One thing that I’ve noticed as I’ve progressed down my entrepreneurial path is my work becoming constantly more enjoyable. I wake-up every morning eager to make further progress, knowing that after today I will be one step closer to my goals. I wake-up thankful for what I’ve been able to accomplish and content in the path I’ve chosen. I have so many different projects and so many things to do that boredom and procrastination have virtually disappeared in most aspects of my life. That feels really great!

My regular readers already know that I’m not some highly enlightened person who has managed to find peace within modern life. I don’t have an exceptionally high discipline level and I don’t have some special hard-worker gene. I find the regular corporate environment amazingly dull and I’ve skipped or slept through a good quarter of my university lectures. Running my own business didn’t magically make everything better either. In fact it was terribly stressful in my first attempts and while I enjoyed certain aspects immensely I also found myself demotivated by the workload. My increasing happiness comes from reconciling my need to work and my desires.

Work is a necessary part of life, both in terms of supporting yourself and having a sense of purpose. As much fun as the image of retiring sitting on the beach drinking pina coladas and wearing a hideous Hawaiian t-shirt sounds people have found even that to be unfullfilling without substance behind it. Unfortunately that whole latter aspect of purpose tends to get lost among the more urgent priority of survival. It’s easy to take a job temporarily to make ends meet only to have that become a career. Or to get a degree in a field you find you hate and with massive student debt try to get a related job and make the best of it anyway.

Work is the majority of life and the work you choose to do should satisfy both your monetary and mental needs. The great people in history made their accomplishments by pursuing that which they were passionate about. They made contributions to the world that followed the higher purpose that they found in their work. This doesn’t just include entrepreneurs, there’s the inventors, the artists, the explorers, the mathematicians and those fighting to solve world issues.

I listed a whole bunch of reasons that don’t explain why I’m so eager to work everyday that I’m willing to get out of bed at 5 in the morning. I’ve come to believe that the reason I’ve become happier has been the increasing clarity with which I see what I want to do, and the constantly closing gap between what I am doing and what I see my purpose as being. Bit by bit my dreams become my goals, and as I consciously work towards my goals they become my reality.

This is the paragraph where I tell you to drop that job stocking shelves or doing corporate accounting to find what really makes you happy. Well that’s true to an extent, but it’s not quite that simple or easy. That’s the abstract preachy solution you will see in summer feel-good movies and As Seen on TV advertisements. Finding your calling and setting out to accomplish it is a process that takes time, and frankly I doubt it ever ends. If you don’t already absolutely love your work and know what you wish to do with your life then you must start taking the steps to get you there.

For starters you might not necessarily have a very good grasp of what work you wish to do. More likely you have a collection of talents and interests that you are aware of, and perhaps some combination of these can be used to create something that you are willing to dedicate your life too. Getting there is a matter of trial and error, so start trying things and make sure every single day you do something that further helps you find and then fulfill your meaningful work. Building up momentum on a task is an old trick of getting going, and it works amazingly. Rather than attempting to do it all at once feel free to let your steps be small. If you are passionate about the guitar and making music, then start playing it again each day. Look for local groups of musicians. Experiment with providing or taking guitar lessons. Surround yourself with your interest and then be on the look-out for opportunities that will further propell you in this direction. Connect your primary talents with some secondary and see what you can build.

I dare you to do one thing every day for the next 30 days to help point yourself towards a new and satisfying direction in life. Remember that there’s no obligation to start by quitting your job or turning your life into turmoil. Something as simple as picking up a magazine can count as a step for one day, and it’s completely up to you how quickly you increase the size of your steps. As long as you do one thing each and every single day you will have done a whopping 30 things in a single month to help you move from a life of hating your job to moving towards a field that becomes your greatest passion. I hope that you’ll be amazed with the results and have a lot of fun along the way, but if you’re not then you have no obligation to do anything more after the 30 days.

Please feel free to contact me and let me know how this experiment went!

I read a very interesting New York Times article yesterday, describing a study where participants were asked whether to recommend a vaccine (which came with a 5% risk of death) for a disease that you had a 10% chance of catching and dying from. Logically the vaccine is the better choice, but people’s answers differed drastically based on the role they were in:

Only 48 percent of the participants said they would take the vaccine themselves. But 57 percent said they would give it to their children; 63 percent said that if they were doctors they would give it to patients; and 73 percent said that if they were the medical director of a hospital they would recommend the vaccine for all patients.
Nicholas Bakalar, New York Times

The pattern here is that the more distanced you are from the subject, the more likely you are to rationally recommend the best choice. The closer you are to the situation, the more its influenced emotionally and important facts get lost in the decision making.

This phenomena doesn’t necessarily stop at medicine or risk of life, as the same can apply to tough decisions affecting the survival of a business, your personal finances, or even a particularly intense hand in poker that should be folded. I’ve definitely noticed it for my own self, as I often take much longer to make a rational conclusion for the needs of my own business than when others ask my thoughts. It’s very difficult to accept taking on risk for yourself, no matter how low it may objectively be or how poor the alternatives are.

