That’s why I emphasize the concept of Knowing Thyself or Temet Nosce (latin for ‘know thyself’)

I have always believed transparency with oneself is the true secret to happiness.  After all, if you can’t be honest with yourself, you’re bound to live a false life to one degree or another.  Seems pretty challenging to me? Whatever success or achievement you gain under this guise is quite empty.  It would be better to live a very quiet unassuming life with honesty and self-awareness than a tremendous life based on delusion.  
This is a philosophical point that if applied to entrepreneurship can make the difference between achieving your goals and spinning your wheels. 

I recently had the opportunity to address this important point among others at Professor John Greathouse’s entrepreneur course at the University of California – Santa Barbara (UCSB). 
Here are some of the main points.  (If you prefer to watch and listen vs. read, I’ve attached the video of the presentation below)

1. Capacity is kind of important

   
   Would you ever take a road trip with a car without a functional fuel gauge?  Probably not.  That’s how capacity works in life and entrepreneurship.   An entrepreneur who clearly knows their capacity makes better decisions with everything from time management to making promises.   In the beginning, your word is all you have – so make sure you follow through on your capacity commitments.   If you don’t know your own capacity for certain activities, you may run out of fuel.  You’ll find yourself ‘stranded on the side of the road’ of life.  Instead, it’s important to develop your own gauges and metrics so you can fully understand what you are ‘capable’ of.  Trust me, it makes for a more interesting ‘road trip’ through life.

2. When you know yourself, you know what you’re not – and that’s perhaps more important.
   

   One of the critical aspects of any entrepreneurial endeavor is to know your own capacity, skills, and weaknesses so that you may better know what pieces to fit around you for success.   The individuals in a startup always wear many hats – the key is to know which hat you wear well and which you should pass on to a fellow team member.   Step 1 – discovering yourself.   Step 2 – identifying those characteristics you lack and you need to find in others so you can build out the best management team possible.

3. Synchronicity is critical to good sleep and overall happiness

    

   
   Do you ever find yourself laying in bed unable to fall asleep?  What about awakening and feeling groggy because your mind was spinning.   Synchronicity is about aligning your thoughts, words, and actions.  If you achieve synchronicity in life and business, chances are you’ll sleep soundly knowing that your every thought, word, and action conveyed a singular, constant purpose.  This exercise requires practice.   For the entrepreneur dealing with dozens of simultaneous events at once, it requires planning and intention. 
   The entrepreneur has to envision a meeting and set an intention.  From there, you simply say what you’re thinking, and do what you’re saying.   A simple concept rarely perfected.  But then again, so is sleeping soundly.

4. Real confidence requires the knowledge and ability to say “I don’t know”

    

   
   All things being equal, I find that people that really have a good grasp of themselves in terms of capacity, self-awareness, and synchronicity also demonstrate tremendous self-confidence.  The self-confidence comes from all of these best practices, but often manifests itself in demonstrating the skill of openly acknowledging a lack of knowledge.  This is when you know you're dealing with someone of tremendous depth - when someone openly demonstrates their lack of knowledge, you begin to believe what they do know is truly an expertise.  In my experience, saying "I don't know" signifies greater confidence than talking over or through a subject you know nothing about. 
   Try it some time - you should see instant results.

 

5. Reflect in your failures and you will be true

The nature of the entrepreneur is to try and to often fail.  Entrepreneurship is an iterative process - striking a balance between knowing yourself and discovering the right opportunity. The reality is that as an entrepreneur, you are constantly putting yourself out there and, if you're lucky, receiving constructive criticism.  It's important to have the courage to look yourself in the eye before you look others in the eye. Take every opportunity to reflect yourself in others, in your choices, in your investments.  Learn from your failures and see yourself for who you are - a mirror is always true when accompanied by honest self-assessment.

Check out the video from the April 11, 2012 speaking engagement at John Greathouse's class at UCSB

Jacques Habra UCSB Lecture - April 11, 2012.

