I tote no slim, foldable device of silicon, plastic and liquid crystal. My shoulder bag contains only books, notepads, and a manila folder fat with the rumpled typewritten pages of my manuscript.

For the next several hours I will sit alone with these pages, with my thoughts, with my pen and my paper, silent and focused. Gadgets cannot demand my attention. The telephone sits in its cradle at home, miles away. Instead of a screen, I will stare into myself. My characters are within, awaiting my tap on their shoulders. They wait in the realm of my best thoughts, my truest feelings.

I pass through an atrium warm and crystalline, lit naturally from the glass panels at the ceiling. I turn beneath a gothic arch and my shoes whisper on durable carpet. Solid maple desks file by to right and left, partitioned for study and furnished with matching maple chairs. Few are occupied on this summer day (this is a university library). Old burnished wood glows amber under green-shaded lamps.

The ceilings are lofty and gabled. I install myself at a desk and tilt back my head. The empty space soaring over the bookstacks seems to hum with hundreds of meditations: the prior thoughts of strangers, of earlier students, of other writers, of the cumulative human labor of mind and soul to which the neatly catalogued books shelved spine-out are silent testimony.

Libraries count among the last of our public spaces dedicated to the cultivation of privacy. In the best libraries you’re expected to hush. You’re expected to glide amid the stacks, light and noiseless as a ghost, a bit lost in fantasy, primed for inspiration.

And as institution the library is a secular temple dedicated no less to the maturation of the soul—the silent, hopeful soul as it swims amid the most worthy and enduring of what is human.

This maturation and privacy go hand in hand. Today, laptops are welcome in libraries, even accommodated with free wireless service. And yet the laptop seems (doesn’t it?) somehow profane here, a bit sham, or impermanent, somewhat too … plasticky. It is, in the end, a mediating device, after all.

Meanwhile, the library’s fertile atmosphere works to return you to the wireless state. The close, soft, book-scented air shares the rich and healthy mustiness of a garden. It’s an air meant to conjure awe at everything the fertile mind of man and woman has produced—in the humanities, the arts, the sciences. Here you’re reminded of the most meaningful, time-tested method of social networking. You remember the countless, single, solitary souls who have sat alone in rooms through the ages, nurturing ideas, imaginings, dreams.

Finally, the library expects you, eventually, to hunker down in the glow of a green-shaded desklamp, to turn pages and take notes, to tend your thoughts and wade toward understanding, empathy, expansion of self. Visiting a library means remembering what it’s like to be human, to have a single inimitable soul among souls; it’s a way to reawaken one’s capacity for individuation, to realize one’s potential.

Here I am. The light is good, the silence is rich, and I’m ready to work.

You might also enjoy:

“Presenting…the Intravidual”

“Is the Internet Dangerous?”

“One Way to Protect Your Soul in A Wired Age”

“In Praise of Physical Spaces”

Though students might be surprised to know this, many teachers – including me — would agree that we learn more from our students than our students learn from us. Every new session of my introductory entrepreneurship course reminds me of this. Here are just three lessons I’m (re)learning this term:

1. Everyone is extraordinary
Every student, even the least forthcoming, has a rich inner life and unique experiences to share. Yet many have yet to fully realize how extraordinary they are. That’s why I require each student to give a five-minute individual presentation (IP) focused exclusively on personal and/or career goals. Classmates (and teachers) learn much from these IPs, as do the presenters themselves, who are rarely asked to talk formally about themselves in class. A teacher’s job, in my view, is facilitating student self-disclosure.

2. Everyone can use more feedback
University students rarely get enough direct, personal feedback from teachers. Come to think of it, few of us get enough direct, personal feedback on our professional performance. For teachers, encouraging students is job number one; giving them feedback is job number two. Good feedback travels both ways: in winter quarter, a couple of students panned my grading methodology, which helped me improve a lot this term.

3. Effort determines results
I see this basic rule of success verified over and over again, inside the classroom and out: Average effort produces average results, extraordinary effort produces extraordinary results. Students who work hard on their IPs give dynamite presentations. Students who sweat over their assignments earn good grades (and even start companies). Effort determines results. This bonehead simple, cause-and-effect relationship is, in my view, life’s number one success rule.

