I fell off my bicycle right between a bus and a rickshaw, just as traffic started to move.
I only got a few scrapes, but it was scary. And I rode on. And again the next day.
Sometimes, moving forward is safer than staying still–and the only way to get where you want to go.
I had about a mile from my house to the office, along an artery road in a city of 20 million. Sometimes, the commute took 10 minutes by bicycle. Sometimes, it was 45 minutes. I was an aggressive minnow among the buses, cars, rickshaws, and motorbikes.
I hadn’t always been a cyclist. At first, I’d negotiated a rickshaw fare each morning. Starting the day with a stressful negotiation, and taking a long ride to the office on side roads, wasn’t sustainable. I needed a bike to cut through traffic.
My first day on a bike in Dhaka, I realized I needed to be more aggressive. For safety. People expected me to move into tiny gaps in traffic, but I was hesitating, and blocking the dance. That was a good way to get hit by someone, or cause an accident for someone else.
I needed to shorten my commute. Bicycling increased my risk, but to shorten my commute it was a risk I had to take–so I did. And I quickly learned how to reduce the risks. I learned to:
Look at the flow of traffic ahead
Claim my place in the flow
Recover quickly
Buy some cycling gloves
In life or in business, risk is sometimes unavoidable. Unless you give up and go home. But it helps to know where you’re trying to go.
Through Common Thriving, I help small-business owners see clearly:
where they are
where they want to be
what they need to do next.
And how to deal with the details, risks, and rewards of doing what’s next. Sign up for the Light Stretches newsletter for an idea and an action step to grow a bit each Friday.
Bill Gates’s seat was 50 feet in front of mine. My seat, of course, wasn’t in the section roped off for board members; I was there as a lowly B-share holder. I’d even had to find a different hotel the night before after they canceled my reservation.
I was a nontraditional college student, and I was going to be rich. And I was going to learn from the best how to get there. In my teens, I’d learned the magic of compounding returns. I moved on to Peter Lynch’s “Beat The Street”. And I found the Super-Investors of Graham And Doddsville, and I was hooked. I read Ben Graham. I printed out 10-K SEC filings and pored over them, calculating free-cash-flow ratios. And I bought a couple of “baby” shares in Graham’s most famous disciple’s company, Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway. (Turns out, financially, I should have stopped right there…but anyway.) I wasn’t sure whether I’d manage a fund or private wealth, but I was going to hone my skills, and use them to make other people rich, and become independently wealthy myself.
The Berkshire shareholder meeting has been called “The Capitalist Woodstock”, and one B-share would get you in to hear the Oracle’s wisdom live. And so, I made the pilgrimage to Omaha. Like a huge fair, you could load up on products from Berkshire companies. Mrs. See’s. Justin Boots. A custom Berkshire Monopoly game. Swarovski crystal from Borsheim’s. And books, my favorite. Recommendations from the masters themselves, Buffett and Charlie Munger. And a lovely coffee-table book, Poor Charlie’s Almanack, written by a fan of Munger to capture his “worldly wisdom”. That was a dangerous book.
Munger really was a wise person, with deep insights. His approach to mental models changed my intellectual life. (For a worthy current promoter of these ideas, see Shane Parrish at Farnam Street.) And the practical wisdom captured in his speeches and aphorisms is worth reading and re-reading.
But one little nugget in the Almanack stuck in my mind. It wasn’t lengthy and apparently isn’t famous, because I’m having difficulty finding it either in the physical pages or online right now; citation, hopefully, to be added. But it was a seed that began to grow.
Munger was a billionaire. But he lamented how much we reward intelligence in finance, and how much society loses when brilliant minds devote themselves to “shuffling little pieces of paper” (I wish I had the exact quote for you, but for now you’ll have to rely on recollections from a couple of decades ago) instead of working on the real problems confronting us.
It gave me a bit of pause, but I read on. Later, I finished a couple of business degrees and a postgraduate finance designation. But Munger’s lesson kept on simmering. It combined with other destabilizers over time…but those factors, and the ways they’ve combined, are other stories. Stories along the path to becoming a lot less focused on maximizing my net worth, but even more interested in understanding what kinds of “wealth” we hold, build, and destroy in our collective interactions.
