Many successful entrepreneurs have shifted their thinking from seeing problems as hurdles they must clear to seeing them as opportunities.  Ask yourself:

• Are you utilizing your “X Factor”: the potential of the human will?
• How are you going to meet adversity?
• Have you helped someone engage their rare and valuable qualities?

Recently, Livescience.com reported five simple things you can do to be happier. The website said that although happiness is partly genetic, we still have the ability to change our lives in ways to become happier.

Research has shown that the following five activities can improve happiness:

1. Be grateful – Write a letter to someone who has helped you recently. Let them know that you are thankful for what they did for you. Research showed that writing a letter of gratitude can boost your happiness even if the letter is not sent. Each year, Acton students write gratitude letters to a person who has inspired them and reads the letter aloud to their mentors.
2. Be optimistic – just thinking positively can make you happier. Focusing in on what is good encourages  long-term happiness.
3. Count your blessings – Along with being optimistic, actually writing down the good things that happen to you can also increase your level of happiness. This act helps you focus on the positive force and influences in your life.
4. Use your strengths – Studies have shown that using your strengths to your advantage can make you happier. Similarly, our program at Acton strives to help our students identify and connect their passion to what their strengths are and what the world needs.
5. Commit acts of kindness – Donating your time or money can help you feel happier. Studies have shown that helping others can boost happiness in our everyday lives.

What other activities have you done to feel happier?

Early application deadline for the 2010 – 2011 Acton program is Wednesday, February 24. The final application deadline is March 31. Start your application early to have all the requirements and materials finished!

Spring Life of Meaning Course registration deadline is Friday, February 26. For more information, e-mail Ben at Ben@ActonFoundation.org. This is an amazing opportunity to learn how to balance family, work and community in an effective and meaningful way.

Our final Information Session this spring is being held on Wednesday, March 3. The session will be held at our campus (1404 E. Riverside) from 6 p.m. – 7:30 p.m. If you are interested in learning more about the program through engaging in a case-like discussion with teachers, alumni, current students and friends of the program, this event is just for you! Register here for the session.

Image courtesy of magnoliagrace.

To Mr. Rabeder, it’s simple: “Money is counterproductive — it prevents happiness to come.” He explains, “For a long time I believed that more wealth and luxury automatically meant more happiness. I come from a very poor family where the rules were to work more to achieve more material things, and I applied this for many years.”  He said he felt like he was a slave working for things that he did not wish for or need. “It was the biggest shock in my life when I realized how horrible, soulless and without feeling the five star lifestyle is,” he says. So, realizing that if he didn’t do it now he wouldn’t ever do it, he sold all his belongings. All the money will go into microcredit charities that he set up in Central and South America. Now, he says he feels “free, the opposite of heavy.”

Are such extreme measures necessary to find happiness?

Research in the field of happiness proves that money does not buy happiness: once you’ve met your basic needs, making more money won’t make you happier. Over the last 50 years, real income has risen dramatically in wealthy nations, but the level of happiness and life satisfaction has remained flat in the US, as well as most other prosperous nations. And someone who wins the lottery will be just as happy six months after their big win as they were six months before they bought the winning ticket.

But Mr. Rabeder goes a step further and argues that money is counterproductive — that it can make you less happy. That’s a pretty dreary outlook and got me thinking about where Acton’s curriculum fits into the happiness argument.

At Acton, we take a more nuanced approach: we don’t think money alone will buy you happiness, but we also don’t believe that this fact should relegate you to an ascetic life in a small hut. Instead, we think entrepreneurs should discover their own callings in business and life. A calling is success combined with meaning. In other words, it’s mixing what you’re good at with what you’re passionate about in order to solve a problem or fulfill a need in the world. This “meaning” dimension should buffer against the feelings of soullessness and being a slave to consumerism that Mr. Rabeder described.

Additionally, and somewhat paradoxically, we believe that this journey to find your calling should not be driven by a pursuit of happiness.  Only once you’ve abandoned your quest for the ephemeral rewards of happiness, wealth, and power will you be able to genuinely look for your calling.  Instead, try pursuing a worthy challenge, losing yourself in a relationship, expressing thanks and generosity, and being more spiritual.  As you get to know yourself and master a discipline, you’ll be closer to finding your calling.  You’ll know you’re close when you say to yourself, “Thank God it’s Friday, so that I can work the next two days without interruption.”