A teacher’s effort determines results, too. This term I had the brilliant idea of giving ten graded assignments, all of which required me to provide individual feedback (no multiple-choice, Scantron-corrected tests in my classes). When double the usual number of students showed up, I was suddenly on the hook for some 200 mini-feedback essays. That kept me scrambling many extra hours, but the effort paid off in solid student progress.

Readers of Soul Shelter includes some extraordinary teachers (see What the Bricklayer Taught Me) and some extraordinary ex-teachers (see The Truth About Quitting). What have your students taught you? And for the learners among us — meaning everyone — what have your teachers taught you?

You may also enjoy:

“In Defense of “Aimless” Learning”

“On Pilgrimage: The Ghosts Who Are My Teachers“

— Here’s a good summer read that affirms the worth of obscurity, naïveté, and so-called “delusions.”—

I find myself at a semi-nascent period of my career as an earning writer—that is, earnings are no longer merely nascent. Each year, just enough wages come through to contribute a decent supplementary income to my household. That is something to be extremely grateful for—and grateful I am, everyday.

But keeping even the little checks coming continues to be a struggle week by week. And an optimistic outlook, rugged perseverance, and a brave belief in the worth of the work at hand all become more important as time goes by. For despite my many plans, ambitions, works-in-progress, and continuing commitment to my art, the future remains uncertain.

This is the story of many a working writer—and has been so for ages, as anyone can see by reading the correspondence or journals of any number of even our greatest authors. Henry James’ notebooks contain a fair share of biographical evidence to this point. In 1889 James anxiously writes:

I simply must try, and try seriously, to produce half a dozen—a dozen, five dozen—plays for the sake of my pocket, my material future. Of how little money the novel makes for me I needn’t discourse here.

(Perhaps a need to remind myself of this plight of penury—and affirm it as universal to most all writing lives—was in part what compelled me to publish a novel about the impoverished poet Rilke.)

Ultimately, most writers can only bend their heads, keep working, and strive to be their best. “Success” as the world knows it is wholly beyond our control, and anyway mostly irrelevant to the substance of our daily labors. “For us, there is only the trying,” said T.S. Eliot in his Four Quartets.

But struggling as I am to keep the small checks coming, the mystery of success remains a natural subject for pondering, so I was primed recently to delight in the new book, Born Standing Up, by comedian Steve Martin. It’s an eloquent narrative of awkward beginnings, perseverance, and accidental fame.

Martin devotes his attention to the long struggles, the necessary obsession, the small and ill-paying—sometimes non-paying—triumphs that marked his journey to comedy dominance in the late 70s, and this sets his book apart from the standard celebrity memoir. There’s no gratuitous namedropping in Born Standing Up, not a bit of juicy insider gossip. Martin’s subject is his apprenticeship in—and his ultimate abandonment of—stand-up comedy. He begins:

I did stand-up comedy for eighteen years. Ten of those years were spent learning, four years were spent refining, and four were spent in wild success.

This eighteen year period took him from youthful gigs at Kiwanis Clubs in his native Southern California, through employment at Disneyland during his teenage years and a repertory act at Knott’s Berry Farm during college, to eventual fame and fortune as a stand-up comedian who regularly sold-out giant stadiums.

Most fascinating about the book is Martin’s central confession: his complete lack of natural talent.

I had absolutely no gifts…Thankfully, perseverance is a great substitute for talent.

That aphorism becomes Martin’s pervasive theme as he recounts his experience pursuing a lifelong passion—and finding himself subject to the incidental whims of fortune and success.

I was seeking comic originality, and fame fell on me as a by-product. The course was more plodding than heroic: I did not strive valiantly against doubters but took incremental steps studded with a few intuitive leaps. I was not naturally talented—I did not sing, dance, or act—though working around that minor detail made me inventive.

