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!

I recently swung through NYC’s largest, hippest candy store with my wife and a small gaggle of 10 year old girls. It was wonderous (I started vibrating just from the sugar in the air, lol).

Then we hit one section where we saw the display in the image you’re looking at.

Which made me wonder…

Why is it illegal to advertise cigarettes to kids in the U.S., but in a setting built for kids, it’s okay to sell a product that creates a clear positive association with smoking for kids?

Curious, what do YOU think?

Is this okay?

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.

A few years later, looking for even higher margin product, I started checking the prices on different beverages around the house and noticed wine sold for more than juice.

I remembered an episode of I Love Lucy where Lucille Ball stood in a massive vat of grapes crushing them into wine, so I crushed a bag of grapes into a mini clay urn, sealed-off the top with electrical tape and hid it in my tree-house to ferment in an attempt to make my own wine to sell.

Chateaux Fields never quite made it to market, but to this day, I can remember the smell when I opened that urn a month later.

That graduated to shoveling driveways in winter, mowing lawns and landscaping in summer, painting album covers on jeans jackets in high-school and launching the first company I ever sold in college, a mobile disc-jockey/sound & lighting business called Playrite.

Nobody taught me to be an entrepreneur, it just felt right. But, I’ve always believed the lessons of entrepreneurship should be taught to kids as early in life as possible. And, apparently, so did brothers Adam and Matthew Toren, who co-founded the company, YoungEntrepreneur.com, and wrote a great kids’ book on entrepreneurship -Kidpreneurs.

I recently had a chance to sit down with Adam and ask him why he’s so passionate about teaching entrepreneurship at an early age and why it matters so much.

Here’s how our conversation unfolded…

Why does it matter that kids learn about entrepreneurship when they’re still kids?

There are a couple of reasons why it’s important to start teaching entrepreneurship at a young age. First, the lessons a child learns while being taught about entrepreneurship can help throughout his or her life. And just as with any important lesson, the earlier it’s learned, the better.

A good example of this is teaching kids the money side of owning a business. Financial management isn’t generally taught in the schools, and a lot of parents are either poor money managers themselves or don’t think to really teach their kids about how to properly handle money. This lack of knowledge can be disastrous to a young adult’s credit rating and, ultimately, their lifestyle. And often, by the time they decide they need to learn about how to properly handle money, the damage is already done.

On the other hand, if a kid is taught about money management at an early age, they are much better equipped to take on the challenges of budgeting and finance as an adult.

The other reason teaching entrepreneurship young is important is that there’s a lot of opportunity for young people in the business world right now! We interview teens and twenty-somethings all the time who started their first business in their teens – or even pre-teens – and are now very successful business owners. A lot of people say, “It’s never too late to follow your dreams.” We’ve always said, “It’s never too early!”

Do you believe kids have any advantages over adults in embracing entrepreneurship and, if so, what are they?

The most obvious qualities that kids naturally possess that are favorable to entrepreneurship are a natural curiosity, a willingness to take risks, and abundant amounts of energy! But I actually think the biggest advantage kids have over adults in the entrepreneurial world is lack of experience. Now, that might sound a little strange, but really, it makes a lot of sense. Adults have learned “what works and what doesn’t work” from their own experiences and from what others have told them. That can be very useful, but it can also be limiting. At some point, a lot of adults stop trying new things or lose the ability for true outside-the-box thinking because of their limiting beliefs about what will and won’t work.

We run into young entrepreneurs all the time who say that they were successful specifically because they tried something that they later found out no one thought would work, but they didn’t know any better. Not being entrenched in a particular industry or market can give a fresh perspective and a unique point of view, and that’s where true innovation comes from.

Also, because kids now are growing up in a world that is changing more rapidly all the time, they tend to be more accepting of change and are able to adjust quickly as new technologies and market fluctuations alter the business landscape. That’s an important key to thriving in business today, so it’s definitely a good advantage to have.

What additional skills, mindset changes, and experiences does entrepreneurship give kids, that can impact their lives beyond work as they grow?

In my view, all of the qualities necessary to be a successful entrepreneur are easily translated into success in life in general. To be successful as an entrepreneur, kids need to learn critical thinking skills; they need to learn to take responsibility for the decisions and their actions; and they need to be able to communicate well and get along with people. There isn’t an area of life where these skills won’t have a positive impact.

The other skill – or quality – that all successful entrepreneurs have is perseverance. Entrepreneurship is often loaded with challenges, and if a business owner hopes to do well, he or she has to have a strong will and be able to keep on going, even when they don’t feel like it. Again, this is a quality that can translate into success in many areas of life.