These thoughts are based on the collective Noosphere continuing to evolve and bring us closer together every day.

Originally Written on May 17th, 2011 somewhere between Malaysia and Vietnam

In the mist of a south east Asia adventure, en route from Kuala Lumpur to Hanoi, I realized how polar the world truly is.  And by polar I don’t mean cold -well that all depends on how you examine customs.

Consider that at any given moment a westerner is loving their pet cat or dog, kissing them gently, playing with them, that there are literally hundreds, if not thousands, of similar cats and dogs being tortured, skinned, and prepared for lunch.

Backwards?  Absolutely, but not necessarily right or wrong.  Just as it is indeed the case that millions of people read right non phonetic script from right to left and literally billions that read vertically.  Backwards?  Upside down?  Indeed but not necessarily right or wrong.

As the communications on planet earth reach a seemingly poignant real time crescendo and sharing is no longer a choice but a passive constant function, how will the polar opposites meet.

Certainly it would be true to say that anyone in a state of despair is cancelled out by another in a state of joy, again the exchange is constant and infinite.  World powers have a greater interdependent responsibility than ever before as we as a society slowly replace secrecy and corruption with transparency and global value systems.

Is education the key?  Do animal rights and marine biologists have a point in believing that shark fin poaching can be eliminated through education?  Perhaps but there will always remain the ingrained populations that would never stop harvesting shark fins at any expense.  This leads me to the true question: will the meeting of opposites, cultural and behavioral, require force and controls just as they required in past world wars.

When we as humans stop fighting and reach world peace, will we not find hundreds of issues worth fighting for.  Would you stage war to save your pet cat?  I think I would.

Have you caught this Geico Insurance Commercial?

It’s funny. 

But I did some quick math.  Let’s figure the Geico savings, if really good, would be around $400/year.  That’s good money.

Now, the panther I gotta imagine will be about $10,000 startup.  Just getting the paperwork, legal liabilities, zoning, etc – that alone is pricey.  Then, you have to add maintenance, probably $400/month in meat.  What do Panthers eat? 

So, i just don’t see the savings at all.  Even if it’s a rescue Panther.  Sorry Geico.

Now for my applause: at least once in my life, and potentially hundreds of thousands depending on how many people read this, I will have said Geico in reference to your brand at least 5 times.

Now, that’s good marketing.

Check out a commercial for the event here:

Some of the tenets I have learned along the way are as follows:

1. Entrepreneurs should surround themselves with people that know more and care.   Startups that have helpful mentors, track metrics effectively, and learn from startup thought leaders raise significantly more money and have better adoption rates.
2. Startups that adapt raise more money.  If you remain flexible in your business model, you have statistics on your side with 3-4x more money raising and 5-6x more user adoption.
3. Investors over-invest.  Startups over-spend.   This is one of my pet peeves.  I really find it ridiculous how fast a startup spends money and how deliberate they can be with investor capital.  A good startup should be frugal in all respects.
4. Investors rarely have a positive effect on the company’s operational performance. However, mentors are very effective in both operations and progress.
5. Founders on their own take  longer to reach scale stage compared to a founding team of 2 and they are much less likely to pivot.
6. Balanced teams with one engineer founder and one business founder raise 30% more money, have 2.9x more user growth and are 19% less likely to scale prematurely than technical or business-heavy founding teams.
7. Most successful founders are driven by marketplace or lifestyle impact rather than experience or money.
8. Founders overestimate the value of IP before product market fit by 255%.
9. Startups need 2-3 times longer to validate their market than most founders expect. This underestimation creates the pressure to scale prematurely.  Improper market validation is a major factor for a startup not working out.
10. Startups that have not raised money over-estimate their market size by 100x and often misinterpret their market as new.

