My little social media marketing company in Corpus Christi, Neovia Solutions, is growing up. We’re moving into a bona fide office space on June 1. I went full-time with the business mid-February, and it’s hard for me to believe we’re already here. Aside from the fact we’re growing, I was equally excited about what this meant: I got to outfit the office.

Like all good start-ups, I trekked to Ikea to find the least expensive (yet majorly fashionable) office furniture I could. My little Pontiac Vibe was packed to the brim with cardboard boxes and silver metal legs and accessories – and yet, stuck in the midst of the brown and grey jungle, a little green sprig. Bamboo.

My business partner may beg to differ about the necessity of this little piece of office décor, but I am adamant about it’s luck-creating properties. My mom was raised in Japan, and she always said that bamboo brings luck to the room in which it resides. So what’s the first thing my first business’s first office needs? Bamboo.

And I’m not alone. Matt Egan, who owns the San Antonio SEO company Image Freedom, has a pair of lucky shoes he calls the “signing shoes.” He wears them to all his contract signings. Greenville branding firm Brains On Fire believes it’s a bad omen if a new employee eats alone their first day of work. Ryan Paugh, cofounder of Gen Y networking site Brazen Careerist, carries a bad-energy blocking stone in his pocket.

For some, business superstitions revolve more around about not creating bad luck. Employees at San Antonio Web Design firm Internet Direct think it’s bad juju just to talk about their servers. “We don’t ever speak badly about our servers,” tweeted David Stinemetze. “They somehow always find out and crash on us.”

I don’t actually have any reinforcing proof that bamboo has brought me luck. As a matter of fact, I ended up killing all of my bamboo when I moved in with my boyfriend by accidentally leaving it outside for a few months, unattended. And we’re still pretty lucky in love.

But, I persist in my belief enough to think it’s better to have bamboo in our office than not to have it. And that seems to be the key to understanding why superstitions actually work.

SUPERSTITIONS CREATE PERSISTENCE.

This is due to something psychologists call the partial reinforcement effect. Here’s my Alton Brown-style breakdown of partial reinforcement: Whenever someone does something expecting reinforcement (the thing we think is going to happen as a result of our superstitious activity), and it doesn’t happen, it actually creates a sense of persistence in that person. In other words, we keep doing the superstitious activity believing that reinforcement will occur at some point. Or that the thing we want to happen has come at certain times in the past as a result of this superstitious action, maybe not all the time, but this might be one of those times.

So, why do I think our superstitions are actually good things for business owners and start-ups?

BECAUSE START-UPS REQUIRE PERSISTENCE.

We grind and toil away in our businesses, sometimes 16 hours a day, giving it all our best. Every day we are faced with the possibility of rejection, failure, negative bankrolls, and bad decisions. We’re not superstitious because we need the extra luck more than others – it’s because of that partial reinforcement effect.

The fact that we put on the lucky shoes over and over again means that even though we didn’t sell the last two clients we wore them to, we’re still wearing them. And that’s important because it means that we’re still pitching and we’re still selling. We are persistent in the belief that we will sell again in those lucky shoes. And because we believe it, we’ll keep putting them on and trying. And the trying is what makes them work.

And so, our lucky bamboo awaits it’s permanent home in our new office, to do it’s job: make me go out there every day, believing that today will be the day the bamboo will deliver me luck.

And then you don’t do one of them. And they all go down the drain because if you’re not going to be perfect, well then why do a bunch of stuff that’s no fun?

At least, that’s been my experience. Every year, I got swept up in the spirit of self-improvement and made ridiculously long lists of things I was going to do differently, learn or stop doing. I made calendars and schedules and stuck to them for about… oh, maybe three weeks.

Which makes me average it turns out. According to time management firm FranklinCovey, only a third of people will even make it to the end of January.

The end of JANUARY.

The cure is supposedly to make a specific resolution. Perhaps pick just one of the resolutions I listed in the first paragraph and go with that.

But that hasn’t worked for me. I have that Gen Y disease of ambition. Just one of those resolutions feels so… flimsy.

Why you need a theme

Here’s my problem with these specific resolutions: they may not be the right answer. Maybe you find that putting 20 percent of your paycheck into savings isn’t going to work because you can’t stop over-drafting your bank account. Or, you find out your knees can’t handle running. Or, you find it impossible to get 8 hours of sleep. And then you just give up.

