The Self-Reliant Entrepreneur Reading: Winter written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

This week marks the launch of my latest book, The Self-Reliant Entrepreneur. Each day this week, I’ll be sharing an excerpt from the book, along with a challenge question for entrepreneurs to consider. Today’s reading features a quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson, and asks you to engage in quiet introspection, a perfect activity for a cold winter’s day.

“True calling. Each person has their own vocation. The talent is the call. There is one direction in which all space is open to them. They have faculties silently inviting them thither to endless exertion. They are like a ship in a river. They run against obstructions on every side but one. On that side, all obstruction is taken away, and they sweep serenely over a deepening channel into an infinite sea. ”

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Spiritual Laws, 1841

How do you know when you found your calling? Well, here’s the clue. The truest measure of our significance is not what we do, but what happens to others when we do it. Impact like this doesn’t happen overnight. It happens because you’ve mastered your craft. Maybe it never feels as though it fully happens. Maybe someone will have to tell you it happened, but this is how you know you have found your true calling. Today, enter into every act by considering the impact it can produce for others.

Challenge question: Do others know the real you and what you stand for? How do you know?

The Self-Reliant Entrepreneur Reading: Fall written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

This week marks the launch of my latest book, The Self-Reliant Entrepreneur. Each day this week, I’ll be sharing an excerpt from the book, along with some additional commentary and a challenge question for entrepreneurs to ponder, as it relates to the reading.

“Congruence. No person for any considerable period can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the true.”

Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter, 1850

Quite often the very thing that leads many to strike out on their own is an attempt to bring their business and personal lives in alignment. The corporate culture they had entered and adopted no longer feels congruent with their personal goals.

Congruence by definition implies sameness, agreement, harmony or compatibility, all concepts made wholly real by following an entrepreneurial vision. So it’s terribly ironic then that when the amazing fresh opportunity afforded the entrepreneur is coupled with the day-to-day pressure to build a business, people are easily pushed farther and faster out of congruence than when they started. Remember playing crack the whip at the ice skating rink as a kid? It kind of feels like that. This looks like working more hours than is healthy or necessary, promoting products and services you don’t use or believe in, asking others to do things you are unwilling to do, or worse, wearing one face to yourself and another to your team, your employees, and your loved ones. In geometry, when starting two triangles are congruent, you might use a complex formula, but in your entrepreneurial quest, it’s even more complex.

The challenge question: How is your life a reflection of the gift you need to bring to others and how is it not?

The Self-Reliant Entrepreneur Reading: Summer written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Today, October 22, marks the launch of my latest book, The Self-Reliant Entrepreneur. Each day this week, I’ll be sharing an excerpt from the book. Today’s reading epitomizes the summer season. It’s about the abundance and restorative, healing powers of love.

“In one word, the cure for all the ills and wrongs, the cares, the sorrows, and the crimes of humanity all lie in that one word. Love. It is the divine vitality that produces and restores life to each and every one of us. It gives the power of working miracles, if we will.”

Lydia Marie-Child, Letters from New York, 1843

How does one define the word love? Ah, and the greater challenge, is it even appropriate to use it in the context of business? If indeed the cure for all or even some ills and wrongs is the goal of your journey, then perhaps expanding your relationship with the word love does make sense. Not in the romantic sense, but in the humanity sense.

Do you know what makes you take risks? What creates connection? What inspires? These are all ideas that help entrepreneurial ventures soar, and they’re all based on some sort of love. Love takes courage. Love takes wisdom. Love takes honesty. Love takes loyalty. Love takes well, maybe it does have a place in business.

Your challenge question for today: What attribute of love is missing from your mission?