When I was about 15 I had been running a small website on a game called Worms. The site itself was written in MS Word and featured design classics like a button labeled “Best Viewed in 1024×768″ and all sorts of negativity towards Netscape. However I really enjoyed writing material for the site and soon had a repository of unique content on the game.

One morning I received an e-mail that I initially deleted as yet more spam. However something about it caught my eye and after examining the proper English I realized that it was actually an offer from a gaming network to run their Worms Center website. I would be provided with an awesome design, unlimited diskspace and bandwidth, support for scripting languages (back when that feature was relatively rare), and freedom to take the site where I pleased as long as I made it the #1 site in the community. Oh and I would receive money every month for doing so. I was already exceeding the bandwidth on the free webspace provided by my ISP so I accepted the offer and my first job experience ever became building a worm-filled empire.

I didn’t know it at the time, but Worms Center turned out to be my first experience in running a business. I had to hire and manage a small volunteer staff, establish strategic partnerships with other sites, keep on top of the “industry”, manage public relations (got some great lessons there), build traffic, and of course cater to a picky customer base of other 13-20 year olds. In the end it paid for a top of the line computer, a ridiculous amount of pita and sub lunches, and whatever stupid stuff people my age bought. What a great experience!

While I was busy learning about business in an unconventional way and doing so from the comfort of home, my friends were also in the process of getting their first jobs. I was then introduced to a mentality that I didn’t really understand, and still don’t. The moment they joined the workforce flipping burgers and stocking shelves they became really helpful in telling me that I should also get a job. When I insisted that I did have a job and enjoyed it very much the response was always “that’s not a real job Matt”.

In the end not very many of them actually outearned me, and those that did worked ridiculous hours and were covered in grease burns. More importantly I was picking-up real web development skills and greatly improving my writing, which have played an instrumental role in everything I’ve done since.

The most shocking thing about this whole experience was the age that this happened. It’s not like we were forty and disillusioned by years of hard work in the real world. The fear of somebody doing something different, something with an unsure ending, is so strongly built into society that virtually all the high schoolers I knew instinctively tried to tell me that I was on the wrong path. In reality they were scared, and trying to re-assure each other as a flock that their normal path was indeed the correct one.

I wish I could say that this attitude has changed over time, but I still hear the same crap now even as I’m running a viable and relatively safe website development company. It does get better the closer you get to the entrepreneurial crowd, so being in a business program at university finally provided some more open-minded outlooks. Step into other faculties though and you can practically hear a flock of sheep running the moment you mention entrepreneurship.

Being reasonably young, my history has been a mix of entrepreneurship, corporate jobs, contract work, and formal education. I’ve done each of these full-time at one point, but more often it’s been a balancing act between multiple big commitments.

People tend to be surprised whenever they learn of my multiple roles, as the traditional view is that university or a full-time job both require devoted attention and that it’s not possible to fit much else between them. Contract work is a little more forgiving since to an extent you choose your workload, and unfortunately people commonly view someone starting a business as not having a real job at all. Nevertheless all four are actually major commitments, but they don’t have to be tackled in isolation.

The worst leak of perfectly good time occurs through procrastination. We don’t like to get started on something when we don’t have to, even if the task itself isn’t all that bad. It’s a habit that tends to be developed in school and the resulting engraved mentality is that “work needs to be put off as long as possible so that play can occur”. A corollary of this mindset is “work is bad and should be avoided” (or perhaps this statement comes first). Tackling procrastination in your life will literally buy you more time. More than you’ll sometimes know what to do with!

