A year or two ago, I was interviewed down in Alexandria by Larry Robertson, who was conducting a couple of hundred interviews with people on the idea of entrepreneurship. Larry is an expert and consultant on entrepreneurism, advising many enterprises and lecturing often on the subject at Georgetown and Cornell Universities. We had met several years before at an opening for my work at the Principle Gallery in Alexandria, when he had obtained a painting of mine. several years had passed and at an opening a couple of years ago, Larry approached me with an invitation to be interviewed for a book for which he was researching.
So we met a few months later and sat for a couple of hours. I knew that there was a certain amount of entrepreneurism in being an artist, in that you had to create a product of your own design and establish a network for distributing it out into the wider world. Basically, you must take your own vision and make it available for others to embrace. But I thought I had little to offer Larry for his book.
That day Larry explained to me some of his concepts that would be laid out in his book. He described how he had observed the growth of my career in the Alexandria area and showed me in a small chart how my work acted as a pebble which, upon striking the surface of a pond (which would be the initial successful sale of my work there,) sends out waves that spread along the surface, creating more and more opportunity for my work to be seen and be successful. He said the success of my work was a perfect template for success for enterprises of all sizes. I hadn’t thought of it in that way.
I came away from the interview thinking that I had indeed taken more from the interview than I had given.
Well, Larry’s book has hit the shelves. It’s titled A Deliberate Pause: Entrepreneurship and Its Moment in Human Progress and is a really engaging read. He features wonderful guidance from his hundreds of interviews from a wide and varying group of entrepreneurs including Nobel Prize winner Muhammad Yunus , the developer of microcredit where very small loans are given to the very poor so that they may pursue their own vision of enterprise, along with a multitude of other well known names. If you have even a small amount of the entrepreneurial spirit running in your veins, this is an invaluable guide with much to offer.
I think that this spirit of innovation and individual creation of vision, as described in this book, will be a major force in forming the future economy of this country, in pushing along new technologies and new ways of approaching old ideas. You can go to Larry Robertson’s website for his book by clicking on the book cover shown. Well worth your time…
Redtree Times 