What do you think about the pursuit of wealth and happiness?

For more information on finding your calling, check out our new, condensed Life of Meaning night course that we’re offering this spring.  Acton’s “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness” note explores this topic in even more depth.  You can find it here.

Photo courtesy of SamanthaSAYWHAT<3

Listen to students from the Acton MBA Class of 2010 talk about their third month in the program. After sharing a bit of their backgrounds and why they came to Acton, the students discuss their greatest challenges, what it’s like learning from real entrepreneurs, and the kinds of real-world lessons they have experienced so far.

Find Your Calling

The Life of Meaning course teaches you how to balance the demands of family, career, and community. In the course, you will plumb to the depths of your soul and face some of the most difficult moral dilemmas imaginable. Life of Meaning helps you discover a “calling” in business by using your valuable gifts to serve others.

What is Being Offered?
The Life of Meaning course, one of the truly special facets of Acton’s curriculum, will cover key topics such as:

• What do you really want in life?
• How does personal transformation work and what does it look like?
• How can your overcome personal adversity and difficulty as you chase your dreams?
• How can you get started working on your dream right now?
• How can you hold yourself accountable to progress?

How to Register for the Course

Who should take this course?
If you are currently considering or going through a life transition, then this course is for you.  Perhaps you want more tools for defining, discussing and realizing your dreams.  Perhaps you desire to learn more about yourself and how to make real progress toward your vision of success.  Young or old, searching or struggling, this course can offer guidance and tools for real progress.

Who will teach this course?
Ed Perry, General Partner of Murphree Venture Partners and the founder, chief executive officer and managing director of ten successful companies, will lead this course.  Mr. Perry, one of the highest rated teachers at the Acton School of Business, is well-known for his ability to help students gain key insights in a safe and encouraging learning environment.

What does this course cost?
Tuition is $625 and required materials are $65.  The total cost is $690.  Tuition is due by March 3, 2010.

For more information, please contact Ben Allen at Ben@ActonFoundation.org.

Austin, Texas is known for its vibrant and unique culture. Texas’s capital city embraces all types of personalities and characters: from politicians working at the Texas Capitol to students at The University of Texas to interesting personalities you can meet on world-renowned Sixth Street. One more thing to add to Austin’s lively list of charm is its passion for entrepreneurship

Recently, buzz about Austin, its entrepreneurial spirit and economic predictions has surfaced with the coming of this new decade.

According to a BizJournals study, Austin holds the highest score for small-business vitality. Austin ranked the highest in three important categories: population, employment and small-business growth. Bizjournals’ six-part formula included analyzing one-year growth rates for small businesses and private-sector employment and the number of small businesses per 1,000 residents among other things. Baton Rouge, La. and Raleigh, N.C. (last year’s top place for entrepreneurs) followed behind Austin in the study.

ReadWriteStart, a channel dedicated as a resourceful guide to new entrepreneurs, featured Austin as one place to be for entrepreneurship in their “Never Mind the Valley” series. ReadWriteStart cited Austin’s concentration on information technology and particularly noted the role Austin Ventures, a venture capital firm in Austin, played in assisting new technology companies. Acton Master Teacher Phil Siegel is a general partner at Austin Ventures. Emerging industries in the Austin area also include biosciences and environmental businesses, clean energy innovation and other IT-related companies. Other cities featured in the “Never Mind the Valley” series include Boston, London and much more.

Two weeks ago, Ignite Austin, an event giving speakers five minutes and 20 slides to present and share ideas, gave entrepreneurs a reason to keep their eyes on Austin as an emerging start-up city. Stacey Higginbotham of BusinessWeek attended the event and even said she “left jazzed about Austin’s future as a place for entrepreneurs.” Higginbotham said that in order to continue to cultivate Austin’s success as an entrepreneurial hub, the city’s entrepreneurs must come together as a community to collaborate with and aid each other in becoming profitable. Bijoy Goswami’s presentation, The Austin Equation, focused on creating a scene around entrepreneurship. Goswami, who runs Bootstrap Austin and the Austin Equation Web site, created a map of Austin’s entrepreneur resources and encouraged the community to come together on a monthly basis to network and teach and learn with each other.