I’ve come to a complicated relationship with capital and with business. Misuse of money can be a social cancer, and the structures of modern capitalism celebrate such misuses. But I still believe good people can build good businesses that build up their communities, even amidst a broken system–and I’ve spent several decades acquiring the tools to help them do so.
If you’re a business owner fighting to build something meaningful and profitable, I’d like to get to know you and cheer you on as an ally in the struggle. Or if you want to work with me, I’m glad to do that too.
Through Common Thriving, I help business owners move from chaos and uncertainty in their businesses to clarity and confidence about specific steps toward a future they really want. I also offer implementation help, so that paralysis and confusion can change to forward momentum and understanding, and to thriving individuals, companies, and communities. If these are challenges you’d like to progress on, book a time on my calendar to explore what might be possible–I’ll enjoy talking with you!
Some time in the last year, I adopted an email signature on a whim: “Toward common thriving, Joel”.
A client was curious what the signature meant, and I thought a bit before responding. My “whim” had, apparently, long been simmering before bubbling up in an email signature. It’s a core ideal for me. Thriving should be common, as in widespread, frequent, broadly shared. And thriving should be common, as in something we all share in. And individual success should happen in ways that build up the common good.
And, I thought, that would be an idea worth building an organization around at some point. These days, good two-word domain names are incredibly scarce, but I looked–and, shockingly, commonthriving.org was available. I registered the domain, as well as the .com.
Naming the consultancy
Months later, as I prepared to bring my coaching/consulting business to the public, I was racking my brain for a name. I’d registered the LLC several years ago with a placeholder name, but needed something that represented me, that I could own.
I started with some horrible ideas. Polyscopic Business Growth, anyone? And an unromantic, oh-so-pragmatic one I almost committed to, Real-World Business Growth. And others. Tap into my rural-Kansas roots? Evoke grand success?
But then it hit me. I already had a name I loved. And with it, the deep “reason for being” of the business itself, the thing that gets me excited about actually working in this space.
And Common Thriving LLC was born.
I do value deep analysis from multiple perspectives, an idea I tried to capture in “polyscopic” (a term which friends told me reminded them of, um, medical “scopes”). I deeply value making ideas and systems work in the real world. But more deeply than that: I want to build a business where the actual work of it delights me. And to get that kind of business, I’m centering on common thriving.
Open horizons
I’m running Common Thriving, the LLC, as a coaching/consulting business to help small-business owners gain clarity about their most-effective next actions, and to support them in increasing profits and decreasing stress. The consultancy is intended to help individual business owners thrive–and it’s intended to make a profit. But I’m also dreaming. What if we had a whole network of people building businesses that, from the ground up, leaned into “common thriving”? What would the individual businesses look like? What would the network look like? And what would the communities around those businesses look like?
The next step for me is to support good small-business owners in personally thriving as they build their businesses: helping give them the space to breathe and reflect, looking at next steps along the path, and supporting them as they build. Beyond that, the idea of the Common Thriving Network keeps on simmering. I’d love to hear your ideas of how such a network could make life better for its participants and for the world!
I had an “aha!” moment in Thomas Parkinson‘s entrepreneurship class yesterday, via Nathan Gold. Nathan keyed in on metaphor as one of the key tools for an effective pitch, rather than getting into the weeds of what it is you do.
Since being introduced to Charlie Munger’s “latticework of mental models”, I’ve believed that most of our ability to think well comes from having an adequate mental library of metaphors and being able to apply them well–there’s no more-powerful tool for quickly grasping the intuitive “essence” of a thing. But somehow, I hadn’t made the connection between metaphors’ power for thinking and their equal power in communicating and persuading in compressed-time, high-stakes situations.
In retrospect, it’s obvious–but gaining that insight is one of various “pieces” that may each, individually, have been worth the investment in the iMBA program.
Known Unknowns 