well, well, well…
I have some friends who once told me a joke that the title of this post was the punchline too.
Anyway, I’ve been busy working on my new company with my co-workers/friends/etc. We are the Skull Squadron, http://www.skullsquad.com. We are all developers and work on all things development. We are a team of 5 guys who have various skill sets with various languages. It’s been really exciting, but starting your own company takes up a lot of your time. We have an interesting model I feel, and I doubt we’re the only ones doing it, but we’re the only ones I know of at the moment. A number of us had ideas before joining forces that we always wanted to work on, but never could because we were always busy with our 9-5 development jobs. We finally saw an opportunity for us to get together and combine our services and contribute parts of our more or less individual revenue towards the “common goal” of creating our own ideas. So far it’s broken down to where we work, and we get paid 80% of whatever we invoice for, billable work, and the extra 20% goes towards funding members of the team to be able to work on our internal ideas.
This was really exciting in the beginning, but with being a non-traditional company we didn’t have things like “a business plan”. We had a pocket full of random ideas. So, in the beginning we’ve been really working a lot, with not a lot of time to work on internal projects, and when we did have down time we were either unfocused or exhausted from a huge service contract. After about 4 months of that, we finally sat down and looked at what we were doing.
We quickly realized in 4 months, we had made zero progress on our goals. We determined the main cause of this was we had yet to sit down and write down any of our ideas. So we at least jotted down a rough outline (more like a sentence) of each of our current ideas and decided when we’d like to try and get them done by, or at least our first goal. This was a far cry from a business plan, but in the end it really helped us get to the next step of actually creating our own ideas.
The first idea out of the gate was www.portablewishlist.com. This was my idea, and one of the easier ideas to implement that we had. So Ian Pinter and I worked for about a week to get this as far along as we could. The gist behind this idea is that why should you have to create a separate wishlist at every site that you want something, or worse yet, what if what you wanted isn’t listed on a website? We now you have a wishlist that you can embed on your webpage, profile, etc. and put whatever you desire into it. We finished this around the beginning of December, and it hasn’t really garnered any traffic, and we didn’t finish it to our liking, but it is at least usable now, and no longer just a thought in my head. Hopefully we’ll spend a bit more time on it this year and it will be more useful for people during the next holiday season, etc. It was able to get me everything I wanted this year, which was awesome. Hands down the best x-mas gift-wise I’ve had in quite some time.
We also made progress on some of our larger internal projects. We got a website up for our company that was more than the names of the 5 members, an email address, and a phone number. We worked on some company branding assets, but are still undecided as a group if we like it or want to revisit the drawing board. The other projects are not really showable at this point, but as concepts get more fleshed out or things become viewable I will attempt to write about them.
So that’s what I’ve been up to for the last 7 months or so.
This over-dose of work, fun as it’s been, has robbed me of a lot of my creativity I feel as of late. I have become that which I never wanted to become. I come home from work, I plop down in front of the television, and find it quite difficult to remove myself from this device. It’s amazing, I can become fascinated by the most inane stuff on tv. My wife loves to watch teen drama shows, ala MTV. I hate them, but if I sit down and start watching, even for 5 minutes it’s easy to get stuck and I find myself wanting to know the conclusion of the show, even if I think it’s abysmal. Why is that? I’d love to know that about myself.
Every once in a while, I remember that I’m doing what I despise, and becoming lethargic and boring. I think to an extent I’ve always been boring, but never to the degree of which I feel I’m at now. Even when I talk about doing something I used to love to do, like snowboarding, I cringe at the thought of all the effort required to leave the house and go do said activity. I start to think of all the reasons I shouldn’t do this activity, “it’ll be busy, and I won’t maximize my fun”, “do i really want to spend that much for x minutes/hours of entertainment?”, “what if the weather changes?”, “what if I’m not as good as I want to be?”, “what if I can’t figure it out?”, “that’s going to take FOREVER to finish, I might as well not start”, etc. That sucks, whatever happened to doing stuff and worrying about consequences later?
The yard stick I pull out to measure if I’m doing good in life or not is, “would I be proud to tell my children about this?” or “would I teach my kids to act this way?”. My motivational skills of late are failing to some degree at this point.
This seems to happen every so often though, and unfortunately I’m getting a little used to it. So I will attempt once again to remove this pot hole of un-motivation from my path again. This time I will try to use my blog to help me. A friend of mine always tells me about how boring my blog is, as it’s usually a post about some computer/programming difficulty I had, and how I fixed it, and nothing personal. Since I’d like to not talk about technical stuff as much now, I’ll try and be more personal, and maybe my friend will actually read my blog now ;).
Anyway, I’ll make the token attempt to blog once a day again, and see where I end up. Good luck to me.