Those are a few nuggets I’ve collected along the way.  I am honored to have the opportunity to ask Paul Orfalea questions about his organic startup, commonly known as Kinkos, and how he built it into a $1Billion enterprise in 10 countries.  He started with 1 copy machine on a sidewalk :

I’m also very delighted to learn from a fellow Lebanese entrepreneur – I’m interested to see how much of our culture went into his business savvy.

“Be more concerned with your character than your reputation, because your character is what you really are, while your reputation is merely what others think you are.” – John Wooden

The new year ushers, well, ‘new’ness.  I think everyone imagines they’re starting fresh, clean, over.  What happened last year is so last year.  I find myself consulting with entrepreneurs and clients who want to employ this technique of starting over.  I think it’s great in a way, and short-sighted in another way.  The past is very important.  The past when analyzed through a transparent lens is an excellent teacher.  You may find that the things that went wrong, or the things you wanted and didn’t get were entirely as a result of your choices or your behavior.  This is worth examining.  Starting fresh with a positive attitude is key.  However, I encourage my friends and colleagues to reflect on where they were a year ago, five years ago, even ten years ago.  What has evolved?  What needs to evolve now?

Correspondingly, I have had many conversations with business colleagues about reputation.  There’s a fast growing sector on-line of services that manage your reputation.  You have your reputation.com which provides monitoring of yourself as a brand and develops content to ‘present’ you in a certain light.  There are lawyers that are turning reputation sheriffs – out to protect their clients’ against defamatory posts about them or their companies.  Indeed, protecting one’s reputation has to be one of the big stories of 2011 and I think will be an even bigger story in 2012.  On deck in Washington is a bill that indirectly has a lot to do with reputation management, it’s called SOPA or Stop Online Piracy Act.  The bill aims to make it difficult for people to steal copyrighted material.  Moreover it holds accountable the 3rd party Web sites like Google, YouTube, Vimeo, etc, that host this copyrighted material.  It’s been a very popular topic the last few days as companies sprint to boycott the bill while others lobby senators to uphold and pass it.  It will be interesting to see what happens.

So what does SOPA have to do with reputation.  Well, as any of my loyal readers have seen, I’ve been very encouraging to everyone that they should “to protect your name” as it is far too easy for just about anyone to defame you without recourse.  I believe this is in the process of changing independent of SOPA and other legislation.  Even so, I wonder if we should all elevate a bit to a higher consciousness.

What I mean here is that “protecting your name” is tantamount to worrying about your reputation.  Imagine if we put the same energy into working on our character each and every day.  Instead of hiring firms like reputation.com or demanding controls on how defamatory content is published on-line, it may simply be enough to do your thing and smile at the haters as you walk on by.  This assumes that “doing your thing” means you’ll act ethically and with integrity.

And so, that is the point of this post.  Anyone can be an entrepreneur, I really believe this.  And, anyone willing to work hard and innovate can be successful.  It is very unlikely you’ll be successful and continue to be successful without character.  You could have the best reputation on earth and with a maligned character, you’ll find yourself hitting roadblocks in real life and in relationship with yourself.  On the other hand, you can let people say what they want, post what they want, and continue to check yourself and your integrity and chances are you’ll be just fine.

In my case, I find that surrounding myself with people that expect me to live by a high standard and perform at a high level is like “coaching” for my character.  Fitting as Mr. John Wooden who began this post is arguably one of the best coaches of all time.

Technorati Tags: jacques habra, jacques habra character, jacques habra reputation

It's now 2012 and what's changed?  I mean other than the date.  How are those new year resolutions coming along?  What's your plan for improving those broken relationships?  Is your financial plan in order?  How's it going each morning with that 6am run?

