The virtuous cycle

As I write this, I'm currently leading a weekend workshop in Quebec City called "Revolution 2006", to help solopreneurs clarify their vision and create the confidence and action plan to transform their results in 2006.

During a break, to air out my thinking, I picked up the Saturday National Post (Toronto) and looked at the Financial Post section and this article about theWorld Economic Forum in Davos, and the speech that Bill Gates gave, pledging over $900M for TB research.

In it, he referred to the "virtuous cycle", that, after some research, seems to be a theme that recurs often at Davos. From the Post article:

[...]By "virtuous cycle," Gates means the process by which a nation provides some form of healthcare, where education is widespread, the economy is a meritocracy and governments promote entrepreneurship. The "cycle" works this way: Education creates technologies and entrepreneurs to exploit them; those entrepreneurs pay taxes, which government spends on more education and research to create more technologies.[...]

In my mind, I see the virtuous cycle as connecting vision, passion and profit:


Once a society meets the basic needs of its citizens (education, health), and people are encouraged to start dreaming a vision and take risks to make it happen(meritocracy, entrepreneurship), this starts to ignite a passion in people that powers them to take action and generate profit, which raises the general level of wealth, that gives people even more freedom to have bigger visions, more passion, more profit, etc... in a "virtuous cycle".

So the question came to me... what's first, the chicken or the egg? In that do I need great means to be able to dream big? Or is it the big dreams that create the great means? How can I dream big if I don't have the means? How can I bootstrap myself into this cycle?

Back to the workshop I'm leading. My personal life mission is to "inspire passionate possibility", which is all about creating a space for people to dream big visions and take action. That's what we're doing this weekend.

So basically, I encourage people to set objectives - visions - that are slightly beyond their reach, in such a way as to ignite their passion to take action to produce profit... and grow bigger dreams.

In the end, I believe that the entrepreneurship track - and even more, the solopreneur - is the ultimate way to truly live a life project that ignites powerful change in the world. This is why I do what I do...