This isn’t the first time that you’ve heard of procrastination being a terrific waste of time. How on earth do you overcome it though? Unfortunately saying “stop procrastinating” is about as effective as recommending exercise, a good diet, and getting 8 hours of sleep for a healthy lifestyle. Human beings tend to have a natural resistance to willingly picking-up these habits. There’s a good parallel to the way we behave in the physics of motion and friction. First we have momentum - an object that stays still tends to stay still, and an object that is moving tends to keep moving. Thus once you get yourself moving it’s much easier to keep moving. There’s more though! An object that is at a standstill encounters greater resistance from friction than when it’s already moving (I believe the terms are static and kinetic friction). Once moving friction is still encountered however, and without enough force exerted to keep the object moving it will eventually stop.

I think this explains the general course of taking up good habits pretty well. Some people never get past that initial movement by putting off starting until “tomorrow”. Others get started with fantastic intentions but the little pressures and requirements of life start getting in the way bit by bit. This kinetic friction slows the progress of the exercise/diet/basket weaving until eventually the habit stops. Procrastination plays a major role in creating kinetic friction by sucking up just enough time to convienently make it impossible to continue with the new habit. Inevitably the resulting complaint is “I just didn’t have enough time”.

There are numerous suggested methods for training yourself out of procrastination. Different techniques will work for different people, but here’s one that should work for anyone without commitment issues. It may seem like cheating because it’s simple and isn’t strictly a matter of internal discipline.

Take on Activities to Forcefully Fill Up Your Time

Internal motivation can be a difficult and fuzzy concept. A firm appointment or deadline with someone else expecting you to live up to it is on the other hand a fantastic way of making sure you’re done when you need to be. Of course that will only make you do the task at the last possible moment that you have to, but what if you have enough tasks that there is always something to work on? What if you can’t afford to space out for an hour or watch TV? Suddenly your mind means business and stuff gets done fast.

I’ve had a particularly busy schedule for the past two years, and the results have been very interesting. Not only have I been getting things done through the sheer force of having to do so, but overtime I’ve naturally grown to appreciate time. My instinct to procrastinate is far weaker than before and as I internalize the idea of getting things done instead of procrastinating I am quite capable of making use of my time effectively without the external forces present. This is a key achievement for me in relation to running my own business, as there is rarely anyone outside of the government that forces me to do anything at all in that area.

To make anything work, even a method as simple as this you have to start today. If your schedule prevents you from doing so right away (and getting coffee or watching TV don’t count as an appointment), then make sure you pencil in this action sometime today.

Important Sanity Considerations

Before you start signing-up for stuff, we need to do some final reality checking. Let’s take my life as an example. I am currently one quarter of the way through a 4 month full-time job contract (my last one ever). I also devote 25-35 hours a week to my website development business and another 6-10 hours to this blog (an addictive and time consuming success). Despite this I have a minimum of 2 hours each night to relax and cook a proper meal. I’m done working by 5 on weekends and spend most of Saturday morning running errands.

That sounds really nice on paper and frankly I’ve managed to make my life work almost as nicely as the above paragraph describes. However I’ve also been actively working on my time management skills for years and I’ve still got a lifetime of improvement ahead of me. Consider the following to help you succeed:

1) You Have to Take Breaks - Make Them Meaningful and Real

It’s impossible to work at your best when your constantly working. Having a coffee break is alright, but what’s really important is taking time at the end of the day to stop and relax. Ideally you should have defined times when you are working, and when you are not. It’s easy to make the mistake of taking a half-break, such as grabbing a snack and then eating it while you continue to work, answering work e-mail in the evening, or even thinking about work when you supposedly resting. The idea is to allow your mind a complete and total rest. No e-mail, no phone calls, no getting that last little thing done. You’ll be surprised at how much more restful this is, and ultimately how much time you actually save by not trying to be productive while supposedly at rest.

2) Organization and Efficiency Won’t Magically Happen

Realistically you’ll find yourself feeling like you’re in a tornado whirlwind once you realize how quickly those commitments are shooting at you. You’ll also find that while you’re now spending more time actually working, your work habits aren’t necessarily more efficient. Proper time management and working effectively are detailed disciplines in themselves that need to be aquired over time. They are absolutely key for getting more done without working yourself like a horse.

