Chapter 6

Harness your Entrepreneurial Energy

With the first strategy of the Finch Effect, you adopted a gig mindset and reclaimed ownership of and power over your career. Now, in the fifth and final strategy of the Finch Effect, you will harness that sense of individual ownership by incorporating entrepreneurial tactics and methods into your career strategy. In other words, you'll find ways to think and act strategically, like an entrepreneur and owner of your own career path, no matter what your employment circumstances are.

It's interesting the way people react to the word “entrepreneur.” They seem to use a kind of absolute logic that makes them either completely identify with the term or completely separate themselves from it. It's the same sort of thought process that people approach creativity with—to my mind, the statements “I am not creative” and “I am not entrepreneurial” have a lot in common. Yet we all have entrepreneurial potential. Members of the Fittest know it and act accordingly. Entrepreneurial capability is a basic human attribute, and we live in a time when it's possible—and a smart idea—to develop that potential.

How does the concept of being entrepreneurial resonate with you? If you don't identify with it, I encourage you to reevaluate your understanding of the term. In a great opinion piece for the Washington Post, Vivek Wadhwa, the director of research at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at Duke University, enumerated the top commonly held misconceptions about typical American entrepreneurship. He noted that the stereotypes we see in the news, like Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates, paint a picture for the rest of us that in order to be a successful entrepreneur, you need to be a technology visionary, a genius 20-something, or a college dropout with a healthy disdain for being a sheep in the system (and it helps to have a gift for winning over venture capitalists with your nonconformist visions and uncompromising attitude).1

But the truth is that entrepreneurs in this country come from all backgrounds, industries, and base funding amounts. Their business endeavors can grow into small or midsized businesses, or can remain one-man shops. From what I've observed about members of the Fittest and learned from my own experience, age, education, and industry have nothing to do with an individual's potential to be an entrepreneur. The only requirements are a desire to create vocational opportunity for yourself and the initiative, direction, and sense of ownership to do so. Simply put, an entrepreneur is someone who is enterprising.

Part of being a member of the Fittest is embodying this kind of entrepreneurship—whether you are creating a new business or just a new opportunity within your current career. The Fittest understand that other people may present you with opportunities but that often, in order to best advance your career and support your adaptive professional brand, you need to create them yourself.

I am not going to spend the rest of the chapter trying to talk you into going professionally rogue (although we will go there for a while). But I am going to try to talk you into harnessing what I call entrepreneurial energy to support your career success as a member of the Fittest.

The simplest explanation of entrepreneurial energy comes down to the practical application of the gig mindset you have cultivated in the first Finch Effect strategy. The entire premise of the first strategy is that once you make the mental shift to owning your career, and adjust your perspective to ownership, you will be in a position to take action and succeed regardless of what is going on in the job market. Entrepreneurial energy fuels that action, and it can be utilized in several ways.

One way members of the Fittest use entrepreneurial energy is by approaching their work as employees in a way that further differentiates them from their peers and increases their value to the organization. As I've mentioned before, some of the skills and business tactics that have served me best as an employee are ones I learned when working for myself.

Another way that the Fittest expend entrepreneurial energy is by diversifying their income sources through business endeavors outside their current job. Working on the side can help you build expertise in your industry, thus making you more valuable as an employee. If you lose your job or find your hours reduced, having established work outside of your traditional job can serve not only as a means of monetary support but also as a launchpad for the next step in your career.

A final Fittest way to harness entrepreneurial energy is to actually jump the employer ship and become a full-fledged entrepreneur. Depending on where you are in your career, what your lifestyle needs are, and what's going on in your industry, striking out on your own may be the best way to adapt and succeed in the job market.

In this chapter, we will examine each of these three uses of entrepreneurial energy in depth to discover which application is the right fit for your current situation and adaptive professional brand. As we explore each more deeply, I encourage you to keep your mind open and alert, even if you think you know which tactic you will pursue. We know by now that the key to our vocational success is an ever evolving refinement of our Finch Effect skills as our needs and the needs of the job market change.

