Why? Because while I was away Greg closed on a new house. Mike and I both told him that we’d cover as much of his work as we could for the rest of the month while he got settled and took care of the plethora of projects that any new home owner is faced with. Just as Greg has covered for us when we have traveled in the past. In my case, Greg covered as much as he could for me while I was in Virginia even though he was finalizing things with the house closing. He and Mike also covered for me during the hurricane disaster.

The most important function of our business (or any business for that matter) is ensuring that our customers have a great experience with us. Sure it would be nice to get some development work done or work on some marketing projects, but those pale in comparison to making sure that every order gets shipped out quickly and accurately, and that those customers who have questions about their order get taken care of quickly. Any time one of those areas weakens, we immediately shift our resources in that direction. Could Greg have answered all of the customer service questions? Probably. But it certainly would have been stressful for him, and the customers probably would have had to wait longer to have their inquiry resolved. It makes total sense for me to shift off of development and over to customer service. This just seems completely logical to us.

There’s a nice side benefit to this: I get to see the business from a completely different perspective. As an owner, that’s hugely valuable to me. In this case, I’m answering a lot of customer service questions as we’re in the process of hiring someone to do just that. Think that will help in the interviewing and training process?

I think this is somewhat to be expected of owners of a small business. The good owners at least anyway. It becomes more difficult when you expect this level of teamwork from your employees. Everything we do has a purpose, so the last thing I ever want to hear from an employee is “I’m not doing that because it’s not my job”. That’s the antithesis of teamwork. As I look around at the people I’ve worked with over the years, it seems like this is a personality trait you either have or don’t have. If someone is out for themselves without regard for their peers or the company’s customers, no amount of structure is going to help them become a good teammate.

However, I think a company can make it easier or more difficult for someone to be a team player. If someone’s raise is rigidly tied to specific projects getting done, it’s hard to fault them for doing anything other than those projects. If, as managers, you don’t do a good job of explaining “why” you need someone to shift gears and help somewhere else, it’s hard to expect someone to be enthusiastic about it. Conversely if you tell your employees that you value and reward teamwork from the beginning, and you fully explain how that teamwork helps everyone, then I think it falls back on the person’s personality.

We’re lucky right now. Our warehouse manager Charlie is absolutely great at doing what’s best for the team. I think it’s one of his very best traits. This has never even come close to being an issue for us. However, as we keep adding people to our team, it might be more tricky. Alongside a strong work ethic, it’s arguably the most important trait you want in an employee. Depending on how good we do at the interviewing process, we may or may not end up being good at detecting it. We will however quickly get rid of anyone who isn’t’ working for the good of the team. I’m a big believer in “hire slowly, fire fast”.

Dear Norm:
I am 17 years old and recently sold a website for $100,000. It took me and my partners eight months to build, and we had to overcome many obstacles. And yet, when we finally sold it, I didn’t feel excited or elated. Rather, I’ve been really depressed. I went to a dance with a date last Friday and had a horrible time. It reminded me how out of touch I’ve been. As I was building the business, I kept thinking, What are you willing to give up to get what you want? I gave up everything. I haven’t watched TV in months, and so now I can’t talk with friends about the shows they’ve seen. I gave up piano. I haven’t read a good book of fiction in a while. I haven’t done sports such as swimming, and I used to be one of the fastest swimmers in the club at my school.

So even though I reached my goal, I am not a happy kid. I’ve decided I need to quit business — or at least take a break for a while. I’m planning to study hard and go through school as normal people do. Do you think I’m making the right decision?
– Hanson So

Norm gave a very good answer, but the more important point is that inevitably, if you want to start a business, you’ll probably have to give up quite a bit socially, regardless of your age. In a lot of ways, being a student entrepreneur (something I generally advocate) can stunt your personal growth. I was lucky enough not to catch the entrepreneurship bug until the end of college, long after I had the “normal” high school experiences (football team, prom, etc etc) and after I got the college partying out of my system.