Martin has always had a serious streak. All comedians do, of course—their craft demands a rigorous personality infused with perfectionism (see the film Comedian, which follows Jerry Seinfeld through the grueling process of developing new stand-up material). But few comedians have incorporated their serious side into their public career as has Martin, who’s long expressed an interesting blend of zany and heartfelt. His play Picasso at the Lapin Agile is a perfect example of his rounded style, as are the films L.A. Story and Roxanne, both wonderful comedy/melodramas that originated as Martin authored screenplays.

Like his best movie moments, Martin’s book is a refreshing blend of the breezy and the thoughtful. His motive here is not to produce a work of chuckle-inducing comic writing (see his earlier book, Pure Drivel, for that). In Born Standing Up, Martin provides a longer-lasting service to his reader. The memoir engages, entertains, and instructs. It will resonate emotionally with anyone who longs to bring their passion and a pursuit of excellence to convergence in hopes of earning a living.

Martin has a knack for quotable insights. Born Standing Up is jeweled with them. He writes:

I did have the one element necessary to all early creativity: naïveté, that fabulous quality that keeps you from knowing just how unsuited you are for what you’re about to do.

And later on:

Through the years, I have learned there is no harm in charging oneself up with delusions between moments of valid inspiration.

The book repeatedly affirms the worth of obscurity, naïveté, and these so-called “delusions.” And that’s a marvelously unique perspective to take as a basis for what, as we all know, becomes a tale of staggering worldly success.

What comes through in Martin’s story perhaps most palpably, most movingly, is the precious fleetingness of his apprenticeship period, before the arrival of mastery, before the glories of success or the rewards of fame, when the sole significant payoff of performing was the pure and resonant joy it brought. Here Born Standing Up, which at first appears to be a chronicle of a much-coveted pinnacle gained and abandoned, becomes an allegory of the importance of living life and cherishing one’s work each and every instant. Whatever our circumstances may be, however far from the ideal our careers may seem to run, there is always the work at hand to be nurtured with passion and delight. Recognizing and cherishing that reward—that we are doing exactly the thing we most wish to be doing, that we are learning daily—is the essential task of a fulfilled life.

In 1981, the year Steve Martin quit stand-up comedy forever, he was 36 years old, and he had become far more famous than he really wanted to be.

Though the audiences continued to grow, I experienced a concomitant depression caused by exhaustion, isolation, and creative ennui… This was, as the cliché goes, the loneliest period of my life.

I was caught and I could not quit, because this multizeroed income might last only a moment. I couldn’t imagine abandoning something I had worked so hard to craft. I knew about the flash in the pan, I had seen it happen to others, and I worried about it happening to me.

But it’s in freedom that the passing of time is sweetest—the freedom to learn, experiment, and make useful mistakes. And Martin had grown to understand that he was no longer free to do the thing he most wanted to do. He had striven to become a performer, but now he found himself merely rehashing prior achievements in hopes of staying rich. He was no longer growing, and the joy was disappearing.

Toward the close of Born Standing Up, he tells of an impulsive visit he paid to the Bird Cage Theater at Knott’s Berry Farm some twenty-odd years after his early employment there. The theater is no longer in use. Martin lets himself in and stands alone in the musty dimness. In this space, which is still unchanged, he had learned some of his most enduring lessons about performance. Daily, with a troupe of performers, he entertained small audiences, experimented, played around onstage, and now and then failed freely—with no ill consequences, but immense lessons learned.

Light filtered in from the canvas roof, giving the Bird Cage a dim, golden hue. There I was, standing in a memory frozen in amber, and I experienced an overwhelming rush of sadness… [I] looked out at the empty theater and was overcome by the feeling of today being pressed into yesterday. I didn’t realize how much this place had meant to me.

Driving home along the Santa Ana freeway, I was still unnerved. I asked myself what it was that had made this place capable of inducing in me such a powerful nostalgic shock. The answer floated clearly into my consciousness as though I had asked the question of a Magic-8 Ball: I wanted to be there again, if only for a day, indulging in high spirits and hi jinks, before I turned professional, before comedy became serious.

The journey itself, the learning itself, the apprenticeship, the obscurity and marvelous naïveté—the struggle itself—is the beautiful thing, a freedom to be cherished. Many long for such freedom from the heights of whatever professional pinnacles they have reached.