A book that helped me make leaps and bounds in this area, and which takes an incredibly sane approach to time management is Getting Things Done by David Allen. Allen’s approach is great because he spends a great deal of time on actual method instead of simply preaching why you should have a todo list (oh and he also explains why traditional todo lists won’t work).

3) Get Started Today

Finally get started today. It’s as true as night and day, if you put it off until tomorrow it’s simply not going to happen. Best of luck!

I recently wrote about our society’s fear of risk, and I realized this morning that I missed a very important connected problem. Not only are we raised to avoid risk, a problem that automatically discourages entrepreneurship of any sort, we also develop a keen fear of failure.

I began reading Losing My Virginity by Richard Branson founder of Virgin. I’ve really enjoyed the first 50 pages (it’s a 500 page monster) as its written in a highly entertaining storytelling form. It’s got an interesting quote too regarding the student magazine Branson started:

My schoolwork was going from bad to worst, but I was giving myself a wonderful lesson in confidence-building. Had I been five or six years older, the sheer absurdity of trying to sell advertising to major companies, in a magazine that did not yet exist, edited by two fifteen-year-old schoolboys, would have prevented me from picking up the phone at all. But I was too young to contemplate failure. Richard Branson

How long have you dwealt on the potential failure of your new venture or even your do it yourself kitchen cabinet project? I certainly don’t remember having these kinds of fears as a kid, yet how many of us can honestly answer that question now with “very little” or “not at all”? I jumped into a whole assortment of projects when young and simply expected that I would finish them and that they would work. Some did come to fruition and some got dumped when something even grander entered my head, but looking back I put some serious effort and dedication into things ranging from merely elaborate LEGO constructs to gigantic computer games.

Would You Give it Your Best Expecting to Fail?

The practical problem here is that succeeding in accomplishing something you genuinely care about doing is unlikely to be easy (unless you like easy challenges). Certainly the main focus of this blog - starting new businesses - is anything but simple. For this you have to be convinced that the venture is worth the effort to put 100% of yourself into it, to do your absolute best work. Any resistance, doubt, and second-thoughts are serious holdbacks to success for at least three reasons:

• The vision you have in your head is where you will inevitably end up. Failure is a self-fullfilling prophecy.
• Like it or not your competing in a world with other bright people who have put their absolute best into their accomplishments, be it in launching a business or winning an olympic event.
• Doing something great just can’t be done with mediocre effort.

Somewhere along the way, and no doubt heavily tied to a developed fear of risk, we become deathly afraid of failure. Suddenly it’s very difficult to get anything meaningful done because we are afraid of failing and the consequences. The bigger the decision the more at stake and the more afraid we are, so it’s no surprise that there’s a major resistance in people to starting a business or otherwise working for themselves. One of the comforts about working at a corporation that keeps employees as employees is that the company absorbs the brunt of your failures, not you. However the company also absorbs the majority of the benefits from your work, and if you have had a reasonably successful career then you must have been a net gain. Too bad it’s the company that has reaped most of the fruits of your labor.

I read somewhere that 90% of our fears never come true. I have no idea how accurate of a statistic that is, but it does make a very important point - most of the time we spend fearing something is time wasted on stuff that doesn’t actually happen. That in itself should be an inspiration to toss aside this unwarranted load of worry and just go out there and succeed. Becoming more fearless is something I’m constantly I’m working on, and I’ve made major headway by taking more risks and accepting more failures (thereby making failure a normal part of the process towards success).

It sounds like part of the solution for escaping a fear of failure is tackling it early on - before the possibility of failure becomes a barrier to getting started. One of my regrets is having never participated in a program like Junior Achievement which provides opportunities to start a business at a young age. Concepts like goal setting, success strategies, money management, etc should all be taught in school - a modern version of home economics (and mandatory for both genders). This kind of practical knowledge is key for getting the most out of life regardless of the path you take.