What you need is a theme, something that sets the tone for your year, and gives you a banner to work under. In the end, what is your overall goal? Is it to be fit and healthy, to have good finances, to feel rested? Make it the Year of Finances, or the Year of Fitness, or the Year of Relaxation.

For the past three years, I’ve picked a theme for my year. And it’s worked.

2007 was the Year of Survival. I got sober in April (a late start to the year, I know), and basically just learned how to live all over again. This theme was more or less picked for me. I can’t take credit for that one.

2008 was the Year of Relationships, as you can clearly see in my blog (here, here, here and here). Having learned to survive, I went about learning how to survive with others. My relationships with men were all over the board as I tried to figure out what I wanted and who I was. My relationships with family and friends got some work also. I think this was a subconscious theme.

2009 was the Year of Finances. Honestly, this was the first year I set a resolute theme at the beginning of the year with an earnest desire to tackle it. I didn’t know how I was going to do it. I fumbled around with Quicken Online and heard about Mint.com and read I Will Teach You To Be Rich, but what ended up working for me was Dave Ramsey’s Total Money Makeover. I didn’t get on board with it until May. But I didn’t give up on my finances because that theme hung over my head all year. I knew that there was an answer and having a theme, and not a specific resolution, helped me gather the research, feedback and experimentation I needed to find my answer.

How to pick a theme

The more my life becomes calm and healthy, the more the areas that need work seem to stick out. I’m not blessed with the kind of clarity in my life where I can just go, “Oh, I really need to work on my finances! I can see how this contributes to my other problems.” Yeah, I don’t have that.

So I sort of feel my way through my life, asking myself what feels bad, where do I feel negative emotion in my day, then trying to trace it back to the source. I felt awful when my bank account over-drafted for the billionth time. And oh, hey! That seems to come up a lot. Maybe I should work on that.

Ask yourself these questions:
- What is causing the most problems in my life?
- What is giving me the most chaos?
- What are the most inconvenient things happening?
- What seems to be happening over and over again even though I try not to?
- Where do I see a spike in negative emotion in my daily life?
- What would give me the most peace if I could find a solution for it?

If you’re having trouble picking between two (or three or four…), pick the one that’s solves the most problems. Last year I was trying to choose between the Year of Finances and the Year of Health & Fitness. When I made a list of the problems each would solve, the Finances Year solved a lot more problems, including some of my health problems (medical care is expensive, yo!).

What happens next…

The amazing thing about having a theme for your year is that it’s about changing your mindset toward a certain area of your life. You’ve decided to change some area of your life that you previously carried an attitude of indifference toward. Lots of things will change.

Take my 2009 Year of Finances for example: not only did I stop over-drafting my bank account (which could’ve been my short-sighted New Year’s Resolution), but I’ve paid off all my credit cards, survived meeting my hefty insurance deductible for health care (thanks to surgery), and stored away almost three months of living expenses in my savings account. And since I decided I needed an alternate stream of income, I started my first business and have a steady stream of clients. Year of Finances indeed!

Of course your theme can fail. The number one reason resolutions fail is because people aren’t committed to them in the first place. If you aren’t committed to your theme, then you won’t move on it.

Move forward with a positive attitude. Remember this is the year you will change your [finances/health/career/love life/insert theme here]!

The great thing is that area of your life will be forever changed, not just temporarily shifted. As I move into my 2010 theme, I don’t stop working on my finances. My attitude toward finances has been changed forever.

Wanna know my theme for 2010? Read the follow-up post here. What’s your theme for 2010?

Photo courtesy of Tojosan via Flickr.

In the meantime, you’re cranking away in front of your PC from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m., fearing layoffs and keeping an impatient eye on the recession economy.

Here’s the thing though: you shouldn’t just be biding your time in your stuffy corporate job. I found in high school and college that the level of my education was entirely up to how much I wanted to learn. I’ve always been one for making the most out of a less-than-ideal situation, and my corporate job is no exception.

I do my job like it’s my own business. I run it like a business, like a separate entity that provides a service to the corporation I work for. I’ve heard it called “innerpreneur” or “interpreneur.” When people ask who I answer to, my boss tells them that I’m like my own little company. Of course, I still answer to him, have to keep regular business hours, only get my allotted 10 vacation days, etc. But he considers me to fairly independent.

