I heard John Hodgeman say this about his path to success on The Sound of Young America podcast. I just filled in what goes around it. (Included in Be Yourself would be “do your work and put it out there.”)Do I create a structure / container / brand / plan first or do I play? This is a question many artists, entrepreneurs and anyone else endeavoring to live a creative, fulfilling life asks.This is the answer. But it implies you have a container within you. You act as your own authority, even if you’re not quite sure about it. Asume that you will be asked to do what makes sense. But people can only ask of you what they know of you.

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Much of life bils down to feeling you have to choose between being yourself/free and being loved.

In order to have both, people often seek financial independence first. Of course, by the time you’ve sold off part of yourself and made the money, it’s hard to integrate and remember what you were all about before. Perhaps creating from a free place is how one can create financial independence. I’m banking on it.

Anil Dash has a real nice post about the kind of great stuff independent entrepreneurs can make.

This is what we all need. How to choose your work/ partner/new venture/PhD thesis/husband/wife/bandmate/major?

What do you want to tend to in an ongoing way?

We don’t need constant initiation. What will thrive out there and in you is what you feed and care for.

This is what I tell myself. And I am someone who writes jokes and epigrams so that I don’t have to finish and nurture each idea (to avoid overwhelm).

Business has turned the corner form “masculine” to “feminine.”

The intention we bring to our acts, affects the outcome of the acts.
The Net and the apps and creative acts that make it grow have been built, for the most part, out of a desire to connect and a desire for open-ness, which speeds genuine connection.

Any geek knows how to feel validated by others and even themselves by fixing problems. It’s a way to make ones head useful and feel present and appreciated by those for whom you solve problems. But any validation and sense of self worth/valuation or (company valuation) built on that alone will lead to an empty looping (something familiar to any geek who has felt befriended only for their laptop tech support skils).

This empty looping possibility is just as true for any organization or system. What makes the connection really genuine and ore self-sustaining is when it is the intentions that connect, not merely the acts.

The best thing about the geeks, the artists, the children or anyone who has maintained their genuine sincerity (with which we are all born) is that they live truly. And the connections made with an honest and vulnerably sincere person and their sincere acts don’t have to be fed by constant problem solving.

I see this on a huge level embodied on the Net. Only geeks would have built it. Not because the have the mad coding skills, but because they wanted to connect as they are with others and the temerity to *assume* other want to as well. This motivatation drives how the Net is being built and which structures, including those operating as businesses work on those structures.

So we have the Net, the digital era, a physical manifestation of the growing web of connection that is wrapping closer inside of us and or thoughts and our questions and our minds and hearts. It is helping shrink the earth like any empire before it.

It is the sincerity that truly links us. All 6.6 billion of us. We all came into this world with it.

I’ve found that it’s us who is the biggest obstacle to what we want. No matter how objectively “hard” anything out there is, it’s never as hard as our own skulls and assumptions.

Can you handle wanting?
Wanting without a fear of disappointment that overwhelms snd the dejection that follows that. Then wanting is not happening.

Before we ever do anything that we actually do, we want.

Forget Nike.
Just want it.