Time & Money. Sonja Becker
TIME & MONEY HOW TO SPEND THE REST OF YOUR LIFE
1st Edition, Spicewood Publishing, New York, 2002
2nd Edition 2014
© Sokrates Verlag München GmbH, Germany, 2014
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the authors.
Graphic Design: Wolfgang Rollmann, München
ISBN 978-3-9812912-1-6
www.sokrates-verlag.de www.sokrates-verlag.com
INTRODUCTION
TRUE HAPPINESS IS HAVING ONE’S PASSION AS A PROFESSION
We all have to work for a living. How we spend our time earning money largely determines the quality of our lives. For those who earn a living doing the things they love, life is an exciting adventure. This book will help you make career choices you won’t regret when you reflect on your life.
The meaning of life is less important than the zest for living. Vitality and aliveness are career related. No vacation is as invigorating as the right vocation. If you organize your career around what lights you up, you will enjoy your entire life more.
While most people toil away at their obligations, a fortunate few achieve freedom by transforming their passion into a career. If they can do it, so can you. Time & Money will introduce you to the philosophy of entrepreneurship, which is an attitude of personal responsibility combined with a penchant for innovation. The entrepreneur operates a business or runs a department of a corporation as a profit center. He or she guarantees results that build the business and add to the bottom line.
Entrepreneurship is by no means exclusive to small business. We wrote this book for free agents, people who live by their own choices, whether they work alone, collaborate with other free agents, or perform a leadership role in a large corporation. Every big company is a conglomerate of units that function as small businesses. We all need to be effective and to make work meaningful.
Entrepreneurship means living one’s dream. It means achieving goals that are in tune with the heart. It’s not easy to follow your bliss when other people expect you to conform to familiar systems. In a society that glorifies compromise and mediocrity, entrepreneurship is a hard road. But there is no easy road. You can fight for what truly matters or you can fight off the boredom that comes from living without passion.
Parents and teachers charted the course for most people. We developed various roles that enabled us to fit into society and to earn a living, but something is still missing. We were not created to spend our lives constricted in a cubicle or performing repetitive tasks, and our bodies know it. Most people wear expressions of hopelessness and defeat.
It can be different. You can create a life that organizes around your self-expression. Time & Money will show you the stages of a rewarding career. It will give you the big picture of how a business grows. Starting with small projects, you’ll learn to transform your favorite activities into your own business or into a new branch for an established company. By transforming the things you most enjoy into products and services that benefit others, you can learn to achieve real financial freedom and the peace of mind that goes with it. The missing piece for most people is the design.
You wouldn’t build a house without a blueprint: the craftsmen wouldn’t know how to coordinate their work, space wouldn’t flow properly from one room to another, and every time you changed your mind, the costs would skyrocket. Yet people routinely fall into a career or lifestyle without the benefit of a suitable design. Unless you become the architect for your life, it will be over before you achieve your dreams. Here is the design manual you need to get started.
Business is a game that operates according to specific rules. Those who break the rules are doomed to failure. You must know which rules are universal and which ones change as a business matures. Knowing when to shift gears is essential to winning. Time & Money isn’t a “how-to” book. There are plenty of manuals and guidebooks, and some of them are quite useful. We have avoided the oversimplification and narrow focus that makes business books easy to read and hard to apply. Here you will learn some of what works and what doesn’t work in the process of designing and building your career as a free agent.
Time & Money demonstrates a flexible business model for people who want to live life on their own terms. It doesn’t tell you what to think. Rather it shows you how to think in alternative ways that get results under real-world conditions. You will learn to apply curiosity to discover the craft that best suits your nature and to build an organization to bring that craft to market. True success is complex and difficult. Time & Money is for intelligent, motivated individuals who see their careers as a lifelong learning game.
We have conducted over thirty thousand coaching interviews since 1980 to explore what makes people truly happy. This book is a map based on the actual experiences of our clients. The lessons we learned as career coaches enabled us to write Time & Money, which we hope will save you valuable time by helping you design a career and lifestyle that really fits your nature.
In larger terms, entrepreneurs benefit society by creating jobs. Entrepreneurial companies, large and small, have created millions of jobs for associates, free agents, vendors, employees, and temps. While corporate jobs have declined in recent decades, entrepreneurs have forged an entirely new economy by providing sevices that make life better. By finding your niche, you discover the pleasure of providing for others.
THE THEATER OF BUSINESS
Business is people. The better you understand yourself and others, the happier and more successful you will become. We all play various roles in life—mother, father, son, daughter, friend, lover, boss, employee, leader, and countless more. These roles bring meaning to our lives. They connect us to other people. But often they don’t reflect who we are. Career satisfaction comes from knowing who you are and from choosing roles that fit your talent and temperament.
When you don’t know yourself, you can’t recognize your real talents. You work hard at a life you don’t enjoy just to make ends meet. Your real ability lies dormant. Time is fleeting and money is scarce. Scarcity makes your decisions. Life seems like a struggle. You know there is a better way, but pressing duties keep you from seeing it.
We have discovered a way to help people gain a larger perspective by restoring their ability to play. According to William Shakespeare, all the world is a stage. Business is a theater in which most people are cast in roles that don’t really fit. Everyone plays in the theater of business because everyone has to produce something of value in order to survive. It is refreshing to think of your career and your lifestyle as entertainment. First, it must enliven you. Then it must delight your family and friends. Finally, a great career must amaze your associates and astound your opponents.
We have survived as a human community by evolving with complementary talents. Like ants that specialize within a colony, we each find the function that suits us best. Before you can earn a living successfully you must determine what role best suits your nature.
A successful business or project requires three basic functions that are performed by three very different types of people:
(1)Visionary—the artist who sees an innovation that can be turned into a business.
(2)Marketer—the believer who sees how to get that innovation to as many people as possible.
(3)Manager—the general who organizes