I was thinking about my experiments with entrepreneurship the other day, and I realized that I have a lot of room to learn things. Books tell me it takes about five years for many businesses to shake out the bugs and settle down; even then, only about half of new ventures survive the first five years (according to US statistics). As a relentlessly optimistic person, I immediately read that as, “Cool! Half of new ventures succeed in surviving their first five years!”

Anyway. Five years is a long time. This is what five years looks like:

Five years is longer than my university degree. It’s longer than the time I worked at IBM. If I work hard and I work smart, I should be able to learn lots of things in five years.

Things I am curious about:

• How to help people, groups, and organizations adopt different ways of working: This is a challenge! It’s difficult to help one person change, much less a team, much less a community. But it’s essential because otherwise people will miss out on all these productivity improvements from technologies or processes. They’ll waste time. They’ll get frustrated. They won’t make the best decisions they can make. I want to help people work better so that they can focus on things that make the most of their skills and passions.
• How to document and improve processes: Many organizations struggle to grow beyond one person or a small team. So many things aren’t written down. There are few processes in the beginning. Then there’s no time to document operations because there are too many things to do. Besides, people don’t feel like they can write down what they’re doing, or they’re too close and they forget what else other people would need to know in order to do their job. I can interview people and watch how they work, write those steps down, and make it easier for people to scale up by delegating, automating, or eliminating the things that they do.
• How to communicate effectively and engagingly: People want to learn, but they don’t have the time to read lots of books or listen to lots of talks. I want to help people learn more effectively. People like the things I sketch or write about, and they like my presentations too. I want to learn more about things that help other people, and I want to get better at organizing and sharing what I learn.
• How to build a scalable, sustainable business: I want to build a business that goes beyond the time = money equation. More than that, I want to learn how to systematically build these businesses, so that I can help other people do so too. That’s because there are a lot of people whose talents and skills aren’t sufficiently used because of their time requirements, their location, or other factors. I want to help more people have these options and create the kind of value they can create.

Five years should be a decent length for a self-made program. Maybe a Master of Business Awesomeness? Here we go. =)