Here again is Henry James writing in that notebook:

To accept the circumstances, in their extreme humility, and do the best I can in them: this is the moral of my present situation. They are the reverse of ideal—but there is this great fact that for myself at least I may make them better. To take what there is, and use it, without waiting forever in vain for the preconceived—to dig deep into the actual and get something out of that—this doubtless is the right way to live.

You might also enjoy: “Measures of Success,” and “Fulfillment: A Work in Progress”

One of my students, an accomplished Irish designer, delivered a stunning presentation during our entrepreneurship class last summer. The experience jolted me. How had he done that?

Clearly it had something to do with the mysterious process called design, and I suddenly realized that my own presentations were, in terms of visual thinking, stuck in the dark ages.

Like most business school teachers, I’d tacitly bought into the deeply faulted notion that when an instructor 1) makes a verbal statement, then 2) shows a PowerPoint bullet of that same statement, what magically results is 3) permanent imprinting of the point upon listener minds.

This widely accepted 1-2-3 PowerPoint fiction is a prime example of wishful thinking. It ignores stark fact: Listeners are far more powerfully moved by visuals than by text (and they remember them better, too).

Just as I was reeling from my PowerPoint epiphany, a friend told me about Presentation Zen founder/writer Garr Reynolds, a tried-and-true Japanophile who, unbeknownst to me, had bought my second book, The Swordless Samurai. I grabbed a copy of Presentation Zen — an extraordinary work — and completely overhauled my entire approach to presentations. I (and my students) remain humbly in Garr’s debt.

I was struck anew by the mystery of design a few weeks ago on a visit to Japan. Though I hardly understand design’s most basic principles, over dinner with Garr in his hometown of Osaka, I grew more convinced than ever that design is deeply connected to entrepreneurship.

Design / di’zín / n. & v. • n. … 3 a plan, purpose, or intention

This I know: Design is intention, a goal. Likewise, entrepreneurship. As my students constantly hear, entrepreneurial action always resolves to a simple question: What is your goal?

Shortly after the Japan trip I found myself in Amsterdam, again marveling at the mystery of design, this time how it’s brilliantly woven into the fabric of everyday life in the Netherlands. I love the way Dutch design shows you what to do without words, or even diagrams.

Take these toilet buttons, for example. Depending on your own, er, output, you know immediately which one to push.

Look at this transaction counter at the Amsterdam Centraal train station. No need for signs, numbered tickets, or obsequious “assistants” to inform you of your turn. When the floor sparkles, you immediately know what to do.

That’s good design. And somehow, that’s entrepreneurship.

You may also enjoy:

“ Why Businesspeople Speak Like Idiots”

“ Secrets of Creative Longevity from Steinbeck, Rilke, and Woody Allen“

“ Entrepreneurship: A Primer“

The following appeared in the obit section of a small Western U.S. newspaper.*

It is with great sorrow that Mark Cunningham announces the death of his funnier third-grade self. Those closest to Cunningham (his siblings, parents, and spouse) have long known of his fondness for his younger self. Many a time has Cunningham regaled them with nostalgic accounts of his days at the rear of Mrs. Barbieri’s classroom at Red Glen Elementary: the scrawny chestnut-haired student ensconced at his tattooed desk, surrounded by giggling girls and envious, head-shaking boys.

Cunningham’s current self, it might as well be admitted, is barely funny at all. Those who read his novels do not hesitate to label him downright dour. What funniness Cunningham strives to exhibit in passing moments to his in-laws, distant relations, or current associates, proves diffident and dry, and is often met with laughless bewilderment.

It’s precisely this sad turn of events that inspired the placement of this obituary. Should the following be read by a former third-grade classmate or two — someone who once squirmed spasmodically at the back of Mrs. Barbieri’s class of 1986, tense with laughter that threatened to induce a wetting of the pants — then the passing of Cunningham’s third-grade self might find its proper eulogy in joyful remembrance.

