—

Here’s a little video on the Alchemy of Ideas.  Hopefully this will shed some light on why Intellectual Property law does not care about your idea – only what you’ve DONE with your idea to bring it into the word and share it with the rest of us.

Granted, I still have a lot of improvement to make on the video technical – lighting, sound, visuals, etc.  Stick with me.  I hope to polish up the technical as quickly as I can.

Comments Welcome.

While the CBL program was small, I knew the attorneys in the program were on to something powerful. They were on the way to changing how lawyers work with entrepreneurs from the old lose-lose hourly rate model to a model that empowers both the attorney and the client and forms a true “Trusted Advisor” (go read the book) relationship. I couldn’t give that up.

But, I couldn’t just take what I was doing with the CBL program and slap a different name on it. While I could do that legally, it didn’t feel “right.” If I was going to do my own program for small business attorneys, it needed to be the type of program I would build without the influence of someone else’s vision, style, and habits.

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I’ve kept a journal since the day my dad passed on way back on Memorial Day, 1991. My journal entry dated 7/7/09 includes a description of an organization that helps foster the spirit of creative business. I called it “The Space Between Center for Creative Spirit in Business” and I kept coming back to the concept over and over.  It would keep me awake at night.

Last week, I had a choice to make: was it time to bring The Space Between Center to life?

So, I thought about it for a little while.  Then it hit me… I could build my program for small business attorneys as the first initiative of The Space Between Center. It had been waiting for months for the right time for action.

Every day at least a few emails came in from attorneys around the country continuing to encourage me to start my own program. If you’re and entrepreneur, you shouldn’t ignore customer demand.

I formed The Space Between Center LLC last Friday. It felt REALLY GOOD!

Since then, I’ve been defining what my program would look like, how it would operate and what partners I will bring in to make it all come together. The idea is too big for me to implement alone. I found the right partners. They’re on board and almost as excited as I am.

And, inquiries from business lawyers keep coming in…

As of NOW I don’t have to say “wait just a few days.” Now I can say “go to www.spacebetweencenter.com and sign up for a free informational/introductory call on Friday, March 19^th at Noon Eastern.”

There will be other initiatives of The Space Between Center, but for now we’re focused on helping small business attorneys develop win-win relationships with clients. The program based in part on the success I’ve had implementing my flat monthly fee model over the last year. This model changed my life almost overnight.

My clients love it.

The members of the Creative Business Lawyer were having success with it in less than two months.

So, I want to share it.

I’m keeping a few new benefits of the new program secret until the call. These new elements will go beyond just learning the business model and provide some tremendous value to the members.

In case you’re wondering – no, it’s not some kind of “private coaching” scheme.

If you are an attorney and want to know what’s going on, join the call. It’s free, so it won’t hurt you to listen in.  Oh, and my friend, attorney, and marketing consultant Ben Glass will be co-hosting the call.  Ben is NOT associated with the program financially, so you know he’ll keep it real.

If you are an entrepreneur, tell your lawyer about this and ask them to listen in on the call.  If you don’t have an attorney using a flat fee monthly model, then we’ll just have to do something about that soon…

Now back to work.

If you’re not familiar with the Ignite format, each speaker has only 5 minutes and 20 slides (each on 15 second auto-timers) to Ignite the audience with whatever they’re talking about.  Most of the topics are audience-selected, but a few are selected by the organizers.

Here are the event Details: http://ignite.oreilly.com/2009/11/ignite-fort-collins-4.html

Ignite Fort Collins Colorado #4 & Global Ignite Week: Thursday March 4, 2010

Ignite is a night of presentations on a variety of topics, with a twist. Each presentation has 20 slides that automatically advance after 15 seconds. It is a worldwide movement. View sample presentations from other events around the world here.

We’re bringing geeks, designers, and hipsters together for a night of beer drinking and fun.

Tickets go on sale at 9:25 AM on Thursday, February 18.
Tickets are required and available at 3 price levels: Free (as always!), $5 (micro-sponsor) and $10 (mini-sponsor). The event is expected to sell out, so mark your calendar…
Get tickets here

New sponsorship levels!
Read all about our new micro- and mini-sponsor levels. Become an Ignite Fort Collins sponsor for as little as $5.

BEvERages and food The first keg is on us, after that a cash beer bar will be open. Delicious snacks are also provided.

Event location:
Drake Centre
802 West Drake Road
Fort Collins, CO 80526
[map]

Doors open at 6 PM. Presentations at 7 PM. Get there early – socialize and enjoy some free snacks and beer.

