David Kelley has a great piece up on The Atlas Society site entitled Life: Your Adventure in Entrepreneurship. You don't have to be an Objectivist or Randian to appreciate it. He discusses the spirit of entrepreneurship and how it applies in all parts of life. Here's the opening graf:
The entrepreneurial spirit is the spirit of enterprise: ambition to succeed, initiative in taking action, alertness to opportunity. It means being proactive rather than reacting to events and opportunities as they come along. It involves a full acceptance of the responsibility for initiating action to achieve one's goals, and for dealing with the consequences that arise as one does so.
I liked this bit on self-ownership:
Not all of us own the businesses we work for. But all of us are self-owners. The concept of self-ownership is a partly metaphorical way of capturing the fact that individuals are ends in themselves. That fact is easier to state in the abstract than it is to embody in the concrete, in one's actual outlook and practice. The sense of self-ownership manifests itself in the kind of total autonomy that leads us to say of someone: "He is his own man." It involves a commitment to one's own happiness as a true end-in-itself—not something one has to apologize for pursuing, not something that one may enjoy only on condition that it serves some other end. It involves the ability to experience happiness without any tendril of guilt at having succeeded. It involves a sense that the only person one answers to, ultimately, is oneself.
Read the whole thing.
Thanks to DaveJ for sending, who also sent me this worthwhile piece on the Myth of Crowdsourcing.
This is much needed for me. Having to face naysayers and people questioning my career choices, this particular paragraph was a highlight for me:
“What is true in the economic sphere is equally true in every other sphere of life. In regard to family, for example, the entrepreneurial outlook does not assume that one must (try to) love one’s parents and siblings, regardless of their actions and character. It does not assume that one must conform to the conventional pattern of getting married, having children, putting them through college, and retiring at 65. That pattern is—or was—conventional because it worked for many people. There’s nothing wrong with choosing it if it works for you. But there’s nothing irresponsible in choosing another pattern of life that works better. The point is to choose on the basis of your cherished and chosen values, and then to act accordingly—that’s the entrepreneurial spirit. Self-ownership and self-esteem”
Thanks for the post, Ben.