Hacker. Human.
Clouds. I like them.
One of the greatest challenges that an newish entrepreneur will face is the challenge of compensation and the significant lifestyle change that must occur in order for their dream to become a reality.
This is especially difficult for the corporate executive who’s attempting to leave their 6-figure income to pursue that “great idea” after having created a lifestyle that requires such a large yearly financial stream of income.
Like you I spend a bunch of time every single day working through my inbox, answering emails, sending emails, reading emails, deleting emails. I’ve shared my personal inbox management system before so you can go ahead and read that if you missed it but the fact is that you and I spend a buttload of time there.
Which means, naturally, that there is a literal cost of real resources that we’ve allocated to it. I emphasize real here because some people have not ever thought about this and are making many people’s lives very miserable, like mine.
The next time you send an email, not just to me, but to anyone, consider how much time you are literally asking them to commit to reading it and what it might cost them, not just to directly respond to the email with a decent and thoughtful response but also what you are asking them to sacrifice in terms of their other responsibilities and priorities.
It makes me even reconsider how “important” the emails that I send out really are.
Have you ever thought about spending time refining your “gut”?
I encountered this idea the other day when talking with a few other entrepreneurs about how they got their start and how they figured out which ideas were the ones that they should passionately and intentionally pursue.
What came from this conversation was a bunch of meaningful takeaways but the most intriguing one was this idea that your gut or intuition is one that is both natural and developed, the latter being an important part of an entrepreneurs’ success.
I began to wrestle with this idea on my drive back and thought about the practicalities of the idea and how one could actively engage, refine, and even train one’s intuition to become even more potent and perhaps more importantly, accurate.
This year is almost half-done and it’s around this time that I start getting that itch, you know, the one type that you can’t quite seem to solve, the one that’s in an unreachable part of your body that you can’t seem to get to.
It’s that itch that something must change, although I’m not entirely sure what it is, but I know it’s there. I also liken it to that cut inside my mouth that I get after chewing sharp chips via my local cuban joint that doesn’t really ever heal because my tongue keeps messing with it.
Well, that example’s a bit grotesque, but I’ll move on.
Dry erase everywhere!
I’m loving what we’ve done in our office as we’ve applied a layer of IdeaPaint on some of the tables and desks that we have around the office.
I especially like that we’ve put it on the tabletop / standup desk environment that I love to use when there.
Have you ever had a premonition? You know, the feeling that something is about to happen but you can’t quite put your finger on it?
It’s the idea that you have some sensation or anticipation of a future event without logical reasoning. It might envelop your mind or you may actually physically feel the affects of it.
I can’t say that I’ve really ever had a premonition or something that really shook me up emotionally and then actually happened – certainly nothing like those events in the movies such as Final Destination franchise, but what crystalized last night as I chatted with my wife about what the rest of this year looks like for our family, was probably as close to a premonition as I’ve come.
The next big thing is happening right now.
It’s being developed in basements, at night, and on the weekends.
It’s being coded on lunch breaks, written in a carpool, or designed on a subway ride.
It’s being concepted in sketchbooks, wireframed on mobile devices, and hacked on a flight from NYC to ATL.
It’s being designed by full-time moms, edited by full time stock brokers who want to do something else with their lives, and even put together, piece by piece, by middle school students who decided that sports wasn’t their thing.
There’s something about Soundcloud that really intrigues me. I think it’s a technology and community that could end up being vastly more disruptive than what the founders had anticipated or set out to do.
With over 38M users and about 5% of them “Pro” subscribers ($38 per year USD) it could be a $72M a year business (although Forbes cite it’s a third of that, with around $20M in sales last year). Profitability isn’t my point though because I’m sure it’ll continue to scale quite nicely.
Some day I’d love to speak at a TEDx (or even TED) event one day.
We’ve got one here in Atlanta, just announced for this year on November 8th, 2013. The theme this year is Catalyze:
Our theme this year is “Catalyze” and we have begun curating our speaker roster for 2013. We are looking for inspirational talks about catalysts in action as well as initiatives/projects/programs that have been unexpectedly accelerated or changed by catalysts.
If you’d love for me to speak at this even then you should consider nominating me (*wink* *wink*).
