And She Spoke

“Go make a ruckus.” - Seth Godin Regardless of your particular brand of business, money is not enough to drive most of you — there’s something deeper. There’s a problem that you’re trying to solve or an improvement to an existing way of doing things. If you’re an entrepreneur, there’s something special that you’re bringing to the table that no other person or business is doing in the exact same way. In our minds, you’re all making a ruckus. Ruckus-making, in the context of business, is the same thing as innovation (with maybe a little bit of a political bent). In fact, YOU having a business is a very political act. You are veering outside of the path of the dominant economic culture. The antidote to the monopolistic economic culture comes in the form of the artisan. As modern humans, we’re drawn to local, small-batch, unique. They serve as a counterweight to the heavy core of big business, big agriculture, big healthcare, and big tech. As a community creating intentional, conscious businesses, we are paving the way for a new brand of artisan: digital artisans.   How can you shake things up in your own small corner of a market somewhere? Other Mentions: The Filter Bubble: How the New Personalized Web Is Changing What We Read and How We Think, Seth Godin: Keep Making a Ruckus Joy: Tartine BakeryHustle: The Content of No Content by Elizabeth Kolbert

“We form each other. We are bound up in each other’s choices.” - Eric Liu and Nick Hanauer Integrity is about doing the right thing, being honest and consistent, and being in harmony with what you believe and how you act. It is also a critical element of being able to build anything that’s going to exist in the long run (a business, a government, a community). Do you make regular decisions in your business from a place of integrity or do you get sucked into the allure of Groupon, clickbait social media posts, or other short term solutions to sales and profitability? Most of us would not make the decision to intentionally pursue shady business practices, but integrity falls along a spectrum that creates a lot of grey area. Integrity sometimes requires that you make decisions for your business that are not optimized for short-term profitability, but rather, long term sustainability. Joy: The Lively Show #233Hustle: The Gardens of Democracy

“Our accelerating disappearance into the digital ether now defines us—we are the mediated people, whose contact with one another and the world around us is now mostly veiled by a screen. We threaten to rebel, just as we threaten to move to Canada after an election. But we don’t; the current is too fierce to swim to shore.” - Bill McKibben After returning from summer holidays, we feel compelled to incorporate more analog habits into our lives and into our business. We’ve both felt the physical acknowledgement that the pen is an extension of the human body in a way that typing on a keyboard will never be. The writer and activist Bill McKibben writes that humans have come to use screens as mediators that color virtually every experience and relationship in our modern lives. If the solution to digital overwhelm is to make a conscious effort to engage in offline living, how do we apply these analog tools to business? Offline connections. Word of mouth. Sales calls. Good old-fashioned networking. We’re all trying so hard to automate and to minimize the contact that we have with potential clients and customers, but the truth is that people trust (and crave) human connection. How can you find ways to take your online community offline? How can you add just a little more humanity into someone’s life? Other Mentions: Why I Love My Paper Dictionary, Pause! We Can Go Back!, Surviving This Summer on the Internet Joy: The Artist’s WayHustle: The Revenge of Analog

“Waiting for a train to go or a bus to come, or a plane to go or the mail to come, or the rain to go or the phone to ring, or the snow to snow or waiting around for a Yes or No or waiting for their hair to grow. Everyone is just waiting. Waiting for the fish to bite or waiting for wind to fly a kite or waiting around for Friday night or waiting, perhaps, for their Uncle Jake or a pot to boil, or a Better Break or a string of pearls, or a pair of pants or a wig with curls, or Another Chance. Everyone is just waiting.” - Dr. Seuss So many of us are constantly playing the waiting game in our business. We’re, personally, in the midst of a huge transition on this front. We’ve decided to make the future of our company about agency. Taking action. Figuring it out. Self reliance. (It feels great.) We’ve identified a handful of places where we see folks get stuck in the waiting game in their businesses (many of which we’ve found ourselves in as well): Waiting for the money (to close the round, to win the next pitch competition, to sell out your next program, etc.) Waiting for that perfect person to come and join your team Waiting to be heard or to be acknowledged by others Waiting for the product, program, service to be built or perfected Waiting for the customers and clients to come to you So how do you break out of the waiting game? Take action. Take control back. Be willing to make mistakes and even to fail. Embody the archetype of the empress. Decide what you need to do, own it, and lead. Do what it takes to go out and make it happen. You’re not less than anyone. You’re fully capable. Joy: The Holstee ManifestoHustle: Kaouthar Darmoni and her Tedx Talk