I pretty much sacrificed my social life from ages 22 – 25 to get myself and the business into a strong financial position. In retrospect, I wouldn’t have changed a thing.  Sure, it sucked sometimes, but much like Hanson I think I wouldn’t have been able to handle the social trade-off had I started any earlier.  Starting in my 30′s or 40′s with a wife and kids would be just as problematic in different ways. Not that it’s ever easy, but I’d make the argument that those first 3 – 5 years after college are the best ones to immerse yourself in starting a business.  Now at 26 I could conceivably do all of those “late 20′s” social things that people do: marriage, house, and kids. I don’t really want to do those things (quite yet), but at least I have the opportunity to.

That said, there’s never really an ideal time to do something that requires sacrifice. That’s what makes it a sacrifice.

I’ve cut the number of feeds in my feed reader in half, stopped playing video games or reading books, have been taking advantage of all of my 13 Ways to Find More Time in ’09, and definitely been working the productive nap to account for a little less sleep each night.  Pretty much everything has been temporarily eliminated other than eating healthy, going to the gym, having dinner at least once a week with my parents, and spending some time with my girlfriend.

It’s sort of like a forced Spring cleaning.  In a way it’s therapeutic – focusing on less things makes life simpler and reduces stress, which offsets the pressure of a deadline (or at least reduces the stress a bit).  In a month or two when I have more time, I’ll probably force myself to downshift by going back to my productive output guidelines and at that time I’ll figure out which things I want to start doing again and which ones I really don’t need.

I think being able to handle times like these are crucial to being an entrepreneur.  If you’re not able to temporarily block out  all of the crap that life can throw at you, the stress can drive you insane.

The first is that 95pct of people are dreamers who really don’t want to do the work. They would like to think they have the “next big thing”, but don’t realize that the “next big thing” that impacts their potential success is preparation and effort.

The 2nd reinforced belief is that the American Dream is still alive and well, even in these tough economic times. There are still many, many of you that know that success can be defined in many ways, but that it’s earned through preparation, hard work, love of what you are doing and a thirst to be the absolute best at what you do. It’s not only refreshing, its exciting to learn more about some of the companies that have been presented.

Let’s tackle one at a time.

The first is something I’ve talked about a few times with Adam Gilbert.  It seems as if the culmination of the “I want it now” epidemic in our culture (you know, the same one that causes people to run up credit card debt and buy cars and houses they cannot afford) is that everyone wants to achieve great things, but very few are willing to put in the work necessary to attain that goal, whether it’s losing weight or starting a business or just about anything else.  That gives a huge advantage to people who are simply willing to work hard.  As everyone who regularly reads this blog knows, I’m a huge advocate of minimizing work and being as efficient as possible.  Don’t mistake that for a lack of work ethic though.  Challenging the status quo for more efficient solutions is part of being a (good) entrepreneur.  So is hard work.

We’re working about as long and as hard as we ever have right now.  The combination of trying to do a major re-launch of Detailed Image by Spring while still growing fast (February was one of our best months ever) isn’t easy.  But we have a plan, each one of us knows what we need to do, and we’ll do it and do it well.  No excuses.  No short cuts.   We’re putting things in place now that will help us for years to come, so it’s easy to put the hard work in perspective.  Work hard now so that it will benefit us in the future.  I’d like to think that everyone would do the same, but just surmising from the people around me (not named Mike, George or Greg), I know that this isn’t true for most.

As far as the second comment, I’m glad that Mark feels that way.  I hope that anyone considering entrepreneurship feels the same way and sees these down economic times as an opportunity.  Since it sucks to be an employee, why not at least try starting a company?  Hopefully enough people who otherwise would have been at cushy jobs will create the companies that turn our economy around.

Now, I’ve seen this plenty of times, but never on ALL the sites at once.  Usually it’s while I’m messing with some configuration in the .htaccess file and I immediately undo what I did and the problem is solved.   Right away I called Mike and George and we confirmed that none of us did anything that would cause such a crazy error, particularly since we were all in bed sick when it happened.

I quickly opened a ticket with Liquid Web, the company who manages our server.  They have an average response time of 10 minutes (guaranteed within 30 min) and as usual they did not disappoint.  Within an hour of when I noticed the problem, we were back up and running for the most part.  It took me a few more hours to work out all of the kinks, but as of today 1/1 I think everything’s basically back.