If a parent is not an entrepreneur, but buys your book – Kidpreneurs – for her or his kids and even reads it to them, how effective will that be in letting them understand that world? And, how effective will it be at inspiring them to explore that world when their parents haven’t made that same choice?

That’s a great question, because one of the challenges we often hear young entrepreneurs expressing has to do with parents who just want them to forget about owning their own business and focus on doing what it takes to get a good job. Parents want what’s best for their children, and in their minds, that’s often what they see as the “safe” choice.

The irony of that thinking is that these days there isn’t a job that exists that’s guaranteed safe or secure. Whereas a laid off worker might hunt for a comparable job for months or, in some cases, years, I can think of ten businesses that I could start with very little investment – right now. They would take some time to flourish, but not more time than it takes the average job seeker today to find employment.

If a parent has purchased and read Kidpreneurs for their kids, we can assume the parent has some level of interest in and understanding of entrepreneurship. And that alone can be huge. It is very difficult for children to pursue something their parents don’t believe in. Having support – or even just not having them disapprove – can make a big difference to kids trying to express their entrepreneurial spirit.

A study conducted in 2007 and then repeated with similar results in 2010, by the Kaufman Foundation, shows that kids are in fact more likely to start a business or aspire to do so if they know another entrepreneur. But overall, about 40% of kids from ages eight to seventeen expressed an interest in starting a business. So, a parent doesn’t have to be the example or the inspiration for a child to become an entrepreneur, but they shouldn’t be a hindrance.

Buying Kidpreneurs and going through the process together can be a great learning experience for kids as well as parents. Even if a parent has no entrepreneurial background, the child will, at the very least, begin to think of the possibilities of business ownership. And if that doesn’t translate into starting a business right now, they’ll still carry the lessons with them into adulthood.

What are some of the stories and/or kid-driven businesses that you’ve seen come out of the Kidpreneurs experience?

We continually receive mail and email from parents, teachers, and kids who have read Kidpreneurs and want to share their stories. Many inspiring accounts have come out of the book, from kids who have been motivated to start their own businesses to those who simply found inspiration and encouragement to follow their dreams, whatever they may be.

Some of the actual businesses that Kidpreneurs readers have started include jewelry sales, used book retailing, and a number of online ventures, to name a few. One of our big Kidpreneur fans, Sky Rodrigues, is in the movie making business, and he shot a video testimonial that’s pretty cool. A good example of the many emails we receive is this one from a teenage reader:

“Thank you Matthew & Adam for writing this book and sharing your passion for Entrepreneurship. This book really made me think about all of my potential and I have already started writing down ideas for my first business. I plan on talking to some of my best friends to see if they would like to partner with me.” – Adeena T. (13 years old)

There is little else as rewarding as hearing from a child who’s read the book and been encouraged to start their own business!

Why now? At this point in your life? And at this point in the world?

My brother and I were very fortunate to have been guided and encouraged by our grandfather, Joe, to become entrepreneurs. At an early age, he introduced the concept of entrepreneurship to us and set us up with our first business, selling these little stunt airplanes at a local folk festival. From that point on, we knew “what we wanted to be when we grew up” – entrepreneurs! Without his encouragement, and that of our mother, we might not have ever been drawn to entrepreneurship.

A lot of kids don’t have a parent or grandparent who is well-versed in business ownership to show them the way. We’ve found that many parents – even those who are entrepreneurs themselves – want to guide their children in the direction of business ownership but simply don’t know how. Knowing how to start a business and being able to effectively teach the concepts to kids doesn’t always go hand in hand. So we wrote Kidpreneurs to help parents, teachers, and kids work together to bring kids to entrepreneurship.

It’s almost cliché to say that children are our future, but it’s so true. And in today’s rapidly changing world, the old “Get good grades; go to college; and get a good job” advice is no longer relevant. The days of working for a company for 30 years and retiring with a nice pension are long gone. Kids entering the adult world need to be ready for a new paradigm – one that comes with its own set of unique challenges and opportunities; and we strongly believe that entrepreneurship, and the skills that go along with it, are what will best prepare our children for the future.

What is the single most important thing a parent can teach her child about what’s important about the way they choose to earn a living?

Regardless of whether someone grows up to be a business owner or an employee of someone else’s company, what’s most important is that they are doing something that is fulfilling to them. In our writing, my brother and I often talk about the importance of passion. If you’re passionate about what you’re doing, obstacles won’t seem as big and will be easier to overcome, and your “work” won’t feel like work at all.

