For over two decades, Shel Horowitz, The Transformpreneur, has shown businesses how to thrive by doing the right thing. Shel shows how to go green and market green affordably and effectively–AND how to thrive by transforming society: turning hunger and poverty into sufficiency, war into peace, and catastrophic climate change into planetary balance.

Shel is an international speaker and TEDx Talker, transformational business consultant, and the multiple-award-winning, bestselling author of ten books, most recently Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World (his second Guerrilla book with Guerrilla Marketing founder Jay Conrad Levinson). Visit him at http://goingbeyondsustainability.com

I’m a lifelong marketer AND activist. In 1999-2000, I led a movement that saved a mountain that used everything I knew about both. After we won, I thought about what I could bring from activism back to the business world. And I felt a calling to do this work.

Mindset is essential. I’m totally convinced that we won Save the Mountain while the “experts” were moaning “this project is terrible but there’s nothing we can do” because we believed we would win. But even I thought it would take 5 years–and we did it in just over a year.

Things will work out. You do your best, you may or may not achieve the results you want, but even if you don’t, good things will come out of the experience.

That *I* could help change the way the business world thinks, even as a solopreneur working out of an old farmhouse. This is still a journey, but I believe I’m helping to change the culture a bit at a time. Ideas I advocated 20 years ago have become mainstream.

Several times, I moved into a new focus, and later the original area became obsolete. I started as a typing service. After computerizing in 1984, resume writing became my main focus. Then, marketing copy for small businesses. Finally, the transformational work (still evolving). Each was a risk.

“Impossible is just a big word thrown around by small men who find it easier to live in the world they’ve been given than to explore the power they have to change it. Impossible is not a fact. It’s an opinion. Impossible is not a declaration. It’s a dare. Impossible is potential. Impossible is temporary. Impossible is nothing.” (Muhammad Ali)

Start small Avoid running up big expenses for a fancy office or staffing you don’t need yet. But don’t try to do everything yourself. Outsource to freelancers the tasks you don’t do well. Above all, follow your heart and make a difference in the world.