The odd part is, no one knows what happened.  They told us our php configuration was severely corrupted.  They reconfigured everything and it worked.  I then had to double back and tweak a few things so everything worked OK with all of our sites.  But I’ve been pressing them for an answer, and they are just as clueless as I am.  We didn’t change anything, they didn’t change anything, and they don’t think it was hacked.  They offered a few far off possibilities, but nothing that really explains it.  As long as it doesn’t happen again, it’s water under the bridge.  If it does, I’ll raise hell.

Speaking of raising hell, it turns out that the error was showing for a good 2 hours before I discovered it.  Turns out my website monitoring set up didn’t work.  Or, more specifically, Montastic hadn’t monitored our sites in 2 days!  A far cry from the 10 minutes they claim on their site.  So while Liquid Web was sorting everything out, I signed up for free accounts for SiteUptime, a service I used for years with SL, and immediately received the text message that both DI and TD were down (I configured it to forward emails to my phone as text messages just like I did on this tutorial).

In sum – we don’t really know what happened, it’s fixed now, and we have web monitoring that actually works moving forward.   The odd part was how this coincided with us being home sick.  Had we all been out drinking, this problem might have dragged on for much more than a few hours on New Years Eve, costing us much more than it did (which probably wasn’t much considering when it happened).  Since we were home sick, we were able to take care of it.  I guess if I had to be sick and the server had to have a problem, this was good timing.  Chalk one up for  “everything happens for a reason”.

And of course, this is just one more reminder that the life of a business owner isn’t always quite normal.  If I was out, I would have had to leave.  No mater how good of a time I was having.  There are a lot of advantages to running your own business, but there are also some disadvantages.  The buck stops with you.  A lot of people couldn’t accept that or don’t factor that in when romanticizing the life of a business owner.  Me, I’m OK with it.  It comes with the territory.   You can’t be the one reaping all of the rewards if you aren’t the one taking the risks.

I got a question for you. I am having a problem with this myself and do a shitty job on getting back on track. How do you prioritize your work/hobby/activities on the side when none of the tasks deal with making money?

I’ve been thinking about that for a while, and decided it warranted it’s own post.  In many cases, prioritizing the work isn’t the hardest part.  It’s figuring out how to prioritize your time in general.  

First off, I struggle with this.  Always have, probably always will.  I also know that each of my partners struggles with it to varying extents.  I’m pretty sure every business owner does too.

Most people have work or school, and their family/social life.  Two things that they have to balance.  Entrepreneurs generally start working on a business while they’re in school or work.  Suddenly you’re trying to do your job, have enough motivation to get a startup off the ground, AND trying to balance in family, friends, and hobbies.  Something has to give.

I like picking up new hobbies in addition to the ones I already have.  I enjoy going to the gym.  I like kicking back and reading a non-business book.  I like having drinks with my friends.  I want to spend time with my girlfriend and my family, and her friends and family.  And I like a whole lot of other things too.  It can be overwhelming.

The “correct” work/life balance is only something you can achieve.  It’ll take constant work.  If neglected, you’ll probably work too much.  At the end of the day, if you aren’t happy because you spend too much time working (or not enough time working), you have to be the one to make the adjustments.  Set short-term boundaries and goals that force you into action now (today, tomorrow, or this weekend at the latest).   Procrastination is my enemy, and it has to be yours too.

In my case, I *think* I’ve struck a pretty good balance, in part because of how hard I try and in part by lucky timing.   When I left my job, I worked all day everyday to get my/our sites off the ground.  I felt like I had to.  I did the bare minimum socially to still keep the relationships I had and to keep my sanity.  That meant skipping family parties unless they were the really big holidays.  It meant only meeting up with my friends once per month when they were going out every weekend.  It meant showing up for a drink and then kicking out early so I could get back to work.  The whole time I thought “this will change someday soon and I’ll be able to give them more time”.

Thankfully, it did.  This time lasted for about two years for me.  For the majority of it I lived in my parents basement and I was single.  I literally had no responsibility and could focus solely on the business.  As long as I made enough to cover my small monthly expenses (cell phone, health insurance, etc) I could keep my dream alive.  There’s no way I could have handled the apartment I live in now or the relationship I’m in back then.  Thankfully things just sort of timed themselves with our success and my subsequent down-shifting into a more balanced life.

Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately, depending on how you look at it), I’m of the opinion that every business owner has to have some time period like this where you phase out the rest of your life to some extent and really focus on getting established.  Starting a company is just too hard not to have your full undivided attention.  Some people in your life will understand.  Others won’t.  You need to just block those people out – every bit of energy expended on changing their mind or trying to get them to understand could be spent building a business relationship with someone who really does care and can help your business.

For me, leaving my short-but-successful career and starting a business was the first real thing I ever did in life that “went against the grain”, and in turn I was a bit shocked at how people react when you don’t do what they think you should do.   Everyone handles this type of criticism differently.  It bothered me.  I tried to take the criticism and use it as motivation, turning the negative emotion into a positive.   On the days I couldn’t pull myself out of bed, I’d think of how crappy I’d feel if I had to go get a job and admit to my failure as an entrepreneur, and it motivated me to keep going.  I did my best to separate my feelings for what people said from my feelings from them in general.  Motivation is good – hatred isn’t.   I have a “library” in my head of comments people have made to me over the years that drive me to work harder.  It’s important to understand that this will never stop – I can think of two instances in the past week where people made condescending remarks about our business and our legitimacy.  Mark Cuban says it still happens to him, that people call him “lucky”!  It comes with the territory:

Fortunately, things turned out well for me with MicroSolutions. I sold it after 7 years and made enough money to take time off and have a whole lot of fun.  Back then I can remember vividly people telling me how lucky I was to sell my business at the right time.

Then when I took that money and started trading technology stocks that were in the areas that MIcroSolutions focused on. I remember vividly being told how lucky I was to have expertise in such a hot area, as technology stocks started to trade up.

Of course, no one wanted to comment on how lucky I was to spend time reading software manuals, or Cisco Router manuals, or sitting in my house testing and comparing new technologies, but that’s a topic for another blog post.

Bottom line:  either you have selective ignorance and use it to your advantage, or it eventually crushes you.  I don’t think there’s an in between.  This is when having partners or an entrepreneurial mentor really comes in handy.  They will always understand.

And when I finally did down-shift a little bit I had to force myself to not work all day long.  It was hard.  I started making myself have one non-business goal per day.  I created the (somewhat excessive) program I outlined in my productive output post.  It was what I needed to back off.  I knew I was “addicted” to overworking and I needed to stop.

I think the important thing to keep in mind during this entire struggle is what you ultimately want from your entrepreneurial quest.  I knew I didn’t want to work the hours I did a few years ago for much longer, and I jumped at the first opportunity to achieve more balance.  Once we get a few employees, I’ll jump again at the opportunity to travel a bit around the country and work more remotely.  Because that’s what I want to do.  As long as there’s progress towards what you want, you can justify the sacrifice.  If that’s not the case, then maybe you should consider doing something else that provides you the opportunity to pursue the lifestyle that you want.

“As a young entrepreneur, you will have NO work/life balance. I am very serious about this. If you want to succeed, you need to be working 24/7 every day of the week.”

That’s why I wrote such a long response prior to asking my next question:

“It’s easy to be happy for a year or two working all day, every day.  In my opinion, it’s hard to be happy doing that for a lifetime – one day you’ll wake up at age 50 and realize that you’ve missed out on love and relationships and wonderful experiences because you were obsessed with your company.”

That’s why Anthony took the time to write such a long comment:

“Adam – You’ve spent a lot of time on this blog advocating the fact that this is not true, and that entrepreneurs need to try as hard as possible to sidestep that misconception. I am with you on that. A true entrepreneur, and one who is on a path to success, may reach a peak of high workload, but for the most part, should constantly be on a steady decline of hours per day/week being worked. If you’re doing things right, you’re finding more and more ways to automate, delegate, etc.“

Work/life balance is a very touchy subject for anyone who runs a business.  You clearly love your company, but happiness is rarely (if ever) achieved by loving one thing and neglecting your mental/physical health or your relationships with others.

