Welsh denim entrepreneur David Hieatt (david hieatt) recently tweeted this:
“Being an entrepreneur is one of the most effective personal development programs you can ever take.”
BAM!!! Ain’t that the truth!!??
The question is, why is this so?
The short answer is because to be an entrepreneur, you have to cover all the bases. You got to get everything right.
Via an email 10 October 2020 by Gapingvoid Culture Design.
There’s the joke about how everyone remembers where they were when they first heard The Beatles had broken up, even the people who weren’t born yet.
The Beatles broke up 50 years ago, and yet people are still telling their story, that’s how good they were.
Not only were they the biggest band in the world in terms of sales, but their music was also way ahead of everybody in terms of innovation. Not even the Rolling Stones could keep up with them.
We could talk about why that is. Sure, they were immensely talented. Sure, they were lucky to be at the right place at the right time, as a new, postwar era was opening up and needing new songs to fill the space. Everybody knows all that.
What’s less well known is the “grit”.
Like Malcolm Gladwell wrote in his book, “Outliers”, the average early-1960s Liverpudlian dance band was lucky if they played twice a month. But because The Beatles had that residence gig in Hamburg, they were playing 3–4 times a day, cranked out on speed, for weeks at a time. So they were learning their trade A LOT faster than the boys back home.
Then Beatlemania hit and they worked 20 hour days for the next couple of years, traveling the world, playing shows every night, doing dozens of interviews a week. They were young and they could handle it, but still, it was relentlessly brutal, on a scale unseen before.
Then around 1965, they quit touring. It had gotten too intense. Luckily they were making plenty of money off of record sales (Hey, remember those?) and their name was big enough, so they could afford to.
So while the other bands were living out of tour buses and smashing up hotel rooms, The Beatles could afford to stay home and write songs, reflect, and work on their art, allowing them to make progress at a pace other bands couldn’t keep[ up with. Their fame had bought them a lot of creative space, which they made good use of.
When their manager, Brian Epstein died in 1967, that would have been a good time for the wheel to fall off the wagon and the whole thing came crashing down, as it often happens with bands when a business is so violently disrupted.
But that didn’t happen. Why not? Because Paul McCartney stepped in.
Not a lot of people know this, but Paul was always a workaholic. This explains why, even today, being nearly eighty years old and with more money than Crassus, he still tours extensively. These kind of folk are like sheepdogs- they need to keep really busy or else they go mad.
After 1967, the Beatles were really Paul’s band. He set the agenda, everyone else just tried to keep up, including Lennon, who was content to sit back and chill in rock star comfort. But it was always McCartney cracking the whip.
A lot has been written about why the Beatles broke up. Personal differences, Yoko Ono, etc.
A big part of it was simply they were tired. They’d been at it full tilt for a decade, even before they got famous, and now they were burning out. Not to mention, they were all fabulously wealthy and could afford to call it a day. Their mortgages were paid.
When we look back on The Beatles’ story, we see the music, of course, we see the young men and the fame and the genius and the spectacle and the historical narrative.
What is less mentioned is the *grit*. The long, grinding, days involved just keeping the show on the road. It wasn’t glamorous or sexy, but in many ways, it was the most important part.
As John Lennon once said, “You have to be a bastard to make it, and that’s a fact. And the Beatles are the biggest bastards on Earth..”
You could say “Grit” was the fifth Beatle.
Happy Eightieth Birthday, John. We miss you.
By Gapingvoid Culture Design — Hugh MacLeod
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Originally published via email by Gapingvoid Culture Design on June 25, 2020
Joyce Raby is the Executive Director of the Florida Justice Technology Center. FJTC’s mission is to increase access to justice through the innovative use of technology.
As we settle — as best we can — into a new normal work life that includes remote/virtual offices, I want to speak a bit about how I see this experience as an opportunity to strengthen, renew or even create from scratch a positive and compassionate company culture.
