Now for some quotes:

“In everyone’s life, at some time, our inner fire goes out.  It is then burst into flame by an encounter with another human being. We should all be thankful for those people who rekindle the inner spirit.” - Albert Schweitzer.  From a Deepak Chopra Center for Wellbeing newsletter I get occasionally.

“At the age of 20, we don’t care what the world thinks of us; at 30, we worry about what it is thinking of us; at 40, we discover that it wasn’t thinking of us at all.” - unknown.  From a birthday party evite from a friend who is turning 40.  I’m looking forward to 40 only for that reason.

The following quotes are from a guy named Jeffrey Fry who I honestly can’t remember how I know.  He sends out a daily quote/tidbit email and since I find many of them interesting, I have stayed subscribed to his list.

“You often love someone not for what they are, but for what you are when you are with them.” - Jeffrey Fry

“Change only happens when the status quo becomes unbearable.” - Michael Drapkin. I recently heard a speaker on the topic of understanding people and he had another twist on this quote that goes something like this “Nothing changes until the pain of remaining the same is worse than the pain of changing.”

“Kindness is the oil that takes the friction out of life.” - Dustin Hosterler

“I must not fear.  Fear is the mind-killer.  Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.  I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.  Where the fear has gone there will be nothing.  Only I will remain.” - Frank Herbert

Love is the highest bliss that man can attain to, for through it alone he truly knows that he is more than himself, and that he is at one with the All. - Rabindranath Tagore. Interestingly, I have a cousin named after Rabindranath

The one pager can be different depending on who you are sending it to.  It’s much harder to write a one pager than a novel sometimes because you have to really figure out the best words to put down in a limited amount of space.  It’s a cross between a product sales sheet and a company highlights document.  A ‘teaser’ document that will hopefully get someone to call you to discuss your company further.

Since tweeting about us finding a home for Babble Soft, I already have more leads than I expected.  That is the power of a strong social network…so many people reaching out to help others.  I’ve started following up on those leads and they are interestingly quite different.  I also sent messages to some of my LinkedIn contacts to see if they might have connections to appropriate partners.

I’m not as organized as I should be about this process as I’m pulling together information in real time.  I guess I’m following a “fire, ready, aim” route instead of the proper one but it’s the best I can do at this moment in life so may the winds of favor smile on us.   Thank goodness for smiley emoticons.

On an unrelated note, in the background today I’ve been playing music.  For all of my life, I’ve loved music but I haven’t been able to have it playing in the background when I work.  I usually have to have almost complete silence when I read, study, type, etc.  But for some odd reason that wasn’t the case today.  I found myself listening to Jim Croce, James Taylor, ABBA, Simon & Garfunkel (Feelin’ Groovy), Michael Jackson, and of course Backyardigan’s while working at my computer.  Not sure if that bodes well or not to the final product, but it’s an interesting new experience for me.  I guess I’ve just enhanced my multi-tasking abilities or maybe I’ve killed those brain cells that tell me I can’t listen to music and concentrate at the same time.

Just finished listening to I Am A Rock - by Simon & Garfunkel “And a rock feels no pain and an island never cries”

My husband is just getting back from taking the kids grocery shopping, and now we’re off to take the kids to see Ice Age - Dawn of the Dinosaurs at the theater.

I have a great friend who has a house on the lake and every year, they throw a 4th of July party.  This is the same friend who got me the purple peacock hat for my birthday.  You get a perfect view of the fireworks right from the back yard of her house and there’s nothing like watching fireworks in an uncrowded place while sitting on chairs.

Needless to say I got my pyro-fix for the time being with a few firey delights which shall remain nameless.  I’ve always been fascinated with fire.  My mom used to get really upset with us for melting candle wax on the fireplace ledge and making things out of the wax when she wasn’t there.  Rightly, she was worried that we were going to burn the house down.  Fortunately, that never happened.

