Adam McFarland

Tonight my little sister Jenna graduated from 8th grade. I accompanied her and my parents to the ceremony held at the high school that I graduated from back in 2000. Being twelve years apart with no siblings in between, I always feel like there’s a huge gap between my generation and her generation. In reality, there really isn’t. Much of what she goes through is the same as what I went through twelve years ago. Take tonight for an example:

The principle gives a speech about reaching for your dreams, pursuing your passions, and striving to do something amazing. The teachers hand out all sorts of awards to the kids who have perfect attendance or have an average over 90. Each kid gets called up and given a diploma, a class picture, and a folder with certificates for their various achievements. My sister had nothing short of 20 different awards and certificates. Don’t get me wrong, she’s a great student. But is anyone that good? I’m guessing most kids went home with the same bag of goodies. We live in a world where everyone gets a trophy for just trying. Kids become conditioned to being rewarded for just showing up.

The question I kept asking myself was: does all of this give our kids the best chance to succeed? As the (very long) graduation ceremony began my mind started to drift back to the time twelve years ago when I was sitting in the exact same spot. I thought about who was in my graduating class and what they’re doing now. Some have gone on to start businesses (two of my partners - Mike and Greg - were in my 8th grade graduating class). Some are working in politics. Some have joined the peace corps. Most have settled for mundane jobs and given up on their dreams. Still, others have hit rock bottom and become addicts or criminals. Yet twelve years ago we all sat there just like my sister. We were all filled with hopes and dreams and promises of greatness to come. Why did some veer off course?

At that point I realized something - our parents don’t prepare us for greatness. They prepare us for mediocrity, to be average. Do you want your kid to cure cancer? Start their own business? Join the army or the peace corps? Work for a non-profit? Get a Ph.D? Teach inner city kids?  Help the disabled? The question parents should ask themselves deep down: do you really want your kid to change the world?

Every single parent would answer “yes” to that question. But their actions speak louder than their words, and the two don’t agree. They’ll go on and on about how their child will become president or solve our energy crisis, but what they don’t realize is that achieving anything great requires hard work, sacrifice, passion, focus, determination, and most importantly the ability to deal with failure. Because most likely, if you’re striving for greatness, you’re going to fail. Achieving great things is hard. Most of the great things in this world have been discovered or achieved by people who relentlessly fought for what they believed in even when they failed repeatedly, even when they ran out of money, and even when others told them to quit and get a “real job”.

Parents: how will you react when your kid has $20k in student loans and leaves a secure job to start a company like I did? Or when they take a leave of absence from college to go overseas to help in Darfur? Or when they decide to join the army and go fight in Iraq because that’s what they believe in? You’ll get nervous. You’ll push back. You’ll ask them to reconsider. Because it scares you to see them fail. But what you don’t realize is that your fear also prohibits them from doing something great. Your fear pushes them into working 50 hours a week doing something they don’t love because it’s “safe” or “secure”. Our world has warped our minds into believing that your 401K is more important than your happiness or what you do for others.

We do a great job of telling our kids to be great, we just do a horrible job teaching them the traits they need to become great.  My advice to every graduate this spring - be it 8th grade, high school, or college - you truly can do anything that you want with your life. Dream the impossible, then do it. Cherish that mentality - don’t let other people ever take it away from you.

Back in February I wrote a post about positive reinforcement.  At the time we were just realizing how important it was for all four of us to see the positive feedback that the others get.  The prime example that I used were Detailed Image orders.  At the time we weren’t yet in the warehouse and George and Greg were doing 100% of the shipping of the products.  There was no real “need” for Mike and I to also see the emails every time a sale came through, but we started doing it after I realized that it was helping our morale to open up our inbox and see ten orders instead of just getting weekly sales updates.

It’s crazy how much this has helped.  We all get the immediate positive feedback any time a sale comes through.  We also all have become great at inspecting orders at a quick glance for any errors.  As refined as our system is, there are infinite order possibilities - I’d say 1 in 100 orders still has one of us doing some manual work to double check that everything went through properly.  A few times each week I make minor tweaks to the code to prevent a wacky scenario from happening again.

