When a dream dies

 

Heartbroken disillusioned funk.

Rewind. Play. Stop.

Rewind. Play. Stop.

Rewind. Play. Pause.

Off.

Beauty, ugliness. Laughter, sadness.

Magical moments and regretful inaction.

All lingering guests remain.

Tripping and kicking at the threshold of your consciousness.

Take courage, young builder, Kick them all out!

For good.

Wipe the embarrassment off your chin.

Brush regret off the toes of your boots.

No matter how great or promising or real you think the dream,

it is dead.

It has been for some time.

It was once alive, no doubt. And it was good.

Wake up! Knock it off!

Get up off the ground, you fool. Leave this madness at once.

Open your eyes. See the stream of light just above your face.

It softly pierces the pane, dancing playfully with leafy silhouettes.

Look there! Just beyond the foggy dew.

See it rise. Slowly. Awkwardly.

There. Beyond the crooked hedgerows of recollection.

Though it wobbles and flops, it is taking flight.

Lifting slowly, sloppily, but most definitely up.

Up it goes from the eternal stream of newfound dreams.

Will you capture it? Should you?

Maybe. Possibly. I hope so. Yes?

Choose to be lucky. Let it sweep you off your feet.

Fly away and tell me what you see.

Why I (still) Launch in Tulsa

I received a call several years ago from a journalist I admired. CNN Money was doing profiles on U.S. entrepreneurs and their cities.

At the time, Tulsa was one of the few cities outlasting the Great Recession and our promising startup was one of a handful of tech companies based in Tulsa. The series was called, “Why I launched Here”. It featured entrepreneurs from both large and small cities in the U.S.

My friends and I were bullish on our city but only a few actually believed Tulsa was destined for an economic and cultural renaissance.

Looking back, you cannot recognize this place from 10 years ago. What once used to be the, “Oil Capital of the World”, has slowly and deliberately developed into a sophisticated city fueled by a new kind of energy.

The New York Times recently reported Tulsa was emerging as a “Hipster Hub”. Over the past year, we’ve got a few people talking.

No. 1 Tulsa, OK — 10 Best Cities For Young Entrepreneurs, Forbes

No. 1 Tulsa, OK — 10 Affordable Cities, Huffington Post

No. 5 Tulsa, OK — Most Affordable Big Cities in the U.S., Kiplinger

No. 14 Tulsa, OK — America’s 50 Best Cities, Bloomberg

No. 47 Tulsa, OK — 52 Places to Go in 2015, New York Times

So here we are, nearly 10 years later, and I’m still here. More importantly, I’m still helping to launch new ventures I believe in … right here in Tulsa.

Why, you ask? It’s quite simple:

Education: Tulsa has world-class public and private schools. We have OU Tulsa, OSU Tulsa, and one of the most innovative community colleges (TCC) in the country. Above all, we have The University of Tulsa which is giving the Ivy League a run for their money.

Neighborhoods: Beautiful, affordable historic houses near downtown and along the Arkansas River. Our community is funding a $300 million “Gathering Place” along Tulsa River Parks that will rival Central Park.

Culture: Gilcrease Museum, Philbrook Museum, Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan, Circle Cinema, Arts Alliance Tulsa, Tulsa Garden Center, and Tulsa Art Deco.

Music: The Hop Jam, Sound Pony, Colony, Vanguard, Cain’s Ballroom, Brady Theatre, BOK Center, Public Radio Tulsa.

Community: Tulsa Farmer’s Market, Tulsa Tough, Route 66 Marathon, Tulsa Run, Food on the Move, Kitchen 66.

Shopping: Utica Square, Center 1, Dwelling Spaces, Whole Foods, Sprouts, Natural Grocer’s, Trader Joe’s, Reasor’s.

Coffee: Topeca, Hodges Bend, DoubleShot, Kolache, Cafe Cubana, Shades of Brown, CHOCS, Nordaggio’s.

Dining: Tallgrass, Lucky’s, Palace Cafe, Laffa, Ri Le, Mondo’s, Yokozuna, Tavern, Bull in the Alley, Stonehorse, Chimera, Trenchers, Boston Deli, and the soon-to-be Prairie Brewpub.

Food Trucks: Lone Wolf Banh Mi, Lola’s Gypsy Caravan, Lick Your Lips Mini-Donuts, Mr. Nice Guys, The Parish.

Craft Beer: Prairie Artisan Ales, Marshall, Dead Armadillo, Hanson Bros.

Libations: Valkyrie, Hodge’s Bend, Bramble, McNellie’s, Fassler Hall, Dust Bowl, Sound Pony.

The most awesome convenience stores on planet earth and a locally based privately held business doing $12.5 billion in annual sales: QuikTrip!