Just like in school, I have two options: I can do what’s needed to get by, or I can make the best of it and really learn something useful. Even if you have a lot of built-in structure in your role, you can still take your position and see how to run it like your own company. It’s great practice for when you finally do have your own company, and your superiors will start to be a lot like my parents were when I was in school – they’ll give you more and more freedom as they see you handling it on your own.

What services do you provide?
The most important question you will ask yourself as an entrepreneur is, what am I providing? As an innerpreneur, you need to ask the same question. As a marketing research analyst, I provide accurate, timely research to my clients that is easy-to-understand and useful in their roles.

Who are your “clients”?
As an entrepreneur you will need to determine who your target consumer or client is. In your corporate job, you also have “clients” – those people who consume your services. It might be a certain department or set of departments; it might be your boss. In my corporate role, my “clients” are the advertising departments of four regional branches of our company, as well as smaller clients in other departments.

Have a marketing plan.
By now you’ve certainly been given the advice to “sell yourself” or “toot your own horn.” I never really understood what people meant by that. Was I supposed to run around telling people how wonderful I was at my job? Not quite. I figured this out during the recession when I saw my industry making sweeping layoffs. I knew I needed to sell my position. I set to work selling my services to my clients. I made a list of the services I provided and the benefits to my clients. In other words, I started emailing the managers of the advertising departments and talking directly with the account executives about what I could do to help them do their jobs better.

I do seasonal marketing. I send emails during the holidays (a busy selling period) letting the advertising departments know how I can save them time, and I use the slower periods to extol the virtues of our planning software and my training opportunities. It works. That’s how you sell yourself, and avoid layoffs.

What are your profits and losses?
As the owner of a company, you’re going to get pretty familiar with P&Ls (profits and losses). This is basically a ledger of what’s coming in and what’s going out. I like to think of this process as doing a return on investment (ROI) on my position. Your salary is your “losses” – that’s how much your “business” is spending every year. It’s probably hard to quantify your “profits” – that’s how much you bring in for the company. You probably don’t have a revenue-producing role; it’s most likely more indirect. As a research analyst, I can tie my role to revenue through the research I provide to our advertising department to facilitate sales. Try to think of your position in terms of this. The closer you can tie yourself to revenue, the more secure your job will be.

Are your “clients” satisfied?
Just like I would in my own café (that’s the business I hope to one day own), I check up with my clients to see if they’re satisfied with the services I’m providing. I check in with managers, account executives, my boss, and our corporate offices regularly to see if they’re getting everything they need from me when they need it. I ride out on sales calls periodically to see my product used in the field, and I survey my clients to see what’s missing. I go back to my boss or corporate offices when necessary and/or make adjustments accordingly.

Is there a more efficient way to do this?
One thing we all say we’ll do when we own our companies is cut out all the red tape. If you’re in a publicly traded corporation, there’s only so much you can do (thank you, Sarbane-Oxley) to cut out certain kinds of bureaucracy. But you can eliminate inefficiencies in your role. The four branches I provide services for were running the same report four different ways. I found a way to streamline, and our corporate offices are considering adopting the changes across all 14 branches we own now.

Have a processes manual.
Good god, I do a lot of stuff. I run various weekly, quarterly, twice-yearly and yearly reports. Some need feedback from my “clients” and the rest are run from five different databases. There are processes for running those reports, training new executives, organizing research studies, cleaning up databases, updating research slides, ad nauseum. There’s no way I can keep all that straight in my head. And what happens if I get promoted, laid off, hit by a bus, or move to another company? I’ll have to spend my last two weeks trying to do a brain dump the size of a small country. So, I keep a processes manual. I record how I run this or that report, what it’s used for, who needs it, how often, etc. I also keep track of the flow of these processes. How do the requests for services come in, to whom do they travel when they are completed?

Have job descriptions.
If you’re thinking of running your own show one day, you’ll need to read “E-Myth Revisited.” In it Michael Gerber talks about how even if you’re a one-man show for a while, one day you don’t want to be. You will play a nominal role in your company (if you so choose), watching it run like a well-oiled machine from a distance. It will be a thing of beauty. He recommends that you create roles for your company – a VP of marketing, production, and sales; managers; produc
ers; etc. where applicable. The idea is that even though your name is penciled into all those roles now, later it won’t be. So, I did that with my job. I came up with job descriptions for the different hats I wear, the various services I provide. Sure, they won’t grow like a business would; one person will probably do all those jobs in this position, but I know how to describe every job I do. And my bosses and predecessors will know as well.

