Life Entrepreneurs

Posted by Rich Crowley in books, entrepreneurship, happiness

I’ve recently finished reading Life Entrepreneurs: Ordinary People Creating Extraordinary Lives.

The premise of the book is that to be a successful entrepreneur without sacrificing other aspects of your life (ie. family life, hobbies, etc.), you need to blend the two together rather than trying to find a balance.

A couple of tidbits I really like from the book were the reference to Martin Seligman’s Authentic Happiness where his research shows that happiness comes from three things: pleasure, engagement and meaning. Pleasure is about whatever makes you feel good, engagement is your level of involvement in your various pursuits like work, family, hobbies, etc. and meaning revolves around you using your personal strengths to work toward some higher end. Pleasure is what our society most often focuses on but has the shortest half-life of the three. The latter two have the strongest influence on a person’s happiness.

I also liked the models of living section where the authors outline the four main models on a drive-direction index. If you’re high drive, high direction, you are a captain. If you are high drive, low direction, you are a seeker. If you are low drive, high direction you are a passenger and if you are a low drive, low direction, you are a drifter. At different points in our life, we may be in different quadrants.

The authors then go on to outline seven steps that a life entrepreneur takes and each of these represents a chapter in the book. There is some additional material and exercises that can be obtained from their website at www.lifeentrepreneurs.com as well. This seven steps seemed a little too formulaic for me but the examples they provide from real-life people studies do give you the sense that this isn’t purely an academic exercise.