13

LEARN TO BOOTSTRAP

After my first year of college, my mom announced she was out of money. It wasn’t what I wanted to hear, but tough luck. I went home, got a job as a girl Friday at Priam, a Silicon Valley–based corporation, and saved what I earned. A year later I returned to college, knowing something I hadn’t known when I left: I may need to make my own way in life to get what I want, and I can.

During economic downturns, many of us face similar circumstances. In trudging through a gloom-and-doom atmosphere, there are things we want to do for ourselves or our family, businesses we want to expand or start, but can’t.

Here’s the reality: whether times are good or bad, many of us don’t have what we want, or what we perceive we “need,” to pursue our dreams. In 2007, Entrepreneur magazine and the Corporate Research Board screened ninety-five thousand companies to compile “The Hot 500 Fastest Growing Businesses in America.” Only 28 percent of those companies had access to bank loans or lines of credit, while just 18 percent were funded by private investors, and a mere 3.5 percent received funding from venture capitalists. In other words, more than half of the companies on the list were growing and thriving despite having limited access to the funds most people would deem necessary to nurture a business.

LEVERAGING CURRENT ASSETS

Making our dreams happen is about leveraging the skills, money, and time we already have. It’s about starting where we are and avoiding the lottery mentality:

Marathoner and mother of five Emily Orton (see chapter 1) said it well: “A budget of money, time, or space shouldn’t be about what we can’t do or have, but how to make it happen.” No doubt many of the entrepreneurs behind the “Hot 500” companies sought funding, but it just wasn’t available. So they started anyway, perhaps because their reality was “Do, or Don’t Eat,” and they were thus highly incentivized to make their businesses work. Their determination to succeed was strong enough that 61 percent of the entrepreneurs turned a profit within a year.

Dana King, a St. Louis-based interior designer whose mission is to “make good design happen for everyone,” is a terrific example of an entrepreneur who focuses not on what she doesn’t have, but on how to make her dream happen. When a pitch she made to HGTV for its Next Design Star reality show was rejected, she decided to try her hand at filming her own show. Her hurdles: limited financial resources and very limited technical know-how. (You can follow Dana’s progress and her dream at seedanado.com.)

Dana King: Geekifying Myself

Computers—I affectionately call them “confusers”—and I have a long love-hate relationship. The hardware is too hard. The software is too soft. I have been waiting for a computer that is juuuuuuust right, and doesn’t require an advanced degree to install or special geek aptitude to operate.

Ahh, the iPhone. It changed my life overnight.

Now I can interact with a digital device intelligently and confidently. Thank you, Steve Jobs, the only geek, besides my husband, Dan, that I’ve been madly in love with. My iPhone makes me feel empowered.

For more than twenty years, I have been reliant on Dan to help me operate most electronic devices, and our marriage has been on the edge at times because of my digital codependence. Our biggest arguments have been over my disinterest, distrust, and general dislike of digital devices that don’t read my mind and automatically know what I want them to do.

Since the Dell won’t talk to me, I took my frustration out on Dan. These days, if you sleep, you get left behind in the cyber-galactic fog of blogging, linking, Twittering, and Facebooking in a way that can be detrimental to your hopes and dreams.

You learn what you want to learn. I just didn’t want to learn to use technology. But I do want to succeed. I want to be a media mogul, just like Rachael Ray and Oprah. I desire a media platform to teach and spread my gospel about celebrating creative living. The application and audition tape I sent to HGTV went unnoticed. To heck with the studio. I just need a camera guy or gal and an editor; maybe a producer, too; and some big bucks, or sponsors. I’ve got none of those. Does that mean the dream dies?

Dan woke me up one morning with, “I think you should start a vlog.”

“I have a blog,” I reminded him.

“No a VVVVVVVlog,” he repeated. “Post video of what you do. You don’t need a camera crew or sponsors. You just need a flip camera. You can edit the footage yourself.”

Dan knows better than to encourage my projects because he is certain to become collateral damage. I took this suggestion to mean he must believe in me. He must really love me. Encouraging me to embrace a digital project is like asking for a tornado to land on our house.

Dan convinced me that vlogging would be easy, if I would just take the time to learn and stop whining. So I took the challenge, and I reserved the right to whine. Except that he was right. Editing video is easier than I thought. In no time (about twenty hours) I produced my first short film (we’re talking seven power-packed minutes), complete with music and captions. I can now host, film, edit, and produce a show. Who knew?

