Daring & Disruptive

Unleashing the entrepreneur

Lisa Messenger

• Publisher: The Messenger Group
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780987097460
• eBook ISBN: 9780987097477
• Topic: Negocios y empresa
• Subtopic: Emprendimiento

DARING AND DISRUPTIVE IS AN INSIGHTFUL AND SOULFUL ACCOUNT OF THE ENTREPRENEUR'S ROLLER-COASTER RIDE FOR THOSE WHO WANT TO SUCCEED ALMOST AS MUCH AS THEY WANT TO BREATHE
...WHO WANT TO MAKE THE IMPOSSIBLE POSSIBLE AND THE ORDINARY EXTRAORDINARY. After decades of success in multiple industries, Lisa Messenger blends her personal stories with the important business lessons she has learned along the way, from why money is not the only currency to how to fail well.
Lisa gives readers a valuable insight into her world, whether you're a budding entrepreneur, seasoned game changer or a corporate ladder-climber dreaming of creating your own gig or making positive change from the inside. This book will help you dig deep, stay on purpose, back yourself, be true to your ideas, and ensure that if you're thrown to the wolves, you'll have the strength to come out leading the pack.
Your life is your message to the world. So embrace the journey and live it out loud. "Business anarchy for fun and profit - not for the short of breath, weak of spine or faint of heart. Put on clean underwear and turn to page one."- BRADLEY TREVOR GREIVE AM, NEW YORK TIMES Bestselling AUTHOR

I’d say my goal in life is pretty simple: I want to live every day as fully as possible, making every second count while I strive to become the very best version of myself I can be. Easy, right?

Well, I try. Whatever comes, let it come. Whatever stays, let it stay. Whatever goes, let it go. These are the words I try to live by – at times, more successfully than others.

I made a very conscious decision in 2004 to turn my life right around and despite the odd unavoidable bump in the road; I haven’t let that promise down. When people say, “You’re always so happy,” or “Gosh you do a lot,” I’m reminded that the lifestyle I lead is purposefully big. It’s not an accident; this is the life I chose.

I run 100 miles an hour in business because I just don’t want to waste the opportunities before me. As a result, I set goals and run wildly towards them, much to the amusement and sometimes frustration of those around me.

There are a lot of motivations fuelling this, including a desire to make a vast difference in the lives of other people, and to demonstrate by my actions and the way I live life that anything is possible. I have a naturally determined spirit and a disruptive force engrained deep within that just wants to try something new or prove to others that there’s another way.

However, I deeply believe that there is something else that leads us towards living a full, rich and successful life – and that is having purpose. Having a ‘why’. As the former US President John F Kennedy once said: “Efforts and courage are not enough without purpose and direction.”

If you’re an accomplished entrepreneur, you can readily pick up your skills and your team and traverse multiple industries with varying success, learning the intricacies of that business as you move. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with that; I’ve done it on multiple occasions, with book publishing and magazines, for example.

But, I have never just done it for the sake of money. Financial success is a nice by-product and it absolutely buys freedom and choice, which in turn provides a greater platform for good. But in and of itself, money is not my driver – not even close.

The one time in my life where I threw money at something for money’s sake (a respected colleague had a new entrepreneurial venture and I agreed to back it), the whole experience was quite soulless and only reinforced my thinking that as an entrepreneur, the things we do are about so much more than the hefty bank balance we (hope to) accumulate.

As a side point, I have a healthy relationship with money and I think it’s important. For years, this wasn’t the case; one of the things that held me back was that I thought money was a dirty word. As a result, I prevented myself from making any significant money and sabotaged my dreams along the way.

When I learned that without money, my ability to have a platform in the world or to make widespread positive change is limited, my belief system around it changed. I realised that having money and being a good person did not have to be mutually exclusive.

But back to purpose and your sense of ‘why’, so many people talk to me about purpose and they ask, “Have I found mine?” And then, “If so, how did I find it?” Finding your purpose and your ‘why’ for your business life – or your life generally, if you feel as I do that the two are intertwined – is a different journey for everyone and I can only speak from my experience.

