The Art of Non-Conformity: Unconventional Strategies for Life, Work, and Travel

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Every month I look back at what’s happened with ChrisGuillebeau.com in the previous month. If you’ve missed some articles, you can catch up here.

This month, I’ve been busy getting the site online for my small group of beta readers before I branch out in April. I’ve pre-written the first two months’ worth of content, although when I travel I hope to provide some real-time updates as well.

Writing

LIFE – I wrote about How To Be Remarkably Average, and what I hope will be the outcome of this site over the first year.

WORK – I wrote about What Entrepreneurship Is and Isn’t, and How To Stand Out in Any Job.

TRAVEL – I wrote A Short Narration of My Travels So Far. (There are a lot of travels still to come, so stay tuned.)

Gratefulness

I’m grateful to Robert & Kelly Gash for their help with great photos, especially the one for the header which comes from the Seattle Public Library. We were almost thrown out of the building for taking photos without a permit, but thankfully we got what we needed before getting busted by the library police.

I’m grateful to my new friends in Malaysia, Jason & Reese Spykerman, who translated my ideas into the great design for this site. I talked with several designers before finding the Spykerman team, and something was missing in those conversations. When I talked with Jason & Reese, they “got” the idea right away and then did a very nice job with the design.

I’m grateful to Matt Shedden, the very first person I talked to about the site in detail, who told me what resonated with him and what didn’t. Thank you for your advice.

What’s Coming Next

On March 13, I’ll finish my year and a half at the University of Washington, receive my $32,000 diploma, and fly off to India. I’ll be there, and hopefully in Bangladesh if I can get a visa in Calcutta, until the end of March.

At the end of March I’ll head to Japan, my stopover point, and pick up my first OneWorld Round-the-World ticket. This will take me to L.A., where I’ll be for a weekend business conference at the end of the month. I’ll be back in Seattle on April 6th.

During the trip, the thrice-weekly essays will continue to be posted, and depending on internet access, I hope to write some real-time updates as well.

Audience Participation

You can participate in the development of this project in several ways:

Leave a comment at the bottom of any essay. I haven’t actively promoted the “comments” section in the posts yet, but you’re free to share your comments and include a link back to your own site if you have one.

Send other feedback. Use my contact form to tell me what you think so far. In the future, I probably won’t be able to respond to every inquiry, but right now I can.

Join my newsletter announcement list or add me to your RSS reader.

Tell your friends, or tell the world by voting for my writing at Digg, StumbleUpon, or other social networking sites.

I appreciate the time you spend here. Don’t forget to change the world the way you think it needs to be done.

-CG

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Regardless of what kind of work you do, it’s usually not difficult to set yourself apart by going beyond the status quo of being average. All too many working environments are filled with all kinds of people who are just ambling through their jobs. Many don’t want to be there at all, and never miss a chance to let everyone know how much they’d rather be somewhere else.

Others are embarrassingly opportunistic, focused entirely on themselves and “what’s in it for them.” Their every move is built on pleasing the people they think will determine their future. Still others in most workplaces base their time and energy on the goal of just getting by. They do what they need to do, for the most part, but they rarely take risks and rarely excel.

Sadly, these characterizations are true even in a lot of “helping” professions– in academia, in non-profit organizations, in the clergy, and so on. Setting a goal of doing the least amount expected of you may have started in the corporate cubicle world, but the norms of mediocrity have since spread throughout most professions.

Fortunately, there is a clear alternative to ambling through your workday. The alternative is to be excellent, to make a huge difference in your working environment, help others do better, and increase your own workplace stock along the way.

Focus on these eight principles to become a superhero in pretty much any job:

Never turn down a project by saying, “That’s not in my job description.”

We’re often taught that high achievers carefully select the tasks and projects that they work on. This is true in the long run, but when you’re getting established somewhere, you shouldn’t be so selective. Instead, do the things that need to be done but that no one wants to do.

You can always point out later that you’ve done everything you’re supposed to do and a lot more, but don’t whine about your projects while they’re underway. If someone asks you to do something, it’s usually because they think you’ll do it well. Impress them and do it even better.

