standing apart from the crowd

the coolest new zealander i know, stacey (remember discounderworld and shoe per diem - those are her brainchildren), has a new blog to go with her new job and already she's making me think. this morning, i read her post on the word entrepreneur and found myself nodding.  as you know, i often ponder language,  and stacey's thoughts on entrepreneur not really being the right word for someone who is starting a little business had actually occurred to me of late.

entrepreneur seems to be a whole lot bigger than small business owner. and while i admire anyone who has their own little company, whether they be a plumber or electrician or specialize in communications in english, there is somehow a difference between daring to go out on your own with a small business and true entrepreneurship. i find entrepreneur as word laden with the notion of a unique invention or The Next Big Thing. i find it interesting stacey also associates it with time and how you as an entrepreneur build up your business in order to spend less time at it, so you can move on to the next thing. i would actually call that investment, rather than entrepreneurship, but i find the thought interesting.

in danish, there is another word for entrepreneur - iværksætter. literally - one who sets work in motion - i like that, as it feels to me like it applies better to the business i'm setting in motion. we've not invented a smart new wheel or the answer to twitter or a truly good battery for storing wind power (whoever invents that will be rich) - we're providing high quality communication services in english for other iværksætter in denmark, who want to grow their businesses globally. and iværksætter seems like the perfect word for it. i guess that's the advantage of living in two languages, you can take the best words from both to express what you would really like to express.

it strikes me as i think about entrepreneurship and read advice about it (and there's a LOT of advice out there), that it's all glowingly positive, evangelistic and rather cheerleader-y. i'm slightly disappointed that no one really talks about all of the fear and night terrors associated with it. because while it's exciting, it's also a tremendous amount of pressure to place on yourself - because the success or failure is all on you - there's no one to blame. and whether or not you get a new kitchen anytime in the near future may be resting entirely on you. 

the pros and cons of working (mostly) at home

my wonderful new job is in norway. i live in denmark. so, i've made an arrangement whereby i work most of the time from home and only "commute" to oslo to spend a few days every other week (tho' that's fast becoming every week). thanks to the miracles of modern technology (secureID, smart phones, VPN connections and the ubiquity of broadband), this works pretty well.

the pros of working at home:

1. no one interrupts me
2. i have time to make sabin's lunch "pakse" in the morning
3. i get to drop off sabin at school every morning, right before school starts, instead of an hour before like we used to
4. i can wear pajamas most of the day
5. i don't have that panicked feeling on sunday evening if the laundry isn't done
6. i'm home when the mailman comes to deliver packages
7. i can play the same 4 songs 600 times in a row if i want to and no one complains
8. time and peace to think and to concentrate
9. i can pick up sabin mid-afternoon so she doesn't have too long a day
10. i get to make dinner on a daily basis
11. i enjoy being by myself
12. i have created a lovely, pleasant, inspiring space upstairs in which to work
13. i'm never far from my juicer
14. since i am a night owl, i can work into the wee hours and not have to worry about getting up and getting ready for work in the morning
15. i can drink 2 giant pots of fragrant, hot chai all by myself and not have to share
16. small time-outs during which i (perhaps a tad obsessively) carve erasers into stamps

cons to working at home:

1. no one interrupts me
2. wearing pajamas all day is a bit embarrassing when the mailman comes to the door at 1 p.m.
3. i actually sit and work for too long without a break because there are no interruptions
4. if there's IT trouble, there's no IT guy to call (thus i have to just tell myself to restart the computer and see if that helps)
5. if i have something i need to discuss, i either have to wait til i go to norway or call someone (and i hate calling people, except for a very few "phone friends" that i can while away hours talking to on the phone)
6. no one to bounce ideas off of
7. i pounce on husband when he comes home, telling him all of the things i've been thinking of all day (this can be a bit annoying for him)
8. distractions (like those erasers just sitting there, waiting to be carved into stamps)
9. the smart phone is ugly, ugly, ugly
10. not enough interaction with other adult people

but, largely, it feels luxurious and very nearly decadent to have a great job and be able to work most of the time at home, thereby getting much more time with my family. and that the job involves traveling is great too, so when i'm not home, i'm going somewhere fun--like oslo or singapore or manila or marseille. so, i can't really complain. and looking at the list above, there are more pros than cons.

my business

i've spent the morning organizing all of the paperwork for my little business in its lovely bookbinder's design folder. it still strikes me as strange that i have my own business. strange and wonderful. i make invoices. i scan receipts. i handle the bank account. i make my travel arrangements. i fly all over the place. i keep track of all kinds of things. and most important of all, i do a job for a client. how cool is that?

i've always either been a graduate student or an ordinary worker bee, taking in my monthly paycheck. although this is a bit more challenging, figuring all that stuff out myself (especially the taxes! and the pension! yikes!), i feel independent and strong. dare i say, like a grownup, at last.

perhaps now i'll finally get a handle on the financial side of things--money has always been a strangely abstract thing to me, sort of ephemeral and always more tangible to me in the form of an object i've just purchased than as a concept or in those silly little bits of paper that the world seems to chase around endlessly. perhaps now my view on it will change, when i know that it's really myself who has earned it and is doing something to create the fact of money coming in to my very own business.

how exciting! how grown-up! amazing that it took this long...but maybe it's my inner child that enables me to look upon it with delight.