The Self-Reliant Entrepreneur

August 1Our Individual Nature

Each season brings a world of enjoyment and interest in the watching of its unfolding, its gradual harmonious development, its culminating graces—and just as one begins to tire of it, it passes away and a radical change comes, with new witcheries and new glories in its train. And I think that to one in sympathy with nature, each season, in its turn, seems the loveliest.

Mark Twain—Roughing It (1872)

The unfolding of seasons aligns well with the life of the entrepreneur. Discover, evolve, blossom, regenerate—developments that occur naturally with the changing light and temperatures—mimic the eventual change that must come with entrepreneurial growth.

And that's our task—to recognize that each season, in its turn, seems the loveliest—that's the art of entrepreneurial life.

Frederic Henry Hedge argued for something he called “The Art of Life” in an 1840 edition of The Dial:

The work of life, so far as the individual is concerned, and that to which the scholar is particularly called, is self-culture,—the perfect unfolding of our individual nature.

To many who subscribed to this belief of “self-culture,” it was the purpose of life. Impractical as it may feel to pursue today in a life full of “go get 'em,” it may indeed be the secret to happiness and personal power.

There is in this life for us an infinite changing of the seasons. Take them one at a time. And know that every season will be worth living, perhaps even lovelier than the last, when every ...