BeMoRe

Think big for yourself! Be bold. 

Enough said!

Simplicity.  

Everyone begins at the same starting line. Work hard to take yourself the furthest. 

Entrepreneurship.

How to Be Gracious, And Why  by @Chiareality

Social Media. It all works together.

Act Like A Leader Before You Are One. by @amyegallo

from Harvard Business Review

Entrepreneurship: A Working Definition by @teisenmann

Use everything that is available to you to help you succeed. 

A great post yesterday by Jessica Hagy, a FORBES Contributor, included twenty tips to find your calling. Honestly, anything you do to maintain a commitment to your passion is a step in keep yourself connected to what you love. But how do you integrate that passion with your profession. We've made a few notes on each of her points for additional food for thought.

20 Ways to Find Your Calling

1. Ignore the future, deal with the present.   The question, “What should I be when I grow up?” is wrong. Ask instead, “What is next today?” People become fat one bite at a time, and we become adults one hour at a time, so what we do today matters.

2. Shop around.   Unless you try on the outfit, you’ll never know if it fits. Do the same with vocations, avocations, hobbies and skills. You’ll need to sample every flavor to know your true favorite taste.

3. Say yes to odd opportunities. Say yes to the things that intrigue you, instead of the ones that bore you.

4. Find a problem to solve. Being the solution makes your work feel meaningful. Having an issue to work against also gives you a villain to play against—and makes you a hero.

5. Burn your plans. Your life will not go according to plan. Nobody’s ever has. So don’t worry if you get off track. The track was imaginary anyway.

6. Do not follow someone else’s dream. Your parents want you to be A. Your boss wants you to be B. Your friends want you to be C. And society is clamoring for you to be D. You can’t please everyone, but if you do what YOU think you should, at least you’ll be able to sleep at night.

7. Blend your talents. Instead of doing something that only takes advantage of one skill, create a mash-up of several things you do well. You’ll set yourself apart and feel more satisfied with what you’re doing.

8. Seek out people you actually like.  It’s more satisfying to dig a ditch with friends than to design a skyscraper with a team of sociopaths.

9. Give yourself permission to change your mind. Most of us choose our paths around 18. As time passes, you might find new things to do and places to be and people to know, and a few calls you made at 18 will probably need to be overturned.

10. Ask the elderly for advice. They’ve been there, done that, got the AARP card. You’ll find that happiness and satisfaction have more to do with love and purpose than dollars and cents.

11. Roam a library. You never know which book, author, or topic will speak to you from the shelves. You might just find what you didn’t even know you were looking for.

12. Seek support, not tolerance. You’re going to need help with anything and everything. Make sure you have people in your corner who do more than just nod and say, “that’s nice,” when you tell them your dreams.

13. Spend time before you spend money. Invest in reading and talking and finding out before you plunk down a ton of money on a degree or a certification or a relocation. You might find that you don’t have to write a check to compose your future.

14. Don’t confuse a job with a purpose. If you are working to support your family, they are your real bosses. If you are working to further a goal or idea, don’t let your paycheck (however plump it is) become an obstacle to it.

15. Consider your epitaph, not your resume. Thinking long term can help you see both what’s vitally important and what’s certainly silly.

16. There’s no need to be THE best. Very few people are the very best in the world at anything. Doing your best doesn’t mean you have to be THE best. Your best is more than enough.

17. Don’t keep score. No one will be at the top or bottom of their game forever, and who you perceive as your competition is a constantly changing cast of characters. Keeping score can become a full-time job if you let it, and that’s an awful way to spend a day, much less a lifetime.

18. Change course if you find yourself coasting.   It’s possible to get stuck on a very easy and vaguely rewarding path, like a cushy or undemanding job. If you feel yourself simply rolling along, it’s time to switch gears, because coasting can atrophy your dreams.

19. Be authentically uncool. Stick with what you love, even if others sneer at it. This is also referred to as integrity.

by Steve Blank via Harvard Business Review

Launching a new enterprise—whether it’s a tech start-up, a small business, or an initiative within a large corporation—has always been a hit-or-miss proposition. According to the decades-old formula, you write a business plan, pitch it to investors, assemble a team, introduce a product, and start selling as hard as you can. And somewhere in this sequence of events, you’ll probably suffer a fatal setback. The odds are not with you: As new research by Harvard Business School’s Shikhar Ghosh shows, 75% of all start-ups fail.

But recently an important countervailing force has emerged, one that can make the process of starting a company less risky. It’s a methodology called the “lean start-up,” and it favors experimentation over elaborate planning, customer feedback over intuition, and iterative design over traditional “big design up front” development. Although the methodology is just a few years old, its concepts—such as “minimum viable product” and “pivoting”—have quickly taken root in the start-up world, and business schools have already begun adapting their curricula to teach them.

The lean start-up movement hasn’t gone totally mainstream, however, and we have yet to feel its full impact. In many ways it is roughly where the big data movement was five years ago—consisting mainly of a buzzword that’s not yet widely understood, whose implications companies are just beginning to grasp. But as its practices spread, they’re turning the conventional wisdom about entrepreneurship on its head. New ventures of all kinds are attempting to improve their chances of success by following its principles of failing fast and continually learning. And despite the methodology’s name, in the long term some of its biggest payoffs may be gained by the largecompanies that embrace it.

In this article I’ll offer a brief overview of lean start-up techniques and how they’ve evolved. Most important, I’ll explain how, in combination with other business trends, they could ignite a new entrepreneurial economy.

The Fallacy of the Perfect Business Plan

According to conventional wisdom, the first thing every founder must do is create a business plan—a static document that describes the size of an opportunity, the problem to be solved, and the solution that the new venture will provide. Typically it includes a five-year forecast for income, profits, and cash flow. A business plan is essentially a research exercise written in isolation at a desk before an entrepreneur has even begun to build a product. The assumption is that it’s possible to figure out most of the unknowns of a business in advance, before you raise money and actually execute the idea.

Once an entrepreneur with a convincing business plan obtains money from investors, he or she begins developing the product in a similarly insular fashion. Developers invest thousands of man-hours to get it ready for launch, with little if any customer input. Only after building and launching the product does the venture get substantial feedback from customers—when the sales force attempts to sell it. And too often, after months or even years of development, entrepreneurs learn the hard way that customers do not need or want most of the product’s features.

After decades of watching thousands of start-ups follow this standard regimen, we’ve now learned at least three things:

1. Business plans rarely survive first contact with customers. As the boxer Mike Tyson once said about his opponents’ prefight strategies: “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.”

2. No one besides venture capitalists and the late Soviet Union requires five-year plans to forecast complete unknowns. These plans are generally fiction, and dreaming them up is almost always a waste of time.

3. Start-ups are not smaller versions of large companies. They do not unfold in accordance with master plans. The ones that ultimately succeed go quickly from failure to failure, all the while adapting, iterating on, and improving their initial ideas as they continually learn from customers.

One of the critical differences is that while existing companies execute a business model, start-upslook for one. This distinction is at the heart of the lean start-up approach. It shapes the lean definition of a start-up: a temporary organization designed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model.

Read  the rest of the article here.