Focus externally and continually ask for feedback.

Ask your boss, your colleagues, and your subordinates the same question every couple of weeks: “What can I do better?” If they don’t give you a straight answer, they’re usually just being polite. Ask again.

Also ask all of these people, “How can I help you?” Spend time every day focusing on the people around you. Think about their needs and preemptively help them. Make it clear you’re not helping them so they can help you later; just make their lives easier and help them look good to others.

Build a strong team even if you’re not the boss, and be a leader no matter what your title is.

You don’t need to be in charge to be a team-builder. Just start doing it. Take notes at meetings and email them out to the participants. Begin asking follow-up questions: “Who will take responsibility for this? When will it be done?”

Leadership rarely involves telling people what to do. Instead, it’s usually about helping people and teams create synergy and accomplish great things by working together. You can do that without any title at all. When the time comes where you do need to tell someone what to do, they’ll listen to you if you have taken the time to build the team well.

You know you’ve been successful when people start looking to you for the answers even when more experienced or more senior people are around. If you’re not at a meeting and people notice your absence, that’s a good start. If they wait to begin the meeting until you can be located, that’s even better.

Propose and Support Amazing Ideas…

Think about how you can make your organization or your workgroup great. Think really big, but also think small—sometimes the most effective changes require relatively small shifts in behavior or perception. Ask others for ideas. Most people have them, but they often don’t know how to present them, or they feel shut down from a previous negative experience. Get the best ideas out of the best people, and start pitching for them.

…but don’t pitch your biggest ideas in a group meeting.

Your ideas will “travel” further if they have the support of others, and it’s much easier to get buy-in through individual meetings. This is why the “meeting before the meeting” is usually more important than the meeting. Test out your best ideas. Give them time to settle with others. Go to each key decision maker to share your idea before the real meeting starts.

Then at the meeting, introduce the idea by saying, “I mentioned this to a couple of people earlier…” Everyone you talked with earlier will feel validated that they were involved before the big meeting, so talk to as many people as possible.

After you’ve established some credibility, start a small but meaningful rebellion.

Make sure you pick something that is easy to win but still makes a positive difference for most of your colleagues. Good ideas are dress codes, mandatory but useless meetings, and any long-standing practices that don’t make sense. Start violating these norms, slowly but boldly. Because you’ve taken the time to establish credibility, your rebellion will be closely watched. And because you’ve picked something that’s easy to win but meaningful to others, you’ll have good support for it. After you achieve the change you were seeking, share the credit and plan your next rebellion.

Don’t get tangled up in long email threads.

Never be a slave to your Outlook folder. Check it twice a day, turn off the “ding” sound that alerts you to new mail, and set up an Action folder to process important items instead of continually looking through your Inbox. As an inexperienced leader who derived too much self-worth from my Outlook addiction, someone said to me once, “Chris, don’t try to be the fastest person to reply to these long email threads. Just take your time, listen to other people, and then contribute something meaningful.”

Work smarter and harder.

Yes, you should find ways to work smarter and avoid repetitive, monotonous tasks. But you should also work really hard. Show up early and leave late. After you’ve established some authority, you can get back to pacing yourself. It’s a lot better to have a reputation as a hard worker from the beginning. When you relax a little later, no one will notice.

If you feel threatened by someone, don’t show it.

Most people who lead by intimidation are quite insecure. Don’t reinforce their insecurity by pandering to it. Even when it’s working for them and you feel intimidated, never let them know. Instead, do your job, keep excelling, keep looking out for others, and eventually the tide will turn. You may even end up as their boss one day—it happens all the time.

***

These general tips below will also help:

Share Credit, Accept Blame. Many people try to pass the blame to others. It’s very different to say, it’s my fault. I’m sorry. Try sending an email with the subject “Hey everyone, I’m sorry” sometime and see what happens.

Compliment others every day. Do it by email, phone, notes, any way you can. Find out how people like to be complimented and do it the same way. Don’t make it trite. Most people know when you’re being genuine.