BUT positive reinforcement also works the other way.   Weekends and Monday’s have been our biggest sales days the past few months.  Of course, the days where we get the most work done are probably Tuesday - Friday.  See where this could mess with you mentally?  I feel like in the middle of the week I’m working my ass off and seeing so-so sales.  Then we’re out drinking beers on the weekends, doing no work at all, and George pulls up our system on his iPhone and shows everyone how much money we just make during dinner.

Don’t get me wrong - making $1,000 while you’re out drinking for the night is a cool feeling that you can’t really get unless you run your own business.   However, waking up every day in the middle of the week and seeing sales slow down a bit kind of sucks.   You go from the high of all highs to just feeling OK about things.  Even though I know the weekends are when we make our money it still messes with my head.  I’ve become conditioned to seeing a sale as my positive reinforcement for doing a good job, whereas I used to just think that the completion of my daily tasks was enough.  Not saying that we shouldn’t be monitoring sales closely, but doing so often has the by product of being on a roller coaster ride emotionally based upon how many customers purchased on that particular day.

I’ve never met a business owner who thought it was easy to take a step back and enjoy what they’ve accomplished.

Businesses always have unique problems, issues, things that are unsettled that stress owners out.  It’s because of this that you either fall flat on your face or develop an extreme sense of optimism and a strong work ethic.  Unfortunately those are accompanied by a feeling of constantly being worried that this problem or that problem is going to crumble your business.  The same things that make it possible for one to succeed in business are the exact qualities that make it difficult to appreciate the hard work done.

For me, this week has been one big crap sandwich filled with twists and turns caused by the growing pains of our business.  It’s seemed like we were completely doomed several times in the past, yet we’re still around.  This is no different - we had a stressful week, but the big picture is still pretty good.  Nonetheless, it’s hard to see that right now we’re already a pretty impressive business, regardless of what the future brings.  Sometimes I even feel guilty for taking a few minutes and telling my partners they did a good job or for taking a moment and admiring what we’ve accomplished.  Not because I think it’s wrong, but because I’ve become conditioned to always pushing towards bigger and better things.  It feels like it’s a sign of weakness to be “content” with the company, if even for a second. Us business owners, we always have something bigger and better down the pipeline.

Then again, my personality is such that I am a pretty genuinely happy guy.  I  am very appreciative for what I have.  I do not lack any of the truly important things in life.  It’s like a personality split that pulls me back and forth.   The drive to do better is a blessing, but the inability to appreciate it when you actually have done better is a curse.  Very frustrating.

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Sorry for the lack of posts this week.  I had some good ones planned (or at least ones I thought would be good), but it’s been one of those overly chaotic weeks where even when I do get a free moment to relax or get some work done I’m so frazzled that I cannot think straight.  Not a week where my productive output plan really came into play much, although for all of the other more “normal” weeks I’ve been adhering to it pretty well.

“Without realizing it, we fill important places in each other’s lives. It’s that way with a minister and congregation. Or with the guy at the corner grocery store, the mechanic at the local garage, the family doctor, teachers, neighbors, co-workers. Good people, who are always ‘there’, who can be relied upon in small, important ways. People who teach us, bless us, encourage us, support us, uplift us in the dailiness of life. We never tell them. I don’t know why, but we don’t.

And of course, we fill that role ourselves. There are those who depend on us, watch us, learn from us, take from us. And we never know. Don’t sell yourself short. You may never have proof of your importance, but you are more important than you think.”

-Robert Fulghum, All I Really Needed to Know I Learned in Kindergarten (great non-business book, by the way)

A few days ago I received an email from Adnan, who runs the very popular young entrepreneur blog Blogtrepreneur. The message included the following (reproduced with his permission of course):

This is going to sound random, but I really wanted to shoot you an email just basically saying that your blog has been my favourite read over the past year. Out of the 30-40 blogs in my feedreader, and the many, many blogs I frequent over the course of the day, yours is the one I most look forward to reading.

I wrote back and expressed my gratitude for taking the time to write such an email. Emails like that are why I blog. Hell, getting emails like that are what I live for. There are few things that make someone happier and more satisfied than to hear that they are appreciated.

The world truly would be a better place if we all took more time to share our appreciation with others. For some reason it’s a really hard thing to do (for most people anyway), but that doesn’t mean we can’t work on it. It’s not an easy thing to do whether the person is really close like a family member, or someone you routinely encounter like that person you chat with a few days a week at the gym.

Today I challenge you to tell someone important in your life how much they mean to you. I’m going to start by following Adnan’s lead - emailing my favorite blogger - and then try to carry the momentum over to the rest of my life.

As any college student will tell you, scheduling classes is an art form. My first semester I didn’t have much choice and had to take whatever was available. My second semester I loaded up on Monday and Thursday and had the rest of the week off. It sucked - Mondays and Thursdays wore me out and the rest of the week I had to spend 10 hours doing homework. My third semester I put large gaps between my classes so I’d have time to get work done during the day, but all I did was bone around on ESPN.com and AIM.

My fourth semester I finally got it right: 1 - 3 hour breaks between classes, equally spread out throughout the week. I got the same amount of work done in a 2 hour break that I’d get done in a 5 hour break the previous semester. I didn’t mess around and waste time because I was under a time crunch. A 2 hour break really means like 70 minutes of work when you factor travel time and setup time into the equation. You don’t have any time to mess around with 70 minutes: you’re always under a bit of pressure and that’s why you get so much done. You’re focused. This one lesson has stuck with me ever since.

Read the following excerpts and stop and think for a few minutes before continuing the post.

If you’re an employee, spending time on nonsense is, to some extent, not your fault. There is often no incentive to use time well unless you are paid on commission. The world has agreed to shuffle papers between 9 and 5, and since you’re trapped in the office for that period of servitude, you are compelled to create activities to fill the time. Time is wasted because there is so much time available. It’s understandable.

Most entrepreneurs were once employees and come from the 9-5 culture. Thus they adopt the same schedule, whether or not they function at 9 AM or need 8 hours to generate their target income. This schedule is a collective social agreement and a dinosaur legacy of the results-by-volume approach. How is it possible that all the people in the world need exactly 8 hours to accomplish their work? It isn’t. 9-5 is arbitrary.

Since we have 8 hours, we fill 8 hours. If we had 15, we would fill 15. If we have an emergency and suddenly need to leave work in 2 hours, we miraculously complete those assignments in 2 hours.

Tim Ferriss - The Four Hour Workweek, pages 73-74

ROWE stands for Results-Only Work Environment. In a ROWE, each person is free to do whatever they want, whenever they want, as long as the work gets done. Currently, there are two authentic ROWEs—Fortune 100 retailer Best Buy Co, Inc. and J. A. Counter & Associates, a small brokerage firm in New Richmond, WI. At both organizations, the old rules that govern a traditional work environment—core hours, “face time,” pointless meetings, etc.—have been replaced by one rule: focus only on results.

In the 4-Hour Workweek, you helped people understand that because of technology, people don’t have to defer living until retirement. They can design their own lifestyle. Now imagine what would happen if the entire culture of a workplace went through the same transformation. That’s what a ROWE is. A ROWE is a work culture that gives people the power to take control of their lives. As long as they get their job done, they’re free.

One of the misconceptions about ROWE is that it’s a work-from-home program. It’s not. If you want to work in a cube, that’s great. If you want to work from a coffee shop, then that’s great, too. The question in a ROWE is not “where is everybody?” but “is the work getting done?”

Cali Ressler and Jody Thompson in an interview with Tim Ferriss

The United States leads the world in two categories: work and waste. American employees put in more hours and take fewer vacations than just about anyone else in the industrialized world, and our individual ecological “footprints” are much larger.

Coincidence? I think not. The way we work drives our habits of consumption and waste. The more we work, the more we drive, the more energy we burn, the more styrofoam to-go containers we use. At the end of the day, we’re so tired, we devour more takeout and TV, often falling asleep in front of the latter. If we want to accelerate the recent trend of reducing waste, it may be time to consider the radical step of, well, relaxing more, consuming less, and living fuller lives. May the Wall Street Journal editorial board strike me down.

