John Jantsch - The Self-Reliant Entrepreneur: 366 Daily Meditations to Feed Your Soul and Grow Your Business

JOHN JANTSCH

Copyright 2020 by John Jantsch. All rights reserved.

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.
Published simultaneously in Canada.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Jantsch, John, author.
Title: The self-reliant entrepreneur : 366 daily meditations to feed your soul and grow your business / John Jantsch.
Description: First Edition. | Hoboken : Wiley, 2019.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019037261 (print) | LCCN 2019037262 (ebook) | ISBN 9781119579779 (hardback) | ISBN 9781119579755 (adobe pdf) | ISBN 9781119579762 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Entrepreneurship. | Self-reliance. | Creative ability in business. | Success in business.
Classification: LCC HF5415 .J36 2019 (print) | LCC HF5415 (ebook) | DDC 658.4/21dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019037261
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019037262

Cover Design: Wiley
Cover Image: svtdesign/Shutterstock

To Carol, who makes every day the best day of the year.

To the makers, founders, owners, start-ups, side hustlers, intrapreneurs, and entrepreneurs everywhere who courageously choose to insist on themselves.

My girls, Jenna, Sara, Ellen, and Mary, for your contribution to every word in this book and for occasionally acting like you think I'm funny.

My friend and literary agent Stephen Hanselman, without whom this book would not have happened.

Amanda Rhode, whose research and care for our literary collaborators was invaluable.

Jay Baer, who should recognize his suggestions sprinkled throughout.

Todd Henry, for pushing me to lighten up a bit.

Carrie Wilkerson, for constantly admiring my work without question.

BJ Ward and Karin Kraska, for being true readers.

The team at Wiley, for recognizing immediately that this book needed to be written. Elizabeth Welch, your copyediting was such a gift.

Team Duct Tape, Sara, Jenna, Tricia, Carly, Michelle, and Rachelle, for creating the space for me to give this project so much time.

Crow's Coffee in Kansas City, Missouri, and Salto Coffee Works in Nederland, Colorado, for letting me hang out for long writing sessions infused with coffee and eventually beer.

The hundreds of authors cited in this work, both dead and livingyour inspiration and audacity will always find a home with me.

In this book I invite you to take inspiration from a renegade minister, a handyman turned political activist and naturalist, and an innovative educator and early feminist voice, though they may seem at first an odd collection of mentors to guide today's entrepreneur.

Each of these sources of inspiration produced their primary body of literary work in the mid-1800s, during a time that many cite as America's first period of a truly spirited counterculture.

I'm speaking of the period often referred to as American transcendentalism, a brief time that experienced its heyday just prior to the American Civil War and left a lasting impact on American literature, religion, philosophy, art, political activism, social thought, and as I propose in this work, a goldmine for today's enlightened entrepreneur.

It doesn't matter what you call this point of view or even what you call yourself. You can possess the spirit of self-reliance and independence no matter your profession or job title. Being an entrepreneur is as much about who you choose to be as what you choose to do for a living.

In addition to blossoming independent thinking, this was a period of unparalleled awakening in American literature, when perennial classics such as The Scarlet Letter, Leaves of Grass, Moby Dick, Little Women, Uncle Tom's Cabin, Self-Reliance, Walden, and Civil Disobedience, along with a great deal of the catalog of Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, and Edgar Allan Poe, sprang forth.

This was a period when America's literary voice finally broke free of the influence of other cultures. There's a reason your teachers asked you to (made you) read most of these works. I invite you to revisit the golden nuggets of these classics in the context of your entrepreneurial journey. Don't worry; there will no pop quizzes.

Not to overcomplicate the history lesson here, but some of the writers sourced in this book would be seen more as coming from a period also referred to as American romanticism. Romanticism and transcendentalism have many commonalities and some differences. Both placed great emphasis on the individual as well as inspiration from nature.

The time period identified as each's heyday overlaps; however, romanticism did not concern itself at all with God or religion, whereas spirituality was a founding aspect of the transcendentalist philosophy. Transcendentalism flourished perhaps as a natural outgrowth of American romanticism.

Even though some of the authors of the works listed here didn't consider themselves transcendentalists, in all of these voices you can hear the emergence of a self-reliant, self-searching, and at times self-torturing protagonista common motif driving this new form of American literature.