Go above and beyond. Deliver more than what’s expected. Don’t do it to be rewarded; do it because it really adds value.

***

Be excellent, and a remarkable thing will happen: by helping others look good and improving your overall environment, you’ll look good as well. You’ll do it without backstabbing and without doing stuff that has no real value. Instead, you’ll inspire others.

And then you’ll be a leader, just like John Quincy Adams said:

“If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader.”

This is real leadership for any generation and any workplace. If you don’t yet know how you’ll change the world, this is a great way to start.

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At the time I’m writing this, only about 10 people will be reading. The ChrisGuillebeau.com site has been live for a couple of days, but I haven’t announced it anywhere or done any kind of promotion.

It’s good to test things out before you take over the world.

A couple of months from now, I’ll go live with a more public launch, but until then I’ll be adding content, tweaking the design, and getting the site together.

Right from the beginning, I thought it would be good to state for the record what I hope to accomplish here. A goal is good, a measurable goal is better, and a publicly measurable goal is best of all.

This project is about unconventional ideas and how to put them into practice. I’ll be writing mainly about the subjects of international travel, personal development, and entrepreneurship. The theme that links these different topics together is nonconformity, or ways of thinking about life, work, and travel that are vastly different—and usually vastly superior—to what is offered by the status quo of conventional thinking.

I have some degree of experience in each of these areas:

LIFE

• Finished college at age 19 with two degrees
• Lived in the poorest region in the world (West Africa) for four years from 2002-2006
• Admitted into a competitive graduate school program without taking any standardized tests
• Finished graduate school three months early with a 3.9 GPA and 20 more credits than needed (Note: this will technically only be true as of March 2008—but I’m not expecting any problems)

WORK

• Supported myself entirely through self-employment for 10 years
• Have lived completely debt-free for my entire life
• Gave keynote speeches and facilitated negotiations with numerous government leaders in Africa
• Served in various leadership positions, including two years where I had primary responsibility for 120 staff members

TRAVEL

• Visited more than 70 countries so far (but there are still a lot left!)
• Traveled in Virgin Atlantic’s Upper Class cabin from London to Tokyo (the ticket cost $8,000, but I paid only $212)
• Took a 36-hour bus ride through East Africa, a 10-day series of bus rides through Eastern Europe, and a 10-day independent walking trip through the Middle East (all of these just in 2007)
• Earned 680,000 Frequent Flyer Miles from 2005-2007 with only 84,000 actual miles traveled

Anyway, those are a few credentials, but I put them here only for people who are interested in those kinds of things. Going forward, I’ll be focusing on helping others achieve their own significant goals.

Looking ahead from the beginning of the project, here’s what I’d like to see one year from now:

1. 78,000 words of high-quality content in at least 150 posts. I’ll be writing primarily in the short essay format, but naturally some essays will be longer.
2. An additional email newsletter series of 15-20 messages. You can sign up for that here and follow along as it develops.
3. 25 completed profiles where I feature other non-conformists who are out changing the world as they see fit.
4. An average of at least 1,000 committed, regular readers who follow the project through RSS, email updates, or by checking in at the site.
5. A signed contract for my first book that will explore these ideas in greater detail. Later in the year I’ll submit a proposal to a few book agents with good reputations, and based on their feedback I hope to move forward with a publisher’s contract before January 1, 2009.

There are also a few other metrics that I’ll be tracking, but I haven’t set measurable goals for them yet. The main one of these is revenue, or how I will monetize the site. Since the beginning of the planning process, I’ve gone back and forth about this for various reasons.

The most important consideration is that I’m not creating this site to make money. In fact, I’m effectively giving up a lot of money to work on it instead of working on business projects. However, I certainly don’t see anything wrong with making money either, so if I can do so in a non-obtrusive way that adds value to readers, we’ll work on that later.

For now, I’ll err on the side of less promotion and more great content. At some point after the April launch, I may need to think more about monetization, but for now it’s off the radar.

While I’m writing, I’ll be pursuing other important goals.