For you young turks looking to create a dynasty, get your butts to Tulsa and set up shop at 36ºNorth. This is the kind of place where you may just want to launch your next venture.

Chief Soul Officer

You’ve got soul or you don’t.

No matter how depressing the news may get in the United States, or how outraged other countries get with our politics, when I travel to the farthest corners of the globe, I always find people who are madly in love with America.

What makes this country so irresistible? 

Well, it’s obviously in the music of Miles Davis. It’s in the bubbles of an ice cold bottle of Coca-Cola. It’s definitely in a new pair of Air Jordans.

I’m talking about soul.

Not the genre of funk mastered by James Brown and Aretha Franklin; I’m pointing towards a more esoteric, spiritual sense of the word.

There was — and is — an undeniable energy we possess in America that cannot be found anywhere else. This quality was perfected sometime between 1776 and the creation of Pixar. It’s this crazy idea that anything is possible.

Anything.

And herein lies the tragedy. Fewer and fewer Americans are experiencing this mental-emotional-spiritual state of being soulful.

As an entrepreneur, what concerns me most is the rapid speed in which it’s being sucked out of our culture. I’m not piling on corporate greed or big government. I’m saying Main Street in America is losing its soul.

Visit the restroom in the most popular restaurant, shop or theatre in town. Many of them are disgusting. Or try calling your health insurance company or the lawn mower repair guy and ask for same-day service.

It’s my belief that this culture wouldn’t exist if the owners and managers of businesses had the courage to empower someone in their organization to focus exclusively on meeting the needs of the people they’re suppose to serve.

Let’s call this person the Chief Soul Officer.

To prove my point, here’s a challenge for any business owner or CEO. See if you can answer, “Yes” to four or more of the following questions. If so, your organization has soul! (If not, you don’t need me to tell you Elvis has left the building.)

1. Direct competitors consider your offering to be among the best in class.
2. Employees and customers refer to your offering as “great”.
3. Spouses/Partners of employees say you provide excellent wages/benefits.
4. The smartest kids in your city want to go to work for your company.
5. Local schools/nonprofits refer to your company as a community partner.

Companies with soul produce undeniably great stuff … from paper clips to rocket ships. They consistently greet and know their customers by name. They cannot keep bright, passionate people away from wanting to get hired. They radiate employee, company and community pride.

So find your company’s soul! Bust out of the crowd of peers that bitch about Obamacare, the tax code, or whatever the trending media piñata is that’s consuming cable TV. These things have no impact on the way you serve others and they don’t do a damn thing towards maintaining clean restrooms.

Like my friend Bob Goff likes to say: Choose to be awesome! And not just went people are looking. Soul reverberates from the inside out. From the bottom to the top.

The trouble with uncurious people

Chances are, the people you work with are bright. And uncurious.

Near the top of my list of things entrepreneurs can stop doing in order to inch closer to greatness, this is a big one.

Did you know she graduated from Harvard?

[Big shot] said we can’t afford to lose him.

I hear she’s about to take another offer.

He is so connected. He’ll bring in so much business!

These are some of the stupid things we say before hiring uncurious people.

Assuming a person’s resume and references are exception and they actually fit the bill in terms of qualifications, what if you went a few extra steps and determined just how curious they really are?

Ask them about their favorite music, movies, food, pets, hobbies … anything that ignites a spark of passion. No spark? Maybe no hire.

Whoa … she just got really fired up talking about her cat Cobain!

Interesting name for a cat, you think. OK. Turn on your Passion-O-Meter and let’s find out how curious this woman really is.

How many cats are we talking about?

Why cats and not dogs? (Response limited to one minute!)

How did she find the cat? (Expensive import? Animal rescue?)

Is she a Nirvana fan? Does kitty smell like teen spirit?

That’s when she tells you she livestreamed her cat 24/7 while attending graduate school. That’s right: Cobain has 5,412 followers on Instagram. Turns out, Ellen Degeneres tweeted happy birthday to Cobain. On live TV.

See where I’m going with this?

This is the point where we lose many of our HR friends who use algorithms and online subscriptions for “acquiring” talent. Which is too bad. Because this is precisely how many of them screw themselves out of hiring right. 

Software can’t evaluate people at the soul level. Not yet. And if we can’t tap into a person’s inner creator, this is a problem. Even if you’re a bookkeeper.

If you’re the praying kind, you probably believe like me, that we are all born to create. This makes us C-U-R-I-O-U-S. Creators are not satisfied until they understand how stuff works and why things cannot be made better.

I’m sure there must be a scientific method for identifying a candidate’s level of curiosity, and if there is, it needs to be made more accessible to entrepreneurs. In the the meantime, stop considering new hires because they simply match a job profile. Look for people who demand to know what’s next? What happens if I succeed? What happens if we fail? 

