why I am an entrepreneur.

Risk and Creation in the New Year
When you are a serial entrepreneur, you gotta stay flexible. I have been learning a lot about that – this year and in this economy… I have part-timed as a sommelier, a coat check, a hostess, and now an event manager with a walkie-talkie.

I lead an “interesting” life in the Chinese sense and find myself with time on my hands to think about how I got here.

Beauty from Dirt… my compulsion to create.
Early-on in my career as a workaholic entrepreneur, an Uncle asked me why I worked so hard and devoted myself so completely, when the pinnacle of success was so poorly paid? As an IBM sales executive he saw landscape architecture (my then business) as financially questionable. He seemed to me not very bright, quite risk adverse and an overly fat corporate cat. Did he really have no conception for the compelling act of creating beauty from dirt? Or the God-like rush of seeing a garden bloom in all seasons; or for the compulsion to create at all?

My stupefaction at his attitude would merit a different response now but then even asking the question made him a contender for my least favorite Uncle.

Now that I am considerably older, have four businesses under my belt and stalking a fifth, (2 in real dirt, 1 in hyper-media dirt, and 1 in Internet dirt), I have recently been reconsidering. Perhaps it was me, who was not all that bright. Let’s review:

Why trade an 8 hour a day, well paid job for a life of 16 hour days with no pay and no weekends? Why work so hard and AND pay your own savings in order to get it going?

My Beloved, who is an avowed AA twelve-stepper, recently said,

“ Honey, sounds like you need to consider the second Step… that you need to acknowledge a higher power to return yourself to sanity”

He has never been bitten by the entrepreneurial bug but he knows about addiction.

Why do entrepreneurs gamble like this? Why do I insist on hitting my head against the wall of creation? Creating real value is the stuff of nations. (Take note: ping-pong derivative dealers, though you were clearly well paid and have the singular approval of my uncle…)

I have two things that are bothering me that I am attempting to tease apart from my personal economic dilemmas. This series of posts is about outside forces and their affect on my entrepreneurial efforts; the second is deeper but perhaps even more important to our world, collectively.

1. How does society husband innovation?
2. How can I /we be more successful at it e.g. killing our albatrosses.