I hope to visit at least 15 new countries this year as part of my five-year journey to every country in the world. I’ll write about each of those visits here in weekly trip reports. I don’t travel constantly—I usually go on 3-5 overseas trips a year for about 2 weeks at a time. Eventually the site will be at a point where all my trip reports are live updates, but since I have a lot of catching up to do, the first year will mostly contain trip reports from previous countries I’ve visited.

I also work with several non-profit organizations, speak to groups about leadership and international development, run marathons, and other fun stuff. From time to time, I’ll write about these activities whenever it seems they are relevant to the site. But mostly, the project will be less about me and more about the power of choosing an independent path.

I hope you enjoy it.

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In September 2006 I first considered the idea of trying to visit every country in the world, and I decided to write a short essay about everywhere I’ve been so far. Over the next year I’ll be posting one of the essays each week until I catch up.

The compilation below is a short summary that is meant to be used as a reference for more detailed trip reports. As I complete the reports and post them on the site, countries I’ve reported on thus far will be linked in blue.

In case you’re interested in the short version of my travel life, I lived in Asia for two years as a child, but didn’t start traveling seriously until 2002, when my wife and I moved to West Africa to spend four years volunteering for a medical charity. We lived in Sierra Leone for one year, in Liberia for one year, and in various places throughout the region for two more years. Part of that time was also spent in Europe and South Africa, and the whole experience taught me a lot about travel and cross-cultural living.

We left Africa in 2006 and moved to Seattle, where I now begin most of my adventures. Since 2005, I’ve visited more than 20 countries each year, and my goal is to visit every country in the world before my 35th birthday in April 2013.

Africa

Sierra Leone was the first African country I visited and lived in. I arrived in Freetown by ship and spent four months learning the ways of West Africa. Togo was next, and I learned French by studying in Lomé and driving all over the southern part of the country. Benin, next door to Togo, was a place I came to know well through more than six visits over the next few years. One time I took an overland journey to Lagos, Nigeria, where I experienced the most interesting border crossing of my travels thus far. In Guinea I was followed by the Secret Service and warned not to talk about anything political with anyone. At night I stayed in a Catholic guesthouse, and when the electricity went out for three days I learned the French words for candle and lighter.

I made two trips to The Gambia, where I had good Indian food while meeting with government leaders every day for a week. The Gambia is a tiny country almost completely surrounded by Senegal, where I was mostly in transit several times, but I remember thinking of the capital Dakar as the New York City of West Africa because everything was so fast-paced. Côte d’Ivoire was another transit stop, but I went to Abidjan so many times (at least six) that I decided to count it as a country. One time I was stuck in the airport for 18 hours as a connecting flight to Benin was continually delayed.

Liberia was the country where I spent the most time, living there for a year and taking four other trips there. When I think about West Africa, I usually think about Liberia. My Ghanaian friends told me that Ghana was the promised land, and they were right: after spending months in Liberia and flying to war-torn countries around the region, my first visit to Ghana was amazing. Later on I lived there for my last four months in Africa, and I used to take long runs on Saturday afternoon out along the beach in Tema.

If forced to choose one country to live in for the rest of my life, I would probably choose New Zealand, but South Africa would be a close second. I ran so much in East London that I acquired my first running injury and then couldn’t run much in Cape Town a few weeks later. I went to the mountain kingdom Lesotho on my leaving-from-Africa exit tour. It was the ultimate sleepy capital and as anti-climactic as you could imagine. Then I went to Zambia, which I liked, and to Zimbabwe, where the country was falling apart due to the policies of Robert Mugabe. I paid $1 million Zimbabwean dollars for a Diet Coke, and people approached me on the street constantly trying to get U.S. dollars instead of their own worthless currency. I haven’t seen Botswana properly yet, but I did go over for a day tour while staying in Zimbabwe.

In the summer of 2007 I took a ten day overland trip through East Africa, beginning in Uganda where I saw the world’s largest taxi park. I continued on to Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, passing through Kenya on a 36-hour bus ride. I went to Zanzibar afterwards to recover and was more exhausted than I remembered being on any other trip. I hadn’t eaten in two days, but I found a great vegetarian Indian restaurant my first night and ordered enough food for three people even though I was by myself.