What else can I do? Where else can I go? What’s possible?

Curiosity may kill cats but it may be just the thing that your venture needs.

One day before tomorrow

It’s safe (and a little sad) to say I’ve spent half my life living in the future.

I came by it honestly. My father is a futurist. This guy had me reading Peter Drucker, Tom Peters and Charles Handy before I could get my hands on the swimsuit edition of Sports Illustrated. Thanks to Jim Roberts, I was instilled with confidence that I had what it takes to put a dent in the universe.

Dad was a “you can watch the news or make the news” kind of guy.

He would say, “God has big plans for you!”, which used to feel more like a curse than a blessing. It wasn’t until I was a grown man that I realized God has big plans for everyone.

On my 33rd birthday, Dad reminded me Jesus saved the whole world at 33. 

“Yeah … I’m probably not going to do that this year.”

To counter-balance Dad, my mother, Saint Judy of Boise, made sure I understood I was no better — and no worse — than everybody else.

Treat the President with the same dignity and respect as the homeless man down the street,” she would say. She loved to quote Rudyard Kipling and his famous poem, “If — ”, especially the part about walking with kings yet never losing the common touch. Mom was all about that.

The sad truth is, I over-corrected like most entrepreneurs tend to do. I became so obsessed with shaping the future, I found it nearly impossible to focus on right-this-second.

Maybe it was having three kids or working 80-hour weeks for 20 years. Maybe it was all those trips to Africa. Whatever it was, I finally discovered the world will go on without me. It was here long before I arrived. It will be here long after I’m gone.

By obsessing on crazy-big, cancer-curing ideas all those years, I overlooked the magic that can only happen when you pour yourself into someone right in front of you.

Now that I’m on the tail-end of half time, both career-wise and as a parent, I feel lucky to discover what the world needs most from us is to for us to give ourselves to the small and seemingly insignificant things under our nose.

It’s tough to free yourself of the glory days and heartbreakers of the past. For me, it’s more difficult to free my mind of the future I used to visualize. For me, I have to carve out time and open my eyes to what’s around me.

Today, I am convinced my greatest contribution to this world is likely in the magical space that exists between me and the people that surround me right this moment. Which happens to be one day before tomorrow.

Entrepreneurish? I hope not.

No disrespect to my friends at Alcoholics Anonymous but I’m thinking it’s time people like me had their own support group.

Hello. My name is David Noah and I’m an entrepreneur.

A friend of a friend recently asked me what I did for a living. I told her what I tell everyone: I’m an entrepreneur. “So you're in-between jobs?,” she asked without blinking.

I wasn’t offended in the least bit. That’s because I am an entrepreneur. We get rejected and discounted all the time.

This beautiful word that has been around for nearly a thousand years has somehow devolved.

It’s obvious the word is overused and misused. Like crazy. But so are words like “Christian” and “Muslim”. We use these words because, well ... they still have meaning.

You can’t be kind of pregnant and you can't be kind of entrepreneurial either. You are an entrepreneur, or you're not.

There’s nothing entrepreneurial about being entrepreneurish. Entrepreneurish people dabble. They pose. They like the idea of being an entrepreneur but shudder at the idea of covering payroll on their credit card.

Entrepreneurish people exploit the ideas of others while using other people’s money. Which clearly isn't entrepreneurship; it is opportunism at its worst.

Back in the 13th century, the root-word for entrepreneur surfaced as a verb. The word “entreprendre” meant the act of doing something. Not a bad start.

Three hundred years later, the word evolved into a noun and became commonly associated with people known for undertaking new business ventures.

By the 18th century, economists had a very specific idea of what it meant to be an entrepreneur.

The essence of the word became inextricably linked with two characteristics: (1) taking calculated risks of new, unproven ventures — without any assurances of ever deriving profits; and (2) creating value for others — by envisioning new forms of human progress through the repurposing of underutilized resources.

When I think of what it means to be an entrepreneur, I gravitate towards a few undeniable traits found in people that have built things from scratch with their own money and often without the moral, political or financial support of society.

Real entrepreneurs possess:

• A clear vision of what’s possible

• An intense passion for seeing their vision become reality

• A willingness to sacrifice their financial gain and social standing

• A track record for seeing the things they envisioned become reality

• A body of work that inspires other people to become entrepreneurs

Being an entrepreneur has been a bitter-sweet journey for me. I’m not sure I even had a choice.

Whether you’re an entrepreneur or not, leave a comment if you think I’ve missed the mark. If you agree with me, be nice to the next entrepreneur you meet. These folks are up there with school teachers and coaches in my book and we tend to leave the world better than we found it.

That’s doing something.