People talk a lot about how much entrepreneurs have to work to build their businesses, and that’s very true. But it’s not the same as someone having to work hard at something they don’t like to do. When you’re following your passion, all areas of your life improve. You’re happier, so your relationships are better, you’re likely to be more productive, so your financial picture is better, and you even have more incentive to take care of your health. That doesn’t mean it’s always easy, but the struggle is vastly more meaningful, which makes it less of a fight and more of an adventure!

++++

Adam Toren is a serial entrepreneur (Co-founded YoungEntrepreneur.com), mentor, investor and award winning co-author of Kidpreneurs (Basic Principles of Entrepreneurship for Kids). He also co-authored the soon to be released (September 2011): Small Business, Big Vision: Lessons on How to Dominate Your Market from Self-Made Entrepreneurs Who Did it Right.

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——————-

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.”

There are a lot of elderly folks, many of them widows and widowers, who live in my building.

Every winter, a parade of dumpsters end up alongside the building.

Vessels that port away the contents of the homes of those who’ve passed.

My apartment looks down on the spot where the dumpsters get dropped.

The image you are looking at replaces itself on a regular basis.

Precious items, keepsakes, valuable mementos, furniture, marvelous art all sent to landfill.

This is what’s left of someone’s life. Not the experiences, but the stuff.

Curious, what does this bring up for you?

What’s the take-away?

Perfect day to go ice-skating, so we all headed off to the rink. It was packed, mad skaters of all ages whizzing, whirling twirling, crashing, smashing, plodding, screaming, zipping. Total mayhem. My first thought was, somebody’s gonna get killed, maybe we should come back during the week when nobody else is around.

But, hey, we were there and my daughter was itching to get on the ice, so we all hit it.

As we skated around, I noticed something kind of cool happening. Rather than being terrified by the craziness, my daughter was tracking and adapting to it. Openings would close, gaps would open, people would fly or crash into the path and she’d just find a way around them and keep on keeping on. It was like a game to her. Real-time, fast-paced problem-solving.

And this all made me wonder…

How much do we sit around waiting for clear ice before taking action.

How many times do we wait for everything to set up just right, rather than showing up, taking the rink as it is, stepping onto the ice madness and all and rising to the challenge of figuring it out along the way, knowing we may get a little dinged up, but we’ll also be moving forward, learning, adapting and growing.

I’ve become increasingly convinced that in life, there is no such thing as the perfect time.

Looking for calmer waters or less frantic ice may serve you well, but the perfect swell or an open rink? Could happen. But how much might you miss waiting?

So, I’m curious, are you waiting for the ice to clear?

It was am amazing trip. Life-changing for all of us.

One that taught us all so much about the world and about travel and how interconnected we all are.

Funny enough, though, one of my first memories of the trip was boarding the 15-hour flight from NYC to Hong Kong. Walking through the first-class cabin, spacious with with reclining, super-plush, sleep-chamber seats, my daughter looked up and smiled. How cool is this plane, she said.

Then…we kept walking. lol.

Into the massive, every-seat-packed like sardines coach cabin, where we’d stay sandwiched in for the next 15 hours. I’m a reasonably compact guy, but it was pretty tight. Can’t imagine how someone larger than me would’ve dealt. I was with my girls, though, we were on an adventure and we made the best of it, knowing there was lots of magic to come. In that context, no big whup.

We took a lot more flights throughout our travels and that adventure kindled a giant desire to travel a lot more in all of us. And, I have to confess, numerous times I peeked up front and thought how sweet it would be to be chilling there in my own private fully-reclined flying Barkalounger.

So, as I start planning our next big adventure, I’ve been wondering about two questions:

• How much more often would we travel if the flights and hotels cost next to nothing?
• How much farther would we go if we could fly business or first-class, especially on long hauls?

And, here’s the thing, we could have done both on our travels last summer…if I’d just paid attention to what my buddy, Chris Guillebeau, was trying to teach me about travel hacking. But, never having traveled like that, I didn’t pay much attention (sound of hand smacking forehead).

Every flight and hotel could have either cost nothing or rounded pretty darn close. And the long-haul flights could all have been business or first class.

A lot of you guys already know Chris. He writes the ArtOfNonconformity.com blog, came out with a huge-selling book by the same name earlier this year, then promptly launched a 63-stop U.S.-Canada book tour. And he’s now in the later stages of a 5 year quest to visit every country in the world.