Before you answer those questions, let's take a closer look at the word Resolution

res·o·lu·tion/?rez??lo?oSH?n/

resolutions, plural

• A firm decision to do or not to do something
  • - she kept her resolution not to see Anne any more
  • - a New Year's resolution
• A formal expression of opinion or intention agreed on by a legislative body, committee, or other formal meeting, typically after taking a vote
  • - the conference passed two resolutions
• The quality of being determined or resolute
  • - he handled the last French actions of the war with resolution
• The action of solving a problem, dispute, or contentious matter
  • - the peaceful resolution of all disputes
  • - a successful resolution to the problem
• The passing of a discord into a concord during the course of changing harmony
• The disappearance of inflammation, or of any other symptom or condition
• The process of reducing or separating something into its components
• The replacing of a single force or other vector quantity by two or more jointly equivalent to it
• The conversion of something abstract into another form
• The substitution of two short syllables for one long one
• The smallest interval measurable by a scientific (esp. optical) instrument; the resolving power
• The degree of detail visible in a photographic or television image

I think the critical aspect of any resolution is the notion that it solves a problem.

But really though, is there really a problem most of the time?  Or are you just looking to improve your life in one way or another.  I think that's what trips people up and why most resolutions are not followed through.

In the case of the entrepreneur, we don't need a new year to resolve to solve problems or improve our business.  We want these things by definition.  We want these things because self-improvement and self-assessment are driving tenets of entrepreneurship.  What I find most interesting are situations where people 'invent' resolutions because they don't know where to start when it comes to their business challenges.  They find themselves in the same pattern, perhaps doing the minimum to get by, to break even, to cover the nut.

Say one of your resolutions this year is to grow your company's revenue.  There's a lot that can go into that 1 resolution.  You'd have to think through a well balanced

business plan that considers the investment you'll need to make to generate more revenue, and the expansion in resources and/or supply that is required for revenue growth.  Again, such a lofty endeavor can often trip entrepreneurs up until they find themselves in a mode of stasis like Dostoyevskys' Underground Man.

If you haven't yet read "Notes from Underground", I highly recommend it.  For the purposes of this post, it is quite an extreme example as this has nothing to do with consciousness or free will.  But the important takeaway is that it is easy to get caught up in resolutions and gigantic life changes to the point that you find yourself not taking action, or worse yet, going backwards.  In the case of the Underground Man, he found himself sitting in a chair, quite motionless, just staring out into space with his thoughts and analysis.

Instead, start small with focus.

Set Intentions for Better Meetings

One thing is certain in the world of the entrepreneur, you are going to have meetings.  Lots of them.  Perhaps they will be over coffee, or via Skype or the latest craze, Google Hangouts:

But before you meet, set the intention.  A great mentor of mine back in my early days (around age 21, circa 1996) would always ask me as we drove to a client meeting:  "What do we want to accomplish in this meeting?"

It seems like such an obvious question, but I took it to mean something more profound.  I began to imagine what the last 5 minutes of a 60 minute meeting would look like.  What would we conclude, what action items would we take, what direction were we headed.  Even though the meeting itself would dictate the ultimate answers to those questions, having an idea of what was to be accomplished made tremendous difference in the value of the meeting.

Setting that intention saves precious time and demonstrates resolve to your client, partner, staff, team.  Try the following to make the intention stick:

1. Right when you schedule the meeting, write an intention and purpose in the calendar entry.
2. The day before or a few hours before, consider what is to be accomplished.  Visualize the players in that meeting.  What role will each play, what role will you play.
3. Send an advance email to the indivdiuals with a sense of the intention - not necessarily an agenda or an attempt to summarize your points in advance of the meeting, but at least an outline of the purpose.  This gets people thinking.
4. State the intention at the beginning of the meeting.
5. Repeat and revise the intention at the end of the meeting.

So, before your next meeting, or even your next resolution, get clear on what you want to accomplish.  Otherwise, you might end up in a basement staring off into space :)

The next big thing has everything to do with how we as humans choose to communicate; with which sense and in through
which medium.  The three big companies that we will hear about for decades are Google, Apple, and Facebook.  Everything else is infrastructure.  The unique of those 3 is Apple.  It’s the only software+hardware play in the bunch with a strong retail presence.  Google and Facebook care mostly about 1 statistic:  Time Spent on Site.  Apple is in the same race with one strong advantage – the device to the site.

