Startup Life: Advice Column

Q: Dear Amy:

In Startup Life: Surviving and Thriving in a Relationship with an Entrepreneur, you talk about scheduled communication on a daily (Four Minutes in the Morning), monthly (Life Dinner), and quarterly (QX Off the Grid) basis. All that scheduled time doesn't sound very romantic. Where's the romance?

A: The most important point about having regularly scheduled together time is that scheduled romance in no way precludes spontaneous romance. If your days are full of unexpected bouquet deliveries and sleeping in late on Tuesdays after long bouts of lovemaking, maybe you don't need the commitment of time set aside just for the two of you to connect. However, I suspect that if you measure the rate of spontaneous romance events, you will likely find that you may not be having much spontaneous romance anyway in the startup phase of your entreprenurial endeavors. Having calendar appointments gives you something to look forward to during times when your entreprenurial partner is completely occupied by work.

The other really important point about romance is the very definition of the term. What's romantic anyway? This is an important and ongoing conversation to have with your partner. It can be an exciting and intimate journey to test what works for each of you over time. Brad and I don't find much romance in the images created by television commercials by diamond companies, but find romance in the daily moments we share together. Different couples have different ideas about what constitutes romance for them. I personally love the intimacy of the morning and evening routines in the bathroom, brushing and flossing and washing, but we have friends who use separate bathrooms to keep the mystery alive. Figuring out together what feels romantic to you can be an exploratory and very personal part of your relationship.

Dear Readers: What feels romantic to you? Do you find that having a regular date night increases or decreases other spontaneous expressions of romance? And I'm taking other Advice Column questions that lots of people seem to share. Ask away!

Startup Life: Book Review in Forbes

I am delighted to share a thoughtful and positive review of Startup Life in Forbes online by Brent Beshore entitled "7 Changes for Your "Startup Life.'" Click here to read the review.

According to Brent, "If you are an entrepreneur, are thinking of becoming one, or are in a relationship with one, I would highly suggest you buy “Startup Life: Surviving and Thriving in a Relationship With an Entrepreneur.” At the very least, it will give you an inside look at a highly successful long-term relationship that has endured through virtually every cycle of entrepreneurial living. Or, it just might change the way you do life." Thanks for the kind words, Brent!

Brad and I have been overwhelmed by the positive response to the book, and hope that entrepreneurial couples are enjoying the conversations Startup Life is sparking.

Early Review of Startup Life by Jonathan Fields

Want to Have a Startup AND a Life? Read This Book.

Practical Book Shines New Light on The 'Startup Life'

Startup Life: Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke

One of the long quotes that we intended to include in Startup Life: Surviving and Thriving in a Relationship with an Entrepreneur was this excerpt from Rainer Maria Rilke letters to a 19 year old cadet in the Vienna Military Academy written over a period from 1903 to 1908. Even though the words were written more than a century ago, they are still powerful and timely. This quote was located at the very end of Chapter Two: Philosophy –

It is also good to love: because love is
difficult. For one human being to love another human being: that is perhaps the
most difficult task that has been entrusted to us, the ultimate task, the final
test and proof, the work for which all other work is merely preparation. That
is why young people, who are beginners in everything, are not yet capable of
love: it is something they must learn. With their whole being, with all their
forces, gathered around their solitary, anxious, upward-beating heart, they
must learn to love. But learning-time is always a long, secluded time, and therefore
loving, for a long time ahead and far on into life, is: solitude, a heightened
and deepened kind of aloneness for the person who loves. Loving does not at
first mean merging, surrendering, and uniting with another person (for what
would a union be of two people who are unclarified, unfinished, and still
incoherent?), it is a high inducement for the individual to ripen, to become
something in himself, to become world, to become world in himself for the sake
of another person; it is a great, demanding claim on him, something that
chooses him and calls him to vast distances. Only in this sense, as the task of
working on themselves ("to hearken and to hammer day and night"), may
young people use the love that is given to them. Merging and surrendering and every
kind of communion is not for them (who must still, for a long, long time, save
and gather themselves); it is the ultimate, is perhaps that for which human
lives are as yet barely large enough.

And this quote was the epigraph at the beginning of Chapter Five: Personality –

“Love consists in this, that
two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other.” Rainer Maria Rilke

Enjoy!

