The Educated Emotion

One of the hardest things to do is start fresh, start anew. As an entrepreneur, you will inevitably find yourself in situations where friends, family, mentors, former coworkers...are simply unable to help. That is because you are doing something different, something that has not been done before.  A Template For Life   In an excerpt from a poem I wrote in 2010, "Blank Pages and Empty Rooms" I weigh the pros and cons of a blank page. I was raised on templates. There is a way to cook, to bake, to love, to study, to be a lady. As an adult, that has been expanded to include a way to eat, walk, talk, write a contract, and even begin a business. As much as I complained about all these "rules" of society, I realized recently that I had also been comforted by this structure.  As an entrepreneur, I have had to reexamine my fears of the blank page. In the planning stages, I still had templates to rely on - business books, business plans, financial sheet...

*originally posted on April 18, 2012 Three Farmers and Two Geese Today the entertainment industry lost one of its greatest contributors, Dick Clark. He spent over 60 years in numerous memorable roles from radio to music to television. One of the roles that he is less noted for is entrepreneur; some of Clark's biggest marks on the industry were actually ones he created. Dick Clark was always the 'cool kid'. He wanted to be a part of what was new. In fact, he said that he wished he had been a little younger when the Internet takeover began.  In an 1999 interview  with James Moll, Clark was asked "How do you describe the start to your professional career?" Clark responded with a story of his first job in the mailroom of a radio station. In the mornings he would sit with disc jockey, Danny Fusco and give the weather forecast for the rural radio network, assuming that no one was listening. But when Clark started performing as if someone was listening, that...