So let's go once more unto the breach, dear friends, and get to work on harnessing your entrepreneurial energy.

Entrepreneurial Energy and the F-Word

Can you think of a time when you failed? I mean really failed?

I can, several times, and they are all embarrassing to think about. It's amazing how an experience of totally dropping the ball can make you sensitive to the possibility of future failure. In fact, the most frightening element of entrepreneurship is the real possibility of failure. Even when we ask ourselves the “right” questions about the risks and rewards of starting our own venture, there is no escaping the fact that failure is a potential outcome. And in a dicey economy, it is normal that the fear of failure is more acute than it might be in better job markets.

As we begin to examine the benefits and limitations of harnessing your entrepreneurial energy to thrive as a member of the Fittest, I'd like you to acknowledge the presence of the “f-word” in your mind and think about what would happen in the event that you did fail professionally. Self-limiting beliefs about failure, much like the concept of confirmation bias we talked about in the second chapter, have the capacity to poison our perspective, drawing it away from seeing and seizing on information and opportunities to use our entrepreneurial energy and thrive.

Let's break down what would happen if you actually and truly failed.

First, you'd probably be embarrassed or angry. I can tell you that when I fail I feel keenly the stupidity, injustice, and unfairness of it all. If you ever need help becoming aware of your negative self-talk, all you have to do is fail, and you will hear it inescapably loud and clear.

Then, depending on the nature of the failure, there might be some consequences, like lost members of your target market, wasted money, or a damaged reputation. And then there might be some penance, like slaps on the wrist from superiors, the slow rebuilding of broken trust, or the even slower refilling of the piggy bank. And then what?

Nothing. That's about all failure is made of.

Some failures might take longer than others to recover from, but typically, failures—even epic ones—are pretty short-lived affairs. Think about celebrity scandals, even the worst one you can imagine: they are all anyone can talk about for about a week, and then suddenly they're off the world's radar. Our failures, though they're less public, have about the same half-life, for one simple reason: contrary to our pervasive belief (and we all share this one), the rest of the world isn't thinking about or paying attention to us all the time. A good scandal is compelling enough to pull people out of their self-centric, internal dialogues for a short burst of time, but sooner rather than later we all want to get back to thinking about ourselves and our own issues, not others'.

The truth is that what makes a failure persist is our inability to let it go. Our emotional bruises from failure have a way of shutting us down and preventing us from learning and growing from it. We adopt failure as part of our perspective, and begin to perceive our situation and place in the world through the context of those experiences. It can be a really limiting way to live and work. The worst thing about having such a perspective is that it can be self-fulfilling. It's not surprising then that we are less likely to be defined by our successes than by the way we embrace our failures.

Actually, failures can open up golden opportunities to succeed if you know how to handle them. Hardly any successful people have never experienced significant failure—and the most spectacularly successful people have likely experienced spectacular failure at some point. And have grown from it.

In my understanding, there are four main approaches people take to turning entrepreneurial failure into success: persistence, alternating the venue, reworking strategies, and starting over.

The persistence method is short and simple: if at first you don't succeed, try, try again until you do. The persistence method works when you believe that what you are doing is right and that eventually it will yield the result you want. If you know you have a good idea, you don't stop until it works. Tenacity and not taking no for an answer (even if you actually get no for an answer over and over) can sometimes be the best way to push through the wall of failure and reach success on the other side. For example, you open a business in a location that might not be yielding immediate returns, but you believe it will be a prime location in a matter of time as a result of other community development.

Yet sometimes it's not the idea that is failing; it is where you are implementing it. The alternating the venue method for turning failure into success works by moving a sound strategy to a different venue for implementation. If your business is not doing well at the initial location, you decide to relocate to another part of town where more of your target audience can be found, or you take it online and ditch the brick-and-mortar shop.

The method of reworking strategies is characterized by examining your whole approach, cutting out parts that are not helping, and implementing new strategies. To continue our example, you decide not only to change the location of the store but also to adjust its layout, redesign your logo, and streamline your product offerings to increase their customer appeal.