Startup Life: Poem of the Day – The Summer Day by Mary Oliver

The Summer Day

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean-
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

– Mary Oliver, New and Selected Poems, 1992,
Beacon Press, Boston, MA. Reprinted with permission.

Mary Oliver is one of my favorite poets. My funeral instructions include the reading of her poem White Owl Flies Into and Out of the Field, along with the playing of some Bach or Samuel Barber. (Brad has specified Pink Floyd "Dark Side of the Moon" for his memorial soundtrack. We are different from each other.)

We had intended to include this poem at the beginning of Startup Life Chapter Six: Values because of the vital questions it asks. These would be excellent starting points for conversations with your life partner over a monthly Life Dinner. It also feels lovely to have summer images during a week of bitter cold here in Colorado.

Startup Life: Poetry and Permissions

One of the many interesting things I've learned during the publishing process of Startup Life: Surviving and Thriving in a Relationship with an Entrepreneur with Brad is that publishing houses don't do the work of getting permission to reprint copyrighted material – authors are responsible for this work. Or at least our publisher doesn't do this work, and we were responsible. Neither Brad nor I realized this until about 3 weeks before our final galley proofs were due when we received an email on October 26th asking whether we had gotten reprint permission for the poems and literary quotes we had included in our drafts. Surprise. Oops.

Brad's terrific and resolute assistant, Kelly Collins, sprang into action at the beginning of November, only to discover that it takes 6-8 weeks for the permissions and our final author draft was due in 4 weeks.

I was really disappointed and unhappy with this realization since I had been the instigator of the poetry and thought it added a richness and depth to the text and supported our deep belief that words and language matter.

Surely that's what underpaid and overworked publishing interns are for?

We did receive and pay for permission to reprint a Mary Oliver poem "The Summer Day," in time, but it didn't make sense to include just one of the poems. So we pulled the poems by Mary Oliver and Wendell Berry, and quotes from Rainer Maria Rilke and Antoine St. Exupery, among others.

But Brad and I both still hold the conviction that beautiful language can connect us and give voice to emotion and thoughts that may be difficult for non-poets to express. So I am going to blog the quotes and poetry we had originally intended to include in Startup Life, as well as some additional gems that we love. Here's a poem by Wendell Berry that we intended to include in Chapter Two: Philosophy –

The Peace of Wild Things

When despair for the world grows in
me

and I wake in the night at the least
sound

in fear of what my life and my
children’s lives may be,

I go and lie down where the wood
drake

rests in his beauty on the water,
and the great heron feeds.

I come into the peace of wild things

who do not tax their lives with
forethought

of grief. I come into the presence of still water.

And I feel above me the day-blind
stars

waiting with their light. For a time

I rest in the grace of the world,
and am free.

From The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry copyright 1998 by Wendell Berry
from Counterpoint Press, a member of Perseus Books, LLC

Launching Startup Life: Surviving and Thriving in a Relationship with an Entrepreneur

On this first working Monday of the new year, Brad and I are officially announcing the launch of our book Startup Life: Surviving and Thriving in a Relationship with an Entrepreneur. Brad is writing a series of books on entrepreneurship and the startup world, beginning with Startup Communities: Building an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem in your City. I am honored and delighted to be his co-author on this book, which also includes essays contributed by a group of about 20 entrepreneurial couples.

While this book addresses issues common to all relationships (communication, values, money, sex, children, etc.) we hope that it will be particularly useful for couples in the throes of a startup business. We dedicated the book to the believers and the empiricists: those who are willing to love. It takes a lot of energy and courage to try to create and sustain a relationship while building a startup company. We really hope that some of the concrete skills and tactics we suggest will be helpful.

The book is available on Kindle on January 29, 2013 and the hardback release date is January 22,2013 In the strange world of book publishing, advance sales orders count extra, so if you're considering reading this, please consider purchasing it before the official release dates.

Brad and I look forward to sparking conversations about how to have a happy life that includes both meaningful work and meaningful love.

Launching Startup Life: Surviving And Thriving In A Relationship With An Entrepreneur

Early Review of Startup Life by Jonathan Fields

Two New Startup Books You Need to Read

Building An Entrepreneurial Ecosystem In Your City

Kauffman Foundation Partners with Startup Weekend to Help Educate Entrepreneurs