Linda Solomon is a friend and fellow social change leader in BC, and it's been fun watching her start-up online magazine, The Vancouver
Observer.com, build momentum. A few weeks ago I sat with her to do an interview for one of her famous profiles of local folk. Linda, an award winning journalist from New York, has a vision for a vibrant "deep local" online news site, and she's built a decent and growing following by investing in "real journalism": well researched articles, colums, reviews, and thoughtful opinions, written mostly by accomplished writers. No brain farts here folks. In fact, she tells me that she's one of the only outfits in town that hires journalism students on praticums. Behold the rise of nimble, independent new media while the newspapers flail!
Her well written and intimate profiles first caught my eye when one made the rounds recently about my dear friend and former coach Jeff Balin (unfortunately, due to her site being on an old platform she's in the process of migrating from, you have to go to the home page, type "Jeff Balin" into the search bar, to find the article). It was truly a beautiful piece on a beautiful man, and you got to glimpse deep into who Jeff was and what made him tick.
Linda's profile of me took some turns towards the deeply personal, including talking about recent difficult events I've shared with my extended community but not the wider world. She is a great interviewer and got me talking about some of the lessons I've learned as first a struggling, and more recently successful small business guy. Here's an excerpt of lessons I learned from my first, completely failed, business in 1996:
Solomon: What are the top three kisses of death for a new business?
Mogus: Get out of the office. We spent all of our time planning what we thought the world should look like instead of finding out for ourselves what was really going on.
Solomon: What else?
Mogus: Choose partners wisely. People who think differently enough to fill in your blind spots, but not so different you spend all your time arguing. And make sure they’ve had real success in their past. Not the hint of success, the real thing.
Solomon: Number three?
Mogus: Deliver what you’re good at yourself. In the service biz if you’re hiring other people to do the actual work, you’re too expensive. Small businesses don’t need managers, they need do-ers.
I'd love to post other excerpts here, but you kind of have to look at the whole interview to get the context. Mostly we got to talking about my struggles in trying to make our "social business" model work during the .com bust and the horrible Bush years, as well as some more recent insights from my spiritual practice that affect my worldview and my work with clients.
OK one more, I love this one because it combines "market forces" with "feedback from the universe", which are both scary but oh so helpful and necessary for growth. This is something I've often thought but never said out loud:
Solomon: It sounds like you took a lot of big risks to do what you really cared about. It also sounds like you hung in with nerves of steel through some very difficult times to turn the company into a very successful one.
Mogus: Life’s always been working on me in this way, I just wasn’t paying attention to its constant feedback.
I love market forces because what market forces did for my business is they gave me constant real feedback on how well we were doing with our purpose. Because when a client leaves, or a staff person leaves, or a deal falls through, that’s all information from life. If you ignore that, or if you have big funders who are friends and keep funding you, you can ignore life’s little feedbacks of suffering caused by your delusions. It was fierce feedback, scary as hell, but ultimately it was very kind. It was fierceness in service of truth.
My teacher says what you resist persists. Listening to others and embracing their point of view, is so important. It’s really embracing what is. I’ve gotten quieter since my daughter’s passing. I have this question I hold which is, if twenty percent of your actions bring you eighty-percent of your impact, then what the hell do we spend our weeks doing? We’re literally in the hamster wheel of samsara most of the time. I ask myself, ‘how can I regularly be in touch with doing what Life wants me to do?’ And when I’m in that space, then, life’s pretty easy.
It was fun to be so personal and put myself out there. Here I am world! Would love to hear any comments/thoughts/feelings you have in response to the article, please leave one either on Linda's site or below. Thanks for reading.