Presentations selected for Ignite Fort Collins #4
In order of presenters first name:

Coworking: The New Way to Work, Angel Kwiatkowski
The top 10 do’s and don’ts when faced with a Zombie Invasion, Chris Vieville
Fifteen Films I Hope You Haven’t Missed!, Dave Taylor
The Strong, Healthy Lives of 50 Athletes Over 50, Don McGrath
The State of Data Visualization, Douglas
Homegrown Healthcare- How Love, Art and Facebook conquered Medical Bankruptcy, Frank Stanley
How iFarted and Came Out Smelling Like a Rose, Joel Comm
How not to drive like a douche in the mountains, joshmishell
The Red Pill – A Whirl-Wind Tour Through Western Esoteric Symbology, Kevin Houchin
What’s it like to be a host mom for Ft. Collins Foxes baseball players! Marge Brodahl
Top 10 Reasons Why It’s More Fun to Hate Your Job, Michael Joseph
Marketing is for the Dogs, Nick Armstrong
Dating & Recruiting …..pssst they aren’t all that different after all! Nora Burns
How to Talk Your Way Out of a Traffic Ticket, Traci Brown

As many of you know I’m a big fan of social media, especially Twitter.com (@kevinhouchin) and Facebook (Kevin E. Houchin). I recently posted the following and received a couple responses that motivated me to start writing.

The question about HOW to recognize purpose is a question that a lot of people have. While I don’t profess to have THE answer, I think I have AN answer–one that I’ve shared in my Fuel the Spark books, in my workshops, seminars, and keynotes, and will definitely share again in my next book: The Secrets of Creative Business. But I don’t want you to have to wait or have to pay for this, because sharing this information is at the heart of MY purpose on the planet.

First, and this is VERY important, understand that you are not searching for your purpose, instead, the goal is to recognize your purpose. Searching for your purpose will lead you to failure every time, because by searching, you are looking outside yourself to find something that’s already inside you. If you search outside yourself, you’ll be fooled into accepting what other people think your purpose should be as what your purpose really is.

Second, know that you probably have more than one purpose, or at least more than one way to manifest that purpose in the world. Properly stated, your purpose will never be “completed” but you will always be in the process of fulfilling the purpose without “failure.”  Many times, if you feel that you have more than one purpose, each purpose you state will be related in some form to a higher purpose that you have not yet recognized and articulated. I’ll give you an example and then we’ll move on to why recognizing your purpose has become so difficult.

I created my purpose statement using the tools and structure from the book Inspire: What Great Leaders Do by Lance Secretan. (No, I don’t have an affiliate relationship with Lance.) This is one of my favorite books ever and one I think everyone should read.  My kids will be required to read this as soon as I think they can understand what’s being discussed and I’ll probably read it out loud to them well before they can read it on their own. Lance breaks purpose down into three statements: Destiny, Cause, and Calling.  Here are mine:

1. Destiny: To reach my full potential in this lifetime by helping as many other people as I can reach their full potential in this lifetime.
2. Cause: Every person on Earth recognizes their personal spark of divinity and begins to share their flame.
3. Calling: Writing and speaking around the world to share the recognition of the personal divine spark and give people the tools they need to be accountable and share their spark.

This essay is a step toward fulfilling my purpose on the planet. My law practice, where I help people find ways to make their living through creative business (sharing their spark of divinity) is another. My books and speaking events are a literal calling to help people understand these concepts and then have the tools to act on what they’ve recognized in themselves. In a quite moment last night I literally heard my little voice say I needed to write this essay for my friends Terri and Marla who commented on Facebook, and share the essay with the world via my blog. I know my purpose. Now let’s get back to recognizing yours.

Understand that it’s not your fault if you can’t articulate your purpose yet, because it’s not something we’re taught in Western culture. In fact, our entire culture seems to be structured around obscuring your purpose or providing you with all kinds of false paths. This isn’t done intentionally. Most of the people providing these false paths to nowhere do it out of love and pure intention, but as we’ve discussed, anything coming from outside yourself is going to be a false path. Most of the time, these folks who are trying to help you find your purpose really have no sense of their own which means this isn’t really their fault either.

Your parents provided purpose in your life. They sent you to school, they taught by example, they taught by providing positive and negative feedback for your actions. Many of us discuss what we want to be when we grow up with our parents and sometimes our parents do far too much to drive that decision down a path that THEY define as “success” or “security” out of love for you and sometimes out of a desire to reach some unrecognized or unfulfilled purpose of their own.

If you were lucky enough to have some great teachers in your life, they probably exhibited some examples of purpose for you. How many people wanted to grow to be like one of their teachers or coaches? While at school, you find friends and those friends help shape your dreams, goals, and definitions of success – for better or worse. After school, you go to work and the culture of the job or company shapes your purpose.

