Speaker 2
Wow, that's a lot to unpack. We'll make this a four-parter. Yeah, so tell us a little bit more about entrepreneurship is about creating pathways to alternative currencies. It sounds like you're saying that free time is a currency.
Speaker 1
Yeah, I guess in my perspective, I take a very holistic look at entrepreneurship that entrepreneurship and business building isn't something that you do that's separate from your life as a whole. For me, entrepreneurship is really about lifestyle design. And again, as humans, I think from a pretty young age, we're taught to value specific currencies. In our time at school, we're taught to pursue marks as the driving currency of that edge education system. We leave the world of school. We enter the world of work and we're really conditioned to chase that next formal currency, that the dollar signs and making more money, generating more income. And I think a lot of entrepreneurship training, which is the area that I specialize in, is really focused on helping entrepreneurs to achieve abundance in that single currency, in making as much revenue, building a profitable business model, generating income. Don't get me wrong, those things are all very important. But I guess my entire philosophy here is that we are dynamic human beings who value multiple things within our lives. And oftentimes I've seen entrepreneurs just obsess over chasing revenue. And while you may create abundance in that currency for yourself, you end up creating a deficit in many of the other things that matter to you. How many entrepreneurs out there have thrown their entire being into their business at the detriment of their family or personal relationships, of their mental or physical health and well-being? And so again, I think for me, entrepreneurship is about acknowledging that as humans, there are multiple currencies that matter to each of us, and that business building can be a wonderful avenue to creating abundance in the multiple currencies that matter to us. A great example of that, in a past life, as your intro mentioned, I was an English teacher. I could never have imagined the degree of freedom that I'm living with today. My wife Laura and I, who's also my business partner with the Makers Collective, we just came out of our first five-week stint being digital nomads. We up and moved to Portugal for five weeks and just ran our business from over there, got out of the winter for a little bit, got to meet new people, experience an entire different culture. But that idea of having freedom of mobility, freedom of time, like I look at that freedom as a currency. When I speak of alternative currencies, I also mean things like your skill sets, right? Seeing skills as a currency and entrepreneurship is a way to create abundance in terms of being more dynamic with your skills. And so again, I think we're pretty layered as people and there's multiple things that matter to us. And entrepreneurship from my experience can help to create an abundance of the many currencies that matter to us as people.