Month: May 2013

It’s not hard to understand what’s at stake when you refuse to realize your potential. Failing to awaken the greatness inside of you is a travesty and a remarkable waste of your talents. You get it.

Something similar with unexpectedly unpleasant consequences is starting down the path to your dreams but then chickening out mid-leap.

1. If you abandon an unfulfilling career to join the circus but stop short of auditioning for the trapeze artists position that you want and instead settle for something you feel more “qualified” for (balloon animal…engineer?), then you’ve missed the mark.
2. If you dream of starting your own business or passion project but allow fear and Resistance to convince you to offering services in the industry from which you defected, you’ve missed the mark. [Example: an associate at a law firm who quits to pursue painting, but ends up offering freelance legal services because it makes more sense and is easier to explain to the in-laws. “Hey, I still work for myself!”]
3. If you dream of working for a startup and settle for a biz dev position instead of User Unteraction lead because you don’t know jQuery and you’re ashamed to share your Photoshop comps to the hiring manager, you’ve missed the mark.

It’s also dangerous to start on the path of living your dreams and play by the rules that govern your former, safer life. There’s no sense in facing your fears for a season instead of becoming the kind of person who thrives in the face of calculated risk.

Being in the neighborhood of your dreams might feel like a victory, but if you’re going to spend the same number of years on the same planet on this plane of reality regardless, then why not give it all you’ve got?

The more I study life and success, the more it becomes apparent that the only battlefield we have in common is the mind. Bring it under subjection and the world is your oyster. Fail to develop a strong mental resilience, and it can be your undoing.

I’ve always loved the idea of doing the impossible. The phrase is perhaps a bit overused, but you have to be doing (or saying or thinking) something unreasonable in order to win. If you’re a heavyweight boxing champion, you might put it like this:

“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

Sounds good to me.

[Shouts out to Les for bringing this quote to my attention today, and to Nicky for almost making me decide against publishing this post on account of his.]

A friend hit me up for some feedback last week and I thought I’d share.

Disclaimer: I’m not a startup advisor (except when I am), nor do I coach people (except when I do), so take it for what it’s worth.

So my friend — let’s call her Jasmine, since I think that’s a beautiful name and I like the idea of having a friend named Jasmine — is considering a project that would provide a service to the technology community in her city. It’s part startup directory, part job board, part connection platform. There’s a successful model for it here in NYC and this serves as the inspiration.

Jasmine has shopped the idea around to those who stand to benefit from it, and has been met with considerable resistance. Chiefly, as it turns out, because there are a lot of people who want to be the first to execute a project of this sort and they feel threatened by my friend’s interest in it.

To add another layer of complexity, Jasmine is in a bit of a holding pattern with her career.

She quit her well-paying job to strike out on her own in search of work that fulfills her. She’s known in social circles for having a competency in one particular aspect of digital media, but it’s unclear if this is what will “put her on” if you will.

When probing further with the idea, I found out that there are a few people interested in helping out, and that there is not yet a clear path to monetization.

So. My feedback was as follows:

1. No one’s opinion of the idea really matters, and asking the wrong people (those who want to ship it first) for their opinions seems to be a bit incredibly counter-productive.
2. If this isn’t a business, then what’s the point? You’re at a point in your career when your next move really should put money in your pocket and earn you respect in your industry, so anything not likely to hit that mark should be cast aside immediately.
3. There will obviously be some political backlash in your city’s (relatively small) technology community among those who want to pull this off. To be dramatic, at the risk of oversimplifying: are you willing to be hated until you’re loved?
4. Is this just the idea of the month or are you committed to seeing this through? You’re going to have to slog through months of thankless work in order to even gain some initial traction, and it’s possible that this still might fail.
5. Along the lines of the last point, it will be a travesty if, knowing what you know and having worked through these questions, after getting people excited about this idea and hacking away until it’s no longer interesting, people visit the website in six months and it has become a GoDaddy parked domain page. If you do it, see it through.
6. Having a few people interested in helping out might not actually be a good thing. If this is a business (and I hope it is) then are you prepared to pay these people? Will they all be happy to toil for free while you earn from it? Or has the expectation about money not been set at all?
7. Unless you’re going to learn the technologies required to execute this project, you’re going to be looking at hiring a developer to help make this happen. Have you thought through this?

I don’t need to know the answer to these questions, and neither do you. But I think the questions need to be addressed before another step is made.