The Key To Entrepreneurship

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Seth Godin writes:

I don’t think the shortage of artists has much to do with the innate ability to create or initiate. I think it has to do with believing that it’s possible and acceptable for you to do it.

I believe very strongly that the future of the United States is tied to our levels of entrepreneurship. We can’t be a successful country with everyone working for the man. I’ve also come to believe that Seth’s comment above is the most limiting reason we don’t have more of it.

I might have told this story before, but my cousin got married and graduated from chiropractic school about the same time. He worked out a comprehensive plan to build his own practice. His wife, though, thought the safer route was to work for someone else for a little while, learn the trade and business, and then go out on their own. My cousin didn’t even think twice about that option.

When we spoke about it, I told her that she needed to understand something: in our family we didn’t know any better. Our grandfather ran his own business. Our uncle ran his own business. My father and his father both ran their own businesses. Even my cousin’s older brother ran his own business. And of course I did, too. From birth, it was ingrained in each of us that running your own business is part of life.

So yes, most of us aren’t in a financial position where we can just quit our jobs and go out on our own. But that’s not the first step anyway. Being convinced that you can quit your job and go out on your own comes first.

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I’ve had a few comments so thought I would expand. My mom’s parents had three kids. Same for my dad’s parents. Of those eight families (including my grandparents) only one never worked for themselves.

On Grammar

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I’ve been writing a lot on this blog the past year and based on the number of visitors, a lot of people enjoy my writing. I love writing and sharing my insights and knowledge with others. It’s no good locked solely in my head.

But the reality is writing every week day is taxing. It’s extremely hard to come up with topics every single day, write well and coherently and always spell and use correct grammar. Most of the time my process is pretty simple. I write my posts and re-read them at least once. Then  I read them again as soon as I get the post in my RSS feed. Each time I inevitably find something to fix.

As you probably can sense by now, I’m pretty anal retentive. I hated this when I was young but have found that it is a benefit for what I do now. One of my pet peeves is poor spelling and grammar. Hey, I’m not perfect. Nor is my ego tied up in it.

So I ask, if you see something I spelled incorrectly or used the wrong word or need to re-write something grammatically, please tell me. I won’t take offense.

Luck

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One of the commenters of my post on Apple’s Churning of the Gut said this:

We all agree that success is partly down to luck. Call it X percent. What you think of Apple’s future depends on what you think is the value of X. If you are young and inexperienced, you probably think it’s low, so Apple must have mainly succeeded on merit, which means it will continue doing well. As you get older and experience the world, your estimate of the role of luck rises, so Apple is riding a lucky streak which will inevitably end.

I’m convinced that luck is a huge component of success for a young company. Getting all the pieces right to get a company off the ground and to any high altitude is a combination of timing, the right relationships, the right marketing and the right customers. So much of that is luck.

But for mature companies, the Apple’s, IBM’s, Samsung’s of the world, I’m not convinced that luck is a significant factor. It seems that most mature companies die by their own mistakes, whether literally screwing up or not reacting to market changes.

Besides, if we want to talk cliches, any pro athlete will tell you that you make your own luck.

Wayne Dobson Doesn’t Have Your Cell Phone

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The technology integrated into cell phones that make it possible for us to be found is also the same technology used to find your phone. Apparently in  Las Vegas, though, a software glitch means Wayne Dobson has your lost phone, or at least that’s what GPS is telling Sprint customers. Not a long read this weekend, but it didn’t take too many lines of copy to relay one of the weirder stories I’ve read in a while. Enjoy!

Who Owns Your UX Philosophy?

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Brad Feld wrote a great post on UX philosophy over the weekend. His question was not who contributed to it but instead who owns it.

I’ve been in three board meetings in the last month where it was painfully apparent that there wasn’t a person in the company who owned the UX philosophy of the product. I’m explicitly saying “UX” (user experience) rather than “UI” (user interface) as each company had an excellent designer and the application looked great. But the UX broke down quickly, especially as you went from novice first time user to experienced user.

In my experience, many small companies are 1) running for their lives and 2) consensus driven. Both of these kill good UX. For one, running fast means not taking the time to contemplate how we’d expect to interact with an application and also means no time spent thinking about the implications of design, features and experience across platforms. Some things just take time and this is one of them. In order to plan for consistent interaction the UX “owner” must have both a deep understanding of ways of interacting and vast experience across platforms, not to mention a deep understanding of the product’s intent. Acquiring those skills takes time.

As to the second point, when there are only a couple of employees it is really easy to go with the opinion of the room. This doesn’t work at all for UX. UX is a dictator’s game, for anal retentive ones at that. Someone has to have the iron fist that says this goes here and that goes there and I expect this other thing to work like this. The group can contribute, provide feedback and better be willing to challenge the dictator, but one person must take responsibility for consistently enforcing the philosophy. Everyone else, then, must follow or get out of the way.