Entrepreneurship
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, [...]
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 [...]
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 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, [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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.
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 [...]
Wage Slave or Crazy Entrepreneur?
Eric Allam of 52 Reviews posted an interesting comment on my post “Top Ten Reasons to Remain a Wage Slave,” which is a spoof off of a couple of Steve Pavlina’s “list of 10″ posts. Eric linked to a post on his blog, “BusinessPundit lays out 10 misconceptions of entrepreneurship, reveals his hypocrisy,” in which [...]