LIFESTYLE ENTREPRENEUR

When it comes to creating a lifestyle that fills you with a sense of purpose and excitement, there are a few guiding principles that can help start the process. The first principle is perhaps the simplest, and that is to live your life the way that feels right and true to You! It is very easy to live a life that someone else has planned out for you, or to feel like the purpose of life is to live up to someone else’s expectations.

So while it may cause some friction in the short run to change gears and re-engineer your lifestyle, if your friends, family and significant others truly value your happiness, they will eventually come around and your relationships will be healthier because of it.

There were plenty of times that I chased an idea so far down the rabbit hole that I couldn’t be sure I was going down the right path. But those feelings of uncertainty, coupled with a drive to succeed and prosper have always helped me persevere until I crossed enough thresholds to be taken seriously in my new endeavor.

        The first principle is perhaps the simplest:

That is to live your life the way that feels right and true to You!

My mother wasn’t particularly supportive of me foregoing college to travel Europe playing rock music in bars and clubs. But that experience led to me owning a record label on Music Row in Music City, Nashville Tennessee. And when my band had the #1 independent rock song in USA she was our biggest fan! It wasn’t that I wanted to disrespect her wishes for me, but rather I wanted to prove that I could make a career doing what I love, even if that meant a lot of setbacks and disappointments along the way.

During three years of playing music and running a record label with my band mate Jake, I had built relationships with people from all walks of the business world; marketers, radio promoters, video producers, investors, management firms and public relations agencies. They all dealt with me as Jesse Krieger, the guitarist for Harsh Krieger that also runs the business side of things. That was my identity for a while and I lived it 100%. But after many years we came to a point where we all wanted to experience something else in life, and we decided to disband and go our separate ways.

That was perhaps the first time in my adult life where I was conscious of the opportunity I had to create a new identity. As I was driving back to my home town of San Francisco I decided to launch a consulting firm and try to leverage all the relationships I made running a label to help other musicians and businesses. That was the beginning of Krieger Consulting Group, which still exists to this day. However the focus quickly grew from just working on music industry projects, to learning all sorts of new industries like VoIP, nutritional supplements and consumer products. I found the experience of building a company in one industry had many parallels with doing the same in any industry.

              I saw the bigger picture: Lifestyle & Entrepreneurship as two intertwined ideas, like DNA strands circling around one another, enabling each other to grow.

It didn’t take long to feel comfortable in my new identity as a business development and strategy consultant to small, fast-growth companies. Whatever I didn’t know, I would stay up late studying and gaining new skills just in the nick of time to apply them to projects. By always trying to go the extra mile for clients, I built a great referral-based business that lead to working alongside 4-time Superbowl champ Bill Romanowski. He hired me to quarterback the launch of his new nutritional supplement business. This project was the peak experience of my early years as a consultant and Bill turned out to be not only the hardest hitting player in the NFL, but also a very driven entrepreneur.

As my client’s businesses began to grow and more people joined their teams, it became clear that the one thing all my clients were struggling with was raising enough funds to grow their businesses. This was a preview into my next lifestyle change as I started to build relationships with investors and investment banks that to help my clients get financing. Once I saw the world of using money to make money up close, I knew that this was where the real fortunes were lost and made, where the real action took place. Before long I was studying for my Series 7 & 63 securities licenses to become an investment banker with a boutique investment bank that offered me a VP of Business Development title in exchange for merging my consulting practice with them. I accepted.

One of my heroes has always been Steve Jobs, founder of Apple and Pixar. In a commencement speech at Stanford University he said that you can only connect the dots looking backwards. That following your passion can lead you to unexpected places, studying or working on projects that seem disconnected or random. But looking backwards, after the fact, there is a common thread that connects all of those experiences together and you’ll find that you got just the right information and experiences to prepare you for the next round of challenges and opportunities.

This advice proved prescient as I embraced my new identity as an investment banker. I went into overdrive; scouting deals, on the phone at all hours, pitching investors, flying in and out of cities on the same day for meetings. I had the pedal to the floor and was making hundreds of thousands of dollars in commissions from millions of dollars of transactions I was generating.

But the success was not without cost, as my relationship life suffered and even my family began pointing out that when they asked “how are you?” I would start listing off the current state of prospecting, selling and closing different deals.

Then, in the summer of 2008, I stumbled upon what looked like an once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. A community of entrepreneurs, dating coaches and health & fitness experts was putting together a pilot program called Project Rockstar.

The idea was to take six somewhat ordinary guys and break all the boundaries of what’s possible in terms of lifestyle. From fashion consults and approaching attractive women in the streets to customized fitness programs and business mentoring, Project Rockstar was 56 days that challenged and replaced every conception of what I thought was possible!

              Think of the most successful person you’ve ever seen. What does he look like? Who is she with? Where are they going and how are they travelling? Despite the specifics, there is a good chance they look happy and radiate a sense of confidence that is born from accomplishment. This is what a Lifestyle Entrepreneur does. They are successful people who do what they want, when they want to, with whomever they please. And they do it in style, making it look easy and inviting in the process.

Endless opportunities present themselves to the successful, as do appeals for help and aid. In both cases it is because successful people are men and women of action who are involved in a variety of lifestyle pursuits and have myriad business interests. The confidence to make the decisions necessary to be successful comes from having a positive self-image and a strong identity. It requires that you know yourself through and through, and trust yourself to make good decisions given imperfect information.

They are successful people who do what they want, when they want to, with whomever they please.

You may already have a strong set of beliefs, or a blueprint for success in one area of life. If decision making comes easy to you, then you’ve got a headstart on discovering, or reimagining, your identity and expressing it through your lifestyle and businesses. If not, then it really is a process of discovering your identity, by removing any covers or filters that prevent you from acting the way that feels right and experiencing happiness in your life.

Success and identity go hand in hand. You can’t act in a way that runs counter to your basic values and expect to feel no guilt or shame, let alone happiness. No. Success is acting in accordance with your core values while pursuing business interests and passion projects with friends and partners around the globe. That is the path of a Lifestyle Entrepreneur on the road to mastery.

Taking inventory of your current belief system and identity is the first step towards becoming a Lifestyle Entrepreneur, so let’s get started!