Forget Work-Life Balance And Build A Lifestyle

In a recent talk, Tony Hsieh, the CEO and founder of Zappos was asked about how the company manages work-life balance.

Hsieh replied,

“For most companies (work-life balance) implies that work must suck so much you need a life on the outside. At Zappos we’re more focused on creating a lifestyle. We don’t think of it as one or the other. Most Zappos employees leave work and hang out with other Zappos employees.”

He’s right. While it’s usually done with good intentions, focusing on work-life balance is killing your corporate culture. Like Hsieh says, the mere term implies that work must be so terrible that you need to stop thinking about it the second you walk out the door.

This was a great philosophy – in 1890. In the days of 8 hour shifts on an assembly line, everyone had work-life balance. When the machines shut down, there were no widgets to be made; you couldn’t work if you wanted to. And there was no point in dreaming about how to get the job done better or faster or how to beat the competition when the machine dictated everything you did.

Its 2009 and things are different now. We live in a knowledge based world. The companies who dream, innovate and change the world are the ones that win. No one is making world changing innovations in 8 hour shifts, 5 days a week. Ideas come in your sleep and breakthroughs come at happy hours.

Start-ups are doomed the second people start talking about work-life balance and begin thinking of each other as nothing more than “coworkers.” They need to be best friends, they need to work around the clock, or at least be thinking about work around the clock, and they need to kick and scream and fight together, just to survive. So start-ups create a culture where work is a lifestyle. Zappos is well past the start-up phase, but they’ve managed to do this too.

Stop worrying about work-life balance or how to give people as much time off as possible, and start thinking about how to create an environment where people never want to take time off. Not because they’re scared or intimidated, but because they can’t think of anything in the world they would rather be doing than working with their peers and friends to achieve a common goal.

The employees you really want aren’t looking for a job, they’re looking for a lifestyle. Create one for them.

Brazen Careerist Is Live! Go Check Out The Site.

As most of you know, Brazen Careerist has been live since March 2008. But, really, we just launched it yesterday. The site has gone from an idea, to a tiny aggregator of 50 Gen Y bloggers, to a network of thousands with social networking features like profiles and groups. And now, we're taking the giant leap to turn the site into a career management tool for next-generation professionals.

You might be thinking, why does Brazen Careerist keep changing what they're doing? My response to that question is, we didn't really have a choice. Over the past six months we've listened to the community and we've listened to the marketplace. And what they both keep telling us is that young professionals (Gen Y) are looking for a professional home on the internet.

On the community side, our groups feature has continued to take off and members now think of Brazen Careerist as a full scale social network. New members are joining every day and engagement on the site is increasing dramatically.

When I read the bios on some of these new profiles, I'm blown away. We have successful entrepreneurs, marketers, freelancers, IT workers, and more. And they're all driven, motivated and accomplished. Our members now think of us as a professional network, and it became glaringly obvious that we had to give them what they wanted.

On the other side, the marketplace needs a young professional social network. Here's why.

Facebook is home base. We all know this. Facebook is where you share your personal information, send messages to established offline friends, and browse through photos from the good ol' days of college. Facebook is not where you meet new people, build a network, and have work related conversations.

Linkedin is the dominant player in the online career network space. It's where you should have a professional profile because it's where your boss and your future boss probably hang out. But the average age on Linkedin is 40, and the profiles emphasize experience – something people in their twenties are a little short on.

When we looked at all of these factors, we realized, there's a huge niche that needs to be filled – a professional network for Gen Y – and our community that started as a little blog aggregator is in the perfect position to fill that niche. So, with this launch, that's what we've done.

First of all, we gave the site a complete facelift, improved the user experience and made just about everything customizable to you – the way a social networking site should be. But most importantly, we completely revamped our profiles to emphasize ideas over experience. The new profiles aggregate everything you say or do on Brazen Careerist. From blog posts to group chatter to profile updates, the new profiles display all of this activity in a feed to show that your experience and background aren't the only indicators of success. Your ideas and potential matter too.