Naturally, most businesses blanch at the notion of giving up any competitive edge in a globalized economy. But it’s not as if moving to a four-day (or 32-hour) workweek would simply lop 20% off the economy. Cutting hours may actually raise per-hour productivity. France, home of the 35-hour week, creates more GDP per work hour than the United States ($37 versus $34, as of 2003). Norway spanks us too ($39), and Norwegians work 26% fewer hours a year than Americans. It’s a myth of modern hypercapitalism that an overworked, sleep-deprived, stressed-out workforce is a necessity. Studies have consistently shown that longer workweeks increase productivity only in the very short term. In a recent survey by Salary.com, workers copped to wasting about 20% of the average day Web surfing and gossiping. Sound familiar?

Companies can take the first step by reinventing the workweek. Then it’s up to us to devote our increased leisure hours to activities with low environmental impact — and not to driving around gas-guzzling cars or booting up power-hungry electronics. Then we could enjoy both continued wealth and improved planetary health.

David Roberts - Reinventing the Workweek, Green Business Practices - Fast Company: May 2008

OK, soak those in for a second…got it? Here’s what I think when I read excerpts like that:

The Logical Thought

So if I’m not an employee, and we’re in long term growth mode (past the start-up phase), and 9-5 is completely arbitrary, and it’s shown that less time working will make me more productive per hour spent, and if I’ll be healthier/happier by spending more time on things outside of work, and it’s better for the environment, why the f*ck am I working so many hours?

In the startup phase there’s a “cavalier” attitude that you have to have. Life = work and work = life, and that’s OK. But I’ve been doing that for two years and I don’t want to become that guy who works 24×7 for their entire life and misses out on everything else. I enjoy new experiences and new people. I enjoy experiencing life. A large part of that is being an entrepreneur, but there’s also a lot that has nothing to do with running a business.

I spent a lot of my engineering days in college, on internships, and in the work force working on Six Sigma and Lean Manufacturing projects and always thought to myself “why can’t these principles be applied to areas in business outside of manufacturing?” What 4HWW did for me was validate that increasing effectiveness and efficiency not only can be applied to all areas of a business, but in all areas of life too. Like everyone else I have become conditioned to 9 -5 and needed a little push to realize that I didn’t have to stay a part of it.

What I Want us to Become

I badly want us to become a model of efficiency and effectiveness. I want it because it makes us a more valuable company. I want it because removing the mundane and repetitive improves the quality of our lives.

In my head, all of this starts with our business processes. Unless you’ve got a ton of money (we don’t) you need to do the equivalent of hiring people by automating anything that is repetitive and can be done without human input. It started with our shopping cart software that automates inventory and shipping (side note: we had the owners of a large e-commerce store that’s been running for twelve years come visit us recently. The founder turned to George and said “I could fire two employees if I had that technology”. That made me feel all warm and fuzzy inside). It continued by moving all of our data to the web and automating backups and with George automating his accounting. In the future we’ll automate more of our marketing - while things like Google Base submission are automatic, niche newsletters based on customer behavior aren’t quite there yet…but they will be.

Once the business processes are set we can move on to us. We all want to work less hours. Some tasks - like packing and shipping - cannot reasonably be automated with technology so the way you “automate” them is to hire employees. I feel that by the end of ‘09 we’ll have the 2-3 people in place that we need to allow us to work 20 hour workweeks. That’s my personal goal for each of us - the other guys might be thinking less or more, but that’s what I’m pushing for.

How did I come up with 20 hours? In 4HWW Tim Ferriss asks the question “If you had a heart attack and had to work 2 hours per day, what would you do?” He asks the question to challenge you to think about what you really need to do to successfully complete your job. However, he bases this on the premise that you don’t like your job and want to work as little as possible. That’s not me/us. I love this stuff. One of the things I really want to do a lot this summer is white water rafting - I’ve been twice and it was fun as hell so I want to officially make it one of my hobbies. I’m pumped. But I equally want to expand upon an email marketing system that we recently launched (right now we send follow-up emails to everyone who makes a purchase asking them to review their products on the DI blog or TD forum, but there’s a ton of growth potential there). I also equally want to hike every state park in the Albany area. Of course I also equally want to bulk up my AJAX skills and improve the user experience on our cart.

