I’ve heard minecraft's success 'explained' in so many ways, from luck to marketing genius to niche appeal. Watching notch code, I think it's due more to a very competent, hardworking guy putting in an unbelievable number of hours. He just gets it done.
I still don't get the appeal of Minecraft, but clearly its creator understands the cause => effect flow of hard work, experience, and generally getting things done.
– Rahul Bijlani, via rahulbijlani.comA revolutionary thought! The point of my life was to enjoy it to its potential, with goals to set the direction in which I was headed.
This was my new definition of the game.
And it meant it was impossible to run out of time, because every day was a brand new opportunity to play and win.
The point being — you're not wasting your time if you're doing what makes you happy. Rahul used to worry about the goalposts always moving, making success just a new starting point for another, more impossible, farther goal which implies success.
It's often tough for me, but I've found that the best way to be happy is to look at all experiences as valuable, even your "failures".
Around my internet1, there’s been a recent meme concerning dedication to starting your own business. It’s not unique to our time, but over the past week it feels like everything I read, watch, or listen to is talking to me about the need to devote yourself fully to whatever it is that you believe your business to be, otherwise it will likely never get done.
Dan Benjamin and Merlin Mann talked about it on the latest episode of their podcast Back to Work, Jim Coudal implored us to build your beer cozies today, and… those are the only two I can remember right now, but it feels like I’ve been pestered with these messages for the past week non-stop.
Listening to these smart, successful exemplars in my industry, I realized that I had essentially followed their advice. I spent all of 2010 as a full-time self-employed freelance programmer, and now, in 2011, I work a “corporate” job while relegating projects of passion to my off-hours. What happened?
When I finished my Master’s degree (you don’t have to call me “Master” if you don’t want to) at the end of 2009, I knew exactly what I was going to do. I was going to take my 2 current freelance (programming) clients, find a few more, and eventually hire employees and sit back while they make me lots of money. I was even going to expedite the “retire on a tropical beach” part of it by setting up my business in Porlamar, Venezuela. By my back-of-the-napkin calculations, between my current meager freelance income and Edyta’s doctoral scholarship, we would live quite comfortably in relative solitude and peace in the tropics, given the expat-favoring pricing in Venezuela.
The plan was to stay there for 1 year. We lasted 3 months.
Then, 6 months after we moved back to the U.S., I was looking for a “normal” job.
Well, our general reason for leaving Venezuela was that we couldn’t get a reliable internet connection — a vital tool in both of our fields of work.
But in general, I found that while many of the aspects of freelancing were empowering, other aspects were putting my brain’s anxiety receptors on high alert. You’ve heard about the empowering aspects already — no boss, working on what you want, etc. — so I’m only going to explain how the empowering aspects lost out (for the time being) to the anxiety-inducing aspects.
Overall, these things (and other, less explainable things) contributed to my anxiety over running my own business. And this doesn’t even get into the anxiety of an exciting startup project turning sour (another post, another time).
So I suppose this is where I put in a little warning to all the would-be self-employers out there. Be as aware as you can be. Which is probably not enough. You can do it if that’s your goal. But the alternatives are not so bad, if you ask me.
This deserves a post of its own, but what I mean by “my internet” is simple enough: the internet as I experience it is not always the same as the internet as you experience it. We follow different Twitterers, we post to different message boards, we use different photo-sharing services. Does that make sense? ↩
This post was graciously edited by Marc Ubaldi