Cunningham’s third-grade self first met with distinction early in the school year — September or October of ‘86, it must have been — at Mrs. Barbieri’s inaugural show-and-tell. Anyone present at that hour will no doubt recall Cunningham’s debut as a witty youthful magician. As the bereaved elder Cunningham recalls, this exhibition involved colored scarves, a deck of playing cards, and a rope of thrillingly erratic lengths. The performance culminated unforgettably: a small red ball, the same object Cunningham had caused to vanish beneath a cup but moments before, appeared in Mrs. Barbieri’s desk drawer to the amazement of the whole class. A young boy’s winsome future could not be more assured in the span of three or four minutes.

For a time, Cunningham lived up to this auspicious beginning. In the remaining eight months of his third-grade career, the funny little fellow grew accustomed to the mantra of Mrs. Barbieri’s third-grade girls — three words wheezed in breathless hilarity: “YOU’RE SO FUNNY!” The triumph of that singular year is most fully attested by the unanimous commentary in Cunningham’s paper-and-paste classroom annual: ‘You crack me up!’; ‘I bet you’ll be a comedian!’; ‘Remember when I sprayed Tang all over my desk because you made me laugh so hard?’; ‘Stay funny, ‘kay?’

Such a crowning year, given the peerless light at its peak, throws other years into shadow. As the Samurai of old knew well, the moment of mastery is also the commencement of decline. So it was for Cunningham. Degree by degree, as the boy advanced through elementary school, junior high, and high school, his funnier self grew more timid, more colorless, quieter.

It’s hard to say exactly how such a thing occurs — what decisive moments account for it — but surely the loss of the funnier self is common to individuals everywhere. Cunningham’s mortification at two romantic fractures in his ninth- and tenth-grade years no doubt muted his funnier self all the more, as did his revolt, at age 14, from his protestant upbringing. And surely the young man’s impassioned reading of certain classic literature was of no small account — but such things, in the end, amount to mere speculation. By age twenty, Cunningham’s funnier third-grade self was verily forgotten amidst the clamor of his graver, more ardent, more prepossessing selves.

Still, with characteristic resilience, in moments of relaxation or late-night delirium, Cunningham’s third-grade self would now and then re-emerge with a flourish. On each such occasion, observers were surprised by the short-lived but sparkling delight this sober young man had furnished them. Later, such moments of effervescence became confined to evenings shared between Cunningham and his beloved wife. The most private theatre imaginable. While Cunningham’s newer friends, his in-laws and professional associates remained unsuspecting of the funnier third-grade self submerged within him, his wife was time and time again floored with glee, invariably visited by the toe-curling whimsy Cunningham had once provoked in Mrs. Barbieri’s third-grade lasses.

It was in the course of one such intermittent exhibition last week that Cunningham conclusively noted the moribund state of his third-grade self. Or, it might be said that for the first time he understood how deeply buried this funnier self had become in the course of twenty-odd years, how rarely it now appeared, and what an impossible feat it would be to resurrect this self completely. In that seminal moment, on an evening in his thirty-first year, Cunningham was unmistakably struck with the profound grief that signals the end to a part of oneself, and his wife felt called upon to console the bereft fellow.

Cunningham’s funnier third-grade self is survived by Cunningham in a more current, regretfully more serious amalgam of selves. He grieves alone. His wife is sympathetic. There will be no memorial service, as Cunningham fears he would be unable to muster appropriate funniness. He might accept flowers. He will let you know.

*not really.

You may also enjoy:

“Incredibly Shrinking Selves”

“What Am I Doing With My Life?”

“Thanks, Bill, for Connecting Our Connections”

“The Happiness Issue“

Last week I spent a couple of days in Amsterdam to attend a conference on business models and deliver a presentation entitled How Your Business Model is Culturally Imprinted — And Why You Should Care (about which more in a later post).

Amsterdam is wonderful: A city of living history with frank, funny, welcoming citizens, and skinny, happy policemen. Good design is evident everywhere, and businesspeople seem to surf on the leading edge of everything — especially in the mobile telephone sector.

Many of the conference participants were sporting Apple’s new iPhone, and more than a few were either involved in startups working on iPhone applications or serving as consultants to large multinational firms intrigued by the iPhone’s blistering adoption rate.

Watching the twiddling thumbs and the twirling tweets, I was overcome by a sense of deja vu. Where had I seen all this before?

More than ten years ago, it turns out, in Japan.

That’s when NTT docomo, Japan’s leading mobile phone operator, launched i-mode, the world’s first Internet-enabled cellular telephone service. I was a witness, and even experimented with docomo’s prototype 3G model in 2001 (see essay on 3G cat video).

The i-mode service was a smash hit, attracting millions of subscribers its first year. Thanks largely to i-mode, today NTT docomo boasts some 50 million subscribers, an astonishing number for a single carrier in a nation with a population of 127 million.

Here’s what strikes me: From a user experience standpoint, what Apple offers today is almost identical to what NTT docomo started offering more than a decade ago. Like the iPhone, i-mode enabled users to send and receive e-mail and perform a variety of other online tasks using a cellular handset. (Note to Japanophiles: Yes, i-mode was largely a “walled garden” insulated from the Internet at large, and naturally with far fewer services available at the time, but the business model and user experience are surprisingly similar).

Whether Apple took any hints from NTT docomo or not, iPhone architects could hardly have been ignorant of i-mode’s extraordinary, ground-breaking success.

Regardless, here’s the point: Other cultures can offer remarkable hints to inform our own entrepreneurial efforts. And today, a Japan struggling with new sorts of ground-breaking challenges — a declining population and the world’s oldest workforce among them — can offer to astute outsiders a glimpse of the future in sectors such as food products, health care, and, of course, always-stunning consumer electronics.

Next week: Design and entrepreneurship

Postscript: To be fair, with respect to the iPhone’s extraordinary design and user interface, i-mode developer Takeshi Natsuno commented in an interview that the i-phone “… cannot be produced by Japanese manufacturers. Never.”

You may also enjoy:

“The Value of Travel — One Household’s Mild Manifesto”

“Entrepreneurship: A Primer”

“What Purpose Work?“

Me: So tell me again, what was it like?

Resident Baby: The place I came from?

– Yeah. Like, was it dark back there or full of light?

RB: You don’t remember? Didn’t you come from the same place?

– Well, yeah, everybody did.

RB: But you forgot what it was like?

– Everyone does, after a while.

RB: Really? You mean, I’ll forget too?

– I’m afraid so.

RB: Why?

– (shrug) It’s part of growing up.

RB: How long do I have?

– Hm?

RB: Till I forget.

– Uh, dunno. Nobody really knows when it happens. Personally, I suspect it happens with speech. A child learns language and forgets the other things. The earlier stuff. The mysteries. But that’s just a hunch. No one knows for sure.

RB: (thoughtful) Hmm.

– You look worried.

RB: What do you expect? You just told me I’m fated to forget where I came from!

– Maybe so, but you can describe it for me now, while you still remember. That way, even when you forget, I’ll remember.

RB: And you’ll remind me?

– Yeah.

RB: But wait a minute, how can you trust what I say? I mean, we’re not even really having this conversation. I can’t even talk yet, after all.

– So… what, you’re saying this is all in my head?

RB: Well…

– This discourse of ours, it isn’t even real?

RB: Well…

– Cause that hurts.

RB: Well, I’m just saying, I can’t even talk yet, so…

– You’re wiser than you know, kiddo. Can you just trust me on that? You’re a teacher.

RB: A teacher? I am?

– Yep, simply by being your bright-eyed, curious, squishable self. You can’t even help it. It’s just the way you are.

RB: (considering) Wow…

– So tell me, what was it like out there, before… You know, before the womb and all that?

RB: Well… (closing his eyes, thinking back) It wasn’t really dark, but not light either. …It was, like, all blues and pinks.

– In the womb, you mean?

RB: No, before that. It wasn’t really warm, but not cold either. There were, like, spots of light, maybe.

– Like stars?

RB: Sort of. Maybe.

– Could you hear anything? Were there sounds?

RB: It was silent. Wait, no, maybe there was, like, a hum.

– Did it all feel like water? Or more like air?

RB: Umm… It was a very settled feeling, I think. Peaceful.

– Wow.

RB: Pretty nice, huh?

– Yeah.

RB: But you know what?

– Hm?

RB: I’m glad to be here now.

