Follow Your Bliss, Know Thyself, Change the World

On the E1KaD forum, December 13, 2008: I enjoyed the following, which was posted today by Steve in Texas. Maybe you might like it, too --

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There has been a lot of talk on [this] forum about focus, building your business, marketing and so on, but I have seen little about being self employed, knowing yourself and getting the most out of yourself and your life.

Here’s my brain dump on "being" for you to use or disregard as you choose.

Why are you here?
Let’s face it, working for someone else is ultimately easer than working for yourself; no accounting, chasing payments, marketing or product creation. Turn up, put the nut on the bolt, get paid, go home. So why are we working for ourselves?

For me it’s the need to create, plus I don’t play well with morons, sorry managers. I used to write and record songs for a living. A couple thousand later I got it out of my system. Now I create other stuff. I love houses and remodeling (who knew), I bang out web applications, websites and and other apps on a regular basis… I can’t help myself. As my mother said when I was debating whether to build my first recording studio, "of course you should, it’s what you do dear".

What is it that you "do" dear?

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Law 23 of Project Design: Successive Refinement

San Francisco, 1976: I got my first computer! It was a high-class Cromemco, in a kit, and had a lightning fast Z80 processor that ran at (gasp) 3 megahertz, and a full 64K of memory.

I had a buddy who knew computers in and out -- he wrote code for our satellites to determine whether a field in russia had wheat or alfalfa -- and he put the kit together for me, cause I didn't know how to solder back then. (He's rich and retired long since, because he went to work for a new startup called Cisco, and they gave stock options; but that's another story.)

He also gave me a book about beginning to program in Basic.

It showed a simple technique called 'successive refinement.' If you are a programmer then you know this technique but for non-programmers here, it's really simple. And mongo useful.

Here's how it works ...

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