So the answer to “The next big thing” is which company provides the best content and the best interaction to that content
will be the next best thing.

The next big thing has everything to do with how we as humans choose to communicate; with which sense and in through which medium.  The three big companies that we will hear about for decades are Google, Apple, and Facebook.  Everything else is infrastructure.  The unique of those 3 is Apple.

It’s the only software+hardware play in the bunch with a strong retail presence.  Google and Facebook care mostly about 1 statistic:  Time Spent on Site.  Apple is in the same race with one strong advantage – the device to the site.

So the answer to “The next big thing” is which company provides the best content and the best interaction to that content will be the next best thing.

The next big thing has everything to do with how we as humans choose to communicate; with which sense and in through
which medium.  The three big companies that we will hear about for decades are Google, Apple, and Facebook.  Everything else is infrastructure.  The unique of those 3 is Apple.  It’s the only software+hardware play in the bunch with a strong retail presence.  Google and Facebook care mostly about 1 statistic:  Time Spent on Site.  Apple is in the same race with one strong advantage – the device to the site.

So the answer to “The next big thing” is which company provides the best content and the best interaction to that content
will be the next best thing.

1. Clear and re-arrange your desk.  The more surface area, the better.
2. Register for at least one networking event you’ve never been to in your community for January, February, and March.  If you’re local to Santa Barbara, I recommend the following:  http://www.mitcentralcoast.com and http://www.westmont.edu/presbreakfast/
3. Take someone to lunch (or invite someone to coffee) that you’ve admired in the business community in 2011.  Ideally, you’ll set the date before January 1, but that is often difficult given how hectic holidays can be.  For sure, set the date no later than January.
4. Use a personal financial excel worksheet to visualize your finances in 2012 – here’s a handy onebut there are dozens out there if you search “Personal Financial Excel Worksheet.”  Find one that resonates with you, fill it out.
5. Notice and adjust your morning pattern.  The first 60 minutes of your day dictate the entire day.  So, that means that how you spend the first 5% of your day will effect the remaining 95%.  Try this each and every morning.  When you awake, breath deeply 10 times, pause intently between each inhale and exhale.  You will have thoughts enter your mind during this exercise, notice them, and let them fade.  Do all 10 breaths.  Then, do your bathroom routine.  Then, stretch your body for at least 5 minutes. This article outlines some excellent options.
6. Set Intentions for your meetings.  Before checking email, look at your calendar.  Under each item, set an intention for that meeting.  It should just a moment.  You may have a meeting with co-workers to go over a project plan.  Know what questions should get answered and what you want to accomplish from this meeting.
7. Taste each and every bite of every meal for exactly what it is… nourishment entering your body.  Hopefully it’s tasty nourishment, but become very present to the sense of taste.
8. Spend at least 10 minutes at the end of the day, sunset or later, reflecting on the day.  What was accomplished?  What could have gone better?  Where can you adjust?
9. Say “thank you” as often as possible and be 100% sincere each time you say it.
10. Trust your instinct on relationships.  If you are having any doubts around the holidays, chances are that person in your life is not your ideal match.  The holidays and end of year effect a sort of gravitational pull for people in love, in romance, in sync.  If that pull is causing tension or a desire for distance, listen to this very carefully.  Most relationships that started in the Fall end the first week of January.  You are only shortchanging yourself and the other person by extending the relationship all the way through the holidays.  The energy it takes to maintain a relationship, especially one that is not right, is tremendous.  You’ll need that energy to build your business in 2012.
11. Consider the people that have helped you this year.  Thank them with a quick email, or phone call, or if time permits a get together.
12. Smile.  Right now, cause yourself to smile.  It’s an easy panacea to just about any strife.

Hope this helps you embark into 2012 on a good foot.  Happy Holidays and Happy New Year.