Asia

In China I was amazed: it was truly another planet. The country was everything I had read about and more. I spent four weeks in Harbin, a northern city located twelve hours from Beijing. After three weeks in Thailand I finally figured out how to order something in Thai other than fried rice. A few years later I started using Thai Airways to travel throughout the region, and in 2006 I was in Bangkok two days before a major coup that ousted the president and put the army in power. As I watched the news from my New Zealand hotel room I was disappointed about missing the fun.

I went to Burma, also known as Myanmar, for several days from Thailand. Monks frequently came up to me in the streets and said hello. I saw the sights and tried to talk to the people as much as is possible there. In Vietnam I learned to walk through the streets with thousands of motorcycle drivers. I visited a temple, ate vegetable pho, and stayed at a nice hotel for $25 a night. In Singapore I stayed at the YMCA and walked around the streets for hours, just like I did in Hong Kong. In both places I took the metro as far as it would go in each direction and then walked back to the center. From Hong Kong I took the ferry to Macau, where I first had the idea of visiting every country in the world. From Singapore I took the ferry to Bantam Island in Indonesia, which was a bit of a strange place. I also took a night bus up to Malaysia, where I walked around for a while and decided against traveling six more hours up to Kuala Lumpur.

I lived in the Philippines for two years when I was a kid. It was my first extended cross-cultural experience, and I learned how to take jeepneys (big public taxis) in search of donuts and video games. South Korea was disappointing because I had hoped to visit the demilitarized zone that separates the country from its northern neighbor, but it was closed to visitors during the short time I was there. I plan to go back there soon and see it properly. I usually begin my Round-the-World tickets from Japan, and I always enjoy the East-West culture conflict of cities like Tokyo and Osaka.

Europe

When I first went to Spain I thought it was amazing that you could get cerveza with your combo meal at Burger King, and it was actually cheaper than Diet Coke. I spent a month in Malaga and a month in Cadiz, where I trained for my first half-marathon in 90-degree temperatures. In Switzerland I tried not to buy anything because it was all so expensive, but the mountains were pretty. I took a combination of trains and buses to Liechtenstein from Zurich, where I wandered for a while but mostly tried to avoid groups of tourists.

After several trips to France, including trips to Paris and a weeklong stay just outside western Switzerland, I still feel like I haven’t seen much of the country. I spent two months in Germany without ever going to a real city. Then I went to Munich and saw how different it was from the countryside. I went back and back and back to Belgium at least twelve times while traveling to Africa, where I often thought about how tiring it must be to make every public announcement in three languages. No wonder the country is falling apart. One time I used a day in transit during my Brussels stopover to take the train down to Luxembourg. I drank some chocolate milk, walked around the small city, and went back up to Brussels. The Netherlands is one of my favorite European countries. I spent more time in Rotterdam than anywhere else, but I loved the whole country.

My first stop in the United Kingdom was three weeks in Sunderland, which is in the northeast and far away from everything except Scotland. My British friends were horrified that this would be my first impression of their country—apparently it’s like the Mississippi of England—but I really liked it. My family came over to visit in Liverpool a couple of years later, and we went to Ireland on a tour that we called “10 minutes of everything Irish.” It was an ambitious itinerary for a weekend, but we had fun.

The only Delta awards ticket I could get out of Europe on a trip one summer was from Bucharest, so I went to Romania for a while after three days in Austria. I flew back to New York with a cellist who had an extra BusinessElite seat just for her cello. This fact made a good impression on me. I went to Hungary from West Africa just before the 2006 riots that brought the government to a standstill. I was disappointed because I seem to always miss exciting events involving political conflict by just a few days (see Thailand above). I wandered through the city and slowly got used to being back in Europe after a few months’ absence. After getting acclimated again, I took the train through Slovakia and on to Prague in the Czech Republic. Prague was as cool as everyone says it is. I stayed at the Marriott with my loyalty points and then checked out to go to a $20 hostel far outside the city. Around this time I began to appreciate the deliberate contrast between environments.

