I am sharing my vision for the future with you for a couple of reasons:
- To inspire you to reinforce if not create a powerful concrete vision for yourself and your business.
- To share insights that for me will positively alter my business and with hard work, the world for good.
I invite you to read this from a creative, yet practical-minded viewpoint.
My last week was transformative – being successful at the Shank Tank for the Expert/Coach/Speaker world AND viewing the aftermath of the election. Having a transformative experience is nonsensical unless it can be shared with my community – and it takes reality and life with that sharing. This week taught and reinforced the following for me:
1. I have a new vision and future statement for the company.
People have responded to the elections with a mixture of hope, resignation, excitement – positive and negative. Having been through some hard times myself in the past I have learned that when things go great or not so great, it warrants the creation of a new vision that is bigger and more expansive.
As I reviewed my mission and what I was learning, I became present to the fact that I am much more excited to “Generate 100 million Joyful and Successful Entrepreneurs by the end of 2027″. This is my new mission.
Why pick this mission?
Having coached thousands of entrepreneurs since 1991, one primary lesson I learned is that when people become successful entrepreneurs, they inevitably give back (with rare exceptions) to their communities – this makes the world a much better place to live in.
I have had clients who have donated to research, organizations, and charities – in terms of money, time, advice, and energy. That has been the same for me and my wife. Entrepreneurs have inevitably seen bad times personally. Having gone through that, they tend to have a natural instinct to give back and help. My primary assumption here is that giving back to the world is a good thing overall.
How would you measure joy and success?
This is something that I feel is an individual assessment – but most of us would agree on some of the common measures, so I am not overly concerned about getting this right.
My primary ‘sub-intention’ in this mission is to have people mindfully moving in this direction of joy and success i.e. if they have not thought deeply enough about it, that they start doing so as soon as possible.
Some math for those of you interested. For the rest of you, please skip down to the summary.
Math Nerd Zone
According to the Asian Entrepreneur, about 400 million people around the world are entrepreneurs. Interestingly, based on per capita numbers, the US lags behind the top 15 most entrepreneurial countries (including Uganda (28% = 10.5 million), Thailand (16.7% = 11.2 million), Brazil (13.8%), and Cameroon (13.7%)!).
About 27 million Americans are business owners = 8 percent (2015). There are currently 1,826 billionaires (2015) and about 15 million millionaires (2015) – 5 million of whom are in the US and Canada.
According to the Pew Research Center, about 13 percent of the world population is in the middle class. Assuming even distribution, (which may be crazy to do), I estimate about only 52 million entrepreneurs are making it.
The distribution is probably not even -so we may be looking at far less than that number.
Summary: Math Nerd Zone
We probably have far less than 52 million entrepreneurs financially successful. Of these, how many are actually joyful will be the next step to try to ascertain and work on. So there is work to do!
2. Lesson: That focus in marketing and in daily activities is even more urgent for all of us today.
We are living in an even more distracted society today than ever before.
In Ancient Greek and Roman times, some philosophers complained that they were being distracted a few times a day by messengers who came from other parts of their empires to announce recent happenings. A few times a day! Geez, I wish.
Today, we are bombarded by messages every few seconds – messages from outside marketing or news and messages internally e.g. worries, thoughts about the past, present, and future.
In our business, we have to learn how to deal with this.
One clear pathway to joy and success in business is to
- Focus your marketing AND
- Focus daily on what will bring you success and joy
Joy does not mean necessarily that you will be dancing through the hills of Fremont or skipping your way to work daily. It will be different for each of you and for me.
For me, joy is the latent or fully developed sense of enjoying or appreciating what you do daily despite the challenges and the successes.
Focusing on your definition of success and joy – and having the marketing follow along in that focus i.e. picking the tactics and strategies that work for you in marketing – may very well turn your life and business in a good way – even if you are successful and joyful already.
Coaching still remains to be a human and effective way to help people stay on track towards success and joy.
If you’re ready to get started, contact me, or follow me on LinkedIn.
Since 1991, I’ve been reflecting on, designing, and implementing methodologies and systems for bringing a transcendent, creative and innovative approach to critical aspects of entrepreneurship.
Great vision Sunil!!!!——–Mike
Thank you Mike!