On January 21, 2010, economist Angelos Angelou announced his prediction for Austin’s economy in the next upcoming years. Angelou said that Austin will experience “modest job growth in 2010” and then become a booming economic city once again in 2011. He predicted that the job market in the city will add more than 26,000 jobs in the next two years. Angelou also stated that one reason why Austin’s employment numbers have not decreased as much as the rest of the country’s because of the entrepreneurial spirit here. “When faced with layoffs, many young and educated workers are not going to start collecting unemployment insurance — they’re going to be starting their own consulting businesses with friends and peers,” he said.

How does this affect you as an entrepreneur? Although this, unfortunately, means that Austin may jump to the No. 1 spot for bad traffic, the advantages and opportunities by adding onto our city population outweighs the cons. More available jobs in Austin will inevitably mean that its population will continue to grow. Bringing in more people creates greater needs for different products and services, thus creating more opportunities for you to build a company to satisfy those needs. More people in the city also expands the market for your products and services. Finally, a larger population in Austin also means that you have a larger pool of potential employees.

What other cities may be a contender for the top entrepreneurial hot spot?

Photo courtesy of C. Young Photography.

Power corrupts, but absolute power corrupts absolutely

Bill Clinton. John Edwards. Mark Sanford. Mark Foley. News of politicians having extramarital affairs has become almost commonplace. In fact, 2008 was the first election in which confessed adulterers ran for President. Still others seem to have sticky fingers, including Rod Blagojevich, Tom Delay and William Jefferson (of dubious $90,000 in the freezer fame). Corruption and hypocrisy seem to be a universal phenomenon — touching politicians across the political spectrum.

They decry the loss of family values in public but cheat on their spouses in private. They condemn government waste but enrich themselves with taxpayers’ money. So what’s the connection between hypocrisy and power? Is it anecdotal? Do these examples just stick out more because they involve high-profile people, or are politicians more at risk of being corrupted?

Two researchers, Joris Lammers, from Tilburg University, and Adam Galinsky, from Northwestern University, conducted a series of experiments to answer these questions.

According to the study they just published in Psychological Science, Lord Acton was right — power actually corrupts. They claim that power is corrupting because it leads to moral hypocrisy. Everyone knows the difference from right and wrong, even those in a position of power. However, power makes it easier to rationalize away doing wrong, thus the hypocrisy between “me” and “everyone else.” For example, in one experiment testing hypocrisy, two groups of people (“high power” individuals and “low power” individuals) were asked to rate certain actions on a scale of 1 to 9, with 1 being “highly immoral” and 9 being “highly moral.” The powerful said that a person speeding because they were late to work warranted, on average, a 6.3 on the morality scale. However, when placing themselves in the exact same situation, they gave themselves a 7.6. In other words, their speeding was more acceptable than other people’s speeding. In contrast, the less powerful people scored themselves the same as everyone else.

The authors also found that people who believed that they were entitled to their position of power were more corruptible. People who were in high-power seats but did not believe that they deserved their high-ranking position were very harsh on themselves, morally speaking.  (For more on the study, read the Economist’s article here).  Other studies have found that an isolated person of power is much more likely to abuse their position — it’s easier to take advantage of people when you don’t see them. Your mind skips over the sympathetic bit and goes straight to Machiavelli. The implications of this finding are troublesome in a world where technology makes isolation even easier (telecommuting; the ability, via blogs or feeds, to read only the news you agree with; speaking to your constituents via twitter instead of town hall meetings, etc).

So, assuming that Lammers and Galinsky are correct, what does it mean? Democracy and liberty are natural extensions of Lord Acton’s dictum in the broadest political sense, but clearly, temptation still looms in a democracy. What’s next?

Also, what does this mean in a business environment, where positions of power are everywhere? Business lunches, travel expenses, and the like all have the potential to be abused — and not just by the CEO. Is the janitor stealing the office’s toilet paper because s/he’s in a position to do so? Is your assistant stockpiling office supplies because she feels entitled to them? (Don’t laugh, businesses lose billions of dollars a year in employee theft.)  To complicate matters, studies show that unleashing the ethics police is counterproductive because such oversight would make people uncomfortable and incite backlash.