As Adam Gilbert says, the way that you find out what is truly important to someone is by how they spend their time:

“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. Do you?”

I’ll take that a step further.  When it comes solely to the business owner and their work/life balance, take a look at how they spend their weekends. Do they use them to recoup and recover, or do they work just as much (or more) than they do during the week?

Why weekends?  Because that’s the time the rest of the world takes off to rest.  You can argue whether 2 days off for every 5 too little or too much, but it’s the way the world works and those are the only 2 days you get to really spend a legitimate amount of time with people in the rest of the world who have jobs.

So go ahead, ask me how I spend my weekends?  Glad you asked.  

To be honest, in 2006 and 2007 I worked most of my weekends.  Probably 75% as much time as a weekday, but I’d have less distractions so I’d get the same amount done.  Then again, my social life sucked.  I justified it (and in retrospect I learned things a lot faster by having my entrepreneurial journey be 7 days/week as opposed to 5) but sacrificing my hobbies, friends, family, and dating life were things that wore on me increasingly.  Those who knew me well often would wonder how I did it (half in amazement, half worried about my sanity).   I always knew that at some point I’d have to balance things out a bit more.  Sacrifice isn’t always admirable – sometimes it’s just plain stupid.

Earlier this year we moved into our warehouse.  Sales continued to grow.  We became more efficient.  We gave ourselves raises.  There was no longer a fear that one wrong move could cripple us.  At that point – as hard as it was, even for someone cognizant of overworking themselves – I took a step back and made a conscious decision to work less.  Every night I started doing something fun that was non work related.  I started saying “yes” every time I got invited to a family party that I would have previously turned down.  I tried to hang out with my friends more.  Most importantly, I started treating my weekends as a time to rejuvenate myself for the coming weeks.  Not to push myself closer to burn out.

Last weekend I went to a wedding.  This coming weekend consists of camping for a night, my fantasy football draft, a full day of watching college football, a family dinner (yours truly is turning 26), and a massive party at my apartment on Sunday night.  Very little work will be done.  That’s OK. Because come Tuesday morning I’ll wake up and be ready to kick ass again.  Taking time for myself doesn’t mean I don’t love what I do as much as I did before.  If anything, the balance leaves me less stressful and more productive when I’m working.  I’m more eager to work when I have a day or two away from it.  Sure, I’ll still block out a weekend here and there to work on a side project because I enjoy those, but the majority of weekends now are for the other people and things in my life that aren’t related to Pure Adapt.  I still have plenty of hours left in the week for my entrepreneurial fix.

You’ve just met a new group of people and they casually ask what you do for a living.  You give one of a variety of answers, based upon how web-savvy the crowd is and how interested you are in talking about your business at the moment.  They think what you do is really cool and they ask a bunch of nosey-but-well-intended questions.

In a way, it gets a bit old.  Of course, in another way it’s pretty freaking cool.  Having someone genuinely interested in what you do is a pretty big compliment.

Then the night goes on like normal.  Until someone brings up one of the following:  their lack of vacation time, their not-so-wonderful boss, the glass ceiling at their job, the BS politics, or the perpetual fear of losing their job.  And then they say it.  They look you in the eye, smile, and (somewhat sarcastically) say:  “Of course, YOU don’t have to worry about that!”   Again, in a way it’s a compliment.  But in another way it’s as if they’re saying “look at the business owner who is soooo cool that he doesn’t have to deal with all of the crap that the rest of us do.  Must be nice to be him. ”

The easy answer is to just smile and say “yup, you’re right.  It’s nice not having that stuff going through my head.  Being a business owner is awesome.”

In a way, that’s true – it’s what I used to say back when I had more of a chip on my shoulder and was trying to prove that entrepreneurship (or better yet, my choice of entrepreneurship) was “superior”.  Now I smile and say how I truly feel.  Something along the lines of “yes, that’s definitely true, but like anything else in life there are trade-offs.”

I don’t have to worry about many of the things that stress someone in a typical corporate position, but I also have stresses that they don’t.  Trying to speak from a completely generalized point of view: owing a business is neither “better” nor “worse” than having a job.  It’s just a different path.  A path that I happen to feel suits me better, but that doesn’t mean that the lifestyle should necessarily be romanticized as much as I feel like it is.  At times owning a business sucks far worse than going to work at 9 and checking out at 5.