This is clearly a dangerous tendancy as emotionally driven incorrect decisions can be devastating to a company. In addition to being consciously aware of this habit, you can help combat it by regularly seeking outside advice. It’s not unusual for a business of any size to have some form of advisory council. All forms of mentoring services are available out there too, from experienced friends to volunteer services to business consultants. I’ve had some great insights and been able to make some tough choices just by occasionally having other entrepreneurs I respect provide an outsider sanity-check on my situation.

If you’re the only who has been reading your business plan, maybe it’s time to seek a fresh outlook.

Starting a new business comes with a whole host of disadvantages against established competitors. You don’t have the money, the employees, the contacts, the clients, the volume discounts, and so on. At times this may seem overwhelming, yet such barriers haven’t stopped small companies from becoming the next big giants by reshaping industries before existing players know what’s hit them.

Just like in a living being, size has a major say in what a company’s strengths and weaknesses are. Being aware of this property when developing a business will allow you to tap into your advantages rather than fighting against the reality of your company’s mass (big or small). If you’re just starting up, here’s why the cards aren’t all stacked against you:

1) You’re fast and nimble.

A large company is a cruise ship travelling forward with tremendous momentum behind it. Attempting to turn is a difficult and long process requiring the shifting of thousands of tonnes. An ambitious well-driven startup is on the other hand more of a motorboat (or jetski if you’re really small!). Easily tipped over by the ocean, but with the power of being able to travel at tremendous speeds and turn practically on a dime.

Large companies are rife with bureaucracy and politics, the natural result of organizing thousands of people into working together. Authority is distributed not only vertically through a chain of command, but also horizontally between different interacting departments. Decisions at all levels require input and approval by multiple people and must survive through both the bureaucracy and politics. Something as simple as purchasing a piece of required software from an unknown vendor could be held up by legal or IT for months, if not stopped altogether. Likewise changing directions on a product or company strategy will involve complex risk analysis, in-depth business plans, and a long time.

As a startup there is often very little stopping you from “just doing it”.

2) You aren’t locked into a dated product supporting millions of users.

A large company’s established customer base is a major asset that it can’t afford to lose. This means supporting all previous products that still have any significant amount of users, a problem that is especially difficult with technology based services. Startups have nothing to lose because they have nothing, yet they have all the freedom of learning from mistakes and shortcomings in existing products.

Microsoft is a terrific example of this problem. The company’s last quarter revenue came to almost $11 billion, but this gigantic size is a major thorn in the improvement of products like Hotmail. As I wrote in an earlier post, Google’s GMail was able to sweep in with a brilliant and innovative webmail service due to not having any prior architecture to update. The company has been able to plan all these features from the start, and then code them in right the first time when adding this functionality is cheap. On the other hand, as this interview with a Microsoft engineer discusses, making even minor changes to Hotmail is a complex task due to the sheer size of platform. I really doubt that Microsoft hadn’t previously thought of the features that GMail now has, but implementing them must have been a daunting and difficult to justify task.

3) You don’t have to hold a million meetings.

Meetings are of course necessary, but they are expensive in a number of ways. When you’re in a meeting you aren’t so much working as making decisions for future work. Thus every person that is sitting in that room is not producing output. That’s not the worst part though. Meetings are really a symptom stemming from the decision making process in point #1, and the more frequent and larger they are, the more people that influence the fate, shape, and timing of an idea. In the worst case you have leadership by committee, which will destroy or dilute innovation into mediocrity in order to appease all involved.

Startups have much fewer people to have meetings with and much fewer formal obligations in the decision making process. This results in fewer sanity checks, but by trading-in this security a startup gains a great speed advantage in both making and implementing decisions.

4) Flexible working environment.

Flexibility in a startup channels its way from a quickly evolving business plan right down to the startup environment itself. There’s greater opportunity for fostering exceptionally loyal and strong teams, and providing the kind of working conditions to allow them to succeed. I’ve seen this happen and it’s really amazing to see people caring so much about the company itself. There’s a major psychological impact of not being employee #5343.

A large company has far more people to manage and collaboration has to occur across it, not just within individual departments. Politics become a major issue and inevitably harm some of the relations between coworkers. It’s tougher to see one’s own work in the results of the company as a whole. Then there’s the tendency to pack as many people as possible into cubicles…

In all these points large corporations aren’t completely helpless. Thanks to management that deeply understand the advantages of speed and flexiblity into today’s environment, some companies like Google will give startups a run for their money even in areas that startups should have the upper hand. Luckily for us little guys, the above advantages do hold in general so rather than trying to emulate the disfunctions of large corporations with none of their resources, startups should be exploiting the weaknesses of their large competitors as much as they can.

Have you come up with advantages that I missed? Be sure to comment!