About a year ago, I decided I was going to set some weight loss goals for myself. In addition to reading about potential diets and workouts and all that, I did a bit of reading about the psychology behind successful weight loss programs and, in general, setting goals and achieving them. Any guess at what the most important step is, the one that everybody says you must do, yet very few actually do it?
Write your goal down, and post it some place where people can see it.
Now, I’m already somewhat breaking this rule, because really, who can see this blog? Nobody yet. Hopefully that will change as time goes forward. But, for now, here it is. I’m starting a MicroISV. I have no idea what my product will be, which is a small problem. However, not more than a few weeks ago I believed that was an insurmountable problem, that there would be no use in even planting the seeds for starting a business. What changed my mind?
- StackOverflow. As a reader of both Coding Horror and Joel on Software, I was pleased that Jeff and Joel started a weekly podcast earlier this year. I’m a podcast junky, btw. I wasn’t too sure of their initial idea (aren’t there already plenty of Q&A sites out there?), but I followed its progress from the beginning, even signed up for the private beta (which, of course, makes me super special), and watched it blossom into a darn nice website. What struck me was how (relatively) little effort it took Jeff and his team (of three?) to put the site together, how quickly they were able to get it going live, and how popular it has become so quickly. I suspect there are thousands of other website/webapps that have similar birthing periods, but this is the first time I’ve ’seen’ it done, from start to finish. ‘You mean you can actually put something together that quickly?’ As I’ll get to in a later post, I write software desktop software, and getting something together so quickly is unheard of.
- Hackers and Painters. I actually picked up a bunch of books from Joel’s reading list about a month ago, and Hackers and Painters is the fourth one I’m onto. Startup was a great read as well, largely because it close to home with my current job situation (I’ll get to that later as well), and was largely what got me primed for when I got to Paul Graham’s essay How to Make Wealth. It’s a great essay, but had I read it any other time I would have just moved onto the next chapter and not given it a second thought. But at this moment in my life, with my current job situation, with trying to plot a career path, with feeling somewhat helpless as the economy has tanked, with watching my software competencies become largely obsolete (relative to the kind of software I want to create) since graduating from college 4.5 years ago, that essay was a slap in the face and a kick in the butt. It’s time to do something.
So, what am I going to do? Well, given that I don’t have a ‘product’ in mind, I’ll set a goal that will hopefully lead to a product:
I’m going to create something that I would have fun using.
And that’s it, right there. If I don’t know what I’m doing, I may has well have fun doing it.