THE JOURNEY OF DISCOVERY

There have been two times in my life where I’ve felt 100 per cent on track or ‘on purpose’ and I’m grateful for them both. The first time was when I wrote my first book Happiness Is… and the second was when I started The Collective. At both times, I was incredibly hungry for something new, I was pushed to my limits in the current work I was undertaking, and I was at times angry, frustrated or generally pissed off at life or work! Who knew that in those moments, you could experience such clarity?

I look back and see them as moments of weighty importance, because to feel pushed so deeply to act by someone or something musters a hunger and energy like nothing else. And as I look at both moments, I realise once again that you cannot underestimate the power of adversity or catalysts that occur in your life.

We must get better at recognising these moments and latching onto the opportunities around them, as these moments of incurable hunger or painful desperation are when the greatest genius appears. In these moments my go-to default mechanism is now, “Something wonderful is about to happen”. It’s a much healthier place from which to reframe a crappy situation.

Happiness Is… was ironically born from a place of me being unbelievably unhappy. Seriously! While my work life rolled along appearing just fine to onlookers, personally, I was struggling. For years, I really had no semblance of who I was and I was living my life according to other people’s expectations. I felt like I was massively treading water: I was in an unhappy marriage, I barely saw my family, who I’d subconsciously alienated, and I was drinking far too much. What a happy trifecta.

On the outside, things may have appeared okay – pretty rosy, even – but on the inside, I was dying. Truth be told, I hardly recognised myself and the person I knew I was at my core, the determined little world-changer with big ideas, had somehow vanished. Living in perpetual fear, guilt and remorse is hell.

I knew I had to turn things around, as rock bottom is a pretty horrific and uncomfortable place to be. I was flat-out miserable and with much longing to escape the situation before it quite possibly gobbled me up, I thought, “I’m going to go on a quest to find what makes people happy.”

So many people want to write a book, but in that moment of absolute desperation, I was fuelled to actually go and do it. Without a skerrick of publishing knowledge whatsoever, I decided to go around Australia on my own eternal search for happiness, to ask people what happiness meant to them. I was on a mission – I knew exactly what I had to do and went about finding a way to do it.

Within weeks, perhaps even days, the change in my outlook was remarkable. You’d hardly recognise me from the half-shell of a woman I had been before that purposeful moment. I had found my ‘why’ and it filled me with such a sense of purpose and engagement, suddenly I couldn’t wait to jump out of bed each morning and see what the new day would bring.

And along the journey, a funny thing happened – because I was so passionate about the project, fuelled by my desire to find happiness, people were drawn to me and my book like a magnet. The serendipity and synchronicity became infectious; so much so that the book went on to sell through the roof (I sold 36,000 copies, when a bestseller in Australia at the time was just 5000).

It was the start of my journey of self-discovery and the beginning of finding out who I was and what I wanted out of life, which I ultimately realised included being in business and having a platform to make a positive change in the world.

That was October 2004. I was at rock bottom and seriously craving change, but what I actually found was the drive to transform myself and my direction in life, along with the courage to do the hard work to make it last. We ended the marriage, I gave up drinking shortly after, then I immersed myself in personal development – therapy, courses, meditating, you name it, I did it.

That’s not to say I ‘fixed’ myself. Personal development, in my view anyway, is always a work in progress. I approach spiritual development the same way I approach sports. I do a lot to stay active: I dip in and out of surfing, golf, netball, rock climbing, dance, yoga, and boxing, but I’m not obsessed with it.

However, I am totally open to going along to absolutely anything with an open mind and a fresh spirit. I believe 100 per cent that the learnings are often very similar across all platforms – the teaching methodologies are the main things that differ. I absolutely love going along to anything new and if invited I will always say yes, however zany.

It keeps me fresh, invigorated, excited. Doesn’t give me opportunity to become complacent or desensitised to new ways of learning. So if someone says, “Come to church with me”, I’ll go. If someone says, “Come and try this meditation”, I’ll go. I’m open. I love to explore and dip in and out of all sorts of things that my friends or people I meet suggest.

THE TURNING POINT

Of everything I did, the most significant progress was made when I enrolled in two highly intensive and cathartic eight-day retreats, but they were so full-on, each was said to be the equivalent of attending a weekly therapy session for five years.

