One of my Twitter crushes, Whitney Johnson, recently posted a question from a session at BIF7 asking, “What verb makes you happiest? How do you conjugate this verb for as long as possible?” It was a fascinating question, and reminded me a passage in Elizabeth Gilbert’s book Eat, Pray, Love in which the Julia Roberts’ character tries to figure out what the word was that best described New York (achieve), Los Angeles (succeed), and Rome (sex). It was an important moment for Gilbert’s protagonist because, after a devastating divorce, she was struggling to determine who she was and where she fit in the world.

The question Whitney posed struck a chord because I realized it was a challenge to apply the same logic from Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love to building a career path — determining the defining verb of what makes us happy and using that to chart a course for our professional lives. It makes so much more sense to me than defining it through an industry or a function. It’s the verb that describes what you want to do all day long, once you strip your work down to the core.

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In the startup world a lot of noise has been made about the Lean Startup Movement, made popular by Eric Ries, first through his blog and, most recently, through his best-selling book.  One of the tenets of a Lean Startup is the Minimum Viable Product (MVP), which he defines as the “fastest way to get through the Build-Measure-Learn feedback loop with the minimum amount of effort.”  I won’t go into the MVP too much, mostly since I can point to other blogs who have done it far better than I could (like here and here).

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