Clearly I love our company as much as I love non-work related things. It’s a good place to be in life. 20 hours limits you just enough so that you get excited to work. If I can only work 20 hours the intensity in which I work will be multiplied many times over. I’ll also really look forward to those few hours a day instead of letting my mind drift to things that I might rather be doing.

What I’m Doing About it

I realize that this all starts with me. I’m the one usually “proposing” these wacky things to my partners so I have to prove the concept before I can expect them to get on board. 20 hours isn’t realistic right now because we don’t have an employee and won’t for a while. However, I’m always looking to make progress and prove my point so I’ve decided to limit myself to 35 hours of work each week. After a few months, I’m going to make it 30. Then I’ll stay at 30 until we have our 2-3 employees in place and trained.

What counts as “work” you ask? Good question. I’m counting everything that is related to running Pure Adapt with the exception of:

• Commuting time
• Blog posts on this blog
• Time spent reading business books or business magazines
• Time spent learning (for example, I have a few AJAX books that will take a lot of time to work through…those don’t count)

Everything else is fair game. I purposely waited until the end of Thursday to do this post because I wanted to test my limitation this week. This week is the perfect test week - if I can do it this week I can do it 95%+ of the time. Being that I got NOTHING done last week with our server mess, my to-do list was backed up a ton. On Sunday night I took all 20 action items and split them up equally among the days of the week. In my head I said to myself “you’re only going to have 6 or 7 hours to do all of this, so you better be focused”. It has worked. Every day I knocked each item off. I am getting at least as much work done in far less time. Some days I worked right up to the last second and others - like today - I was done early. Thus far here are the hours I’ve worked:

• Monday - 7 AM - 2:30 PM (7.5 hrs)
• Tuesday - 7:30 AM - 4 PM (8.5 hrs)
• Wednesday - 7:30 AM - 1:30 PM (6 hrs)
• Thursday - 7:30 AM - 1 PM (5.5 hrs)

That puts me at 27.5 hrs through Thursday. We each have four days at the warehouse and one “off”. My off day is Friday, so I generally do the most work Monday - Thursday. 7.5 hours for Friday - Sunday sounds just about right. I’ll probably work about 4 hours tomorrow, 3 hours on Saturday, and just check email on Sunday (Indy 500 baby….anyone else pumped!?!?!).

This past four days has been the best of my life in terms of work-life balance. There’s nothing outside of work that I wanted to do that I didn’t. That’s huge for me. I’ve also stopped doing work at home - I do most of my work at the warehouse and the rest at Starbucks/other local coffee shops, which helps me mentally unwind when I walk through the door of my apartment. Continuing this schedule will go a long way to ensuring I get the fulfillment I’m looking for out of both work AND life.

I’ll definitely continue to post updates as this unfolds…should be interesting.

Last week was supposed to be a laid back week for me.  I moved to a new apt the week prior so I just wanted to take some time to settle into the new living situation.

Obviously with our server issues that didn’t happen.  The stress/frustration caught up with me and - despite the site move going relatively well - I was on the edge of being burnt out.  Obviously it was a cumulative thing that accrued over the past 2+ years and didn’t just start last week.  I was trying to look at the summer and my move as a chance to regain a little balance and have some more fun outside of work, but last week almost sent me over the edge.  I wanted to be spending my nights playing basketball, having drinks with friends, watching the NBA/NHL playoffs, and catching up on sleep…not doing something I’ve never done before under extreme pressure and with a lack of sleep.

I took Friday completely off and spent the day hiking by myself at Thacher Park.  I’d say I hiked a good portion of the 12 miles of trails.   It rained a bit, but I enjoyed chilling out in the cave next to the waterfall on the Indian Ladder trail for a while.  That’s kind of “my spot” where I go to take stock on shit and regain balance.  Ironically, despite being almost 30 minutes from the warehouse, you can get a crystal clear view of the industrial park because of the elevation.  Other than that though, the thought of work didn’t cross my mind and I was temporarily refreshed.