I flew on Olympic Airlines from Brussels to Tel Aviv with an 8-hour stopover in Athens. So that I could properly count Greece as a country visit, I went into the city for the whole time even though I was thoroughly jet-lagged from not sleeping on my red-eye flight from Seattle over to Europe. I went down to the main public square, where I once again discovered I had missed a huge public protest by only one day. My flight to Tel Aviv left at 3:00 a.m. back at the airport, and I tried to sleep for a couple of hours on a park bench before taking the airport bus. Overall, it was a very sleepy day.

In Croatia I went to Dubrovnik and felt bad that I didn’t go to Split or the outer islands, which I think might have been better. I went over to Montenegro from Croatia and was frustrated by a long walk from the bus station until I came to Prcanj and saw the most amazing view of Kotor across the water. I took a 12-hour overnight bus ride through Albania and it was exactly as I expected: bottles of cheap vodka being passed around on the bus, requests for bribes at the border, etc. I enjoyed it. My friend told me that Ohrid, Macedonia was the nicest place to visit in all of Southeast Europe. I went there and decided she was right. After a few days I went to Skopje and took the overnight train to Serbia, which was three hours late arriving from Greece and then five hours late getting to Belgrade. Once I was in Belgrade I walked around the city, asking people about the war and looking at the bombed-out buildings. Then I felt bad because I met someone who told me that everyone who comes to Belgrade asks only about the war.

Middle East

In Israel I arrived before dawn in Jerusalem from the airport in Tel Aviv. At first I was sleepy and frustrated, but when I saw the incredible sunrise over the old city and heard the Islamic call to prayer, I was wide awake and wide-eyed. In Jordan the bus driver at the border crossing promised to take me to Amman, inshallah. I traveled through the country for a week and ended up outside Petra in the south. In Bahrain I was just in transit, so I bought a Cinnabon and walked outside to sit on the ground and eat it. I thought it was strange that you could buy Cinnabons and Papa John’s pizza at the airport terminal in Bahrain. In the United Arab Emirates (UAE) I rented a car and drove through every emirate. There are seven of them, and they are at least as independent as the states in the U.S. On my second day, I got lost through a brief section that passes through Oman. I kept driving and driving for hours and realized that I was actually going further into Oman instead of out to the other side of the UAE. The mountains were all around me as it was getting dark, and I felt incredibly peaceful even though I didn’t know the right way to go.

Islands

I was rescued at sea in the Grenadines after my kayak capsized, but it was more embarrassing than scary. On Barbados my taxi driver made me laugh when he said I should “put my brain in park” and let him worry about getting to the hotel. On Dominica I learned all the important facts about the island from another shuttle driver: a new KFC had just arrived in Roseau, there were three cell phone carriers on the island, and potholes can be repaired with a combination of asphalt and concrete. From the divided island of St. Maarten I went over to St. Martin and hung out with some Nigerian migrants who had come to open an African curios shop. I also took the ferry to Anguilla and thought all about what had happened in my life during 2006. I wasn’t feeling well in the Turks and Caicos, but trying to find ibuprofen anywhere in the capital city was a futile search.

On Grenada I went to visit the family of a friend I knew from England. They were surprised to see me but then took me around the island, which reminded me of Sierra Leone except much better off, even after a recent hurricane had displaced many people. On Aruba I ran five miles along the beach and then went to Dunkin Donuts to celebrate. I’m not usually a beach person, but in the Bahamas I sat on the beach and didn’t do anything special. I did more kayaking in Tobago and was glad that I didn’t capsize there.

I went to the Canary Islands seven or eight times between 2002-2006. Most of the time I was on Tenerife, but one time I went over to La Gomera with friends for a three-day break from our work. We drove on every single road on the island and had a picnic on top of a volcano.

Most places look the same to me when flying in, but the Faroe Islands are the ultimate exceptions. You fly straight in through the highest, greenest mountains, and just before you crash into one of them you crash land on the runway. It was a magical place where I spent six days. I came to the Faroes from Iceland, where I made a classic travel mistake: I didn’t pay attention to airport codes. My flight from London on Iceland Air arrived at Reykjavík, but my flight to the Faroes left an hour later from an airport that was 45 minutes away. It was one of only two flights a week, and I just barely made it.

