LeeMobile

I’ve been reading Outliers by Malcom Galdwell.  It’s a pretty insightful book on the causes of successful lives.  I’ve also been pretty inspired by it, as Gladwell points out that great success and mastery in life is not directly correlated to innate talents.  Instead, success is the result of hard work (putting in 10 000 hours of practice/work) and the right opportunities.

Among the examples used, he told the story of Bill Gates and Bill Joy, and how they owed their success to putting in thousands of hours of work and practice before becoming successful.

–

I guess I’ve always had this notion of wanting to start my own business, and becoming my own boss.  I don’t even want to become super-successful to make tons of money.  I would be happy in making enough to not work for someone else and still take care of my family.

I would like to be financially independent.  More importantly though, is that I would like my work to be “meaningful”.  Gladwell uses the term “meaningful” to refer to work which directly provides gain.  I would like my own work to bring me direct merit.  For example, someone who sets up shop selling hot-dogs on the street-corner is someone who is doing meaningful work, as each hot dog he sells rewards him directly.

Right now, the work that I’m doing is not meaningful.  I am paid a fixed salary to do work.  And whether or not I work really hard and do a lot of overtime, and putting my best work out there, I’m going to be paid that same fixed salary regardless.  There is no direct correlation between how hard I work, and how I am rewarded. I may get a pat on the back and some appreciation, but that’s not going to pay my mortgage.

Of course, I still work as best I can to become a better programmer, and to achieve a sense of satisfaction.  To me, without continual self-improvement work becomes meaninglesss.  But there is still missing that sense of meaningfulness… that whatever profit my work may produce will not return to me.

–

So being inspired by Gladwell’s book, and reading through Paul Graham’s essays I’m back to working on my start-up idea.  This time I’ve partnered up with some like-minded people to help keep the momentum up.

I’m by no means quitting my job to work on this.  I have no real capital to do this and support my new family (I am going to be a father in less than a month).  But whatever free time I have to afford, I will try in earnest to build this project.

It seems that the key to a successful startup is hard work and determination, above all other things.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 31st, 2008 at 8:07 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.