Are you an Employee or an Entrepreneur?

The declaration “I am an entrepreneur” is surely more satisfying in this social media age than wearing a name tag or passing out the “standard corporate” business card.  In my millennial generation, we like to think we’re calling the shots, writing our own profiles, that we have no respect for the man--when most of us are just filling out the “About me” interface handed to us with little but over-used quotes. Are we really the rebels we brag like? And if we are, is that even a good thing? Is it better to think like an employee or an entrepreneur?

My friend recently inherited a large, very full mini-storage unit. This friend also happens to be facing--through no fault of her own--a serious debt crisis. I came to help her clean the unit out. We found everything from $500 business suits & stetsons to weird but expensive collector’s items--star wars special edition dolls (new the in box), crystal music boxes, about a bajillion baseball cards & autographed gear. She was very focused on clearing the place out to avoid the monthly fee, because her temp job didn’t pay that well. I saw dollar signs all over that stuff & suggested she try to sell it instead of trying to find more regular work for now.

“Honestly, selling this stuff online is going to pay you a LOT more than any other use of your time.” I told her, but she wouldn’t have it.  She gave away thousands of dollars of ebay-able merchandise. I thought it was dumb at the time, but maybe I wasn’t thinking straight.  Maybe, given all of the other stress going on in my friend’s life at that time, it wouldn’t have been a good choice for her. She wasn’t up to it.  Let us be humans--not just producers. We have to invest what we’ve got wisely, but emotional stability is an economic resource just like dollar bills.

Many of us don’t invest our resources well because we don’t realize what they are. We don’t see value in what we have-- an idea, a skill, an audience--so we don’t do the pruning & feeding that could make it bear fruit. One of my biggest professional growth areas over the last few years has actually been evening the scale in favor of thinking like an employee. I’ve always had good ideas, but overstepping my bounds was the only thing that’s ever gotten me fired. Even though my boss was totally wrong & making terrible decisions --his business went under shortly after he fired me, but I couldn’t’ve known that would happen-- I let being right ruin the resource that provided for me, my job.

Business owners, even some of the really big top dogs are wise to think about investing in relationships-- even over-investing before it's really obvious that they need to. I like to think I’m smart. I’d love to own my own business, or write for a living.  However, even the most brazen entrepreneurial minds need grooming. For most of us, it’s at least partially in learning to operate like a good employee that we’ll find our niche in the market and find success in our ventures. Anxious as I am to show my stuff,  I think lengthy seasons of  learning-- serving under a good boss will give better results in the long run. Like a good bottle of wine--I could probably stand to stay on the vine for awhile.

To Share These Streets with Her Has Been a Blessing

Two years ago today, my mom died of breast cancer after an eight year struggle. She was a beautiful lady, inside & out-- a giver, empowerer, analyzer, counselor, sometimes a nag, loud laugher, organizer & often creative genius. She constantly assumed the position of coming alongside people to the point that I have a hard time thinking of stories specifically about her, despite missing her constant presence over my lifetime. A lot of my best character traits came from her (although I didn't get her amazing legs, a damn shame.)

Like one plant gives shade or nutrients to another, we belong to each other. Life is not an individual experience, it is a collaboration, whether we realize and choose to accept it or not. She contracted cancer of the breast, but that wasn’t what killed her. It was the intimacy between organs- tissue connection and shared body fluids. As each gives, takes, and communicates with the others, they pass on subtleties too minute for them to influence or defend against. It is the same with our lives.

Capitol Hill Rowhouses in the fall.

I find peace and purpose in small things my family and I have shared with my mother-- knowing it falls to us to carry her torch now. In 1976 she moved to DC from Oregon, a greenstick sweet little doe of just twenty three. My parents lived on Capitol Hill while my dad went to law school at Georgetown & she often told me how she used to love the neighborhood and watching the leaves change in the fall here. Over thirty years later, just weeks after her death, I had made the same move at the same stage in life and found myself with a weekly reason to walk through Capitol Hill for the first time in my life. It was not premeditated, although it was a kind coincidence. Below is my reflection on the experience of that sweet happenstance one evening after I made the connection, just as autumn was setting in.

I let my mind wander and we're both twenty five, with bright brown eyes and long auburn hair, wandering through the rowhouses on Capitol Hill in the fall, enjoying the neighborhood, wearing burnt orange-brown boots dad bought for her and her leather gloves. Both with peaceful, satisfied, subtle smirks on our faces with little noise but the leaves crunching beneath our feet and sporadic conversation.

We are full of life, healthy, at rest and going places. I shake myself back to the physical reality and it is just me. To share these streets with her has been a blessing.

Begging the Question

The most wonderful things in this life aren’t the ones that arise outside of any individual or organized collaborative purpose that we here possess. We may be able to recognize and appreciate them, or even participate and contribute to them, but never really control them. True blessings, and even curses, always come in disguise, I think. One can turn into the other within the context of an individual life depending on that individual’s reaction to it.

The Great Carina Nebula (credit here)

An obvious blessing is more often than not a source of obstructive pride, blinding us to life outside of it. The best lessons and life processes, however, are those we would probably never choose for ourselves. They are things you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy, but would never take back either. Profound truth and beauty are completely other than the animalistic, reactionary behaviors we tend toward. Transcending problems and stress in this life is not possible without re-timing our hearts to the beat of that outside source.

People say God doesn’t act in the world, but I see the universe as a place that God made and created for His own purpose that we would seek Him out of it. Yes, terrible things happen and yes, it’s falling apart, but it’s like He’s holding it all together with a lynchpin. He’s giving us the forum we need to seek Him.

The things we see and marvel at like sunsets, stars, trees, flowers and oceans-- the handiwork of God-- could just be incidental fingerprints left there because it was Him who made it-- the handiwork couldn’t help but be marvelous because of the source-- not because that’s all He had to show. For me, it begs the question, prompting me to get up and find Him. (Prov 25:2 “It is the glory of God to conceal a matter; to search out a matter is the glory of kings.”)