Success or Happiness?

October 23, 2012 By in Personal Development 3 Comments

We talk about our career choices as if they are mutually exclusive: either you make tons of money and buy fancy things you never have the time to enjoy, or you do what you love and live in poverty, but you’re happy. You sell your soul to Goldman Sachs or write poetry nobody reads.

Not Steve Jobs.  People often eulogize Jobs for his revolutionary success, but for all his accomplishments, he also came off as an intensely fulfilled human being. Jobs managed success and happiness. And the advice he left behind for entrepreneurs is immensely inspiring.

Jobs said you can have both. And he told us where to start: Do What You Love.

BusinessWeek columnist Carmine Gallo writes:

In 2005, Steve Jobs told Stanford University’s graduating class that the  secret to success is having “the courage to follow your heart and  intuition.” Inside, he suggested, “you already know what you truly want to  become.” Jobs followed his heart his entire career, and that passion,  according to him, made all the difference. It’s very difficult to come up  with new, creative ideas that move society forward if you are not passionate about the subject.

He was addressing some of the brightest and most privileged college graduates on the planet, and he was telling them to leave the comfort zone of their smart colleagues, MBA degrees and fancy consulting jobs, leave that all behind, and strike out on their own. Leave the herd and start your own tribe.

Sounds nice, but this is not easy advice to follow, at least at the start, because it runs counter to tens of thousands of years of human conditioning.  If you stick with your group and conform to what the group’s doing, you are going to be safe, because the group is protecting you. When you leave the herd, all bets are off. You’re alone, uncertain, different, rejected, vulnerable. It’s a very old fear, an animal fear.

But we are not  animals living in the Serengeti anymore. We are not going to die if we leave the herd. Quite the contrary: it’s where we go to thrive.

Once you start forgetting about what you should do and how, and removing the old constraints and limits and fears – salary, what will others think, is this something I know how to do – all these fears restrict the possibilities you can explore.  When you remove that, there’s a whole new world of possibilities out there.

The barrier and the issues you think you are going to face are all in your head. You are basically restricting yourself because at the end of the day, if you’re smart or if you went to a good school or have the privilege and opportunity to work in the startup industry, there’s no limit to what you can do. Unless of course you stay where you are.

When we started Totsy, the dominant thinking was that flash sales online only worked for impulse buys, things you wanted but didn’t need, like designer clothes. Fashion is about the impulse buy, luxury items.

We took a risk and bet that flash sales would also work for products you need. So we decided to focus on a specific vertical sell products new parents need. There was a risk people would not buy that way in that segment because it’s not about Marc Jacobs, it’s about buying a toy for your baby.

And for the success we’ve found here, we are not going to stay put. You have to keep reinventing yourself and taking new risks.

I started my career with a PhD in veterinary medicine. When I made the decision to work in pet nutrition for Colgate Palmolive and then Nestle Purina, I was effectively closing the door to practicing veterinary medicine. Then at a certain point I left that behind and went into luxury fashion at Louis Vuitton, and then left that behind again to become an entrepreneur and start a company that had nothing to do with pets or high fashion.

Most jobs today’s graduates will have don’t exist yet, or might be in an industry that doesn’t exist yet.Your college major may not be as important as you think. Zac Bissonnette writes for The New York Times:

Many students encounter tremendous pressure from their parents to adopt “practical” majors, and I’ve talked to a handful of students whose parents flatly refused to provide for their educational expenses unless they majored in something career-oriented. With less than half of recent college graduates landing jobs that require a college degree, this concern is understandable. But it’s misguided. In recent years, research into the importance of choice of major has led to a surprising conclusion: it’s really not all that important.

All the more reason to start with what you love. And if you’re long past your days of undergrad, do you abandon financial stability to follow your passion?

Not exactly. Success and happiness are not mutually exclusive. The co-authors of Just Start: Take Action, Embrace Uncertainty, Create the Future give some excellent practical advice in Harvard Business Review on how to get started:

If you can’t afford to do the thing you’re passionate about — for example, if you do it, you won’t be able to feed your family, or it would keep you from graduating college (which is something you think is more important than whatever you’re passionate about) — then no, you’d better not bet your economic life on it.

A basic principle concerning how you should deal with an unknown future is that every small smart step you take should leave you alive to take the next step. So, make sure you attend to your lower order Maslow needs of food and shelter and the like. But even this doesn’t mean you can’t work on your passion a little — even if it’s just for 15 minutes a day.

Need some more encouragement to leave the herd and start your tribe? Take it from Jobs:

Socializing the Supply Chain

March 29, 2012 By in Social Responsibility 1 Comment

Hershey’s is moving to independently sourced rainforest-friendly cocoa – at least for its its Bliss line of chocolate – but it took two years of Facebook campaigning, 50,000 signatures on a Change.org petition, 100,000 letters from concerned customers, and finally threat of a Super Bowl ad to finally pressure the chocolate giant to change its practices.

McDonald’s is phasing out gestation crates and pink slime after similar consumer activism campaigns was too loud and too persistent to ignore.

Social media cynics doubt the value of hitting the “Like” button on Facebook, but these are clear signs that the collective value of the consumer voice has hit an unprecedented pitch, albeit in the form of clicks and tweets.