This method requires a willingness to pull your goal strategy apart, analyze what's working and what isn't, and then put it back together . . . maybe with parts from another strategy patched in here and there. This is more time consuming than the first two methods as it constitutes a partial return to the drawing board. It's a good approach to take when you know your strategy needs reevaluating but there are salvageable elements.

A fourth approach to turning failure into success is the aptly named starting over method. This we do when the whole enterprise has failed. We take our dreams back to the drawing board and start from scratch. Sometimes our plans for success seem like great ideas at the time, and only failure exposes the holes in our strategies, showing us how to correct course and start anew. This might mean closing the store altogether, cutting our losses, and reexamining the product concept entirely. To take this approach, we have to be willing to look at our failure squarely and analyze it carefully, not flinch away from it in shame and disappointment.

And that can be hard to do.

In fact, many people see this final method as the embodiment of failure: you tried, it didn't work, and now you have to start over with nothing to show for it. This is not true, of course. What you have to show for the first attempt is wisdom, experience, and an idea of what not to do. How many ways did they say Thomas Edison found to not make a light bulb? It was a lot, but the exact number doesn't matter, just the idea. When you fail and have to start over, you have just found a way to avoid not getting what you want.

You have to admit, when you look past the stigma of failing, there is something liberating about using the starting-over method. As far as I am concerned, the only true failure is allowing yourself to accept failure. Trying, failing, and succeeding are all parts of our evolution and growth. We shouldn't be afraid of embracing our entrepreneurial energy, one of our most powerful capabilities as members of the Fittest, for fear of failure. With so many ways to handle any failure that comes our way, entrepreneurial or otherwise, we have no reason not to jump at the chance to wield that energy and use it to thrive.

Using Entrepreneurial Energy inside your Organization

What does it mean to “use entrepreneurial energy inside your organization”? Simply put, it means thinking like an entrepreneur while acting like an employee.

Traditionally, the roles of employee and entrepreneur represent two completely different professional archetypes, each with their own ideal skill set. For example, success for employees is often measured by how well they take direction from superiors, act within the scope of their job responsibilities or functions, and reinforce the mission, vision, or values of the organization. Success for entrepreneurs is typically determined by their ability to direct their own work and act without precedent, to expand and grow their job responsibilities and functions, and to envision and support a mission, vision, and set of values on their own. Another way to look at it is to think of the role of the employee as implementing the tactics of an organization—the individual actions that contribute to the success of the larger strategy. The role of entrepreneurs is to develop that larger strategy and implement it themselves or oversee its implementation.

From my experience in professional development and management consulting, I can tell you that the number one complaint organizations have about their employees is their inability to act tactically but think strategically—or, as above, to act like an employee but think like an entrepreneur. This requires being a follower and a leader simultaneously, and knowing which hat to wear when. Understandably, employees who can pull off this nuanced balancing act are a rarity—to the consternation of organizations that need this combination of tactical action and strategic thought to keep innovating, setting new standards, and adapting themselves to economic conditions. The result is that employees who can meet the requirements of their job while also contributing to and improving the strategic leadership of their organization are worth their weight in gold to their employers.

Steve can tell you firsthand. While working as a software analyst for a major financial firm, he was given the responsibility of managing a large collection of computer scripts that were integral to accurately processing the firm's data. The opportunity was a big one, especially for a member of the team who had been with the firm for just a year after college. The only problem was that the computer scripts had been originally written at an amateur level. Data that influenced forecasting models were delayed daily, jeopardizing informed investment decisions. Steve was in a tough position, “I hadn't written any of this code, but that didn't stop anyone from blaming me for the daily data problems. I owned the code, after all.”

After a month of trying to manage the subpar code, he realized he needed to approach the issue from a more entrepreneurial angle. Acting without precedent, Steve started “pouring effort” into rebuilding the code from scratch using the latest coding language. “I didn't ask permission,” he notes. “I saw what needed to be done and I did it. In the end my solution might have been rejected by management. Months of work would have been cast aside. I would have been disappointed, but I also would have tried again.”