– That’s a nice thing to say.

RB: No, but I mean it. Like, here we’ve got cookies, sippy cups, fuzzy blankets, storybooks, strollers, the park, the zoo…

– Mm. Simple pleasures.

RB: Yep. Those are what it’s all about. Those, and more complex pleasures when you’re older — symphonies, good novels, mango chutney. But it’s the same idea.

– So you came from where you came from in order to enjoy all those things?

RB: And to help you do so.

– I see. OK, that makes sense.

RB: Yep, but I also came to do this.

(Resident baby climbs up and gives me one of his irreplaceable Resident Baby hugs)

– Hey, thanks!

RB: I’m a baby. It’s what I’m all about.

– Well, I’m glad you’re here — and glad you’re glad to be here.

RB: Happy Father’s Day, Daddy.

– Yes it is. Happy and peaceful.

You may also enjoy:

“The Post That Never Was”

“The Rainbow Vanishes”

“Dr. Soul’s Inspirational Roundup, June ‘09”

“The One Place You’ll Always Be Indispensable“

Jim Carrey’s latest movie, “Yes Man,” was playing aboard my return flight from Tokyo to Portland last week. I was busy working and left the sound off, but every few minutes glanced up to enjoy Carrey’s antics — and in so doing was reminded of the power of raising one’s hand.

“Yes Man” is based on British author Danny Wallace’s book by the same title about the life-changing power of responding positively to opportunity. In the movie, Carrey plays a stuck-in the-status-quo schlep whose life is transformed when he dogmatically follows the advice of a self-help guru who advocates saying “yes” to every request, personal or professional.

In the film, Carrey indiscriminately agrees to perform any task requested by anyone, and ultimately is richly rewarded, both personally and professionally, for his volunteerism. The message is simple: it’s better to say “yes” than “no.” Those who volunteer get ahead.

Carrey’s movie reminded me of a recent personal experience of the power of raising one’s hand. In fact, as this message hits inboxes, I should be 30,000 feet over Canada en route to Amsterdam — thanks to raising my hand.

It started a few months ago when I became intrigued by the Business Model Innovation Hub, a kind of crowdsourced book writing project led by author Alex Osterwalder.

Alex was releasing “chunks” of his new book, Business Model Generation: A Handbook for Visionaries, Game-Changers, and Challengers, to Hub members for review and critique. I was familiar with Alex’s work from his Ph.D. days, but Business Model Generation goes beyond academics — it’s simple, elegant, and practical.

So, like some 400 other volunteers, I signed up and began reviewing the chunks.

I loved the content, which is close to my own work on business models. As I read, I started to see a way to contribute to Alex’s project. So I raised my hand and volunteered to edit the book.

Alex accepted my offer, and though I expected nothing, was immediately offered compensation. A month later, Alex told me he had “a surprise.” His team would fly me to Amsterdam and put me up for a pre-book launch Knowledge Fair. Sweet deal.

It was a lesson in forward motion: To get ahead, raise your hand and volunteer for work you care about enough to perform unpaid. The more you volunteer for projects that matter to you, the closer you move toward work you love — and toward compensation connected to your true vocation.

You may also enjoy:

“The Soul of an Entrepreneur, the DNA of a Business”

“What Am I Doing With My Life?”

“Entrepreneurship: A Primer”

“Measures of Success“

– Soul Shelter’s on site Web-prescription representative, Dr. Soul, directs you to four irresistibly inspiring and thought-provoking readings –

1) Author Anthony Doerr on “looking for validation in a wired world.”

What I am loath to articulate, to even contemplate, is that checking e-mail or tinkering around on Facebook or reading snippets about Politician A on Blog B is not about making money at all but about asking the world a very urgent question.

That question is this: Am I still here?

…. What did I do today that will still retain its original meaning two hundred years from now? Might it be better, and more lasting, merely to walk home right now, and open the backyard gate, and lie down in the grass?

A second very fine essay by Doerr can be found in…

2) The Book of Dads: Essays on the Joys, Perils, and Humiliations of Fatherhood.