The other part of our profiles showcase standard resume information including work experience and education to give a complete picture of who you are and what you have accomplished – even if it's not 20+ years of experience in a single field.

On a personal note, the past few months have been crazy at the Brazen Careerist office. We've pulled countless all nighters, we've had our fair share of arguments, we've had plenty of great discussions, and Photis, our lead developer even managed to lock himself out of his office an hour before our final load balance test, only to pull a MacGyver and climb through the roof to get to his computer. (This was hilarious, you can see photos here) All in all, it's been everything a pre-launch period is supposed to be and we've all had a great time doing it.

So please, check out the site, create a profile if you don't have one and let us know what you think because community feedback is what made the site what it is today, and it's what will make the site great in the coming months!

A Startup Isn't About One Big Idea, It's About A Lot Of Little Ideas

Starting a business is not about the big idea you have. Very seldom does someone come up with an earth shattering, ground-breaking business idea one day, and change the world a few years later. In fact, from my experience, the companies that do change the world tend to come about quite randomly, and the ones that started with an earth shattering idea tend to go bust.

Take Facebook for example. Mark Zuckerberg didn't invent social networking. He stole the idea from a couple of twins from Harvard who hired him to help build a website based on an idea that they stole from a company called Friendster. Six years later, Zuckerberg is a billionaire, the twins made cash by suing Zuckerberg, and Friendster is looking to sell for far less than their investors would hope for.

Twitter started as a side project. The original idea was completely based around sending status updates from your mobile phone. A few years later, that basic idea is still very much a part of Twitter, but it's turned into so much more. It's a new form of communication and it's changing the world as we know it.

The funny thing is, it took Twitter years to even understand what their idea REALLY was. Go look at the new homepage. It's all about real time search. What's happening right now? That's what Twitter is. Well, until three weeks ago, you could go to the homepage and the about page and any other page on the site and have no idea why Twitter was actually useful. The founders didn't even know. It took a lot of money, a ton of hard work and a lot of smart minds to wrap their heads around what the idea actually was and then figure out how they could present it to the world.

The point is, entrepreneurship is not about a big idea. It's about execution and it's about a whole boat load of little ideas that come from assembling a smart team of people and giving them the freedom to innovate.

That's why I loved reading about the new initiative by YCombinator. They will be issuing RFS's or Requests for Startups. Basically they give some ideas of what kind of company they are looking for and they will accept the entrepreneurs that pitch the best way to get the idea done. Obviously the people at YCombinator understand that startups need an idea, but the successful ones are the startups that make ideas come to life.

Over the past two years since starting Brazen Careerist I've realized this first hand. When Penelope and I first discussed starting a company, we had no idea what we were going to do. We knew the market we wanted go into, and we knew that we wanted to help people with their careers, but that's about it. No crazy ideas to change the world. Just a desire to do something great.

Since then, we've all had a lot of good ideas and a lot of bad ideas, and the whole team has worked their tails off to make this whole thing come to life. And finally after a couple of years, we have a pretty good idea of what our business is. All it took was not being able to pay rent occasionally, showering and living at the office some days, working when we were supposed to be sleeping, and cheering our one-man development team as he coded until 6 am.

All that stuff is called execution. And that's what running a business is all about. Every startup that's lived on for more than a couple months has done the same thing, and every successful start-up will continue to do the same thing.

My point is this. If you're dying to be an entrepreneur because you're full of ideas, just pick one. Put a plan together, create some milestones, pitch in some capital, recruit a partner or two, hit your milestones and execute on the plan that you created. Be prepared for sacrifice, instability, arguments, being terrified, and a serious lack of sleep. Because that's what the game is really all about. Your idea is just the beginning.

How to Automate Your Twenty-Something Life + $500 Giveaway!