Yup, my pay has no ceiling.  I can give myself a raise whenever I want.  I don’t need to worry about my bosses nephew getting preferential treatment and taking “my promotion”.  Of course, my salary also has no floor.  Earlier this year we didn’t pay ourselves for several months to survive our move and expansion.  And every time I do give myself a raise I am taking away from money that could be used to increase marketing or hire/train employees.  Pay yourself more at the cost of growing your company (and your stock), or pay yourself less and struggle to pay your bills? Show me an employee who has to make a decision like that.

Sure, I can take a day “off” whenever I want.  I don’t need to get permission from anyone.  I don’t need to deduct it from my yearly vacation time.  At this point, the company won’t fall apart without me.  Of course, at any time on one of those days off something could happen and I could immediately be pulled away from whatever I’m doing from an indefinite amount of time (see our server issue from a few months ago).  The reality is that until we have a large staff I cannot completely get away from work from any discernible amount of time.  I feel like I’ve done a good job this year of spending more time with friends and family away from work, but I still haven’t taken anything even close to resembling a vacation in several years (Florida for a week in January of 2005 is the most recent I can think of).  And even with a staff, I’ll probably be so passionate about what we’re working on that I’ll want to be contacted if something major goes wrong…even if I’m not the one fixing it.  So is the life of an entrepreneur who loves what they do.  I wouldn’t want it any other way.  I will be able to spend more time away from work in the coming years.  But when that time comes it will come because of great sacrifice over the previous years.  It’s not something that I lucked in to, it’s something I earned through my choices and my hard work.  I understand if others think it’s “cool”, but I don’t necessarily think they’d find the process leading up to it very “cool”.

There’s always more to the story than what you see on the surface.

At the time I had just come off of 2+ years of pushing my entire life aside.  In college I worked hard, but I played hard too.  I might not have partied as much as some of my friends (some of which are still in college by the way) but I kept what I thought was a solid balance for someone in an intense engineering program at a top school.  However, once I left my career I didn’t care about balance:  I cared about being an entrepreneur and everything that came with it.  I had the proverbial chip on my shoulder and I was dead focused on kicking ass.

When I moved into the apartment that I’m currently residing in back in May, I took it as the opportunity to “turn on” my social life again.  We had finally reached a point of stability and I realized I needed to phase back in some of the things I’d pushed aside.  The intention when I left my career was never to work 75 hour weeks, neglect family/friends, and teeter on the line of burning myself out.  But the everlasting (self-induced) pressure to make our company a success drove me so hard that – on occasion – I asked myself if I knew what I was doing or if I was just fooling myself and unknowingly becoming a workaholic.  A workaholic that would never recover no matter how much success he had, just because I had become accustomed to it and knew no other way.

I needed to prove to myself that I could have balance and still live the entrepreneurial dream.  So I wrote the post.  I needed the challenge.  It worked.  I began intensely focusing on my 6-7 hours a day and banging through 9 hours of work in 7 just because I was excited at the potential of some true free time after I got finished. All of a sudden my entire day wasn’t based around how much work I could get done.  Pretty quickly I got to the point where 7 nights a week I had plans with friends or family, many of which I saw sparingly the past few years.  Every night something else was going on.  I’ll admit – it was pretty cool coming from a point where I only got out of the house on a non-work related outing once every few weeks.

Of course, this type of social schedule is too much over time for someone like myself  (I proclaim myself to be 50% introverted and 50% extroverted – a convenient even split).  So the past few weeks I’ve still kept my 35 hour rule in effect, but I have made sure I have a few nights a week to myself to read, play video games, catch up on sleep, or run errands.  Of course, a funny thing has happened:  I’ve been getting the itch to use that free time to tackle some of the “secondary” projects like the revamp of SportsLizard or a totally new site (crazy idea) that I’ve been working on.  I call these projects “10%” projects after Google’s 70/20/10 policy where  employees get 10% of their time to work on anything they want, the idea being that very innovative products often come out of the wacky creative projects when people are allowed to think outside the box.  I define “10% time” as time I spend working on non e-commerce projects, seeing as we’re getting 99% of our revenue from our e-commerce sites.  I could spend every waking second on our shopping cart and other e-commerce stuff.  It’s never ending.  We’re growing fast as it is.  There’s definitely a need to cap this work or the potential for burnout definitely exists.