But starting over wasn't necessary, as his solution effectively solved the problem. “After a month I had rebuilt most of the scripts, and within two months I had totally redesigned the data processing system. What used to break every day and take hours to fix now broke once a week or less and could usually be fixed in a few minutes. Daily data was now available before most analysts had even pulled into the parking lot and, more importantly, it was far more accurate.”

The entrepreneurial energy Steve harnessed to take ownership and solve a big issue in his organization yielded tangible dividends as well: he was promoted twice in his first year on the job and received an off-cycle bonus to reward his efforts. I'll say it again: employees who can meet the requirements of their job while also contributing to and improving the strategic leadership of their organization are worth their weight in gold to their employers. As Steve's experience shows, members of the Fittest who want to remain in their current organizations have found that harnessing their entrepreneurial energy to help meet their role requirements has led to improved performance, differentiation from their peers, and an overall increase in their professional worth.

Additionally, people who are interested in staying in their industry but shifting organizations have found the use of their entrepreneurial energy helpful for developing and communicating their APB to their target market. In spite of the positive reputation Steve had cultivated at his firm, in large part due to his ability to think like an entrepreneur but act like an employee, he decided to leave after two years to go work at a start-up. The projects he had used his entrepreneurial energy to drive at his previous firm were excellent vehicles for sharing his APB with his new company, InsightSquared. But six months later, he was getting calls from his old managers at the large financial firm asking him to come back. “They had designed a position specifically for me and were offering me a much better salary than I had been making when I left. But the start-up was a better overall fit. I've already made the leap from 40,000th employee to 6th employee, and after this it might be time to find out what it's like to be the 1st employee.”

I learned a host of entrepreneurial skills after I left my nine-to-five to build my writing career in 2008—skills like market research and business management, which had been foreign to me as an employee. But when I found myself working again as an employee several years later, I was able to harness those entrepreneurial skills to my advantage, and my organization's. The most important of these has been productivity. Not only did I find my productivity skills easily transferred from entrepreneurial endeavors to an employee situation, but I also found they did more to enhance my professional worth than the other skills I had learned.

When you're a writer, productivity can sometimes feel subjective: “Oh, I didn't get that much down on paper today, but I did a lot of ‘mental work’ on my article/blog/book.” Yeah, that was an excuse I found myself making in the early freelancing days. What I soon realized was that “mental work” days were all well and good . . . until I was scrambling to pay my electric bill.

When your livelihood depends on self-imposed productivity, you either get good at it or you find yourself in mounds of debt. The initial bloom of freedom that came from not needing to be chained to a desk for a set of specific hours every day withered a little when I discovered that I had no idea how to get things done unless I had a boss to answer to. Productivity—real, self-driven productivity—was one of the first entrepreneurial skills I learned. It served me well when I was on my own, and it has served me even better as an employee because it requires a kind of organization and self-motivation that employees aren't necessarily incentivized to cultivate. After all, if you are superproductive, all you'll get is more work to do, right?

Yes, and in more than one sense. You may be assigned more responsibilities and tasks, but you will also likely be offered more opportunity in the organization . . . as long as you make sure someone notices the effort. Like the proverbial tree falling in the forest, if a man works eighty hours a week and no one sees him, does he still get a raise? (No.) This is why productivity, when combined with a great adaptive professional brand, is an awesome recipe for increasing your value within an organization.

Break it Down: Build your Productivity Skills
Here are a few productivity lessons that transfer well between entrepreneurial ventures and employee situations:
Allow yourself to procrastinate. If you find yourself sitting at your desk and staring into space or surfing through articles on Cracked.com for a few hours, then you are likely procrastinating. Procrastination often corresponds to certain parts of the day (3 p.m., anyone?) or is linked to fatigue and burnout. When you are being unproductive and avoidant of your job tasks, then it is probably in your best interest to get up and away from your workstation for a while (perhaps twenty to forty-five minutes). Walk around the office, talk to your coworkers, take a coffee break, and if possible get outside for some sunshine. Sitting at your station just because you think you have to is foolish and ineffective. If anyone says something to you about it, be honest: sometimes you just have to go where the procrastination takes you. Note: This strategy should be used with caution; it can easily turn into an excuse for inaction if used too often!
Learn your attention schedule. The problem I have always found with the nine-to-five model (aside from the fact that it's crumbling underneath us) is that it isn't conducive to our individual attention schedules. Not everyone is at his mental best from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. exactly. Some may do better work in the morning; others, later in the day. Unless you have a boss who is open to flexible scheduling, you will need to pay attention to your own attention peaks and valleys during the day, and then try to build your daily tasks around them. For example, if you observe that you do your best work in the morning, try to keep your hours before lunch clear and schedule meetings and so forth in the afternoon.
Replace to-dos with goals. Supplement your to-do task list at work with a list of goals to be accomplished. In 1968, Edwin Locke, who studied the psychology of achievement and success, reported that employees who had clear goals achieved much more than those who had nebulous tasks or didn't understand the ultimate goal of their responsibilities.2 When you see the larger picture of each task—the strategy—you are more motivated to complete it quickly and with higher quality, as opposed to just looking at a list of unrelated or uninspiring tasks.

Productivity is just one example of a traditional employee skill that I am able to leverage for my APB within my organization because I bring my entrepreneurial perspective to it. You can do this with other skills, even if you don't have an entrepreneurial background, by conducting a thought experiment. What would you need to do to maintain or increase your success with that skill if you became the CEO tomorrow? Or better yet, imagine that all of your higher-ups were on vacation for a few years and you needed to accomplish your workload without any direction or anyone checking up on you. What would you do? The point is to look at your job responsibilities and required skills from a place of ownership, initiative, and personal direction. Remember, it's about tactics and strategy.

Break it Down: Should i Stay or should i Go?
A major misconception that arises in recessions or down economic times is that career mobility is on hold. Not so! Actually, if we have the intestinal fortitude to see it, a great benefit of an evolving job market is that all options need to be on the table. It may seem counterintuitive, but now is not the time to consent to staying at an organization that doesn't meet your strategic needs or support your APB.
This exercise asks you to reflect on and move past your perceptions on job mobility in a recession, and provide an authentic and comprehensive answer to the question “Should I stay in my job or move on?”
To begin, try to relax and focus your thoughts on the exercise. Allow yourself about a half hour of undisrupted time to consider the following questions. I encourage you to write your answers to each on a separate piece of paper—this will help you organize your thoughts and also give you space to write down further thoughts that develop and be as specific as possible.
This exercise is extremely valuable, not only for gauging whether you want to stay in your particular job but for assessing how you can more effectively channel your entrepreneurial energy. If you like your organization, you can use your entrepreneurial energy to cultivate new opportunities for yourself through using that energy inside your organization. If you want to explore other options within your field or start to branch out in a new field altogether, you will find harnessing your energy outside of your organization to be most useful. Let's take a look at what that means.

Using Entrepreneurial Energy Outside your Organization

If you are concerned about the stability of your industry or organization, or if you want to continue to develop your adaptive professional brand beyond the scope of your company, then you should consider harnessing your entrepreneurial energy outside of your organization.

Adding some on-the-side entrepreneurial endeavors may seem like just one more thing to fit into your already strapped schedule, but the benefits can make it well worthwhile. What benefits, you may ask? How about:

An additional benefit to using your entrepreneurial energy outside of your organization is the capacity to further specialize your skill set and continue to stand out from the crowd by creating a professional niche. By focusing your on-the-side work on something related to but tangential to your job or industry, you are adding another unique skill combination to the offering component of your professional brand. You will also likely be chasing a slightly different target market than your peers. If you are a sales consultant with a CPA or a doctor with an MBA, what positions or opportunities might you qualify for that you wouldn't if you were just a sales consultant or a doctor?

You have heard the phrase “a big fish in a small pond,” referring to being the best in a small pool of competitors. When I say create and fill your own niche, I don't mean be a big fish in a small pond; I mean be the only fish in a pond of your making. All you need is a little imagination and a fresh perspective on your current career to identify how your entrepreneurial energy can do just that.