I did accidentally burn my sister’s fingers when we were kids.  I got in huge trouble with my grandfather who rarely got upset with us.  He sent me to a corner and I was devastated.  I think I was about 9 years old and in my mind I was conducting an experiment with medical tape wrapped around my sister’s finger and lighting one end of the tape with fire.  I have no idea what I thought would happen, and I had no idea how quickly it would burn.  I guess I just thought it would just stay at the end like a candle wick, but I was wrong and after my sister screamed, I knew I would get in trouble!

With little kids around, we don’t burn that many candles in the house these days but when I do see fire, I find myself mesmerized by it for a while.  It’s sort of calming in a weird way.

I wonder if other entrepreneur’s have a fascination with fire because really what we do is play with fire with some of the risks we take…

I think we often let others make decisions for us in business and in life.  I know I’ve done this several times in business as a young entrepreneur.  We think other, older, experienced people know more, but sometimes they just don’t because they can’t see the things you see.  Sometimes we don’t even realize we are doing it.  We might politely express our opinions but not push hard for what we really want for fear of something happening (e.g., not being accepted, looking bad, not being validated, hurting other people, feeling like we don’t deserve what we want, or our outstanding innate power).  Yes, I do think many of us are afraid of our power and being our true selves.

But then we wake up one day to realize we are living a life and business decided by others and not ourselves.  I know many a mother who finds herself in that position in her life…living a life that someone else (family, society, job) dictated to her and she passively accepts it.  I know a few fathers who feel that way too.  I know far more business people who wished they had spoken up and made different decisions.  In the world of entrepreneurship, we call those learning experiences scar tissue!  A necessary rite of passage to prove yourself.

I’ve learned that knowing your boundaries up front helps you make better decisions even in times of crisis or joy.  For instance, if you know you will never lie, cheat, or steal then your decisions of course are going to be different than a thief who doesn’t have those boundaries.  But if you are not careful, you can end up like that proverbial frog in slow heating water who doesn’t realize he is in danger until it’s far too late and he’s boiled to death (e.g., Enron and other financial scandals that involved otherwise good people).  I think most of us make the decision to jump out, turn the temperature down, ask for help, or change the rules of the game of the pot we’re in and earn our scar tissue and badges of experience in the process.

Making a decision to do something, accept something, not do something, or not accept something can leave you with images of the road not taken.  Not following your gut instinct, can leave you with many more decisions to make that might have been avoided or replaced with other decisions…not to mention heartburn and anxiety.

Oh, if we only could get away with not making any decisions and end up being rich, happy, healthy, and fulfilled…

I wonder if someone has invented a pill for that?

Are we ever content?  I’m not sure if it’s an entrepreneurial trait, a mid-life characteristic, an MBA grad fate, or something else.  But as I continue to tweet about and reach out to my contacts about finding a good home for Babble Soft, I find myself turning to music as I have often done in the past during times of transition.  There’s something about music that pulls out the emotions in me and lets me process them in a way that can’t be processed in silence or even with close friends.

Since I started taking yoga last year, I’ve seen the benefits of certain meditation and quiet times but music - the combination of words and instruments - pushes buttons in me that make it OK to to feel things that intellectually my mind tells me not to feel.  The mind just says focus on this task, get it done, and move on.  The mind doesn’t want to be bothered with stuff that affects the heart and soul.  Music reminds me that to be human is to feel because other humans are singing about their life transitions and it reminds me how kind of normal some of these feelings are.  And sometimes we need to give ourselves the space to feel and really listen to what our body is telling us instead of just our minds to make the best decisions.  Instead of feeling isolated in silence or the sometimes deafening noise of two kids incessant chatter, music brings me softly into the river of humanity.

So some of the music I’ve been listening to lately is by Billy Joel (hence the title of this post), Indigo Girls, Simon & Garfunkel, Neil Diamond, Michael Jackson (mostly because of his recent death), Sarah McLachlan, and oddly enough Book of Love.

May the music be with you…