A Visit from Erik Hanberg

 I found our little talk with Erik Hanberg on Tuesday to be a little enlightening to the realities of business ownership and the uncertainties of income. I appreciated how Erik discussed over-reliance on a single partner and the possibility to draw to heavily on your business to support you personally when you don't have other income.

Erik's business is one of the few where really he relies on himself and no employees to make things run, primarily. Writing books is no simple task, and writing books that explain the finer points of operating non-profit organizations in a way that people will welcome and understand is, I'm certain, ever more difficult than writing itself! At one point he showed us a chart of income over time with the different income sources color-coded, those peaks and valleys each representing a story. Sometimes victories, sometimes terrors. The prospect of running out of money is genuinely that, terrifying. When you're someone running your own business I suppose that on some level you need to exist side by side with the knowledge that if it all comes crashing down then you are going to have several bad days of extraordinary scale. Right next to that terror, though comes an existential joy of success; the feeling that you've won a hard-fought battle towards your goals is one of unparalleled satisfaction.

Fundamentally I think Erik spent his time with us framing the ups and downs of life, the possibilities of success and failure. Most importantly I think he did a fine job of reminding us that success is not some static goalpost placed for us, but a moving target that we get to define for ourselves. Maybe we can define our success is just simply being happy and comfortable with what we do.