No Map. No Guide. No Limits.

In my post on March 8 entitled, “Equity, Lifestyle, and My Escape from Golden Handcuffs,” I wondered, “Do I want to be an equity entrepreneur, or a lifestyle entrepreneur?”
I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently, and I just found some more food for thought on Jonathan Fields’ great blog, “Awake at the Wheel.” In Scaling Talent: Simplicity-Driven Entrepreneurship (posted back in February), Fields questions the conventional wisdom that effective entrepreneurs grow their businesses by creating systems, delegating, and outsourcing. He’s coined a great phrase too: “Simplicity-Driven Entrepreneurship.” [click to continue…]

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the contrasting styles of Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin — “birth twins” who both had to find their way forward through uncharted territory in order to accomplish their historic feats. I contrasted the challenges of Darwin, the explorer, with Lincoln, the commander. But it occurs to me those different roles impact more than just the challenges a person faces on an uncharted journey. They also impact the ways in which we gather and process information and navigate our way through unknown waters. Because explorers and commanders have very different goals. [click to continue…]

“If the thought of living on the road seems appealing,” says MSNBC.com Travel columnist Christopher Elliott, “you’ve got company.” Elliott’s most recent article explores the world of the “new nomad” (aka “permanent tourist”).
Is it the ailing economy that’s behind this trend? Perhaps. Elliott references author Richard Grant (American Nomads: Travels with Lost Conquistadors, Mountain Men, Cowboys, Indians, Hoboes, Truckers, and Bullriders), who suggests that the influx is being fueled from both ends of the income spectrum. Early retirement on the one hand and unemployment on the other.
No matter why more people are contemplating or actually choosing a nomadic lifestyle today, Elliott’s article provides a good introduction to actually walking your talk, gleaned from conversations with folks already doing it. Some of the advice is just good common sense ( “Travel extra light” ), while some is more thought-provoking. [click to continue…]

We’ve received lots of positive feedback via email on Lane’s E-Book, Surviving Uncertainty. We’re enjoying the email, and thought readers would like to have a place on the site where they can leave comments and discuss their reactions with each other.
If you haven’t read the book yet, request a free copy. It’s full of thought-provoking ideas about how to navigate uncertain times and make your life a rewarding adventure.
If you have read the book, we’d love to know what you think. Did it resonate with you? Was it helpful? Did it raise any questions? Prompt any new ideas? Let us know in a comment below.
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Every January, the gym where I work out is jam-packed with new members. For about six weeks, it’s a frenetic zoo. And then … it goes back to normal. It’s as predictable as the coming of spring. The regulars remain. But all those good intentions of people wishing to change their fitness levels and workout routines just don’t last. Why is that? Answer: because change is hard. Old patterns and behaviors give up their dominance reluctantly, for a variety reasons—both neurological and psychological. This is hardly a news flash.
But exactly how ingrained our resistance to change is … that’s the first shocker of  Alan Deutschman’s Change or Die  (which started life as an article in the magazine Fast Company, and then became a book by the same title). Imagine, Deutschman says, that your doctor says that you must either change something about your lifestyle or die. You’d change, right? Wrong. Or, at least, wrong 90% of the time. 
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Yet another entry in the “silver linings” category of the economic downturn …
One emerging beneficiary of the widespread rash of professional layoffs, it seems, is the non-profit, volunteer world. A recent front-page article in the New York Times  reported that large numbers of laid-off professionals are looking to volunteer their services while still searching for a new job.
The flood is apparently overwhelming some agencies, as people seek to put their professional skills to use not just the typical one or two hours a week, but 20 hours a week or more. But clearly, the market’s loss is still the community’s gain, and a boon to social service and volunteer-dependent organizations.
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Today marks the official release of my e-book, Surviving Uncertainty: Taking a Hero’s Journey … which we’re offering as a FREE PDF download.
Why free? I’ll get to that in a minute. First, a word or two about the book.
Writing a book is, in and of itself, an uncharted adventure. Regardless of whether it’s a commissioned work or a completely original idea, or whether it’s long or short, the writer still has to figure out how to navigate through the subject material in a way that others can, and will wish to, follow. And, like most adventures, it’s also something that often sounds far better as an idea, or after it’s completed, than it sometimes feels in the middle of the process. And believe me. I know from whence I speak on that one.
But I remember reading something the author Richard Bach (of Jonathan Livingston Seagull fame) said about this arduous book-writing process. He said he only wrote a new book when an idea took hold of him with such power and ferocity that it drove him, almost against his will, across the room to the typewriter to get it down on paper. I mention that here because that’s kind of what happened with Surviving Uncertainty.
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Fear of falling from high heights is supposedly one of our primal, “non-associative” fears—an instinctive reaction developed evolutionarily to protect us from dancing carelessly on cliff edges we could fall from, thus damaging our chances of reproducing and continuing the species. So it’s fascinating to peer inside the psyches … and physiologies … of people whose idea of fun is to leap off 4,000-foot-tall rock cliffs in Norway. Or out of airplanes, for that matter.
Most lay people, without a single scrap of scientific evidence to back them up, would watch a film like the IMAX production Adrenaline Rush and conclude that there is something different going on inside the brains of people who live for that kind of cliff jumping or extreme skydiving. But they might think it’s a psychological difference, not a physiological one. The term “adrenaline junkie” has been around for a long time (much longer than the British reality TV series by that name), but it’s generally used to describe someone who seeks or craves risky, adventurous activities—not a true “junkie” in the physical addiction sense of the word.
In some cases, however, it seems there really might be something physiologically different about people who resist fear and handle stress better, as well as those who seek more “high-risk” thrills and activities.
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Why start a chocolate factory in Ghana?  A fair question that begs all sorts of answers from the comic (” … well, if I had wanted to do it the easy way … “) to the mercantile (“because I thought I could make better, fresher chocolate”). There is truth in both statements. But I get ahead of myself. 
I was 29 and had graduated from law school at the height of a buyer’s market for such services. I graduated from a campus that gave rise to its own intellectual movement—the Chicago School—a rigorous, analytical examination of human behavior whose legal incarnation, Law and Economics, sought to apply cost/benefit and incentive-based analysis to everything from rent controls to the market for adoptable babies. Even though I was far from the top of my class, I had my choice of job offers and received a raise prior to even starting work, because prospective employers were so fearful of losing a recruit to a competing firm. A classmate quipped that we were like shrimp at a cocktail party—always in demand and never enough to go around.
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