So what’s a manager to do? It’s obviously easier to prevent corruption than try to solve it after the fact, but how do you recognize the culprits? At what point do you start caring? And when does small become big?

Also, is “big” corruption ever excusable? Grover Cleveland won the 1884 election in spite of the press outing the child he fathered out of wedlock, and again, two admitted adulterers threw their hats in the last Presidential race (with one getting 56 million votes). And then there’s the fact that some of America’s most esteemed leaders were less than honorable. FDR, who had an affair with his wife’s social secretary, and Andrew Jackson, whose wife may not have been divorced when he married her, are frequently ranked in the top 10 most successful presidents by historians. JFK, who was rumored to have had an affair with Marilyn Monroe among others, came in third behind Martin Luther King, Jr and Mother Theresa in a Gallup list of the most admired Americans.  Add to the list the political leaders embroiled in corruption scandals over the years.  Did their thirst for power make them better leaders, or were they good leaders in spite of their dalliances?

Even if the position of power is what sparks the affair, should what happens in the motel room have any bearing on what happens in the boardroom?

So Lord Acton was right, but now what?

This is obviously a very fruitful subject for discussion, with a lot of questions, very few answers, and many hot-button issues. The questions above were asked to spark debate…so comment away!

Have you seen the “Did You Know?” video yet? Sony Corp just showed it at their annual shareholders meeting.  It highlights the pace of innovation and how it’s expected to accelerate in the next decade.  It was also featured in Time magazine (”What College Students Don’t Know”) and was shown at the Economist’s Media Convergence Forum in October.  There’s a wiki with the source material, too.

Watch it below. It does a great job of challenging our assumptions about the future.

So what does it all mean?  We’re interested in your comments.

The video was created by Jeff Brenman, Karl Finch, and Scott McCloud.

Here’s what you might have missed among the news about special elections and earthquakes.

Immigrants could play a key role in new business growth according to a new study. The number of immigrants starting companies is growing — from .37% in 2006 to .46% in 2007. While these numbers are small, experts point to the fact that 25% of US tech companies in the mid-nineties had founders from other countries and half of the new tech companies in Silicon Valley were founded by immigrants, including Google, eBay and Yahoo. This comes on the heels of the news that a group of investors is trying to open the door to foreign entrepreneurs. They’re lobbying Congress for a new visa for non-citizens who want to start technology companies. (The Street and WSJ)

Regardless of your political affiliations, Brown and Coakley’s Boston senate race can teach entrepreneurs lessons about social media. A blogger from entrepreneur.com argues that political campaigns are essentially entrepreneurial ventures and that incorporating social media into your venture is critical to success, as no election or business will ever be truly local again. Some of the lessons she highlights are: utilize social media to engage your customers by responding to their requests; to do social media right, it’s not just about strategy, it’s about proper staffing (the Coakley campaign didn’t have a social media champion to spearhead their efforts) and allocation of resources (don’t forget to give your social media guru cross-organizational support — social media touches many aspects of your business); just because you’ve innovated once doesn’t make you an innovator for life (the Tea Partiers have now leap-frogged over Obama supporters in terms of social media innovation). (Entrepreneur.com)

Don’t look to entrepreneurs to help with the unemployment rate. A Kauffman Foundation study has found that most entrepreneurs and small businesses don’t expect to generate new jobs this year. Only 8% of small businesses have increased their headcount in recent months and 36% of entrepreneurs have laid off staff. Additionally, 71% of entrepreneurs said that they would not be adding new jobs in 2010. (gaebler)

Only 1 in 10 entrepreneurs get the VC funding they need. Venture capital funding nationwide is at its lowest rate in the last 5 years according to a Thomson Reuters/National Venture Capital Association study released Monday. In 2009, venture capital fundraising from 120 funds totaled $15.2 billion, down 47% from 2008, when 223 funds raised $22.3 billion. (Pittsburgh Business Times)

Photo courtesy of Russell Cox