George and I then went out for dinner/drinks at the chic Avenue A in Albany on Saturday night, which again gave my mind some time away from “server server server”.

Sunday I looked at my to-do list from last week and realized I did 0% of it.  I slowly started chipping away at a reasonable plan to get it all done this week while still working “normal” hours.  Today I got my work done in a reasonable six hours or so (more to come on this - I’m fairly certain that I can work less and accomplish more. I’m planning on placing a work restriction on myself to show that…and give me the dual benefit of retaining my sanity).

Oh, the best part - we nearly made up all of the lost revenue by having a MONSTER weekend and beginning of the week thus far.   From Friday night until Monday morning orders were off the hook - we ended up shipping out 60 orders this morning, easily a record for us.   Average order value was well over $100, so needless to say we’re feeling pretty good about things.  Monday is also the only day where we all work together in the warehouse, so it’s nice to get a little of that energy you get from feeding off the synergy we have as a team.

As usual, never a dull moment.

“For everything you have missed, you have gained something else; and for everything you gain, you lose something else.

-Ralph Waldo Emerson

The word sacrifice is often associated with entrepreneurs. Young business owners like myself often get peppered with questions about making less money or living with their parents or spending less time at the bar with friends, all in the name of their company. As you get older you usually have to deal with paying a mortgage, balancing a marriage, and spending time with your kids.

It’s easy to second guess your decision to start a company. One truth that has always helped me: it is not humanly impossible to have everything in life. There are always tradeoffs with every decision you make, every day, large or small. Some people might look like they have it all together - they don’t. I’m sure you envy Michael Jordan for all of his fame and success…but I’m sure he envies you for being able to take a stroll in the park with your girlfriend without getting mobbed.

We’re in an interesting position with our company right now in the sense that our large development projects are done and DI/TD sales are good enough that we can all take our foot off the pedal just a little bit. From this point on I think we could each work a 40 hour work week (or probably a little less) and the company would still grow. In the 2+ years since I left my job I’ve never quite been in this position. It makes you really, really think about your choices and how you spend your time.

Adam Gilbert did a series of posts about How to Tell if Someone is Full of Shit a while back. His way of finding out what is really important to someone: take a look at their calendar. We all have a finite time to spend on earth and how we spend it tells others what we truly care about.

A lot of people always talk about what they want to do, what they want to accomplish, what they meant to do, their intentions, how they want to change the world and on and on and on.

It seems as though everyone has intentions of doing big things. Clearly, sadly and unfortunately, that’s not the case. Most people are talkers, rather than doers. Let’s face it. It’s a lot easier to talk than do.

In a world where people are moving a million miles per minute how can you actually tell what someone really cares about?

Look at their calendar! It’s that simple.

Your calendar never lies. All we have is our time. The way we spend our time is our priorities, is our strategy. Your calendar knows what you really care about.

I never understand people who work 20 hour days yet preach about how important their family is to them. Really?

I’m not trying to say that running a business isn’t hard or doesn’t require tough decisions (read any random five posts on this blog and it’s evident we’ve gone through our fair share of struggles as a company and that I’ve had many of my own personal frustrations). My point is this: stop saying “what if?” and “I wish I did that”. Think really hard about what’s important to you and find a way to spend time doing that. If you factor that into every decision to make, there’s no reason to second guess yourself. “Failures” are learning experiences just as much (or more than) “successes”.

Every once in a while I ask myself “what if” about an array of topics (business, sports, life, relationships) and I always come to the same conclusion: I’ve spent my time doing what I love most, each and every day. Several times I’ve even written out my “ideal day” on a sheet of paper and each time I realize that it pretty closely resembles my real day right now…how cool is that? Sure there are other things I’d like to do. Sure I’d like a little more work-life balance. But how can I call what I’ve done “sacrifice” when I’ve gained so much in return? Just because what I do is different from what most people do in their twenties doesn’t make it any harder or any easier than the norm. As I age and priorities change, my ideal day will change and in turn so will my real day. In the meantime, I’ve met so many great people and had so much fun building our company that I can’t imagine anything making me happier.