My vlog has since turned into a website portfolio that has received the attention of a local television show producer. A local production company asked to film my design club—a concept I promote via my postings—and produced a promotional video for me free of charge. If pictures paint a thousand words, video tells even more. In other words, it’s far easier to show you who I am than to tell you.

I still get frustrated, but I tell myself it’s nothing that a little time can’t remedy. And in time, I will geekify myself for my betterment, and for my dreams. As Apple’s Steve Jobs, and my Dan, have shown me, geeks can rock the world!

With the experience of starting her vlog, I asked Dana about the process of bootstrapping her way to her own television show. Here are two pointers from Dana:

TURNING SCARCITY INTO OPPORTUNITY

Dana has a dream of having a media platform. She thought she didn’t have the resources, but she soon recognized that she did, in fact, have enough to start. In late 2008, one of my business partners, Clayton Christensen offered his opinion that the recession would have an “unmitigated positive impact on innovation” because “when the tension is greatest and resources are most limited, people are actually a lot more open to rethinking the fundamental way they do business.” This theory is supported by the Kaufmann Foundation statistic that “51 percent of the Fortune 500 companies began during a recession or bear market or both.”

Whether launching a business or pursuing a dream, there are many high-profile instances in which a lack of resources ultimately proved to be a boon, rather than a bane. If we dig a bit, each of us can uncover examples among friends and family, and ourselves. Would most children have as many opportunities as they do in sports, music, or other extracurricular activities without parents, mothers in particular, who are accomplished at bartering as a way to stretch limited family budgets? Would kids have as many chances to explore their interests if their parents weren’t so adept at arranging for carpooling, chaperoning, and borrowing, thus enabling their kids to participate? Without the constraints of time, money, and health, would the online retailer Shabby Apple exist? (For a reminder of how that business came to be, see chapter 5.) If my parents could have paid for college, would I have caught an early glimpse of corporate life during the Silicon Valley heyday? Would I have ever set foot on Wall Street had I not needed to work to put my husband through school?

All of us have had the opportunity to bootstrap if we look hard enough. Men seem to know how to do this in the business world: 88 percent of the founders of Entrepreneur magazine’s Hot 500 were men. But I wonder if women aren’t better at bootstrapping than we think we are. Chronically under resourced (whether due to the gender pay gap or ceding our resources to conform to societal expectations), women continually feel the tension of having too little budget and too little time. Because of this tension, we are expert at rethinking how to get things done. Many of us know how to turn scarcity into opportunity.

Recall Psyche’s second task, in which Aphrodite requires her to obtain fleece from the rams of the sun. On the advice of the reeds on the river’s edge, she waits until sundown to pick the fleece from brambles the rams have brushed against. This, to me, is a great example of starting with very little and still being able to get the job done, and without putting oneself at risk. We can do the same by starting with what we have, without putting too many of our resources at risk, as we discover our way to achieving our dream. You’ll marvel at what you can accomplish from small beginnings. This is important because it allows us to focus on what we can do instead of fretting about our limitations. The next step is to whack away at any residual perfectionism, a major deterrent to achieving our dreams.

SQUARING OFF WITH PERFECTIONISM

As a child, I did so many things well that I could afford to be a perfectionist. In high school, my needing to do things perfectly became problematic. I almost didn’t take AP American history. I didn’t take calculus or economics because I feared I couldn’t get an A. I did get As in the classes I took but, in retrospect, given my chosen career, a B in calculus rather than no calculus at all probably would have been a decent trade. Perfectionism often starts at a young age and can be quite crippling, as Bonnie Tonita White who has worked as a French immersion teacher, public affairs consultant, commercial real estate agent, and retail sales associate, relates in the following story:

Bonnie Tonita White: Delight in the Doing

One day, while reading to my toddler Josh, I encouraged him to illustrate the story. This appealed to his creative nature, and he settled in beside me with crayons and paper to draw his interpretation of the tale we’d just read. As Josh began to draw, he became frustrated, and his frustration became a distraction. When I asked what was wrong, he became very agitated and began pounding the crayon onto the paper with forceful, intense strokes. He looked up at me with his big sad eyes and tear-streaked cheeks and said, “It’s no good. I can’t make it like I see it!” His imagination and past experience with professionally illustrated books exceeded his physical coordination and ability. He had the ability of a three-year-old, with all of the expected glorious crudeness of design, but he wanted the skills of a seasoned illustrator. He sensed his failure and allowed that inadequacy to overcome his desire to draw.

I’ve recalled this experience many times when disappointed by work that falls short of what I had imagined or envisioned I was capable of achieving. Our imagination fosters a desire to try things. Just because we can’t or aren’t good at something the first time we try doesn’t mean what we are doing has no merit. As I step forward into the next phase of my life, I ask myself: Can I accept the space that lies between my imagination and my best efforts? Or will I stay here safe on this side of my achievements? Can I delight in doing despite the crudeness of my effort as I draw closer to my dreams?

Bonnie’s story is one most women can relate to—we have a vision of a grand and glorious dream, but too often a failed first attempt at doing something new keeps us from pursuing that dream. If we cannot accept imperfection along the road to our dreams, we can easily become stuck, “safe on this side of achievements,” as Bonnie puts it. And remember that other eyes are watching us: if we quit because our dream isn’t perfect, what are we teaching our children?

Learning to bootstrap our way to a dream requires us to do more with less, to get creative to get things done. Perfectionism demands that every detail must be just so, which in many ways is the antithesis of a bootstrapping mentality. Jennifer Thomas holds a bachelors’ degree in Italian and art history and pursued graduate studies in art history at the Institute of Fine Arts at NYU. She also is a former fundraiser for MGH Boston; she shares here how she is learning to push perfectionism out of the picture and use the resources she has.

Jennifer Walker Thomas: King Louis XIV Lives inside My Head

After years of study in the arts, I have a well-trained eye, and know lovely when I see it. Beauty feeds my soul, but sometimes torments it as well. It turns out that there is an unexpected occupational hazard that comes from a head filled with beautiful things other people conceived of and made; it can be very intimidating to find room in there for your own ideas to generate. Even worse, the trained critic in me is always looking at something with an eye to making it better. So, no matter how hard I have worked at something, I still see only the flaws.

Recently (shortly after returning from a trip to France), I flew into my hometown a few days before a beloved brother’s wedding. My parents were hosting his reception in their perfectly lovely backyard, and so there was lots of work to do. I got there early hoping to help, and tackled what was left of my mother’s punch list.

I didn’t inherit my perfectionism from my mother. She has a very sane, “good enough is good enough” attitude, and is a scientist by training and temperament. So her list was easy enough, but at its end things were pretty far from exquisite. Six hours off the plane I had moved on to a list of my own. I was planting, pruning, painting, and generally moving at a frantic pace. I just kept thinking: “This is David’s WEDDING!” I had marshaled the troops and developed an elaborate schedule, but was starting to panic; we didn’t have enough time left. Paralysis began to set in. It was at this point that another brother called it as he saw it, and said: “You’ve got Louis XIV in your head and you’ve got to kick him out, we’ve got stuff to do.”

He was right, and I have been thinking about that statement ever since. I can remember countless times when I have let Louis and his ilk squelch my dreams. Too often I am paralyzed by both my own sense of the lovely and what others have already accomplished. A garden reception? “Think Versailles!” But, who can possibly live up to that? Perhaps my most painful example of this is the Christmas night I spent crying because my holiday accomplishments hadn’t perfectly reflected all my creative ideas. I felt like a failure. My husband was mystified: “How could it possibly have been better?” I let a vision of perfection ruin all my hard work and our peace. That was the real and only failure of the day.

I think that I may have some great dreams inside my head, but the resources at my command are not those of the Sun King. I don’t have solitude, or a patron, or a budget, or a staff. I don’t even have a desk. I do often have a detailed vision of the end, but am blind when it comes to seeing how it can possibly be achieved or even approximated. So all too often I quit before I start, and Louis conquers.

All this means that my brother was right, and Louis has got to go. I am realizing that if I am ever going to follow a big dream to fruition and create something exquisite of my own, I have got to figure out how to see the ideal, but accept the compromises forced by reality. I have got to somehow stay on speaking terms with perfection but not let that beautiful conversation drown me out. So my resolution this year is to kick Louis out. He can head back to Versailles. It’s hard to imagine a better place to live in exile, which has always been exactly my problem.

Jennifer’s take is comical, but it does teach us that if we wait for perfection, we may never start. The only real failure is letting the dictates of perfectionism debilitate us, leaving us forever waiting for all the “necessary” resources to arrive before doing our dreams. Bootstrapping teaches us to use what we have, even if it doesn’t seem like much, and to begin now.

STARTING WHERE WE ARE

Bootstrapping is about starting where we are with what we have and recognizing that we have so much more on hand than we may think we do. We will likely never have enough of what we think we need, but what we need most is to start. In starting with what we have, we just might be a lot more successful than we would if we waited for outside resources to become available. One of my favorite business mantras is “Patient for growth, impatient for profits.” The impatience for profits is about using the resources we have and recognizing that resource-constrained ventures have a track record of success. If we do that first, we can trust that the growth will come.

Bootstrapping is often born out of necessity and requires simply daring to dream that something you want or need is possible. Jolene Edmunds Rockwood who holds an MTS from the Harvard Divinity School wanted her children and every child in her small town, to have access to a quality education in the arts. So she went to work and created from scratch a community arts program that has become nationally recognized and honored.

Jolene Edmunds Rockwood: Building a Community Arts Program

I still remember my reluctance when my husband, Fred, announced he had received a tempting job offer from a company in a town of about five thousand people in rural southeastern Indiana. A small midwestern town was never on my list of places to live. I had just completed my graduate degree and birthed my third child, and my oldest child was preschool age. My husband assured me, “We’ll only stay for a few years, get as much experience as we can, and then we’ll move on.” After a visit to the town and a strong sense that this was where we were supposed to be, in 1977 we made the big move.

I immediately fell in love with the charm of a small community and the open acceptance of the town members, yet I found myself longing for some of the opportunities I had had in a big city. My friend Janel, who moved into town not long after we did, noticed the same thing, so we started taking our kids into Cincinnati (about an hour’s drive each way) for music, drama, and dance lessons. One day, as we were driving in the car, we started dreaming about an arts program in our schools, so all the students could benefit along with our own kids.

After attending an arts-in-education workshop in Indianapolis, Janel and I approached three public schools about starting a program. It was a hard sell at first. At the end of each presentation, we passed around a sign-up sheet for any teachers who would be interested in having artists come into their classrooms; six to eight takers at each school was enough to get it rolling.

Next, we had to find grant money to fund the program. I had never written a grant before, but I thought I could probably do it. Our first grant was $2,000 from the Indiana Arts Commission, which covered half the cost of the program. To come up with the $2,000 cash match, Janel and I persuaded local businesses to donate $1,500 the first year. We solved the $500 deficit by inviting the owner of the biggest business in town to dinner, after which our children performed on the piano, violin, and cello. When we mentioned we were starting a program so all the children could have access to the arts, but were short on funds, he immediately wrote us a check for the remaining $500 and promised to support the program in the future. Over the next ten years, as demand grew, we increased the number and length of residencies; our expenditures went from $4,000 to $40,000 within ten years, and we consequently wrote larger and larger grants. Eventually, the National Endowment for the Arts in Washington, D.C., decided to use our program as an example of a successful arts-in-education program in their funding hearings before Congress.

To recognize our student artists, I started Young Artist Showcase, a program where students sign up to perform or have their work reviewed by professionals in the field, and then receive written feedback and ratings. We feature the winners in a community art show, recital, and published anthology. Showcase recognition has become prestigious and also looks very impressive on college applications.

Subsequently, I started a community arts council, so we could expand our arts programs beyond the schools to include the entire town, and soon the Rural Alliance for the Arts, or RAA, was born. The RAA started a community theater group, and in the past twenty years, we have produced more than forty musicals and plays, which involved thousands of local community members. The RAA also cosponsors the Batesville Music and Arts Festival, featuring a performance by the Cincinnati Symphony Pops. Currently, I am raising funds and community support to build a new performing arts center in our town.

Starting the arts-in-education program wasn’t easy and it took a lot of hard work for many years—and tremendous support from my family—to establish and grow it. In fact, I’m still amazed at how the little idea that started in 1982 grew to be the thriving community arts program it is today.

BREAKING THINGS DOWN

When I arrived in New York I wanted to succeed so badly I had to square off with my perfectionism, muscling through the fear. I also learned a few tricks, such as breaking things down into small enough pieces that I wouldn’t be overwhelmed, or telling myself to spend just five minutes putting everything together that I’d need, and then I could go do something else.

This is one of the reasons I eagerly participate in the twelve-week Resolutionary Challenge each January. Started by Heather Clayton Staker in 2008, the challenge focuses on process, breaking things down into baby steps so we can achieve set goals. Each day, ten points are possible, one point per task. The daily tasks typically include:

In order to send perfectionism packing, the Resolutionary Challenge is organized so that even if I only do five of the ten assigned tasks per day, it’s likely to be one or two more than I would have otherwise done. As a result, I get to feel good right away about my progress. If I don’t have such a stellar showing on one day, I can reboot the next day. Furthermore, there are prizes like a gift certificate for a manicure for completing the challenge and for a score of 60 percent or better. We can each take a similar approach to the dreaming process, breaking our goal down into small, doable daily tasks. We can tailor our tasks to a specific dream (and award ourselves prizes). An example: “I will spend ten minutes a day working on a writing project.” If I do, I get (you name the prize).

When we’re open to bootstrapping, almost by definition we’ve broken things down enough that we can cut through our need for flawlessness. When we do, we can accomplish more (because we procrastinate less) and model for our children how to cope with perfectionism. We can also stop doing something if we realize it’s not worth finishing. We can try dreams out, knowing we don’t have to marry every dream we date. Most importantly, we can happily and exuberantly take on the double-dog dare task of dreaming, without the paralyzing fear of failure.

TURNING OUR BACKS ON THE UNATTAINABLE

Bootstrapping also helps us recognize that there may be things we want to have, and learn whether or not they’re actually attainable. If we start with what we have on hand, we’ll move into the right dream for us. Here’s a piece I’ve written about doing just that:

THE MIRROR OF ERISED

I’d been thinking all week about dreams that can’t come true, coming to no conclusions, until I saw my daughter devour yet another Harry Potter book, and with Harry Potter on the brain, I went to bed. Grapple with a problem. Grapple with it some more, and then go to sleep. In others words, do as Psyche did, let the ants sort the seeds.

In the morning, the Mirror of Erised—a mirror that, as Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling describes, “shows us nothing more or less than the deepest, most desperate desire of our hearts”—came to mind.

When Professor Dumbledore discovers Harry secreted away in an unused chamber within Hogwarts Castle, entranced by the Mirror of Erised, he explains why the mirror is so beguiling and therefore dangerous: “You, who have never known your family, see them standing around you. Ronald Weasley, who has always been overshadowed by his brothers, sees himself standing alone, the best of all of them. However, this mirror will give us neither knowledge nor truth. Men have wasted away before it, entranced by what they have seen, or been driven mad, not knowing if what it shows is real or even possible. . . . It does not do to dwell on dreams and forget to live.”

I suspect that most of us have a desperate desire of our heart, something we even desperately deserve, that we don’t have and can’t have—at least in the way we imagine.

Will you take a moment and think about what your desperate desire is, hold it in your hands, and examine it? Inside of this something we can’t have, there are likely the seeds of a dream that is within reach.

Harry can’t have his parents, but he can be surrounded by those he loves and who love him. Ron can’t be an only child, but he can distinguish himself as he moves with Harry and Hermione through their hero’s journey.

Haven’t we all found ourselves enthralled by, or wasting away in front of, our own Mirror of Erised? I’m learning to walk away from the mirage and bootstrap my way into my life. No doubt you are too.

There’s a great saying that is often heard in my circles: “Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without.” We can dream big dreams, but those big dreams start with taking baby steps, breaking down dreams into very small pieces, beginning with the resources on hand. In other words, they start with bootstrapping. When we maximize what we have, avoiding the lottery approach to dreams, jettisoning our “perceived need” for outside resources, we can jumpstart the process of making our dreams a reality.

STARTING WITH WHAT WE HAVE . . .

A budget of money, time, or space shouldn’t be about what we can’t do or have, but how to make it happen.

—Emily Orton, a marathoner and mother of five

When the tension is greatest and resources are most limited, people are actually a lot more open to rethinking the fundamental way they do business.

—Clayton M. Christensen, author and professor