As a twenty-something entrepreneur with an incredibly full workload, I far too often find myself falling behind in my personal life. I'm not talking about my social life, of course. I always find a way to grab dinner with my girlfriend, sneak in a round of golf, or go out for a night on the town. That's the fun stuff. I'm talking about the annoying daily tasks like going grocery shopping, cleaning my apartment, paying the bills, doing taxes and running out to the store to pick up essentials like trash bags, razors and toilet paper.

No matter how hard I try, I cannot get in the habit of doing these things in a timely way. So recently I've been figuring out how to automate as many of these tasks as possible.

The trend towards automating your life and relying on services is nothing new for twenty-something's. Websites that save you the extra trip to the store, like Netflix are a staple among my friends. And most people I know are living in apartments or condos, where you don't have to worry about stuff like mowing the lawn, raking the leaves, or shoveling snow.

With the emergence of Web 2.0, there are a new whole host of services that let you automate your life. My recent automation to-do has been automating my finances. I put all of my information into Mint.com so I can see my entire financial picture at a glance. Then I read Ramit's book, I Will Teach You To Be Rich, and automated my bills as much as possible.

Now that my finances are taken care of, the next annoying task on my automation to-do list is to make sure I never have to run out to buy essentials again. Alice.com is launching in beta today, and if the site works out as advertised, my weekly trip to Walgreens will no longer be necessary.

Alice lets you set up reminders for when you need to reorder a product. At first you take a guess as to when you will next need a product. When the time comes, you get a reminder. But as you continue to use the site, Alice actually tracks how often you reorder each product and delivers automated reminders so you never have to run out to CVS at 6:30 in the morning because you threw your last razor out three days ago!

As busy as we all are between our careers, social lives, online networking, exercising etc. it's nice to have a handful of tools to automate the annoying tasks, and save us time and money. Alice definitely has the potential to become a welcome addition to my automation toolset.

The folks over at Alice were nice enough to offer a giveaway to the readers on Employee Evolution and Brazen Careerist. So I figured I would keep it simple. Leave a comment below listing one of the tools you use to automate your life or make your life easier. It can be anything from your Netflix subscription, products or services, your addiction to Mint, living in an apartment, or your monthly wine delivery. Get creative! We'll choose our 5 favorite comments and each will receive a $100 credit to use towards purchases on Alice.com. Good Luck!

(*Disclaimer, my girlfriend works at Alice, but the site is great regardless!)

Brazen Groups Are Live!

If you didn't join the private beta launch of Brazen Groups, I highly recommend you go check out the live version today! We officially opened groups up to all members of Brazen Careerist this morning, and we're really excited to see how they evolve.

Groups give our community the ability to create whatever content they want to see on the site. For a small site, we have a lot of user engagement and we can't express how much we appreciate that. But like any true startup, we're never satisfied. So the team came to a decision that it was time to put more control in the hands of our community, and groups was the best way to do this.

Groups have three main features. The first is chatter. Chatter is quick thoughts, ideas, relevant links, questions etc. Borrowing from Twitter, we decided to make chatter short and sweet, so 140 characters are all you get.

The next feature is events. Group members can create an event, including time and place, and an address with a Google map so attendees don't get lost on their way. We anticipate that people in the location based groups will use this feature to organize tweet-ups, Brazen meet-ups and any other networking functions. But it's also just as easy to organize online events or promote your webinars and other events.

Finally, we developed forums to let group members really dive into a discussion about a particular topic. Members can create a forum topic that they would like to get feedback on, and the rest of the group can leave comments and ideas without the restriction of 140 characters.

As we work towards becoming a full scale social network for young professionals, we will be introducing new features on a regular basis. All of the features will come from the crazy ideas that we throw around in the office and the feedback we get from you all. So if you want to have some say in what comes next, let us know what you think. You can even join the Brazen Feedback Group and start a discussion on what you think we should do.

As always, we asked some of our most active members to beta test the product, so there are already more than 35 groups. My personal favorites right now are; Fit Freaks, Madtown Crew, Bookshelf and Drupal.

Definitely go browse through groups, join the ones that interest you, create your own groups, and don't forget to participate!