If you are involved in the creation of software, here’s a short list of things you can do to ensure that your software will sell a bazillion copies of your product, whatever it is.
That’s it. If you can do that, your path to fame, fortune and Ferrari’s is assured.*
So, I quit my job.
After three years in my current role, I recently decided that the time had come (and possibly gone) to leave. I was feeling like things weren’t going in a direction that worked for me. The people at my soon-to-be former company are great. I would work with many of them again in a minute. But as an enterprise I just do not feel that things were working out.
So where does that leave me employment-wise?
I am going to try giving freelancing a try for a while. This is a risky thing to do; I have a family to support and there’s no guarantee that I’ll be able to drum up enough work. And with both Karen and I working from home full time, we’re going to loose the corporate health insurance safety net.
But I think the risk is worth it and that I have a lot to gain from trying to go it alone for a while. The opportunities and possibilities I see before me are exciting and energizing. And I think that taking a risk is the only way to get where I want to be in life.
Will this work? I don’t know. But I am ready to take the leap.
I live in the Land of Half-Done.
Our house is always a mess. Always. My wife and I have now lived together in three homes over 14 years and in all that time, I cannot recall a single time period of longer that a week when our place was not a mess.
It’s the classical modern problem: too much stuff, not enough space, and no energy to do anything about it. But that’s not the whole story. No, the truth is that sometime early in our relationship, we settled down in the Land of Half-Done.
The Land of Half-Done is a semi-magical place, where many plans are made, many projects are started, many dreams are dreamt, but nothing ever comes to fruition.
Dishes make it to the sink but never get washed. Picture frames are purchased but the prints never appear behind the mattes. Holiday cards are printed and addressed but never mailed. Old clothes are bagged but never make it to Goodwill.
It’s true that our house isn’t the largest; we’re packed in tight with three humans, two cats and a pair of goldfish. And it’s true that we have too much stuff packed in around us. However, the biggest problem is that there’s so much we never find the time to finish. And that’s the single greatest factor contributing to the piles of stuff in every room.
The trick is immediate follow-through. We’re not bad a starting things. It’s finding that extra “oomph” to finish. After dinner, the dishes have to get all the way to the washing machine, the soap needs to go in and the machine needs to be turned on. Right away. The clothes need to get taken out of the dryer, folded and put in the closest. Right away. And all of those projects we’ve started but are waiting for the time to finish, we’ve got to get pick them up again and knock them off, one by one. And before we start anything else.
It’s like a kata, a practiced set of choreographed moves that carry through from stance to stance. We need to learn the martial art of Clean Fu.
I live in the Land of Half-Done. And it’s time to emigrate.
I can’t help but feel that a large part of my time on the computer is spent doing chores.
* Performing backups
* Updating software
* Shuffling files around
* Updating Twitter
* Checking mail
* And so on…
When I put it all together, it really looks I spend a huge amount of time on the care and feeding of this little box. And somehow that just doesn’t seem right.
Computers were supposed to make our lives easier. We would all sit back and relax while robots cooked and cleaned for us, Word-process-a-trons magically types for us, and massive think-o-puters solved the thorny equations. And yet here we are, pushing buttons like monkeys in a psych experiment.
As near as I can tell, the “social networking” phenomena is only making this problem worse. For example: I like Twitter and unlike Maureen Dowd, I think it’s useful. But it occasionally feels like another computer-based chore. “Gotta push out another 140 character mini-missive right away!”
I’ve spent the majority of my adult like working with computers. Or at least, that’s what I thought I was doing. Maybe I have actually been working FOR computers. Hmm.