For two years I pushed really hard and my business-life balance was a bit out of whack.  Considering my non-work life is something I highly value, it was only natural that I went the other direction for a few months and loaded up my social life.  Now I feel like I’m settling into a balance that I’ll hopefully keep for the next few years…until we have a few employees and I don’t have any day-to-day responsibilities, which will likely be a whole new adventure for me.  For now I’m still going to keep my “35 hour rule”.  Nights and weekends will always be open for social stuff, but I’m going to still try to get 2-3 nights a week where I can just relax and do whatever I want.  And most likely, what I want to do will include quite a bit of 10% work.

So there’s a new caveat to the rule:   I am limiting myself to 35 hours a week of work – with the same “rules” as before – except that I can spend as much “10% time” as I want.

I know, I know.  The list of things that I can do above and beyond 35 hours is getting pretty long.  Then again, the line between what is “work” and what is “fun” for me has never been 100% clear anyway.   That’s what makes me one of the lucky ones.  I get to do something every day that is fun, exciting, satisfying, and can pay the bills.  Can’t get much better than that.

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*Besides, the most important thing to take away from the productive output post is that efficiency and productivity are more important than hours of work put in.  Results are great.  Results with minimal time/effort are what businesses should really be looking for.

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Minor Blog  News:  I added a “Most Popular Posts” section to the sidebar.  My initial idea was to do a “Best of” section for new readers to familiarize themselves with the site.  Then I realized that I have 440 posts and combing through those would take forever.  So I just auto-pulled a list based upon most commented posts and called it a day.  Maybe for post 500 I’ll do a comprehensive list of my favorite posts…we’ll see.

When it comes to starting your own business, everyone has a tendency to talk a big game.  You might succeed, you might fail, but to me it’s unacceptable to talk about changing the world without even trying.  In most cases, “failure” leads to success at some other point down the road…even if it means you just laid the groundwork for someone else to come along and succeed.

The other day I saw this index card over on Indexed, one of my favorite blogs:

No arguments from me on the sex side of things

But I started to really think about the “changing the world” portion of the card.  And you know what?  Yea, I’d say that’s what most people do.  But that’s not what I do.  Or – more appropriately – that’s not what we do.

My definition of  “changing the world” – an action that improves the life of one or more people.

I don’t agree that the only events that can “change the world” are curing cancer or eliminating poverty.  I think that mentality makes it too easy to give up and walk through life feeling like you can’t make a difference.  That just simply isn’t true.  You might not be able to cure cancer, but you can brighten the day of a little kid with cancer down at your local hospital.  You might not be able to end poverty, but you can pick up some extra groceries for your local food pantry.  I look at this blog, SportsLizard, iPrioritize, Detailed Image, Music-Alerts, etc and I know that each one has “changed the world” in it’s own minor-but-relevant way because I’ve seen hundreds of emails from people expressing their gratitude for the work we’ve done.

What if I didn’t decide to start this blog back in 2005?  What if I gave up on SportsLizard after the first few tough months?  What if George and Greg didn’t take initiative on the opportunity that they saw to start an auto detailing site focused around great customer service and educating car owners?  What if I gave up on my search for an album release date service and didn’t start Music-Alerts?

The obvious answer to me is that we wouldn’t have changed the world.

All of those emails from satisfied users/customers would seize to exist.  To me that’s more important than any dollar amount in my pocket.  That’s why I continue to try to change the collectibles industry with SportsLizard even if it accounts for (and probably will always account for) a tiny percentage of our revenues.  If I can make enough money to live and I know my work is making the world a better place, I will be wholly satisfied with myself.

You might contest my definition of changing the world.  That’s fine, it’s certainly debatable.  I’ll tell you one thing that isn’t debatable:  no one has ever changed the world by just talking about changing the world.  Talk without action will get you nowhere.