J. Timothy King’s Blog

Changes: Fading Out of the Software Business

I’ve been an idiot.

I’ve moved this blog to a new domain, blog.JTimothyKing.com. (That’s not how I’ve been an idiot.) And I’m changing the focus, because the focus of my life has been changing. The fact that it has been changing for the past 2 years but I haven’t acted on it– That’s how I’ve been an idiot.

Actually, I did act on it… kinda. But I didn’t really have a vision for where I wanted to go. Or more accurately, I didn’t truly believe my vision was possible. And so I let my efforts get confused. On the one hand, I was doing what I believed I should be doing to get ahead. On the other hand, I was doing what I really enjoyed. And while I truly believed the two could be integrated, I never acted to integrate them. Because I didn’t truly believe what I wanted was possible… I’m babbling. Let me clarify. (Read more…)

7 Entrepreneurial Secrets of Survivorman

Les Stroud is Survivorman. If you don’t watch the show, you may have seen ads for it on the Discovery Channel.

Les Stroud is a documentary filmmaker and survivalist. In each episode of Survivorman, he strands himself in a remote location, away from civilization, and survives for 7 days. All the while, he documents his experience, so we can see how he survived in each of the various situations he sticks himself in. In recent episodes:

• He makes his way across the Labrador tundra with no one but a team of sled dogs to keep him company.
• His hot air balloon is downed in the African Plains, and he needs to meet his “rescue team” on the plateau in 7 days.
• He is “lost” on Taroka Arm, in Alaska, about 100 miles south of Anchorage. (But try to calculate driving directions!)

There are two reasons I watch Survivorman. (Read more…)

Here’s Why It’s Good For a Consultant to Tell the Employees How Much He Makes

I swear I had decided to write this before reading Pam Slim’s latest post about earning more by working less. But her thoughts dovetail so perfectly with mine.

Recently, the hiring manager at a client company reluctantly agreed to my rate. But he asked me please not to say anything to the other people on the team, because there are some working for a third that. It’s a great feeling, by the way, if it’s never happened to you. (A third? You couldn’t get me to sneeze for that much.) I had no objection to keeping my rate secret, since it is standard procedure. But that got me to thinking.

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How the Oldest, Safest Innovation Redefined a Web 2.0 Website

There are many myths about innovation. The biggest is that it’s risky. This myth is especially prevalent in the hi-tech community. That’s because when we think “innovation,” we think about technological innovation, one of the riskiest kinds of innovation. What’s more, we naturally feel threatened by the most secure and lucrative opportunities for innovation.

And that’s what happened to me. I faced an opportunity to innovate on one of my websites. My first instinct was “That’s crazy!” Fortunately, I knew enough to put my feelings in perspective. And this opportunity opened up a parallel market.

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What Chocolate Says About Entrepreneurship

“Once upon a time, there was a quiet, little village in the French countryside whose people believed in tranquilite. If you lived in this village, you understood what was expected of you. You knew your place in the scheme of things. And if you happened to forget, someone would help remind you. In this village, if you saw something you weren’t supposed to see, you learned to look the other way. If by chance your hopes had been disappointed, you learned never to ask for more. So, through good times and bad, famine and feast, the villagers held fast to their traditions. Until one winter day, a sly wind blew in from the north…”

This past week I rented one of the best films of the last decade. It’s not a film I usually would have watched. Despite its awards and nominations, the movie got a mediocre rating on IMDB. And there was nothing I read to make me think I would find it any different. But I remembered some old friends talking about it years ago, about how in the movie they put ground chili pepper in hot chocolate. (Tastes good, by the way.) And then I learned that this was how the Mayans used to make it. And I love chocolate, and I love chilies, and history intrigues me. And I figured, “What the hey?” But I was unaware of what I was getting myself into. This is one of those films you have to watch over and over again, each time gaining some new insight. Most surprising, and most painful, and most inspiring, as I watched the film, I found myself identifying more and more with Vianne, the main character, in a way I never expected.

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Ten Things That Are Different Now That I’m Self-Employed

My first day as an entrepreneur, I got sick. Seriously. It was Thanksgiving. And I got a virus, which grew steadily worse through that day and the next. Immediately, I got to experience two differences about working for yourself: No paid holidays, and no paid sick leave.

By Friday evening, I was completely incapacitated and coughing up big wads of… Well, suffice it to say I was feeling awful, and starting to worry a little. My cash-flow plan depended on me being able to bill enough hours for November in order not to starve the first couple weeks of January. So, I went to the emergency room. (And my first executive decision, to opt for COBRA coverage, turned out to be the right one.) And the doctor gave me some really nice drugs. And I slept straight through Saturday and most of Sunday.

Now that I’ve been doing it for a week, here are 10 more things I’ve noticed that are different since I started working for myself.

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Ten Favorite Books

These are not necessarily my all-time favorites in all categories. I don’t even know whether I could narrow the list down that far. But these are ten really good books from my library, all of which I heartily recommend.

In fact, I continue to be amazed at how many people have not read even the most significant of these books. How many businessmen have never read Peter Drucker. Every executive, every manager, every entrepreneur must read Peter Drucker. Or how many software engineers have never read Frederick Brooks or Demarco and Lister. Or how many software managers don’t even know who Brooks or Demarco or Lister is.

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I Just Realized How Miserable I Am

Recently, Alexander Kjerulf, the Chief Happiness Officer, asked, “What makes you happy or unhappy at work?” I pulled part of my answer from an old post from my LiveJournal, “Things to Make My Life Perfect.” This list of things I actually wrote in response to a writing prompt for the (now defunct) Alchera Project. At the time, I was in a deep depression, brought about by a demoralizing job.

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Is Consulting More Stable Than Employment?

It occurred to me several weeks ago that consulting could be more stable than employment. So I asked someone who’s had much more first-hand exposure to the subject than me. I asked consultant Pam Slim, author of Escape From Cubicle Nation and the Get a Life eZine, what makes a consultancy stable.

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How Many New Businesses Fail Their Way to Success?

In a recent thread on the Extreme Programming email list on Yahoo! Groups, someone pointed out that XP projects sometimes fail, in that they are canceled. But they don’t go on for a long time, all lights green, and then fail to deliver.

That got me to thinking about the oft-cited myth that 80% of new businesses fail.

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