“It’s hard to explain until you’ve experienced it. The level of power wielded over women in the tech industry rivals that in the film industry… It is so normalized, we brush it off and many of us casually participate because it’s easier. From what I’ve learned from friends, it permeates the finance and legal industries too… all these professions where the white male slightly sociopathic genius is put on a pedestal. The power at the top of that pedestal can be absolute. The struggle to get there can produce even more brutal showmanship of power. The last few weeks have helped to uproot some of the truly deep, dark abuse of power that propels white cisgender physically able men to wealth and success, and largely keeps everyone else out.” — Melinda Briana Epler With all of the headlines making news on the women in tech front, we felt it was appropriate to chime in on the conversation. Although we walked away from the investment-backed startup world over a year ago, we remain connected to a diverse community of other female founders and women in tech. And the stories we’ve been reading sound familiar, yet disturbing. With only 5% of startups having (at least one) female on the founding team, it not hard to imagine why there are countless subtle—and not so subtle—biases against women. An entire subculture has developed within startups and tech companies. And this subculture doesn’t look like many of us. It looks white, male, and young. This subculture, often, doesn’t represent our most pressing needs or long-term interests. But something interesting is starting to happen — in private Slack groups for female founders, in female-run co-working spaces, in secret Facebook groups for female CEOS and others for female gamers…another subculture is developing. It looks and feels a lot like the beginnings of a revolution. Other Mentions: Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble, How to Uproot Systemic Racism and Sexism in Venture Capital, Male and Female Entrepreneurs Get Asked Different Questions by VCs — and It Affects How Much Funding They Get Joy: Hello Ruby: Adventures in CodingHustle: Geek Girl Rising

“At the end of our lives, all we have is our attention and our time.” - Tristan Harris We’ve led about two thousand people through social media training programs in our business, but we want to come clean in this episode and share some of our fears about the role that social media is playing in our (collective) lives. While we love social for its ability to help us leverage our brands online, we believe that there is a time and place for our digital activities. Tune in to discover why we worry about free apps more than paid tools and what’s at stake when we fail to take time to disconnect.   Although social media is difficult to compartmentalize, we’ve got some simple tips to help you add more sanity into your digital life: Turn off ALL notifications on your phone. Use the Facebook News Feed Eradicator Chrome extension Freedom Read blogs on Feedly. Facebook Groups App (unfortunately, Facebook just announced they will be removing this from the App Store) SmarterQueue Joy: You Can Thank Instagram for Your Rosé ObsessionHustle: Tristan Harris // Time Well Spent If you’re enjoying the podcast, we would be so grateful for a rating and review on iTunes! Head over to: soulful.mba/itunes

“Simply put, feminism is a movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression…. I liked this definition because it did not imply that men were the enemy. By naming sexism as the problem it went directly to the heart of the matter. Practically, it is a definition which implies that all sexist thinking and action is the problem, whether those who perpetuate it are female or male, child or adult.” - bell hooks It probably won’t come as a surprise to you that this podcast is hosted by two (proud) feminists. This fact is juxtaposed with the reality that we also inhabit the hyper-masculine world of technology. Tune in to hear about some realizations we’ve recently had related to our relationship to feminism, to our industry, and to our bodies. Joy: Call Your Girlfriend Hustle: Feminine Economy

“Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.” - Albert Einstein The relationship between humans and technology goes back thousands of years, but who decides what gets built — and how? As science and engineering surges within academia and within our broader culture, the humanities have been in steady decline. But what gets lost when art, literature, and philosophy constantly take a backseat to STEM? Other Mentions: Learning to Be Human, Tech’s Moral Reckoning, Toward Humane Tech, Nir & Far Joy: Edward Tufte’s WorkHustle: IDEO’s Design Kit

In the new economy, where the societal gatekeepers have largely been removed, everyone has the capacity to be a teacher (and also, of course, a student). Given the explosion of online education over the past five years, we’ve taken the position that online learning represents a cultural zeitgeist. In this episode, you’ll discover the reasons why we think it would be a shame to miss out on this historical business opportunity. Joy: MOOCs, edX.orgHustle: Namastream Software

When you’re able to channel your inner curiosity, your entire relationship to your business changes. What’s the difference between passion and curiosity? What role does curiosity play in your life and business? It’s one thing to build products, programs, and services based on the surface-level needs of your audience, but it is a whole other endeavor to genuinely inquire about their deepest hopes and fears — but that’s where the magic happens. You have to learn new things all the time as an entrepreneur, so you might as well enjoy the process of discovery. Other Mentions:Curiosity improves memory by tapping into the brain’s reward systemBig Magic Joy: How Curiosity Changed My Life || This is Your Brain on CuriosityHustle: The Marketing Seminar