Using Entrepreneurial Energy while Unemployed

Job seekers who are underemployed or unemployed or even soon-to-be graduates can use this “outside your organization” entrepreneurial energy to balance part-time work (or job hunting) with building out their APBs. The first thing I thought of when I spoke to Kathleen on the phone in October 2009 was, “This woman could sell ketchup on a stick.” Her voice, both authoritative and cool, and her eloquent manner of speaking made it immediately apparent that she was perfectly suited to her field: public relations.

Just one month earlier, Kathleen had been laid off from her position as public relations director at an electric cooperative in Fort Meyers, Florida. “They told me it was my last day about fifteen minutes after I walked into the office,” she sighed. “I really thought I was going to be there for many more years.”

Kathleen knew she wanted to stay in her field and couldn't wait to get back into the action. After a week of feeling bummed that her friends were at work while she was home alone, she had an epiphany: “Just because I am unemployed doesn't mean I have to put my career on hold.” So instead of focusing only on a job search, she kept equal focus on ways to advance her career in spite of the fact that she was unemployed. And so Kathleen Taylor, member of the Fittest, was born.

One of her main strategies was to seek out freelance PR opportunities to bring in some cash and add jobs and references to her résumé. To do this, she worked her network: “I am president of my local chapter of the Florida Public Relations Association, so I made sure I told my board and other members of my professional network that I was available for freelance projects. A lot of them had some contracted work offers they were able to toss my way, helping me to stay afloat and take the reins of my career.”

Now, instead of debating how to proceed, Kathleen is embracing the ability to expand her industry experience while she continues to develop her next career move. “Who knows what fantastic opportunity is waiting for me next? I am watching, waiting, and preparing. And in the meantime, I am taking one of the first breaks of my adult life to . . . well . . . breathe.”

Kathleen's robust embrace of freelancing, even as she stays alert to the next right thing, is a great example of on-the-side use of entrepreneurial energy. Here are a few concrete suggestions for exercising your entrepreneurial capacity to build your brand whether you are happily employed at the moment or not:

When it comes to harnessing your entrepreneurial energy outside your organization, doing it for free—as unappealing as that may sound—isn't a bad strategy. Roberta Chinsky Matuson, blogger for Fast Company online and president of Human Resource Solutions, notes, “When doing this, be sure to establish clear guidelines . . . . For example, rather than tying yourself up five days a week, offer to [provide your service] two days a week. Be sure you have settled on a role that will enhance your skills. If all you are going to be doing is fetching coffee, then you might as well apply for a paid job at a coffee shop.”3

Or if you have the desire, you could just start your own coffee shop . . .

Using Entrepreneurial Energy to Build your Organization

In the fall of 2009, I had the opportunity to chat with Howard Stephen Berg, master entrepreneur and the Guinness World Record holder for speed-reading. Formerly a New York City public school teacher, Berg won his title in 1990 for his ability to read 25,000 words per minute, and since then has parlayed that talent into a multimillion dollar business, authoring seven books and developing the Mega Speed Reading program, which has grossed over $65 million since its launch. In the summer of 2009, he starred in an endorsement for the Sony eReader alongside Justin Timberlake, who, Berg reported to me, is “a nice young man and great entrepreneur” (to my *NSYNC heart's disappointment, Berg remained professional and refused to give me his contact info).

Berg is a perennial champion for entrepreneurialism. “Why are people even looking for jobs?” he blustered in his New York accent. “We live in a capitalist country. Go out and build a company!” Now a grandfather, Berg is insistent that American workers—especially the younger generations—start thinking entrepreneurially to stay competitive with foreign competition: “Other countries are developing strong entrepreneurial mindsets and we need to keep pace in order to keep up with the world.” In his mind, there are no better candidates for this responsibility than young professionals; he sees them as being more open to learning and adapting than older workers.4

While Berg was chatting with me about the glories of entrepreneurialism on the East Coast, three thousand miles away in Orange County, California, Christin was preparing to sit back down at her computer after a leisurely lunch.