We have lost the ability to see each other at the coffee pot or over lunch or on the way into a meeting; we have lost our ability to socialize with each other in real life. Regular socialization is the key way a company culture gets created and maintained; especially in organizations where company culture is not intentionally developed.
Up to now you may or may not have thought about your organizational culture beyond stating your mission. I once heard an executive director of social services non-profit say something to the effect of “we save all our empathy for our clients; we rarely have compassion for each other”. In the era of Covid-19 and other potential pandemics which force us physically apart, it is critical to nurture your organizational culture intentionally and deliberately.
Culture is the sum total of the social norms of your organization. Those norms are engendered and strengthened through example and repetition. If your colleagues can’t see you and interact with you (hello video conferencing) it will be harder for everyone to maintain and participate in a common culture. Without some direct, intentional strategies for maintaining a positive, compassionate culture (I am assuming you want a positive, compassionate culture), individuals will provide their own context for any action you take — and you may not like the context they create.
Brene Brown — research professor at the University of Houston -talks about “the story I am making up” as one of life’s great hacks for lasting relationships. You can use that phrase at the beginning of a sentence to share your experience or “read” of a situation; and acknowledge that you are pretty sure it isn’t 100% accurate. Her point is that everyone will fill in what they think is happening in a situation to provide context and meaning to their experience. These stories can be far afield of what is actually intended. When you are interacting in person there are usually a number of small, daily moments that can inform and course-correct erroneous assumptions about behavior. In the virtual world, those moments may not exist.
I suggest that leadership take a moment — yes right now — to contemplate and work with your teams to articulate what the organizational culture is; what do you stand for as a group; what do you value? This discussion can provide a common vocabulary your team can use with each other to support and foster a positive and compassionate culture in the absence of in-person interaction.
One tool you can use to accomplish this is a Culture Wall™. We created a Culture Wall™ at FJTC to illustrate our organizational culture. It allowed us as a group to discuss and identify what was important to us as a company. This was our culture wall.
Gapingvoid created the images for us and we used the wall in a variety of ways:
Communicating a message using images is far more powerful than just words. Think of brand names — would Nike be what it is without the swoosh? The creation of the culture wall itself forced us as a group to articulate for each other why each tile was important and how that tile would manifest in our day to day work lives.
Why is company culture so critical right now? As so much of our world is rapidly changing, as each day brings an opportunity for some fresh confusion, a positive and compassionate company culture can serve and support your people. In our rush to find ways to serve our clients; let’s not forget to serve each other.s
Vincent van Gogh made some breakthrough paintings for about 5–10 years, before his life ended.
Andy Warhol was making some pretty radical art for about six or seven years, before going all popstar-formulaic for the rest of his life.
The Beatles had been together just over five years, before they started running out of gas.
Doonesbury was the world’s greatest comic strip in the early seventies, but around 1977–1980 it started losing a lot of its early charm and became a bit more “manufactured”.
J. K. Rowling spent a decade writing the Harry Potter books, then kicked back, a very rich woman. Fair enough.
The Clash, the greatest punk band ever, had a good run of about five years, then imploded.
Even Pablo Picasso, probably the most inventive artist in the history of the world, maxed out at Guernica in the late 1930s and coasted till he died in the 1970s.
And businesses are not that different.
They’ll do amazing work for their first decade as a growing concern, before going public and becoming same ol’, same ol’ commodified, or being bought out and swallowed up by a larger competitor (or going out of business altogether).
What does this tell us? That even with the greatest creators in the world, inventiveness is not unlimited. The gods give us a brief window, and we either jump through it or we don’t.
Five or ten years is not a long time. Five or ten years goes very fast.
Know this when your time comes, and act swiftly.
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I received this article via email from @gapingvoid and thought it was too good and I had this overwhelming feeling to share it. You can see the original email below and here. Note they misspelled van Gogh’s surname, oh my I was distraught about that. A fellow Dutchman and they misspelled his name!