The religion of your parents, friends, and nation also shapes your definition of life purpose, usually with a moral undertone, but again as an influence from outside. How many times has religion been used as a tool to bend people’s purposes from what is inside them to what is willed from behind the pulpit. No religion is exempt from these examples and I believe that most of the time the outside influence is delivered with the purest of intentions. But none of these influences will guide you to your true life purpose, because your purpose can’t be FOUND because it’s not LOST.  It’s inside you right now. All you need to do is recognize, accept, and surrender.

I’m about to share with you the most powerful (yet simple) tool and process for recognizing your life’s purpose that I’ve found, and I’ve been working on this for YEARS. But first you have to be in a state to use the tool. This process can be used in your personal life, your career, or even at a business planning level. To make it work, you have to be able to get quiet.

Western culture doesn’t like people to be quiet. We’re bombarded with stuff every second. I do workshops and ask the attendees to just sit quietly and look at a dot on the wall for just one minute. To a person all of them think it’s the longest 60 seconds they’ve ever spent. We are taught to multi-task. We are taught to be on the go all the time. We are not taught to just be. We are not taught how to find the space between thoughts, but it’s in the space between that we find the place where God, the Universe, Spirit, Zero Point Field, or whatever you call the higher power can speak to us in a language we understand. It’s there right now trying to help you recognize your purpose. The tool I’m about to share can help you find the space between thoughts and get quiet enough to recognize why you’re on the planet. Nobody can do this for you.

This process is not about searching, but it does involve some work, focus and commitment. It’s not hard, and if done right is actually fun, fulfilling, instantly and permanently rewarding.  Are you ready to start?

Good.

It starts with this quote from an incredible book called The Universal Traveler:

The most profound choice in life is either to accept things as they exist or to accept the personal responsibility for changing them.

What does that quote have to do with life purpose? EVERYTHING.

Your life purpose is simply the thing you accept personal responsibility to change.

It really is that simple, because when you’ve truly accepted the personal responsibility to change something in the world, your path unfolds with opportunities for inspired action and your life will never be the same. Everything you do will be moving you toward the goal of fulfilling the responsibility you have accepted and if something doesn’t move you toward that change you either won’t do it for long or you won’t do it at all.

The work is figuring out where you TRULY and DEEPLY ACCEPT the PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY to CHANGE something.

There are plenty of problems in the world that need solved. There are plenty of things that need changed. What are you going to accept as your problem or problems to solve?

What can you NOT live with as it exists?

I can’t live with people going through life in ignorance of the spark of divinity that lives inside them. I can’t stomach people living lives of quiet desperation working in a cubical at a job they hate waiting to have fun only on the weekends because they don’t know how to start their own businesses doing what they love. So, I became a Creative Business Lawyer, started this blog, and have been writing in an effort to change that situation.

I can’t stand how law school takes our brightest, most idealistic young people and beats the creativity and idealism out of them, redefining the definition of success into a trap of top 10% and six-figure salaries doing work they hate and feeding a lifestyle of internal and external conflict. So, I try to help change law schools through helping law school administrators better define their branding, and wrote a book to help law students stay balanced in the face of this 3-year+ hazing ritual. Finally, I wrote a book to help practicing attorneys recognize the trap they may be in and find a way out in order to truly use their passion and skill to manifest their purpose in life.

What can YOU not live with as is?

When you answer that question in the sincerity of your heart and soul, you’ve taken the most profound step toward recognizing your purpose(s) in life because all you have to do is flip the statement around.

Your purpose in life is to change the thing(s) that you can’t live with as they exist.

It’s just that simple.  And that difficult.

When you’ve found the quiet place to do this work, it will come to you. You will recognize your purpose. You will be inspired to act in authenticity in every element of your being and every moment of every day.

I could expand on this quite a bit – and in fact, I will. IMPLEMENTING this work is at the core of my next book, The Secrets of Creative Business. When you know your purpose, it will be time to act and I believe at a soul-level that the best way to implement one’s purpose in life is through founding and building one’s own busines and aligning one’s VOCATION with one’s Purpose and AVOCATION.

Recognize your purpose. Accept the personal responsibility. Surrender to that path and you will find more power than you’ve ever imagined you could wield.

Recognize Your Spark.  Share Your flame.

—

December, 2005: On Advent and Christmas

I was at church on the second Sunday of Advent this season and the pastor spoke about the child of light coming to the earth. I thought that discussion was very enlightened for any Christian church today. He used a story about some high-school kids on a retreat camping in the mountains and noticing how bright the stars looked. Their retreat leader changed their perspective by stating, “the stars aren’t so bright – it’s the world that’s very dark.” He went on to say that it is our role as Christians to reflect the light of Christ into the darkness of the world around us. This got me thinking.