Miscellaneous

I’ve been to Canada many times. I especially remember spending ten days in Montreal more than ten years ago, and a weekend trip to Vancouver in 2007. I also remember a trip to Toronto at the end of 2006, where I walked in the streets for hours one Sunday morning after seeing snow for the first time in five years. I had been to 49 of the 50 United States by the time I was 16, but 14 years later I still haven’t made it to Maine. I haven’t seen most of Latin America yet, but I spent three weeks in Paraguay and one week in Brazil a long time ago.

All the Places that Remain

The clichéd expression is completely true: the more you travel, the more you realize how much more you have to see. I feel like a beginner and I have learned so much from others who have inspired me.

While I’m waging a war against conformity, this site will also chronicle my goal of visiting every country in the world before my 35th birthday in 2013. As I eliminate a lot of “easy” countries and move on to regions like Central Africa, Central Asia, and the South Pacific that are more challenging, I’m not 100% sure that I will meet this goal. However, I also believe that nothing worth doing is ever easy, so I decided a while back that I should set my standards high.

Thanks for reading this far. Most of my essays won’t cover this many topics (65 countries so far), but I hope they will all be meaningful to you.

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I call myself a renegade entrepreneur because that’s what I’ve always thought of myself as: someone who creates opportunities and oversees projects, but in a different way than others working in traditional jobs do. As I’ve studied and met with other entrepreneurs and small business owners, I’ve learned that this is not an unusual trait among successful people.

Many successful entrepreneurs, if not most, are unconventional thinkers.

I never set out to work in business. I was more drawn to the values of creativity and freedom than to the idea of doing business deals, talking on the phone all the time, and going on sales calls. In fact, I dislike most of those tasks and have tried over the years to create opportunities that automate the sales process as much as possible.

In my 2 ½ years in college, where I earned degrees in Sociology and Psychology, I also took several business courses. I’m sorry to confirm the belief that a lot of entrepreneurs have about studying business in college: what I learned was completely irrelevant to any business decisions I’ve made over the past ten years. I think there are some programs that focus on small businesses and Internet businesses now, but when I went to a small state college in 1995, they didn’t offer anything like that.

Instead, I learned through doing, and through my overwhelming desire to escape the life of full-time drudgery that I saw many of my friends going into.

What True Entrepreneurship Isn’t

Among people who work regular jobs, there are a number of misconceptions about those of us who don’t. I don’t blame anyone for the misconceptions, because a lot of them are perpetrated and enforced by people with a vested interest in making money from bad investments by naïve people.

For example:

Entrepreneurship is not slaving away to buy a franchise that puts you into debt and creates the possibility that one day, 3-5 years into the future after working harder than you would at a job, the franchise you own will make enough money to support you as much as you could earn at a job. Except you’ll still have to work full-time, and you’ll pay 6-12% of your income to the franchise owner, and you’ll carry all the risk. Hmmmm.

You’d never know from reading the marketing materials from these companies that so many “business owners” were going broke from their investments in the franchise, but it’s true.

Entrepreneurship is not playing the real estate market unless you really know what you are doing. I consider a home with a mortgage to be a liability instead of an asset. I am wary of all forms of debt, and when you are talking about bricks and steel, it doesn’t get more physical than that. I realize this is controversial and practically every other article you see about starting your own business advocates real estate as a primary strategy, but I don’t know enough about the subject to even try, so I don’t.

You would be wise to do the same unless you have a very high risk tolerance and honestly think you can achieve comparably high rewards for your investments. You should also be prepared to spend a lot of time on the same kinds of issues over and over.

What True Entrepreneurship Is

On the other hand, here’s what successful entrepreneurship means for me and many other people:

Entrepreneurship is about creating personal freedom. The vision that many job-working people have of entrepreneurs is often a bit jaded. We get up around 10am, eat a muffin, stroll into the home office at 11, read some emails, go to lunch, take off the afternoon, and so on. My experience has been that some entrepreneurs have created lifestyles like that, but most of us are still working pretty hard most of the time. I do eat a lot of muffins, but I also get up at 5:30 a.m. a lot of days to write and work on my important projects.

