THE DREAM IN ACTION

I’ve been reading Seth Godin’s brilliant book, Tribes, over the past week. One of Godin’s theories in the book, that I definitely buy into is the importance of carving a niche with your message. A Tribe by Godin’s definition is a tightly interacting group of people, bound by a special interest. His call to action is for “you” to be the leader of that tribe. It’s time for “you” to step up. He also notes, about tribes, that if they’re too broad they will be diluted and never really operate optimally, or have any real impact on the world. The leaders message, if broad, will be lost with all the other broad messages. It’s the same issue as we’ve all read about before on the web, the signal vs. noise paradox.

In order to avoid getting lost among the others, I thought it would be appropriate to define the types of individuals that I think have enjoyed THE DREAM IN ACTION so far. I never rule out any transitions or changes in focus as experiences, both yours and mine, change. “The only constant is change” so I think it would be foolish to say that this blog won’t.

Here are the types of folks I think would dig this stuff:

1. Mustard Seed Entrepreneurs

By ‘mustard seed entrepreneur’ (did I just coin this term?) I mean those who don’t necessarily have tons of experience running a company and may only have an idea the size of a mustard seed. This includes early stage startups, “we just launched” types, or those who have an idea but are not really sure how to make it something real. The key is that we’re still learning how to extract potential out of ideas with our actions.

There is value in everyone’s ideas and I want to encourage and aid people in the extraction of value from those ideas through deliberate action. I also want you to challenge me. If content gets stale, if action isn’t being taken towards what I want to achieve, or if something I say does not help you get closer to living the dream, then call me on it. The conversation will benefit us all.

2. Corporate Entrepreneurs

What I like about entrepreneurship is that it’s not just starting a business. It’s a sense of creating value from minimal resources. Entrepreneurship is a cousin of innovation, and innovation can be found, although sometimes not easily, within large corporations. Did you hear that? Entrepreneurs can be found within large corporations!

I work for a Fortune 3 and I fully consider myself an entrepreneur because I initiate change by challenging the status quo daily. Is it easy to be innovative within a giant? Maybe not, but it’s possible. In fact, your large corporation needs your innovative attitude; you are the exact individual that will keep your major corp a major corp. Without entrepreneurial behavior within a large corporation, that company will fail.

In fact, I think that normal entrepreneurs have a lot to learn from corporate entrepreneurs. Sure there are significant challenges faced by growing a company but I can speak first hand to the many challenges of making big changes within the grip of a major corporate structure. What I’d like to see here is both internal and external entrepreneurs joining forces to solve big, world changing problems.

3. People Searching for The Dream

Certain people, the lucky (and hard working ones) always talk about “loving what they do“, they often have experiences that everyone would envy. THE DREAM IN ACTION is about learning from those people, dissecting what they are saying, and executing on that so that you don’t hit snooze five times, but are excited to “crush it“!

I’m not there…yet. But we’re going to continue to analyze, hypothesize, and test the ‘how’s’ and the ‘whys’ until the secret is disclosed. Through a trial and error process, because that’s the only way I know how, I will continue to shoot for that end. Eventually, we’ll hit it, together. Won’t you join me?

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Posting Schedule

I’ve been playing around with the idea of having a set posting schedule. The purpose of this is two fold; first, it will help readers who want to come back on a regular basis for the best possible content I can deliver, and second, it will bring routine and schedule to my thought processes and my ability to fully extract value from my experiences and share them here.

As stated before, it would be foolish of me to think that this will never change, but for the foreseeable future I’d like to post with some regularity. Of course I’ll have to work around, family commitments, work commitments, self imposed writing schedules for the book/s I’m working on, and any advisory work that I have lined up for The Renliv Group. So, after talking with other bloggers in my community both physically and online, I’ve decide to post on Monday and Thursday with what I’ll call, full posts, and on the weekend with blurbs. These blurbs will be things like project updates, cool people I’ve met, or non dream chasing activities that I think are interesting enough to share (for other less post worthy thoughts check out my personal blog).

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My One Favor

I’m aware that I’ve not yet earned your trust and am possibly not yet worthy of your attention, but I’ll only ask only one favor of you. Please react. Whether you love a post and want to share it on Twitter, or Stumble it, or email to friends, OR if you hate it and want to ‘constructively’ call me out in the comments, either way is fine. I just ask that you let me know what you think so that we can improve, learn, and grow towards a more action filled dream.

image via inWaves