Please allow me to introduce myself…
…as a man with a calling.
Finally.
What’s your understanding of a calling?
I consider it a calling when someone’s deep delight serves the world’s great need.
My deep delight is to help folks become the most creative and entrepreneurial versions of themselves they can be.
The world’s great need is, well, we ain’t going to make it otherwise, not in any fashion that appeals to me, unless we commit to being the most creatively entrepreneurial people the world has ever known.
For the past 14 years I have been designing and teaching courses on these topics for Duke undergrads. It was near the midpoint that the Great Recession knocked us on our asses and from there it was easy to see what the housing bubble had been hiding: There were deep deep cracks in our economy’s foundation, a whole bunch of them.
Perhaps because we were surprised at first and then disoriented by what we found but we began talking about our economic crisis all wrong as it just got worse.
We kept talking about the need for an economic recovery. It seemed clear to me, however, that we couldn’t recover and that we shouldn’t want to.
Instead we needed economic renewal, the sort that comes about when we envision futures of sustainable abundance as we each intentionally grow our creative capacities and entrepreneurial instincts and commit to the demanding work of creating and making and innovating and founding and building those promising futures.
When I realized the profound truth that we couldn’t recover, that’s when my calling took on an urgency that has energized me ever since.
The Duke classroom has been my primary platform for acting on my calling, and I have had a blast guiding over 3,500 of their students in a class I designed that was ranked by the students in the top 10% Most Intellectually Challenging.
It’s time to take on a larger challenge, so I am turning to FB and other on-line platforms to continue teaching as I work–and play–at accomplishing my mission.
I have some ideas about how I might go about creating advantage for you, but mostly I intend to practice a Ready Fire Aim approach—it’s the bias for creatively entrepreneurial action that has served me well in the past. Perhaps you’ve found some of the stories about your natural born creative genius I’ve shared already and I intend to offer the principles and practices and the tips and exercises I have discovered that are certain to help you reclaim your creative genius, or refresh it if it never went away.
I hope you’ll give me a chance to be of service. And I hope you will participate by sharing your ideas and experiences and tips with us.
If agree this is important, please share and like this post so more folks can be served.
And if you haven’t seen my first post from a week or two ago, on the creative power of green, you’ll discover there the simple research supported creative hack you can put to immediate use.