Christin, 31, was laid off from her job as a digital music consultant in July 2008. As a consultant, Christin didn't qualify for unemployment benefits and needed a way to start bringing in money before she devoured her savings. “I became so desperate that I even applied for minimum-wage retail jobs. I didn't receive any callbacks on jobs I applied for, and in retrospect I think that was a blessing, because for the first time in my life I am truly passionate about what I do for a living.”

After three months of trying to get back into the traditional workforce, Christin committed to getting herself back on track, just a completely different one. Instead of continuing to perceive her situation as something tragic, Christin shifted her thought process and started looking for a new opportunity. The result? “I finally took the leap and started my own business. I had been developing an idea for a business for about three years but didn't really have time to pursue it since I'd been working full time. I started Green 4 Your Soul, a one-stop shop for all things green. By June of 2009, I had launched my business website, and I continue to build my client base daily. I look forward to working every day, a feeling I never had while working corporate jobs.”

Now, while most of her friends are still stuck in the daily grind, Christin is reveling in making her own schedule and running her own business. “I find that I work around the clock including weekends, but I try to mix things up so I don't get too burnt out or overwhelmed in one sitting. I never feel overworked like I did working in corporate America.”

Her typical daily schedule is enough to make any full-time employee green with envy. Here is what a day in the life of Christin Sheehe, entrepreneur and member of the Fittest, looks like:

It's incredible to think that just a year ago she was battling depression over being unemployed. What's even more incredible is that I have heard many similar stories from other members of the Fittest around the country who harnessed their entrepreneurial energy to successfully—and happily—strike out on their own: the advertising account manager turned self-employed photographer, the big-firm lawyer who opened her own specialized practice, or the insurance agent who now runs her own boutique jewelry store in her hometown. Taking the plunge into entrepreneurship is particularly attractive to professionals who have seen opportunities in their industry dry up over the last few years, getting outsourced to foreign labor markets or replaced with technological solutions. It is also attractive to those who are itching to break out of the nine-to-five routine and pursue their passions as their occupations.

At first blush, starting your own business in a down economy might seem like a bad idea. After all, if the huge corporate guys with hundreds of millions to play with are teetering on the brink of disaster, why would a microbusiness fare any better? In a September 2011 article in USA Today, Laura Petrecca notes that thought processes like this are causing the number of self-employed Americans (incorporated and unincorporated) to remain stagnant since the recession started in 2008. She lists financial concerns and a lack of confidence as the major reasons why people are backing away from entrepreneurial paths.5

And while Christin's patio-filled schedule does seem like a slice of heaven for those of us who are office bound, it's not all dog walking and sun-soaking. She acknowledges the inherent challenges of entrepreneurship along with the benefits: “You are going to have to work harder since you are not working for someone else, but if you are doing what you love it doesn't feel like work. Because twenty-four/seven you are getting the word out on your business. And if you do that, you can quickly build a following and a living.”

In spite of reports noting a decrease in self-employed Americans, an August 2011 data report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that there are still over fourteen million Americans who are self-employed, even in the face of double-dip recession woes. And when it comes to starting your own business, the news isn't all doom and gloom: commercial real estate is down, making office space more affordable to lease; thanks to the internet, setting up an effective online marketing campaign is fast and inexpensive; and with an almost double-digit unemployment rate, finding customers for a product or service may be no more difficult than finding a job. As far as the security piece goes, I beg to differ: with such high unemployment, it is hard for this observer of the Fittest to believe that a full-time job is any more of a sure thing than working for yourself.

But even with these motivating points, I can't tell you that there is no real risk to starting your own business. In any economy, good or bad, some ventures will succeed and some will fail. Others will plug along unspectacularly until the creator moves on to a new project or sells it to someone who can make it succeed. How yours would fare is a matter of a million factors, including preparation, determination, passion, and a healthy dose of luck.