Every once in a while I have one of those moments where I say to myself  “holy crap, I can’t believe this - I’m 25 years old and my partners and I run a company.  We’ve built our own e-commerce platform and have our own warehouse, and we did it without giving up any stock or taking any outside money.  I am living my dream.”  It’s so easy to get caught up in the day to day crap that I forget that sometimes.

Things are going good right now for us.  We weathered the storm of all of the moving expenses.  Our sales have been on the high side of what we were projecting.  The only way we don’t pay ourselves before our June 1 deadline is if we choose not to do so - cash flow is very good.  On a personal level, I’m moving into an apartment closer to the warehouse in a few weeks (cutting my commute in half).  It’ll be my 7th move in 7 years by my count, so hopefully I’ll stay at this place for a while.  There’s some stability after a few years of chaos, and it’s refreshing to be able to focus on my work without it consuming the entirety of my existence.

Dare I say it without coming across as lazy or satisfied:  I’ve finally made it.

I can finally say that without a doubt I can do this for a living.  It’s no longer a pipe dream.  I’m no longer a “lost” kid who left his career to tool around for a while with a business before going back to the “real world”.  This is for real, and it’s so f*cking awesome I can’t put it into words.   It doesn’t matter to me that we aren’t “rich” because that’s not what it’s about to me:  it’s about the experience, it’s about living your life to your full potential without others getting in your way, it’s about building something great with other people who believe in it as much as you do.  All of the ideas I’ve really wanted to pursue - SportsLizard, iPrioritize, Music-Alerts, the shopping cart, etc - I’ve been able to get to market and see what the market thinks about them.  How many people get to turn their “best” ideas into a reality?  Yes, it’s come with a lot of sacrifice, but I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Like most of us, the time in my life when I met the most new people and developed the most relationships was in college.  Lately - for some reason known only to God - I’ve been hearing from and running into a ton of people that I haven’t heard from in years.  It’s been great catching up with everyone and seeing what they are doing.  However, I’ve noticed a pattern - many of them aren’t doing what they want to be doing.  In and of itself, this isn’t a huge deal…as long as you’re working towards what you want to be doing, or what you feel you are called to be doing.

But most of them aren’t working towards what they want to be doing.  They aren’t trying.  They aren’t even thinking about trying.  I’ve spent a lot of time thinking back to conversations I had when I was in college.   I thought back to discussions about passion and drive and determination, and what these friends wanted to do with their lives.  We all had big dreams.  Sadly, in a matter of five years or less most of the people I know have given up on their dreams.  This has nothing to do with being married, having kids, or working a crappy job for a while:  I understand that circumstance often dictates what you do for money.  It has to do with the fact that they’ve given up - you can hear it in their voice.  They are content to not pursue the things I was so sure they’d pursue only a few years ago.  It’s sad and it boggles my mind.  How can they not even try?  How can they not even  take a chance?  Won’t they wonder what if?  Why don’t they just spend a few hours a week working towards their dreams…at night, on the weekends, over their lunch break?  I just can’t comprehend that.  I can’t comprehend giving up.

In the words of the immortal Jimmy V:  Don’t give up, don’t ever give up. 

It’s a weird feeling that I always get around this time. Every single time I’ve launched a new site or project I’ve felt the same thing, best described by a post I wrote back in 2006 just after the launch of iPrioritize:

From my limited experience as an entrepreneur, I’ve come to the realization that the day after the launch of a new business or product is a weird one. The initial excitement and relief of the launch has been replaced with a realization that you have exactly zero customers. Now, maybe for some people this doesn’t happen the next day, but I’d say something’s wrong if you are still celebrating your launch a week later.

I woke up in a weird mood today. I had that “holy crap, how am I going to get people to start using my site and eventually buy my service” feeling, despite the fact that I have a well-thought out marketing plan to execute. I suppose that I get this feeling because marketing is such an inexact science.

