] received either seven, eight or nine different grades; and no essay received less than five different grades from fifty-three readers. Even when the raters were experienced teachers, the grades given to the papers by the different raters never attained a correlation greater than .40. Diederich, P.B., French, J.W., and Carlton, S.T. “Factors in judgments of writing ability.” Research Bulletin RB-61-15. Princeton, N.J.: Educational Testing Service, 60 pp.

This wasn’t about how smart or accomplished or qualified the graders were, it was about straight-up, pure and simple subjective interpretation.

Part of our job is to ask. But the other part is to filter, synthesize, curate, integrate, disregard, pivot, act, combust, create, evolve. Put another way, listen, but don’t supplant.

Where does this leave us?

Sometimes…

The world needs the crazy ones far more than it needs gardeners of the status quo.

So, be open to a “leaner” process that allows for input and insight, rapid iteration and evolution in the name of accelerated learning.

Be open to the possibility of your hunches and assumptions being proven wrong.

Be open to the need to change course, to the possibility that what got you here won’t get you there.

Be open to feedback, to judgment, more specifically judgment built not just upon opinion, but upon fact.

Invite experience on a level that allows you to validate (or invalidate) hunch with data.

But, also be open to the possibility that while all the input, insight and data may lead you down the road to a faster horse, if your gut keeps telling you a combustion engine awaits in the ether, then the ether is the place you need to brave.

Judgment be damned.

“Listen up, people,” says the SVP who’s leading your team. “We need new ideas. Fresh, creative approaches, things that push the envelope. If we don’t get them, I don’t know what’s going to happen. You have until same time next week. I want to see a bare minimum of 5 raw ideas before this time next week. Go! Push the envelop, people, I’ve got pressure from above to make big things happen.”

Wondering if both your job and the future of your division lie in the balance, you set to work. The next morning you email the SVP a set of ideas. They’re rough, but highly-creative. You’ve never heard anything like them. Fifteen minutes later you get a reply. “Nice effort,” says the boss, “but these just aren’t quite right. Keep at it.”

The next day, you try again, submitting 3 new concepts, each one better than the first batch. Minutes later, a similar reply hits your inbox. “I really appreciate your hard work, but these are just too to different, too risky.” This dance goes on daily for weeks. Not just with you, but with the SVP and the other members of your team.

You begin to wonder…

How can a group of smart, innovative people brainstorm more than 100 ideas and have them all be rejected out of hand as being either too dull or, more often, too risky? Is the entire team really that incapable of creativity?

Turns out, the problem may not be the team’s ideas but rather your “leader’s”‘ inability to validate them…

A recent study conducted by professor Jennifer Mueller at the University of Pennsylvania revealed something that does not bode well for organizations.

Team leaders often reject highly-creative ideas not because those ideas don’t have potential, but rather because the leaders themselves are not equipped to handle the fear, uncertainty, exposure and anxiety that rides along with validating, then backing an idea that is innovative, but also necessarily carries potential risk of loss and exposure to judgment.

It gets worse. Most managers not only reject good, highly-creative ideas on a regular basis, they have no idea they’re rejecting them because of their own lack of innovation mindset coping skills.

In the study, Mueller et al shared:

People often reject creative ideas even when espousing creativity as a desired goal…people can hold a bias against creativity that is not necessarily overt, and which is activated when people experience a motivation to reduce uncertainty…. Furthermore, the bias against creativity interfered with participants’ ability to recognize a creative idea. These results reveal a concealed barrier that creative actors may face as they attempt to gain acceptance for their novel ideas.

Turns out, many people in supervisory/leadership roles have become so afraid of having to act on edgy ideas and dance with uncertainty, they’ve unintentionally blinded themselves to the existence of the very thing they clamor for.

Question is, what do we do about it?

Here are a few thoughts…

1. Build intelligent Uncertainty Awareness & Management Training into the training programs for all team leaders, managers and executives.

Maybe what organizations really need more of is not better people and ideas, but rather leaders who are equipped with “uncertainty scaffolding”—mindset skills, practices and strategies that allow them to be comfortable with uncertainty—capable of opening them to first seeing and then acting upon the great ideas that are already being laid at their feet.

With most modern organizational training, as employees rise up the management food chain, they receive additional training in the content needed for their jobs, leadership strategies, social dynamics, best practices, time management and more. But the specific, proven mindset practices, tools and strategies needed to wrangle uncertainty are never trained, let alone explored.

This may be a reflection of a flawed assumption that you either “have that ability or you don’t,” when in fact, it is a skill that’s not only trainable, but mission critical to success on an individual and organizational level.

In a world where companies need to not only exist, but discover and execute on the opportunities delivered by an environment of persistently amplified uncertainty, this skill set is needed like never before.

2. Counter the management negative creativity bias with an unbiased co-decision-maker.

Bring in a second manager who is neither vested in, nor will be held responsible for the the outcome of any ideas that are accepted and executed. In theory, this would serve to counter the underlying negative creativity bias and allow truly creative ideas to surface and be allocated resources. But, it’s not likely to work well in practice for a few reasons.

