Tag: entrepreneurship

“Ride or die?”

Yours Truly, commuting.

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.

Common Thriving

Common Thriving wasn’t going to be a business.

image of a quaking-aspen forest, representative of a community connected by its root system
Photo of an aspen forest by Donald Giannatti on Unsplash

The signature line and the someday nonprofit

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!