Know who will miss you & act accordingly

Let’s imagine something horrible for a few moments. Let’s imagine that you die. That something unexpected occurs and your life is over. The plans you had, the lives you’ve touched would all be thrown into disarray. It is incomprehensible to imagine this, our own death. It’s as if we have this built in mechanism to avoid the mere thought of it. But if it did happen, what would happen at the company you work at? Deadlines would be missed. Some stuff wouldn’t get done. Co-workers would be sad or even shocked. Friends we’ve made would be devastated. There’d be a lot of upheaval, but here’s the over riding reality of you dying and if you work for a large company:

You’d be replaced in 4 weeks.

It’s even foreseeable that the process for replacement would begin the same day the news dropped.

Now let’s compare that to what would happen with your home and family. Lives would be devastated and irreparable. You would never be replaced and the pain of the loss would last a lifetime. Young children would be especially impacted. The hole could not be filled be anyone, anytime, ever.

So why is it that we work late? So why is it we put up with corporate bullying? So why is it we continue to work for jerks for career advancement? Why is it we give large portions of our waking lives to a faceless corporation?  Why would we give an inordinate amount of time and effort to an organisation when the ultimate reality is that we are disposable? The next time you have to make a choice to stay late, play the corporate game and over deliver to corporation  XYZ, and choose between the job and the family, maybe you should think about how they’d act if the unthinkable happened. Once you remind yourself of this you’ll know what choice to make.

It’s another reason why we need to listen to the call to run our own race, and create our own future and for independence. The people who deserve us the most, are those who couldn’t live without us.

 

We only have one

There is no career, only life.

If we think of our life and career as separate entities, we’ve  got things terribly wrong. They are inextricably linked. If we want to be happy, we need to make sure what we spend our days doing is how we want our life to be.

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World of Venn

While we are bootstrapping our startups, it’s worth bootstrapping our lives simultaneously. We should be building projects with overlaps, to the extent that we end up living in a ‘World of Venn’. For the ‘un-nerds’ who can’t quite remember the Venn diagram, here’s a simple explanation:

Venn Diagram:
n.   A diagram using circles to represent sets, with the position and overlap of the circles indicating the relationships between the sets.

[After John Venn (1834-1923), British logician.]

The reason for doing this is simple. By living in a ‘World of Venn’, we are building intellectual assets which have synergy. Assets which are connected metaphysically. Constructs with similar ideals which can be shared, borrowed or stolen. The people in these worlds often overlap too. They’re often interested in learning about and helping in other areas of our Venn worlds. And importantly when one set dies or withers, it has an overlapping intersection on which we can refocus our efforts without having to start from the beginning.

Here’s a sample of parts of my world and the Venn relationships.

ss-venn-diagram

As you can see my worlds overlap and all build revenue streams.
–    Ideas and experiences from rentoid.com, give me great writing fodder and intellectual stimulation for this blog you are reading right now.
–    Startup blog has lead to more professional business writing I do for magazines and journals
–    My academic career at Melbourne University has lead to more Business writing and an upcoming book on marketing & investing.

The point is – they all feed each other, build on one another and leverage my personal areas of expertise.

Each success in one section adds credibility and strength to an overlapping area. The more overlaps we have, the larger our sweet spot becomes. When we have a great number of overlaps, life gets sweeter and the rewards are greater. This is why ‘work life balance’ is simply a hoax. Work is a large part of our life and should be joyous. To try and find time for things outside of work we actually ‘enjoy’, means we’ve got our life wrong. Once we live in a world of Venn our personal and financial growth is inevitable.

Venn is Zen. How Venn is your life?

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