The Book of Dads is a brand new, thoroughly inspirational volume featuring twenty engrossing personal essays by some of today’s best writers. Looking for a terrific Father’s Day gift?

Writes editor Ben George in his introduction:

I wanted a collection of essays that reaches for what it means to be a father — from beginning to end. In what ways, for instance, was it different to be a father than a mother? What did it mean to be a good dad versus a bad dad? And why did there seem to be so much talk, and so many books, about motherhood, but not that much discussion, at least as far as I could tell, about fatherhood? (Witness, for just one example, the supposedly gender-neutral magazine Parenting, whose subtitle, unsubtly, was until very recently What Matters Most to Moms). It couldn’t be that fathers just weren’t interested in fatherhood — the practice, the difficulties and the gratifications, the way it redirects a man’s life — not according to the conversations I was having…

3) Have our finest universities “forgotten that the reason they exist is to make minds, not careers?”

William Deresiewicz, a former Yale professor, provocatively ponders the question in The American Scholar. 

How can I be a schoolteacher — wouldn’t that be a waste of my expensive education? Wouldn’t I be squandering the opportunities my parents worked so hard to provide? What will my friends think? How will I face my classmates at our 20th reunion, when they’re all rich lawyers or important people in New York? And the question that lies behind all these: Isn’t it beneath me? So a whole universe of possibility closes, and you miss your true calling.

4) Author Catherine Blyth thinks about silence.

Our noisy culture is unbalanced by the view that good communication is all talk. At a gap in conversation, few of us pause to consider silence’s virtues: we’re too busy panicking how to fill it.   The quiet person threatens, because he acts as a verbal laxative on us.

Accept Dr. Soul’s best wishes for a bright, healthy, soul-expanding summer.

You may also enjoy:

“Dr. Soul’s Inspirational Roundup, February ‘09”

“On Slowness”

“In Praise of Physical Spaces”

“Five Soul-Stirring Books”

“What We Really Need to Be Happy“

Two and a half weeks in Tokyo and Osaka have given me the opportunity to ponder the meaning of work. No, let me rephrase that — these two and a half weeks have slammed me with the non-stop nature of work in Japan: leave the house at 6:30 a.m., return home at 10 p.m. or later, and make sure you dress sharp.

Work, the noun. In Japanese it’s shigoto, written using the two kanji characters below:

Each character can be read separately as the verb tsukaeru. Tsukaeru means “to serve,” in the sense of subordinating oneself to the goals of a superior — or to destiny itself.

On a recent evening, finding myself with some time to consider the true meaning of shigoto, I lingered at the bookstore nearest my adopted home to peruse a book entitled Nan no tame ni hataraku no ka? (What Purpose Work?). In it, author Kitao Yoshitaka explores and compares Japanese and U.S. work ethics.

In the U.S., Kitao writes, work is about fulfilling one’s personal aspirations. For most businesspeople, the goal is to raise one’s worth as measured in money, then periodically resell oneself to a new employer at a higher wage. Job-hopping, in other words, is the path to further achievement and greater status.

Like most stereotypes, this view has some basis in fact.

The Eastern conception of work differs, says Kitao. In Japan, work traditionally meant striving in accordance with one’s destiny, dedicating oneself to serving the public good. In other words, it’s not about you.

A decade of living in Japan and dozens of visits over the past twenty years has convinced me that — with many, many individual exceptions — Kitao’s view of the difference between working East and working West is spot on. His point is that growing Japanese acceptance of the Western (meaning U.S.) work ethic is altering the nature of work in Japan — and not for the better.

He’s right on that point, too. Nonetheless, a fundamental difference remains. That owes, in my view, to the individualist nature of Western societies, and the collectivist nature of Eastern societies. Even in today’s Japan, most people remain oriented more to the collective — the family, the organization, the nation — than to the individual self.

Noting the clock ticking towards nine, I bought Nan no tame ni hataraku no ka? and exited into the night, to ponder, in the day’s final free hours, the difference between striving East and striving West.

You may also enjoy:

“Working Without Working”

“Measures of Success”

“Entrepreneurship: Why It’s Not about You”

“Soaring Success, Devastating Failure: A Samurai’s Story“