However, it is true that the ability to structure your life around your own skills and rhythms is very important, and one of the true benefits for successful entrepreneurs who can balance this well. On a trip back from Asia, I was suffering from jet lag (I am certainly not immune), and after working a normal schedule for two days, all of a sudden I felt really sleepy after lunch one day. I laid down and slept… for six hours.

Yes, I know you aren’t supposed to do that. But after I finally woke up, I felt so much better. I also realized if I had a traditional job, I wouldn’t even be able to take a shorter nap when I was feeling tired. Of course, I probably wouldn’t be able to travel around the world as much either, and that’s another thing I am extremely grateful for.

The potential for economic freedom is also a tremendously important feature of successful entrepreneurship. Most wealth around the world is created by entrepreneurs, and studies show that your best chance of becoming wealthy is to start a business. Even though I believe that you shouldn’t pursue wealth for its own sake, most goals and ideal lives require a certain amount of money. If they don’t require actual money, then they often require you to give up time that would otherwise be spent working. Therefore, economic freedom, especially in the ultimate form of financial independence, is certainly a worthwhile pursuit for anyone.

One of my long-term goals is to build a successful small business that can be sold for $1.2 million dollars. After careful estimating, I’ve decided that this is the amount I need to create true financial independence without needing to work. Of course, I will work because I like to and I believe that I have value to offer (see below). The idea is just that this reserve, which will be conservatively invested and withdrawn at just 4% a year, will create an income stream to cover most basic bills so that I can continue to pursue my passions, life goals, and service to others.

True entrepreneurship involves the creation of processes, not just the creation of work. If you’ve created a project that requires continual inputs from you and relies on your own work to keep all the plates in the air, congratulations! You have just built a job for yourself. Yes, you have built a job, and maybe even a better job than most people have—but it’s a job, not a business.

A business earns money while you sleep and while you are on vacation. A business is an asset that can be bought and sold. A true business is largely independent of its owner, although of course this is a matter of degree and only rarely is 100% independent. Therefore, entrepreneurs pay close attention to the creation of processes that will eventually allow themselves to focus on what they’re best at, or perhaps even leave the operation entirely.

Full Disclosure: I should probably confess that I am terribly inefficient at this. I recognize that it is one of my biggest weaknesses and has held me back from achieving wider rewards in the past. In my defense I can only say that many other small businesses have the same mindset, because we’re all self-taught. Two years ago I started studying the subject of creating processes, and I was fascinated. So that’s how you do it, I remember thinking while reading The E-Myth Revisited and other business books. I’ve made a lot of improvements since then, but I still have a long way to go.

Successful entrepreneurship is about creating or adding value. I just read a article in the now-defunct Motto magazine about Richard Tait, the creator of Cranium—you know, the board game company. Richard says that every night before he goes to bed, he reads about 200 customer service emails. “Before I put my head on the pillow,” Richard says, “I like the confirmation that we’re doing good work, that we’re making a difference.”

The business of Cranium is adding value to people’s lives. This is one of the primary motivations of this site—to truly give back and challenge people to nonconformity, whether through inspiration, advice, or even confrontation if necessary. (Some of the best lessons I’ve learned in life has been from people I didn’t usually agree with, and in some cases, didn’t even like. We’ll cover this later.)

I firmly believe that we all have a purpose in life, and every person has value to share with others. When we work against that purpose and fail to define a life that involves caring for others, we are not only withholding good from other people, we are also limiting our own fulfillment and meaning in life. How else could Mother Teresa live a meaningful life while so many rich people are unhappy?

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Now that you know what entrepreneurship is and is not, what do you think? Are you an entrepreneur already, or are you one of the 60% of people with a dream of starting a business?

Start learning more today, and if you’re up to the challenge, make a new business plan to get started. One of my favorite quotes is from Wayne Gretsky: “100% of the shots you don’t take don’t go in.”

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