What are your hours of operation?
Yeah, I know. You probably don’t have a lot of control over this. However, you might have more than you think if you start thinking about it. It makes sense for my “business” to be open from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. or 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. because that is when my “clients” need my services. That’s when they expect me to be open for business, so those are my hours. If I could legitimately tell my boss that different hours of operation would be better, say because I’m now dealing with outsourcing to India, he would probably give me a fair hearing because everything I’ve done until now has shown that I have buy-in with my “business.”

Photo by ballgame68 via Flickr.

When I was younger, at high school or university, I had this concept of a successful person as someone who knew a lot about what they were doing. The successful person I dreamed up in my head had a lot of information and used it to stay in control, move through their day with confidence and ease and solve problems with well-thought about solutions. So for me the key to success has always been knowledge you see, you have to know what you’re doing in order to be successful at it.

I’m not going to lie to you – the successful person I always pictured was me. That was my goal for my job: to have all of the knowledge I needed in order to be confident and strong on a day to day basis. In the past year that I’ve been working I’ve realized that my idea of success was dependent on the assumption that there is a protocol, an established way of doing things, that I would need to learn and become really good at in order to be successful.

Then I got a job in a ‘write your own ticket’ sort of company like so many other new, online media companies are. It’s a company that doesn’t have any age or experience prerequisites for success. It’s a company without an established protocol. Your success in the company I work for depends on how well you understand the fact that anyone can publish and access information on the web. Everyone’s a publisher, a mini media mogul and everyone has control of their attention when it comes to their online viewing. So anything my company publishes online is subject to rapidly changing trends, trends that every single person who uses the net shapes. My boss never lied to me when I started. He said it wouldn’t be easy. It’s supposed to be hard to grasp, evasive even, because online media is not a long established industry. It’s still rapidly developing and that can be hard for someone who had such a simple and static definition of success. How the hell am I supposed to feel successful when there is no established protocol for me to dare I say rote learn and then excel at?

I’ll have days where control will feel too far out of my reach to even connect myself with my original idea of a successful person. My confidence, which is so rooted in my intellectual abilities, my power to actually understand things, will rapidly dwindle and I’ll start to feel that I have no capability. On those days I won’t feel productive or, well, competent and I’ll wonder when someone is going to notice and fire me.

For me these bad days happen when I’m reminded of just how much I don’t understand yet. I work for an innovations company. By its very nature its job is to ‘light up the edges’ by conceptualizing new ways for people to communicate with each other that just don’t exist yet. This means that when I started a year ago I needed to get really comfortable really quickly with not knowing, with just trying and moving forward without clarity. You may say that at 23 I’m still stuck in some adolescent hell where I’ll never build up the confidence to feel successful or truly understand my own capabilities. But it all comes down to learning which makes it worthwhile for me. Even though I’m not learning things that have been tried and tested, I still feel like I’m learning on crack. My fear over how much I don’t know, even on it’s worst days, never makes me want to quit and find a job with more direct tasks and clearly defined project and outcomes. I’m learning too much this way and hey, brick walls are put in place to make sure we understand and prove how badly we want things. So if I want to be successful I need to work harder to understand what that means given the challenges and the unknowns of online media.

The thing is I don’t think I’m alone in this battle. So many jobs that are filled by smart, well-educated and driven Gen Yers are new. They were invented along with new technologies and new ways of doing things that need to be managed and communicated.

If you think this isn’t you, if you think these days never happen to you and you never descend to this level of doubt well I don’t believe you. You may deal with it differently or understand it differently but NO ONE and I say this with complete confidence, spends 100 percent of their time riding the top of the wave. You have to struggle through the current sometimes. Those are the times when you actually learn something and those are the days that I think you’ll feel like you’re working towards your own success.

The point I want to make is that it’s supposed to be hard. But that’s what makes us interesting. Be proud of that. This may not seem like the most profound thing you’ve read but it needs to be written and sometimes, on the bad days, it needs to be reread to remind you of the wall and of why you’re trying to push through it.

Marina writes a blog, Connecting Ideas, about work and relationships (and what happens when you work with your partner). She writes about her thoughts which run the gamut of equal pay, writing, love, intimacy, friendship and generally being in her twenties.