Break it Down: What's your Entrepreneurial Readiness?
If you are starting to consider the possibility that now or sometime down the road you might branch out on your own as an entrepreneur, here are some prompts to help you consider how ready you are, both mentally and logistically, to handle the risks and potential outcomes of entrepreneurship:
Take a minute to review your responses to these prompts. Do you see any trends or recurring themes that give you pause about pursuing an entrepreneurial endeavor? I have found that seeing your responses to these questions written out in your own hand can help you sort through your feelings and determine if this is the right way to move your career forward.

When you take an entrepreneurial leap, even your best-laid plans are subject to greater than normal instances of Murphy's Law; that is to say, if it can go wrong it will. So if you are planning to make the leap, you need to plan for extra resources to handle the inevitable arrival of unanticipated costs. Before you get started, it's not a bad idea to double or even triple what you think you might need to be on the safe side. Tony just opened his own pizza shop . . . six months later than expected. After leasing the commercial space in November 2010, he found himself trying to repair an obscure part of an old pizza oven and battling the local town board for the licenses they required. The store opened, and it's lovely—although it would have been lovelier if Tony hadn't blown all his savings on maintaining the rent, electricity, gas, water, and spoiled food costs for months before opening.

I share this story with you not to deter you from opening your own pizza place (I would never stand in the way of more pizza in the world!) but to remind you that when things go wrong—and they will—remember the mentality of ownership that you cultivated in Chapter Two. Successful entrepreneurship is about focusing on what you can problem-solve, doing your homework, and learning how to fail, successfully.

Break it Down: Blue-Skying your Entrepreneurial Pursuit
The point of this exercise is to start brainstorming potential entrepreneurial pursuits, free from conceptual limitations about what is possible or sensible. I want you to consider and answer each of these questions as if there were no recession, and allow yourself to be as creative as you can be. Let your thoughts move organically. Don't think realistically—think potentially! The sky is the limit here, and your answers should reflect free and unbound thought. Allow yourself about fifteen minutes of quiet time to complete this exercise.

Harnessing your Entrepreneurial Energy for Good

The real value of harnessing your entrepreneurial energy is that it expands the ways in which you are capable of adapting to and thriving among changes in the job market. As culture and the economy continue to shift over the course of your career, you will almost certainly find that your success as a professional calls for using this energy in different ways: at some points you may need to run your own business venture, while at other times finding a way to leverage your entrepreneurial potential within an organization might serve you best.

One of the great tensions in the career-long journey of professional evolution is maintaining a balance between comfort and discomfort. We all have a vocational comfort zone: that role, set of responsibilities, or skill set that feels safe, familiar, and competent. Our natural instinct is to retreat into this comfort zone, especially during periods of high stress or major upset. But as members of the Fittest, we balance living in that comfort zone with embracing the discomfort associated with change, transition, and adaptation. If we err too far on the side of comfort, we miss the rewards and opportunities that can come from challenging ourselves and stretching our boundaries of resilience and potential. Yet if we err too far on the side of discomfort, we lose touch with the solid base that keeps our forward progress grounded and stable even amid the stress and anxiety of change.

The importance of this balance between comfort and discomfort is especially evident when you work to deploy your entrepreneurial energy in your career. As I noted earlier in the chapter, many people perceive a lot of stress and anxiety around entrepreneurship, especially in its full-fledged form. While at this point you might be feeling a buzz of possibility around entrepreneurship, I encourage you to move slowly through your internal dialogue about what level of entrepreneurial energy is right for you, and in what venue it's best exercised. Taking on a level of entrepreneurship that is too far outside of your current comfort zone can undo the sense of control you have worked hard to build over the course of this book. If you feel unclear, start by harnessing your entrepreneurial energy within the context of your current role and take it from there.

In Chapter One, I talked about how each of the strategies in this book builds on the others to create a way forward for your career, in spite of a challenging job market. You have now explored adopting a gig mindset, identifying your professional value proposition, cultivating your skills, nurturing your social network, and capitalizing on all these career ownership and empowerment strategies by harnessing your entrepreneurial energy.

Let's put all these pieces together now to explore the way forward: the Finch Effect.