Before the internet, brands owned their own voice. They wrote it on the packaging, in TV ads, on billboards.  In the social media era, brands don’t own their own voice anymore and that’s just a reality. Social media is making consumers too loud and organized to ignore, and they’re demanding a level of transparency big brands have never had to reckon with.

So they can try to spend a lot of money trying to control their voice and hide behind marketing campaigns or they can say, “this is who we are and this is what we stand for.”

The cool thing is that it’s no longer about pretending to be perfect or convincing you a  sip of Nestle Quik will take you to chocolate powder paradise. In the social media era, it’s more important to be just be honest.

Patagonia exemplifies this shift in brand thinking. They aren’t the most organic or the most green retailer, but they’re extremely clear about the way they do things. Should they go fair trade? Make their clothes in the US or somewhere else? They open the door to their customers to tell them what’s important. Nobody’s perfect, but let’s have a dialogue, let’s have a conversation about it. This is nothing short of a revolution.

At Totsy, not every brand we sell is 100% fair trade or 100% organic cotton, but we give as much space as possible to brands that are working hard to have better supply chains because it’s important to us.

There’s a social side to our supply chain values as well.  For toys we feature on Totsy.com, the whole goal is to promote products that develop or improve or encourage interaction between kids and parents. We promote more wooden puzzles than video games, to give two extreme examples, and we won’t sell toy guns. Is it something a kid can play with siblings or parents? Does it encourage education? Is it bringing more value than just a toy product?

For other products, like makeup and heels and sexy underwear for little girls – we refuse to sell those brands. There’s a time when you’re a kid, and there’s a time you’re adult. Under seven years old is definitely the time when you’re a kid. Maybe some parents wouldn’t take issue if we sold these products, but we feel that we have a voice here and it’s important.

You can buy anything you want on the internet, so you don’t need Totsy to do what Amazon already did for shopping. For parents in particular, they’re usually discovering brands they didn’t know about because they didn’t have a child before, so there’s an education process behind what we feature. We curate very highly and only sell 15 new brands a day, but we make sure you never miss out on the best brands.

We have a very clear set of values for what makes a brand the best, and we make sure we don’t even promote products that are not aligned with those values.

A full 30% of new customers find Totsy by word of mouth, social networks or the blogosphere. We think that’s a testament that Totsy moms like what we stand for. Read about Totsy being green and tell us what you think on our Totsy Facebook page.

Want to take our site for a stroll? We plant a tree in honor of your child with your first purchase.

A few days at the World Entrepreneurship Forum…

November 6, 2011 By in Conferences Tags: Leave a comment

As I am getting ready to leave Singapore after spending 5 days at the World Entrepreneurship Forum, it’s time to look back and ask myself the question “What did I witness?”.

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In a constantly changing world, where communications between people are easier than ever, are frequent and often overwhelming or lacking a true meaning, it has been refreshing to sit in a room with 150 world entrepreneurs, top leading educators and politics.

Sometimes it only take one word, one meeting, to may be change the way millions are living.

On this subject I want to relate one of the great commitment of the Forum. Few of you may know but 40% of the world population (over 3b people…) live without sanitation. This is a problem with multiple ripple effects on health, education, and obviously human dignity. Let’s be clear, speaking of toilet is not sexy… But here it’s not about PR, being sexy or shining in city conversations.

One admirable man I met at the WEF is Jack Sim, founder of the NGO World Toilet Organization (WTO). The goal of WTO is to give sanitation to those 40% of us that do not have access to it. It’s a big issue, at very large-scale, and part of the Millennium Developement Goals.

One of Jack’s ideas is that we need to make toilets cheap and affordable. One entrepreneur here found a way to make toilets for $30. But that is still way to expensive for the 3 billion people I mentioned. What we need is a $3 toilet… Hard or impossible to achieve?

It reminds me a conversation I had with Hans Reitz, CEO of Grameen Creative Lab. Adidas was approached by Professor Yunus, Nobel peace prize and dear friend of mine, to solve a health issue. Kids in poor countries walk barefoot and get contaminated by a very bad disease in the form of a worm that lives in their intestine and consumes the already very limited calorie and vitamin intake. But same problem here, you have ripple effects as those kids cannot even study properly as their brain and memory are weakened by the indirect effect of the worm… So Yunus went to see Adidas and asked them to create a $1 pair of shoes (!). First engineers said it would be impossible. But after many major internal long working sessions the Adidas team and CEO became convinced they could do it. And guess what, it’s coming on the market soon.

Let’s come back to our toilets. We had in the room Jack, our entrepreneur, and someone who runs a business of plastic injection. They met at the WEF and found a way to produce this $3 toilet.

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The World has Problems, many, that often seems impossible to resolve when they are at such large scales. But guess what, this is why we are here, to
SOLVE those problems and make the world a better place for all, not just for the “I” we call “us”.

We are all connected, bonded together, not through the “Become A Friend” on Facebook, but through a deeper and much more real level. Some call it Love.

Let’s call it our Human Dignity. That’s what I witnessed.

Singapore, Nov 6th 2011

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