For the past week I was in sort of a post-launch-work-life-funk. All day long I’ve felt anxious and unsatisfied (not typical at all for me) and I’ve questioned if I/we have done everything we could have done to make the site great.

The difference this time is experience: I’ve felt this feeling before and it’s always gone away as soon as things start to pick up and I realize that our months of development were justified. Tastefully Driven has been shipping out 2-3 orders a day, which is fantastic for a nine day old site. I’ve got to remember that we’re in this for the long haul and we don’t need $50k months right off the bat to be having success. I knew this all along - it was part of our plan, but I still got the same anxiety. So I started asking myself WHY.

I think I was wrong back in 2006 - it’s not at all because marketing is an inexact science. It’s because you downshift yourself from going balls out to launch a site to a more steady, long-term marketing strategy. It’s a massive life change that’s akin to switching from being a sprinter to a marathon runner.

For months I was pushing with everything I could to launch the site. Since I knew it was a short term thing, I could work 15 hour days and push aside other aspects of my life. The “rush” was always there because I saw us rapidly achieving goals that brought us closer to the ultimate goal: launch.

Now, I’m doing a mix of things that will bring some sales right away (PPC, product syndication, etc) and things that will bring in sales months/years from now (blog posts, forum posts, videos). Programming goes from exciting features to mundane maintenance, with the occasional exciting feature a few times a year. The ultimate goal is thriving over a period of years, something that’s much harder to get motivated for.

I KNOW from experience that what we’re doing is right and will work. I also know because nine days in things are going about as good as they possibly could (from a sales standpoint and from other important metrics). I feel like a puppet-master who knows exactly what strings to pull at exactly the right times - a skill that only comes with experience.

That said, it’s still a major life change and those take a while to adjust to no matter how confident and prepared you are. The rest of my life that I set aside for a few months now resurfaces and I’ve got to deal with the things that will allow me to live a more balanced life so I don’t burn out - I’ve got to ensure I finish the marathon and that means working a bit less and doing a bit more for myself.

After about a week I feel like I’m getting into a new “groove” and am beginning to find my place. But man, I’m happy we aren’t planning on starting any new sites for a while - even though I knew this funk was probably coming it still sucked.

I’ve never actually heard another business owner talk about this, but I’d imagine it’s a somewhat common feeling for anyone that sells out for something for a short, intense period of time.

I’ve never been the world’s biggest Tiger Woods fan. I respect him, am in awe of his athletic ability, and admire his work ethic. However, I’ve always thought he came across a bit too ‘rehearsed’ and not ‘real’ enough…kind of like Michael Jordan. Nothing wrong with that I suppose, but in sports, business, and in life I tend to look up to people who are a little more transparent and strong in their convictions.

All of that said, his interview this week with Scott Van Pelt for the ESPN Sports Center Sunday Conversation was fantastic. Slowly but surely (likely because of his marriage, child, and death of his father) it feels like he’s showing a little more of his true self, which I find refreshing.

One sequence in particular stood out as particularly interesting to me. It shows the type of desire and focus that you need to be great at anything in life:

SVP: “You have 64 wins on the PGA Tour, a fortune in the bank, how do you fight the human nature that says ‘I’m going to hit the snooze button today, I’m gonna take my foot off the gas, I’m just gonna coast for a while.’ Where does the hunger inside of you come from?”

Tiger: “I don’t know how you can think any other way”.

SVP: “There’s no….what would allow you to be satisfied?”

Tiger: “Hmm - win more.”

SVP: “So the 64th is…it feels as good, as fulfilling, as the 1st, the 2nd, the 33rd?”

Tiger: “God yes. Oh yeah”.

SVP: “So there’s no point when you can sort of put the feet up on a Tuesday afternoon and say ‘Today I’m not going to the gym’.?

Tiger: “No. Because the next…that’s…I look at life as: the greatest thing about tomorrow is that I will be better than I am today. And that’s the way I’ve always lived my life. So I have no understanding why people do hit the snooze button because you have a chance to become a better person, become - for me - a better athlete…all the different things you can do to become better for tomorrow. Why wouldn’t you take advantage of that?”

You can check out the full interview on the video below: