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Survey Time! What's Your Favorite Part About Working Virtually?

  Winter seagull at Lighthouse Beach- Chatham, MA 
  Originally uploaded by Chris Seufert

An interesting thing has happened since I got that first media blitz with that Penelope Trunk article about a year ago--now sometimes journalists will contact me when they're looking for an "expert quote" when they're writing articles on working virtually and virtual companies.

This just happened again on Friday, and I always get excited because it gives me a chance to share with mainstream society what this whole "nomadic web worker" lifestyle is about.

By "nomadic" I mean that our office locations can vary from day to day--one day it's the cafe, the next it's a coffee shop, the next we're working from the beach or a vacation home or our backyards or wherever. Even if we don't move around constantly, we have the potential to do so if the mood strikes.

Sometimes we get so used to this freedom that we forget that there are folks out there who still work in tiny cubicles under fluorescent lights ;-), but it is our duty as virtual company owners to share the amazing secret of what it's like to work without being tied to a geographic location.

How Do You Make Tough Decisions: With Your Gut or Your Head?

  Gut Feeling 
  Originally uploaded by Made in Mississippi

I ask this question of you because over the weekend someone asked this:

"If after waiting 48hrs on a tough decision, do you go with your gut or your head?

My advice was to definitely go with the "gut feel", as I think that the "little voice" whispering deep inside us, advising us about a certain person or situation is actually more reliable than our heads.

Another word for "gut feel" is intuition, and I think our intuition is really the result of us subconsciously picking up on tiny clues that are so subtle that our heads miss them entirely. For this reason, I really think that the gut is mightier than the head.

Do You Aspire To Be Heroic?

Lately I've been really contemplating the preconceived limitations that we often place on ourselves and wondering what sorts of masterpieces each of us could be creating if we could just shake free of the mundane and the ordinary, push aside the goal of "just getting by", and start thinking of ourselves as real heroes in training.

As I've been in this reflective mood, I happened across an amazing book that I recommend to everyone who's interested in exploring their untapped potential--it's called "The Spontaneous Fulfillment of Desire" by Deepak Chopra.

In it he said something that blew my mind:

"We know that our deepest relationships and meanings and contexts derive from the soul. And our aspiration, that grand and wonderful and mythical thing that we yearn to do, also ultimately derives from the soul. In our time here on earth, this individual soul will not be fulfilled unless it completes its mythical quest, which we can think of as the Grand Plan around which our destinies are organized. Inside every human being there is an overarching theme, a template for heroic living, a god or goddess in embryo that yearns to be born. This is who we were meant to be, the self that we deny ourselves because most of us cannot see the limitless potential that is open to us. This is our best self, the egoless self, that bit of the universe acting through us for the good of all."