One, there is no such thing as a complete lack of bias. If you’re human and alive, on some level-you’re biased. It may not be against ideas, but it may be against people, entities and circumstances. There may even be underlying political reasons to want to see a colleague succeed or fail. And like the negative creativity bias, people are often unaware of the existence of their own biases, let alone the impact on their decision-making processes.

Two, this unbiased proxy will not have the same level of intuition, specific segment experience and understanding of the unique abilities, limitations, history and approaches of the members of the other person’s team. That may make them more able to objectively identify and counter a negative creativity bias, but less able to understand the social dynamics of a team and more inclined to validate ideas that would be viable in a vacuum, but not executable in the real world.

In the end…

We are all human. We’re largely hardwired to run from decisions and actions that lead us further down a rabbit hole. That leads us to reject not only our own creative ideas, but the envelope-pushing ideas of those we lead and back. Because validating our team-members “unprovable” ideas, then allocating resources to them makes them ours. If the ideas go down in flames, so do we.

Problem is, in a world where what got us here ain’t gonna get us there, this phenomenon is death not only to individual power, but to organizational innovation and progress.

The answer, at least from my perspective, is to do 3 things…

One – alert team leaders to the existence of the problem—most managers have an innate negative creativity bias.

Two – explain how this leads to an inability and unwillingness to see, validate and back highly-innovative ideas.

Three – equip those same leaders with the mindset skills and abilities needed to embrace truly innovative ideas.

Easy task? No. Necessary for evolution, innovation and progress? Yes.

Curious, what do you think? Have you experienced either side of this dynamic?

Share your thoughts below…

Every year, I leave inspired beyond word. Not just by the ideas and conversations, but the quality of the speakers. As someone who aspires to speak to larger and larger audiences on larger and larger stages, I love to see how the best in the business do it.

But then, there are always those moments during the two-day event where extraordinary ideas converge with a radiant personal energy to create magic.

For me, Boston Philharmonic Orchestra conductor, teacher and speaker, Ben Zander, was that moment.

He was alive, literally floating through the audience. In fact, he started in the audience fluttering, skipping, dancing and prancing up and down the aisles. And, with the exception of running up to the stage to play piano in short bursts, he stayed in the audience for nearly two hours.

Minutes in he had 4,000 stuffed shirts singing happy birthday at the top of their lungs, gesticulating with their arms, animating their faces, laughing. Even more conservative genius marketing types like Derek Halpern (who happened to be sitting next to me) joined in. Not out of some awkward sense of being forced into a contrived experience (I’ve been to those, too), but because Zander swept us all away. Resistance was futile.

His life-force was infectious. Utterly immersive. Radiant.

Zander was so clearly and deeply in love with what he does and so utterly passionate about his message (embracing music and possibility), and who he was sharing it with (he hugged and kissed half the front row after speaking) that he literally could’ve said anything and we would have been human putty.

And this is even more astonishing, Zander’s energy at the end was indistinguishable from his energy at the beginning. I’m betting he could’ve gone another two hours without flagging. I’ve no doubt this comes in part from learning that, when he conducts, often for hours, every person in the orchestra will feed off the energy he radiates. If he starts high, then slowly empties, so will his musicians…and so will the audience. So, it’s his job to be radiant.

But, you can’t go to that place where you literally glow on a level that makes people say “I want THAT!” if it’s just your J.O.B. It’s got to be an organic extension of your very being. Zander isn’t a conductor, a teacher or a speaker, he is music, light and energy embodied. Raw, transparent, fully-aligned with what makes him come alive.

Stuart Wilde said if you want to make more money, raise your personal energy. When you do that, more people will show up, when they do, bill ‘em!

We spend so much of our lives trying to learn how to market better, make better products, build better companies, train in operations, sales, marketing, process and innovation. But, it’s all for nothing if we don’t also spend equal, if not far greater time and energy, exploring, then building around the people, the activities and the experiences that allow us the opportunity to fully align our actions with what makes us come alive.

Because when you do that, you begin to radiate energy. People want to be around you. They become enchanted. They want to follow, lead and support you. And, you’re not supposed to say this out loud, but they want to be you. Or more accurately, they want to have that same inner glow.

Being in the room with Zander brought this home like never before. And it very likely inspired some deeper thought about where I’m going with my career and life.

But, Zander also shared a window into the mindset that allows him to go to the place I aspire to first visit more often, then inhabit. Beyond passion, beyond alignment with what makes him come alive, he creates very deliberate filters that allow him to view occasions that shut most people down as opportunities for wonder.

When you commit time, money or energy to something and it falls short of your hopes and expectations, most people call that a mistake and say, “man, that sucks.”

Not Zander. His response…

“How fascinating.”

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Have you picked up your copy of Uncertainty yet? It’s out and the reviews are rocking my world.