Archive post, no longer relevant:
Today’s the launch of the Bootstrapper’s Workshop. It’s an intensive community-based virtual seminar, designed to take from 21 to 100 days.
What you’ll learn: A third way to be independent. Not the daily struggle of the gig-seeking freelancer, nor the high-stakes VC world of the big-time entrepreneur. Instead, the bootstrapper finds freedom early and often, by building an enterprise that customers want so much that they become the source of funding.
Bootstrapping is freedom via service. Finding ways to connect and lead and serve customers so well that they can’t imagine doing it without you.
How you’ll learn: The Bootstrapper’s Workshop is inspired by the five successful sessions of the Marketing Seminar. We’re using a customized online discussion platform, combined with short video lessons from me, to create cohorts of people who are sharing their best work (and challenges) with each other.
Instead of tests and certificates, this new way of learning revolves around peers, around real-time interactions and most of all, around projects and the work you do, instead of memorization and exams.
We start today. You can join anytime in the next few weeks, but if you sign up now, you can look for the purple circle at the bottom of the page and save some money. It’s disappears in a few days.
Can’t wait to see what you create.
September 5, 2018
All three would be great.
First… you invent, design, develop and bring to life things that haven’t been done before.
Fast… you get the work done quickly and efficiently.
Correct… and it’s right the first time, without preventable errors.
Being first takes guts. Being fast takes training. And being correct takes care.
All three at once is rare. Two would be great. And just one (any one) is required if you want to be a professional.
Alas, too often, in our confusion about priorities and our fear of shipping, we end up doing none and settling for average instead.
September 4, 2018
One day a year isn’t much to spend honoring the folks that built everything.
One day a year for the more than twenty that died from the heights and in the caissons as they built the Brooklyn Bridge.
One day a year to remember the 123 women and 23 men who died in the Triangle Shirtwaist tragedy.
And one day a year for the overlooked and disrespected, for the hardworking and the burnt out.
Of course, there’s still factory work to be done, but more and more, the labor each of us do is labor that can’t easily be done by a computer or a robot, work that requires emotional labor, that challenges us to lean just a little bit further into the unknown.
One of the factors that made hard labor palatable was that the economy didn’t offer a lot of choices. If you worked in Lackawanna, you probably worked a farm or in steel mill. It’s not like you spent a great deal of time wondering about what you might be doing instead.
Today, choices are everywhere. Which means that not only do we have to wrestle with insufficiency (of respect, of compensation, of reliable work) but we also have to take responsibility for our freedom. The freedom to choose something better, and even more important, the freedom to do work that matters.
We live in a world that’s moved by connection more than it is by heavy lifting. The connection of seeing and being seen, the connection of creating opportunity and value.
That shift isn’t easy, and for many, it’s painful. But that shift is up to each of us.
Today’s not just the end of summer. Today’s a day to plan how next summer might be very different for us and for those we seek to serve.
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We’re launching the Bootstrapper’s Workshop on Wednesday because we know this is true. And we want to make the difficult work more possible, to create space for you to move forward, to lean in, and to connect with others who have made the choice to shift.
September 3, 2018
“What’s new?”
That’s a fine approach to staying up to date on a situation or field where you are well-informed. After all, if you notice what’s new and incorporate it with what you know, you’ll remain well informed. This is the thesis behind Slack and even email.
The small town police chief has been to every house, met every resident. Hearing about the changes in town are enough for her to stay on top of her job.
The deluge of information being created in every corner of the world, though, means that it’s really unlikely that we’re actually well-informed. Knowing what’s new isn’t sufficient to keep us informed.
It’s possible that you’ve heard every single recorded performance of the Grateful Dead, or read all of Isaac Asimov or understand the nuances in the tax code. But it’s unlikely. And so, if you’re busy checking to see what’s new on the last Sunday of summer in the northern hemisphere, perhaps it makes sense to set the breaking news aside and take a look at the backlist instead.
You can search all of my blog posts at this link. We’ve installed a new search engine and it’s fast and effective. Type in a concept you’re interested in (here’s one) and you might be surprised at what’s there.
That’s the beauty of the backlist. That, and you can always find more of it, whenever you’re ready.
September 2, 2018
Do the ends justify the means? Is it worth lowering your standards and giving up your principles in order to find a better outcome?
Many times, the means are the ends. How we choose to act changes who we choose to become.
