Think about how Amazon.com made it through.
Think about how Bon Jovi made it through.
Ebay made it through.
Bret Michaels made it through, but in a different way.

Infospace didn’t.  A myriad of others didn’t.

Poison the band didn’t. Guns ‘n’ Roses didn’t.  Motley Crue didn’t.  And a myriad of other groups didn’t survive the hair metal boom.

There’s something to be said for being able to adapt what you love to do to what markets are buying at any given time.

For most of us anyway, those of us that are just working, living, not fighting cancer or terrorists, or dealing with some tragic loss.  The biggest thing we battle is just dying slowly, never living up to our capability or even worse, never exceeding that capability.

If we knew what great cost of effort it takes to displace complacency in our lives, if we knew what great achievements or world-changing things we’d accomplish… what things would we never allow in?  And why do we continue to allow what we know about now?

Don’t get me wrong.  Having Facebook on my cell phone is great.  Having access to all people and all information all the time is very powerful.  But what is it doing to me?  With that power comes great responsibility.

Then you just have to “pull” this grand and complex work out from all the parts.

And once it’s out, maybe no one will get it, or maybe they will. And odds are you won’t think it’s completed – you’ll knock off a part and have to build it again differently, or worse, you’ll have to dig inside the thing and totally change the concrete parts to graphite, or something lighter that just came out.

The joys of software.

Thinking about going sans logo and sans design until something works. Lots to do until it really gets out there, so why worry about it?

The Future Starts Now.

I also kind of associate the idea of “recovery periods” for people that are constantly living on the edges, and I’ve noticed it in my own experience.  3+ years of startup mayhem (with or without a successful exit) generally leads to some recovery period doing something else.  Not exactly complacent, but a certain amount of time to just recover from it.

It kind of looks like this -

Chaos –> Exit (of whatever fashion) –> Being Jaded about nearly Everything –> Simple Living –> Playing more World of Warcraft –> Getting Ready for the Next Round

Isn’t recovery time important just like good sleep?  Yet our expectations of ourselves run so high that we often feel guilty when it comes along.  I for one am going to work 12 hours instead of 16 for a while and let my new ideas gel…

I need a project management/collaboration platform built in a web-based solution. The platform must contain all the features of ZoHo.com, and possess the same graphics and color scheme. Content manager with full management capabilities of all pages, email, fax, sms, reporting, account management, advertising, ect…. We want to own the content manager.

team pages, file storage, instant messaging, live support module, ect. needed

Okay, “all” the features of Zoho.  Zoho has like a hundred apps, 50 man/years of stuff, and you want to build it for $1500.  Okay, so they might not have taken VC, but let’s see… hmmm… some dramatically wealthy founder/CEO in the mix.  And it’s not so much about them as the folks that say, “hey, I can probably get some poor sap to build it for a few grand”.

There are a myriad of these things – build a something like this, build another with all the features of this.  I can’t count the number of requests for Gmail clones that I’ve seen.  It’s apalling.  The sheer number of these types of requests that I see has me disturbed… just more <NOISEWARE>.

Now, granted I don’t want to hinder you if you would like someone in a third world country to attempt to construct such a major endeavor for less than an entry-level home theater system.  But I keep thinking you could spend your time doing something else that might improve the technical environment, not add to the noise that we have to face every day finding what we need to get the job done.

I don’t want to build yet another piece of noiseware, but something useful, valuable, and at least partially not done by someone else yet.

I even find it studying the lives of the older generation – the people who just bought property and held on to didn’t generate growth, they basically paid taxes to have property.  Or maybe they farmed it for a living – but it’s not like growing an empire of mini-storages or multiple farms, or subdivisions.

There certainly is a big difference between the attitudes you have in creating an asset versus providing services.  I’m often torn between making a living offering my services (the only asset is me) and building products.  

Sometimes it feels like I’m seweing a tapestry while treading water.

Yeah, remember the 4 week project, well I’m 8 weeks in and haven’t gotten far.  How do you pull away and make it happen?  I’m thinking this is the biggest challenge.  Brute force.  Ramen profitable.

Grill cook – $7/hr.

Construction worker – $10/hr.

Clubhouse manager – $12/hr.

Usability Expert – $15/hr. ?????

Plumber – $45/hr.

I used to think that globalization was something inevitable, something that moved the business world in a positive direction.  But when professional technology services become commodity – and not just that, but relegated to commodity by reasonable people – what has this come to?

I never thought I’d pay more for trade skills than I would for technology skills.

But it’s already happened.  Because I can’t get a plumber from China or Pakistan, it costs me more to have my plumbing fixed than it does to do a usability analysis on a high profile web site.

Odd.  And I’ll leave it at that.