Not only has he traveled so much without going poor, he’s actually done a lot of it for next to nothing, including flying business or first-class.

As Chris just shared in a post on his blog last week:

Earning the miles is fun, but using them is even better. Last year I redeemed 400,000 miles for my big trips to Kazakhstan, Belarus, Cameroon, Thailand, the Maldives, and multiple repositioning flights between Europe and the U.S.

Next month I’m flying to the Mideast to begin a Round-the-World trip. I used AA miles to book my Business Class flights on British Airways and Royal Jordanian. Cash price: $4,500. Price with miles: $84 in taxes. On the way I’ll layover in Heathrow at the Sheraton airport hotel. Cash price: $220. Price with Starwood points: free.

Chris, you see, is a professional travel-hacker.

He lives and breaths ways to score more than a million air-miles a year, many without ever setting foot on a plane or even spending a dime, then cashing them in big time (Don’t tell him I told you this, but if I remember correctly, the dude once got a hair-transplant evaluation even though he’s got a great head of hair just because there was a rare crazy deal that gave him 20,000 miles for doing it…pretty sure I didn’t dream that!).

So, now we’re looking at our travel plans for next summer, time to set up our next great adventure. After last summer, my daughter now loves to travel. She’s got skype-pals on the other side of the world. How cool is that? It’s so important to we keep building on our experience of the world outside our relatively cloistered existence.

But, I also wouldn’t mind being able to:

• Fly better than coach,
• Travel more often, and even
• Pay a lot less money to do so.

Which is why I’m so insanely excited about the project Professor Guillebeau is launching today…

The Travel Hacker’s Cartel.

The Travel Hacker’s Cartel is a membership program that ferrets out all sorts of insane limited-time air mile deals and sends you alerts that let you amass a mountain of air-miles, often without setting foot on a plane.

I know my plan is to do just that before our summer adventure, so that we can travel like rock stars for pennies on the dollar.

Plus, Chris’ travel hacks should also let us do more when we’re in other countries and have more to give when we’re there.

If you don’t have any real desire to experience the world, totally cool. Until recently, I didn’t either. You’ll probably still want to check out Chris’ blog and book, though. Both are amazing.

But, if you’re like me and traveling, either alone or with family and friends, is something you’d love to do, but would also love to fly farther, in more luxury, spend less, give more and do it all more often…

Head over to check out what Chris is
up to at the Travel Hacking Cartel.

[Disclaimer: Chris is a good friend of mine. Even though he looks exactly like The Dread Pirate Robert from The Princess Bride, I don't hold it against him...I just wish he wouldn't always wear the black eye-sash at parties and walk around shouting "as you wiiiissssshhhhh!" (it's getting old). If you sign up for his gig, I get some kind of commission. I don't remember what it is, but honestly, the membership fee is so affordable, I don't really see how I could end up making enough to retire yet, but, hey, I'm not complaining because he is, in fact, the Dread Pirate Robert and has mad sword skills, so I don't want to piss him off. So, buy, don't buy, the real reason I'm sharing this is because I trust Chris and if you travel the way I'm starting to, it can make the process a whole lot more fun and save you a bundle. Then again, if you had the power of invisibility, you could sneak onto any flight you wanted, but you'd still have to stand the whole time and peeing could be a real issue, which would kinda suck, oh look, shiny...]

It came from the living room, where my daughter and her friends were playing. But, I was in my bubble and there were other responsible grown-ups in the house, so I returned my focus to the words before me.

Thirty minutes later, a call from my wife.

Did you hear that bang?

Yup.

It was the sound of an expensive lamp shattering on the floor after my daughter’s foot caught the edge of the table it sat on while spinning around in a chair.

Oh.

My daughter was upset, I learned. And, though she had to leave for her gymnastics class shortly after, she was concerned about reckoning with me upon her return home.

So I’m told.

How anyone could worry about reckoning with me is another story.

But I was 9 once. I get it.

Imagination always trumps reality.

This would be the perfect time to teach her about responsibility. About the value of things. About the need to respect your stuff and owning your mistakes. About consequences.

But, then I remembered.

Trembling at the thought of coming home to face my sentence.

At her age.

And, I came to believe this moment demanded a gentler lesson.

That stuff matters, but accidents happen.

That owning your outcomes matters, but that love and forgiveness also matter.

More.

S’not even close.

So, two hours later, that picture above.

It’s what she came home to.

P.S. – yes, that is tie-dye duct tape…