Let Me Clarify That Last One…

My last post wasn’t terribly clear; reading it now even I’m not sure what I was trying to say. Can I try again? The problem with my old effort to start a business is that I was trying to develop what Joel Splosky calls a “binary product”. Had I continued the path I was on it would have taken me years to get to the point where I could start getting objective feedback. In the meantime I was seriously burning out. I had already spent a couple of years just proving the concept, and now I was looking at a long road of product development and I just didn’t have it in me. I was ready to bag the whole thing.

And yet, every “find your purpose” exercise I do leads me back to this same effort. Every intellectual analysis of my options brings back to here, even when I am burnt out and sick of it. The I Ching assures me great success; it even goes so far as to interject this message into otherwise unrelated career questions. Erin Pavlina did a reading for me over the summer where she assured me that I was on the right path, but my real goal would not become clear until later on. So maybe this is a step in that direction.

Anyway, I decided to shift gears and develop a blog. I am going to develop the software, but from scratch, and along a different path. I want to develop something great, but the writing on the blog will offset the inevitable weaknesses in the early code. That is, the blog allows me to produce value now, while I spend the time developing the product. I have a lot of insights that I can share, that I have wanted to share, but didn’t because I was concerned about the immaturity of what I was working on. Foolish, in hindsight. What a relief to have finally made that breakthrough. I still have years of work ahead of me, but at least there something that I can focus on right now.

So here I am, starting from scratch. Again.

And by the way, I am intentionally not mentioning the names or websites of my projects. I’d like to keep this a place where I can talk about personal or wacky, far out stuff without worrying about scaring away potential customers or partners. Maybe someday later on, with success running rampant through my life, I’ll “cross the streams“.