I thought first about the whole idea of pinpoints of light in the darkness. Most of those points of light are actually VERY powerful, blazing stars in the vast darkness of space. I thought maybe the Pastor’s thought about our duty to reflect the light of Christ into the darkness of the world may have missed the mark a bit. Instead of reflecting the light of Jesus Christ, maybe our role is to BE a light in the darkness – like Christ. After all, isn’t the point Jesus was trying to make simply that there is a Christ in each of us waiting to be found and brought back to God’s light? Christ in you. Christ in me.

It’s easy to see why the reflection idea is important, after all, the brightest lights in our Earthly darkness are the moon and the planets in our solar system that actually DO simply reflect the light of the Sun. Some of the brightest people around us seem to reflect the light of the Son. But are the people who simply reflect the light of Jesus more powerful than those individual sources of light that happen to be farther away, but bring a light of their own to far larger volumes of darkness? I don’t know the answer, or if one answer exists. Maybe at times we are called to be sources of light in the vast darkness, and at sometimes we are called to reflect a relatively brighter light for the path of a relative few closest to us who are wandering in the darkness. Maybe we need to be doing both at all times.

The Christmas service was themed around the light of God becoming man. The original celebration was on the winter solstice, when light physically returns to warm the Earth in the form of longer days. The Christmas liturgy makes far more sense when examined in this context. This time our new Senior Pastor was giving the message, and correctly themed his message as one of Christmas being a time to remember that the light of divinity descended into human-kind. Predictably, but no less disappointingly, the orthodox Christian interpretation of this idea – that the divinity descended into that one baby – Jesus of Nazareth – and no other human was the substance of his message. I believe this misses the actual message of Jesus Christ, which is unsurprising, because most of his messages were misunderstood by even his closest companions. I believe that his message was that divinity descended into him, as it has into ALL humans – he was different from most in that he was able to tap and appreciate his divinity to help others, while most of us simply don’t recognize our personal spark of “Christos.”

What if Christmas was understood? What if Christmas was a reminder of the divinity in each human instead of a story of God’s divinity descending ONLY to one man who lived for around 33 years over 2,000 years ago and hasn’t been back since? How much better would our world be if each of us were accountable for the spark of divinity God gave us?

I think the world would be a far better place if each of us recognized this responsibility – it might even be a Heaven on Earth.

We can’t let this continue. We have such potential. YOU have huge potential. Are you reaching it? Why are we here in this lifetime except to reach our full potential? Yet we know so many people how haven’t engaged in their lives yet. There is no way they can reach their potential if they can’t even recognize that they HAVE potential. It’s painful. But how can we help?

How can we help?

There is one POWEFUL way to help, and that is through helping people recognize and fueling the spark of divinity within each of us. We fuel that spark, build that passion, in one way, through creativity. Creativity is the process of making the world a better place because we were here. Small improvements count. Creativity at any level, making the world just a little better is still a divine act. And, huge success comes from helping a lot of people be a little bit happier.

Creativity is the most powerful force on earth. If you believe Dan Pink’s hypothesis in the best-selling A Whole New Mind, then you subscribe to the theory that creative, intuitive, right brain thinking will be the primary competitive advantage for American business in the coming decades. I believe that reality is already upon us.

I’m blessed to be a counselor and attorney to creative people. My clients include among others a woman who channels an archangel, fine artists, musicians, advertising agencies, internet gurus, authors, publishers, design studios, architects, consulting groups, apparel companies, software companies, and biotechnology companies. The common thread through all these clients–the filter through which they have to pass before we match up as attorney and client is one thing: creativity. My clients know they are creating something good. They’re bringing something valuable into this world and they are graciously asking my help with the business and intellectual property aspects of their projects. The fact that I earned a fine art undergraduate degree in graphic design and spent over a dozen years working in and with branding campaigns attending law school adds to my credibility and approachability in the eyes of my clients.

I tell each of them that my purpose and commitment is to help as many people as I can to recognize the spark of divinity within them, which is ONLY fueled by creating something good and positive. People interested more in profit than in progress need not apply, and people who say they are trying to do good, but in the end are really only in it for the money usually select out of my client pool.

When we embrace the creative spark within each of us, we embrace our purpose in life and figure out why we’re alive and on this planet. I’m compelled to write these posts to help the people with great ideas understand the business and intellectual property aspects of making a living by fueling that divine creative spark. I’m compelled to write these posts to help people who are in danger of having that spark suffocated by their cubicles break out of the dead spot and fuel their spark by bringing more creativity to their current work, or empowering them to embrace their creativity and bring it to the world in some other manner.

I hope people who these posts will find hope that they can escape the feeling of being trapped. I hope they will find the tools to escape, the knowledge to engage, and the confidence to take action.

This series of posts combines my background as a spiritual seeker and teacher, artist, designer, marketing executive, entrepreneur, and yes – lawyer. It has elements of entrepreneurial business, spiritual inspiration, motivation, and self-help. Please feel free to engage in dialog about these posts by posting comments.