Future isn’t shaped only by passionate tech people. Visionary entrepreneurs and business people have their own contribution in making tomorrow a better place. We do understand that being an entrepreneur isn’t an easy job and it can get overwhelming sometimes, especially in these weird times.
Becoming and being an entrepreneur takes a lot of time, passion, knowledge and expertise and, where experience can’t help, professional help is always welcomed. Since our community has a strong foundation of business people, Digital Roundtable 3 with Ryan Begelman came naturally.
Also known as the man who bought a mountain, Ryan built and sold three solid companies, bootstrapped one of them from $1M to $20M, acquired America’s largest ski resort and confounded Summit, named by Forbes “The Davos of Generation Y”.
Ryan Begelman is currently an investor and a coach. He helps leaders achieve their goals, perform at higher levels and find greater well being. He works closely with entrepreneurs on everything from decision making, to positioning their company to exit, or feeling less anxious.
“I’ve spent the last 25 years really trying to understand how to feel well, how to have this experience of well being and I’ve taken it a really long way. I’ve spent thousands of hours studying and obsessing over this idea of well being.”
The three free choices in trying to obtain well being
Wealth is not just a financial idea, wealth can be defined more broadly, like a sense of equanimity, peace, ease, kind of like an effortlessness for life. In trying to obtain well being, we have three free choices.
One in which we can alter our external environment — where we can collect money, get raises, achieve status, change our appearance, get others around us to act in certain ways in keeping with our sense of happiness, but this often takes too much energy and we will, eventually, get bored.
Our second option is to change our internal environment — change our beliefs and perspectives; change our mind in order to be able to change our experience. Of course, this is not an easy path, but practicing will help us get better in time.
The third option is to do a little bit of both — this will take us to self compassion, self understanding, self love. Sure, we wouldn’t be able to change literally anything in our lives, but these little changes will make us become better and help us in doing our best.
The journey to a wealthy life is paved with self awareness
Becoming aware of our emotions, asking ourselves why we feel a certain way, what do we really want, that’s what learning to become wealthy is all about.
“I think we can approach it more like a scientist. We can essentially observe the way we feel, our thoughts, our emotions, we can begin to notice and pay attention to our energy level, our enthusiasm. Are we feeling energized, or de energized by any given moment, any given interaction? And through that exploration, through that noticing, through that study we can come to notice patterns which will begin to tell us more about what is really true, what is really occurring, who we really are, what we really want — what we don’t want. Through this experimentation we can come to a better understanding of what would bring us true well being and we can start to maintain well being a greater percentage of the day or of the week.”
“ I’m still learning, there is so much i still don’t understand […]”
The opportunities are at the intersection of the things we are really good at and the things the market really needs. There is where we can unlock our full potential.
To truly understand what we are good at, Ryan gives us an exercise of writing down the highlights and the lowlights of a month: moments, meetings, activities, to dos working on, when we felt energized and enthusiastic, expansive, growing, connection, belonging, creativity, love and what it is what we really love to do, what we’re curious about.
To fully understand ourselves, we have to go beyond the notions and the ideas of those who respect us and rely on us, those who encouraged us, those who invested in us if we could be more of our own. In the interest of being seen and approved, we made some parts of ourselves invisible. We have to courageously take the opportunity, learn and study ourselves and notice what makes us be more of ourselves: “more of your real self expression, more of your laughter, of your joyfulness, more of your creativity, more of the weirdness that is you. Imagine filling this kind of globe around yourself with more of yourself.”
These are our main takeaways from the talk, but every topic debated was valuable food for thought. For the entire talk, please visit: