The media have this very annoying tendency to report business news as if they were baseball scores, as if the ups or downs of the Dow, TSX or FTSE are an accurate proxy for what millions of real entrepreneurs are doing.

The other day, out of curiosity, I watched BNN, the Canadian Business News Network. I usually avoid it because it gives me a headache, and this time was no different. It was a non-stop drone of talking heads recommending this stock or that stock on the flimsiest of cause-and-effect relationships. "I recommend you buy XYZ because it's summer and people like to eat ice cream." "Recent hail in Saskatchewan will depress demand for flivvers and sprockets so dump LMN." What bullcrap.

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As a solopreneur, money is a constant obsession. Some nights I can't get to sleep, with all the what-if's and how-can-I's running around in my head.

I fantasize about winning $50 million at LottoMax, what I would do with it. Of course I would give a million to each of my brothers, as well as my mother, and endow an educational trust for my nieces, nephews and their children (as well as any kids I would have or adopt someday, in the unlikely event that should happen). But what would I do with the rest?

I read the stories of lottery winners, how they say they will buy a new house, a new truck (it always seems to be a truck, doesn't it?), go for a trip down south, then put the rest in savings. Several even say they would not quit their job (yeah, right).

But not me. It would all go into my business. I guess that is the difference between employee thinking and entrepreneur thinking.

How are the money worries of an employee different than that of an entrepreneur?

And, even more importantly, will my money worries ever stop?

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This week's SoloSuccess webinar was a look at five things taught in "Start Your Own Business" seminars. Do they work or not?

One thing I realized when preparing and presenting this webinar was that we are undergoing a seismic shift, one as big as the Industrial Revolution. The shift is from a 20th Century "Economy of Things" to a 21st Century "Economy of Experiences". The rules that govern the capital-focused, finite-mindset Economy Of Things no longer work in an Economy of Experience where the cost of production is zero, the products are intangible and velocity is what counts.

This has generated lots of ideas that I want to explore later on.

Links to the recording and handout after the fold.

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Are we in a "recession" or in a "recovery"? Who cares? What real, practical impact does the state of economy as described by the media and the government have on solopreneurs like you and I?

An op-ed piece by David Brooks on NYTimes.com had me thinking about this. His column, titled "The Protocol Society" talks about the shift in Western economies from the 19th and 20th century focus on making stuff (corn, steel, trucks), to the 21st century basis of the economy: sets of instructions such as software, processes, and intellectual property.

In my opinion, what makes being a solopreneur possible in this day and age is that we can leverage our ideas and skills to create parallel streams of income. This is the distinction between a solopreneur and an artisan: the artisan is a self-employed person who makes things or delivers a personal service, and since only one thing can be produced or service delivered at a time, the earning of an artisan is linear. I'm thinking of some people I've coached in the past: a furniture reupholsterer, a plumber, even a dentist. No matter how advanced or specialized is their knowledge, the business model that they're forced into creates linear income.

But when you take that knowledge or skill and transform it into "protocols" - organized information - then you can move from a linear income to a parallel income. Solopreneurs can leverage ideas and technologies to produce much more value from a time unit of work than if we were building widgets or serving customers on an individual basis.

David Brooks makes a a key distinction between the classic physical goods economy and the new protocol economy: physical things are finite, you can use them up, and therefore responds to the law of supply and demand. But the protocol economy, based on ideas, has no such limit.

What does all this mean for solopreneurs? Here are some ideas that came to me as I considered this concept:

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