I’ve been to a raw food vegan commune (and that was an experience I won’t forget in hurry – you’ve never truly stripped back to basics until you’ve experienced frighteningly communal showers), I’ve trekked across parts of Western India, have danced to the beat of bongos in both Byron Bay and regional Morocco and I’ve crawled through sweat lodges in Costa Rica. I’m happy to push myself to the edge in every situation, to live and explore life and suck up every bit that’s on offer. But these days, I’m a little gentler on myself when it comes to thrashing out every part of my past in the name of personal development – the hard work has been done and I’m free to live in the ‘now’.

Of course, this was my journey for helping me work through my particular issues. It is not a fix-all and the things I did won’t work for everyone else, as we all have our own things to deal with as we forge our own path.

I’ve summarised this painful yet illuminating period of my life into a handful of paragraphs to shine a little light on my own experiences, which almost makes it seem like breaking free from a suffocating marriage and starting my life over was a simple process. It wasn’t. It was the toughest few years of my life. But it was also very necessary. I was so miserable and desperate; anything seemed like a great alternative to where I was.

And fortuitously, this period and Happiness Is… set my business life on a new trajectory. I felt 100 per cent on purpose.

IT TAKES HARD WORK

People ask me, “How have you got to where you are?” but sometimes, I don’t think they’re prepared for an honest answer. When I look them straight in the eye and quip, “Ten years of therapy”, their response is often silence. Or perhaps a little awkward laughter. Most people are not quite sure what to do with that.

People hear what they want to hear. And so, I let them make up their own mind. But one thing I do know for sure is that there’s no such thing as a quick fix. There is no ‘one size fits all’. There is no pill. No guru on a rock to save you (they may offer you advice, but they can’t save you). Because you have to do the work. You. Your way. It’s your journey. Mine was mine and I figured out what worked for me. But it’s not the same for you. Only you can work that out for yourself.

Happiness Is… and the business and consumer media around it (thank you media – I am eternally grateful) is the reason I was flooded with requests from others to help them publish their books. And seeing a huge gap in the custom-publishing market, I decided to throw myself into an antiquated industry and see if I could shake it up. That would never have happened without the Happiness Is… journey.

Book publishing became my main business for the next eight years, helping others self-publish in a high-quality way so their books could hold their own next to books produced by a publishing house, and so the author also walked away with most of the profits. While traditional publishing definitely has its place, ours was the best model for some.

The business hummed along perfectly fine with a mix of corporate and private clients. We rode out the financial crisis and we were pretty comfortable. But being comfortable is not a good place to be – are we really doing our best work and being the very best version of ourselves when we’re comfortable? Some would say, “Yes, comfortable is enough.”

In my view? It’s not. Far from it. And so it was time again to push myself to another level and ‘get comfortable being uncomfortable’.

I knew I had a lot more to give and after almost a decade of publishing books, I was now capable, equipped, solid and strong enough in my own skin to take on something new. But this time around, when I felt that calling towards the unknown? This time, I was armed.

To begin with, I’d overcome big stuff and I also had several successful and some not-so-successful businesses to my name.

But just as importantly, I’d pushed myself to my limits in my personal life too. I’d trekked, gone on retreats, travelled and gathered a whole lot of life experiences in that time.

All of which meant that when my second moment of purpose descended, I came at it with a different kind of desperation – one that was no longer about me.

THE MOMENT OF TRUTH

This time for me, finding my new purpose was very much about completely allowing myself to drop to a whole new level, to surrender to the universe and almost remove myself from the equation. With every cell in my being, I knew that I had the strength to hand over completely and say, “I’m ready for whatever is next, whatever form or incarnation that t...

Table of contents

• FOREWORD
• CONTENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• BELIEVE
• FEAR.LESS
• KNOW YOUR 'WHY'
• FAIL FAST
• DREAM BIG, DREAM OFTEN
• CULTURE UP
• INVEST IN YOU
• LEVERAGE IT ALL
• DISRUPT
• DO GOOD
• NOW GO…
• ABOUT THE AUTHOR
• SPEAKING OPPORTUNITIES
• RENEGADE COLLECTIVE
• COLLECTIVE HUB
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• TESTIMONIALS