The way we choose to get to where we're going defines what it's going to be like when we get there.
September 1, 2018
One of the biggest shifts of giving up a paycheck to start a new venture is the fact that you gave up a paycheck.
Happiness is positive cash flow, and the easiest way to get there is to decrease your spending.
An entrepreneur who is sleeping on a friend’s couch and eating corn flakes for breakfast, lunch and dinner is in far better emotional shape than the one who’s the primary support for a family of four in a fancy house in Scarsdale.
It’s tempting but difficult to raise money to pay yourself first… investors want to pay for for your organization’s assets and market presence, not your overhead.
And it’s difficult to make smart long-term decisions when your narrative of insufficiency is overwhelming.
The two tactics, then, go hand in hand:
- Cut your expenses to the bone before you need to. Every dollar not spent is a dollar you don’t need to raise. Eat cereal, not sushi. (This is the best reason to start a business when you’re in college).
- Find customers who will happily pay you in advance because your service or product is so useful that they can’t live without it. And if your service or product isn’t that useful, make it better.
August 31, 2018
That’s a recent idea. To imagine the world in twenty, fifty or a hundred years. Later than later. To consider the long-term impact of our actions. History as a concept is recent and thinking about the future is even more recent.
Of course, future generations will be mature enough to think even further ahead. Either that or there won’t be future generations…
Many of the long-term forecasts we’re seeing today aren’t particularly rosy. But at least we’re having them, now, when we still have a chance to do something.
And yet, some of the long-term forecasts are rosier than we can even imagine. The leaps forward in medicine, energy production and AI are transforming our world even as we live in it.
When you’re just a little kid, the idea of thinking about “when I grow up” is mostly an ill-formed fantasy. And of course, a teenager simply lives for today, and perhaps the weekend.
Once you’ve made the choice to be a productive artist, though, someone who seeks to make an impact over time, time is either your friend or your opponent. Time is either something you use as a tool or something that works against you.
Part of the appeal of the Focus journal that I did with Moo is that it gives you leverage in your work to shift time. It doesn’t automatically give us long-term thinking, but it plants a seed, a seed that helps us realize that we’re on a journey, not simply at an event.
You currently work with people who will be productively working a hundred years from now. In fact, you might be one of those people. When I started posting these notes in 1992, I had no idea I’d be doing it 26 years later. And now I’m hoping that perhaps I’ll be doing it for at least another quarter century.
Drip, drip, drip.
Time doesn’t fly, not if you refuse to let it. But it does keep moving.
PS Ignore Sunk Costs, the latest episode of my podcast Akimbo, is out now.
August 30, 2018
It doesn’t matter what the questions are, really. They’re a prompt.
When you’re in a job interview, a podcast interview, a sales call, a meeting… if we take the approach that this is a test and there’s a right answer, we’re not actually engaging and moving things forward.
Instead, consider using the question as a chance to see more deeply in what this interaction is for, where are you hoping to go? Focus on status roles, the creation and resolution of tension, and most of all, changing minds.
If you’re not working to change minds, why are you here again?
August 29, 2018
How fast can you go?
This is different from the question we ask ourselves most days at work. Careers are often seen as marathons, designed to last as long as we do.
Sprinting—for an hour, a week or a month—develops a different perspective. It helps us understand our upper limit, establishing a performance setting that reminds us of what’s possible.
Not sprinting randomly, erratically, after shiny objects. Sprinting with intent, in a particular direction…
No one can sprint all the time. By its nature, that’s not sprinting. But sprinting now and then is a useful way to learn that we can make an even bigger difference.
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PS Today’s the last of the year to apply for the altMBA. An extraordinary group of people from all over the world is assembling in a month-long sprint to level up. I hope you can join in and become part of this.
August 28, 2018
Smart phones can hobble us. They connect us, and do it with persistence, drip by drip. But they also push us to make everything fit on a very small screen for a very short time.
Teaching complicated ideas to people on a phone is like trying to teach geography to a bunch of sugared-up kids who just had a triple espresso, while they are standing on one foot being bitten by a swarm of mosquitos.
There could be a direct correlation between smart phone usage and underinformed mass behavior.
Sometimes it’s worth opening up a laptop and slowing down just a bit.
Yes, opening up a laptop might count as slowing down a bit.
August 27, 2018
