The few of you who actually know me, may know that I’ve been exploring a dark part of myself for a while.  It has been difficult to persevere with starting a company during this time, but I think I have managed it.  I’ve been learning new skills by the dozen, but not mastering any of them.  I’ve also been reaching out and increasing my network.  It has been rewarding, but has taken way longer than I thought it would.  I have less than zero money and personally owe quite a bit from my past (credit, student loans, and personal debt with my ex).  I intend to pay back my debts, as I always have.  I have been living on next to nothing at a relative’s house, while making payments to my creditors.  My office is my bedroom and I’m getting tired of living so small.  I’m sure things could be much worse and I am grateful for everything I have, but it’s time to make some strides.

Over the weekend I did some volunteer work with a group of 15-20 year-olds.  My sister is the head of a company that delivers personal growth programs, which I highly recommend to anyone who wants to learn more about themselves.  The best thing besides helping others grow is the refresher I got out of it.  I got to see how I was being ineffective and the story I was telling myself to keep those habits around.  This might not mean much to some, but my driving needs are:

• Intensity
• Independence
• Intimacy
• Power

If you’ve communicated with me or read my poetry you might understand how this is true for me.  I love ridiculously.  I commit without hesitation.  I suck at small talk and try to find the root of things.  I am open, but very sure of myself (ie a little stubborn). I am bluntly honest and I enjoy working with small teams and tend to disappear in crowds.  I also tend to jump into my imagination to explore the future more than actually creating it.  My dreaming has incredible value to me, but needs to be harnessed, so that we can do more of the productive work.  I have found my purpose, but I am scared.  I’m scared of succeeding, of becoming “famous”, and living an “exposed” life.  However, I am increasingly tired of failing to produce and I know what I need to overcome this.  I need partners.

I need life partners who will support me and share a vision of peace.  I need business partners who have the networks I lack to finance and lead the project.  I need technical partners to help me stay focused and busy with the details of creating the user experience I know we can deliver.  I need artistic partners to make it look and feel amazing, so that it sells like wildfire.  I need help.  I need a great deal of help.  I am asking you for it.  If you can see a place in this story that excites you, I want to hear from you.  If you dig my companies core values: Peace, Freedom, and Fun, I want to hear from you.  If you think I’m crazy, delusional, or a tyrannical maniac, I want to hear from you.  If you have a friend who works the web in any manner who wants to change the world in a big way, I want you to share my website with them.  I know how to listen very well.  I may not always know what to do with what you tell me, but I want to hear you.

The one thing I hear loud and clear is that humanities greatest values are not on top. There is a group of us that have selective hearing and are in denial about the source and solution to our collective problems and somehow they seem to be in charge.  This is changing, especially as our voices combine to expose their denials!  I hope to facilitate this change and birth a new golden age for all life on this planet.  Then we can engage and participate in a civilization that puts it’s best and brightest values at the forefront.  One where we can dance with the shadows, rather than denying them.

Thanks for reading!

personal growth by jazzmann91; Encouraging you to Question Everything.

First some background.  It is set in a dystopian United States which is suffering some form of recession.  The main conflict is between the industrial leaders of production(profiteers) and the political shamans of “the public good”, also referred to as the looters.  The looters are winning.  They are eating production faster than it can be produced.  They rack up the bills and then when they run out of interest to live off they start bending the rules to siphon the profits of the industrialists.  It’s similar to what is happening in the real world, except the producers are still ahead and will probably remain ahead.  Mostly because in the real world they end up being more intelligent than the looters and because we haven’t run out of key resources yet.  In the book a group of great minds decide to withdraw from producing in the looters world and to convince every other great productive mind to also withdraw.  This of course escalates the collapse of the economy, as the looters have less and less prey to suck profits from, and the people lack competent leadership.

Plot aside, the book contains many long solo speeches by the leaders of the withdrawal.  There is one towards the end that is a 3-hour radio address that stretches 57 pages.  Each speech contains positions about values, moral codes, love, or the backwardness of society.  These include themes like: the strong are punished by the weak for their virtue; and the productive rich are plundered by the poor and unproductive for their wealth.  The path of freedom is held up at gunpoint and told to bow before the need of the “public good”.

Society had become lost due to enslaving their minds rather than elevating them.  The looters live by a code that only listens to their hearts, even if their mind tries to show them the falsehood of their direction.  Thus they expect to live without earning their way.  They expect justice and the media to get in line or they threaten to discard them.  They expect everyone to give to their brothers without thought for themselves and on and on (literally) This flowchart typifies the existence of a low level looter dealing with everything as it breaks down:

Having hit an emotional low point in my life, this book was very good for me.  It encouraged me to reevaluate how I give myself away without standing up for the value I represent.  It displayed how emotions are a guide to true value, but are not good for creative strategy and planning.  Another example the book gave me is in how to take pride in what I accomplish, not the kind where one betters someone through competition, but in pure value creation.  It displayed how to take pleasure in producing for my own sake and to profit from the pleasure of others who use my product.  To do otherwise is to submit to being raped by a society, who will forever demand more of me than I can give.

Like many others, I have adopted the fears of my father and, in my opinion, I have followed this path for too long.  I’ve been afraid of success and have thwarted myself by not working as hard as I could.  It drives me to be distracted rather than focused and to avoid the most pertinent work in front of me.  I’ve also learned that my fear of success from another angle is fear of failure.  In the last few years I had taken failure as if it were success, and while it is important to go through failures to reach success, it needs to be learned from and tossed aside.  I was taking pride in my failure and while I learned from it, I wasn’t tossing it aside and moving forward properly.  Now with nothing left to lose and my passion still before me, I see the truth.  This book helped me see how to pour my love into producing the product that I know will give me great satisfaction first and sharing it with the world second.  Now I just need to practice what I preach and work really, really hard to make it great.  I think I’m much better prepared to do that now.

Thanks for reading!

Atlas Shrugged by jazzmann91; Encouraging you to Question Everything.

I had sent in a business opportunity document, that they used to brief themselves.  I wasn’t thinking clearly when I filled that out, and had sent in some answers that could easily be considered a joke.  This was correctly interpreted as ego, and at least one of the panel had been looking forward to meeting it.  I showed up with my ego in check, already expecting to be a bit of a face plant.  The advice I got about “showing ego to investors is: they will slam the door in your face”.  They laughed about it, and so did I.  I’m very aware of my ego and have plans to put it to good use, but I need to be more strategic.  I have some taming left to do.  Part of my strategy for working on this is publicizing my failures, I hope you enjoy this one as much as I did.

After the ego bit, they asked me about my background, which I had failed to include in the presentation.  I’m sure my lack of business experience was easy to spot.  The one common encouragement on my feedback sheets was I displayed “knowledgeable”ness.  My numbers were highly dubious and, to be honest, incomplete.  I really need to work out a better case than the worst one for presentations.  Duh!

They commented that most of my market research was still just opinion.  Yup. On my feedback sheets, there is a lack of definition of who my customer is. I can agree with.  These two items have prompted me to think more about doing surveys and getting some broader feedback on what people would use.  They also commented that my marketing plan isn’t serious or specific enough. I had some grasp of the competition, but no defensible advantage.  All in all, I got my butt kicked.  I had expected some harsh reality and ended up getting it in spades.

I would like to take a moment to thank my butt-kicker panel for serving it up.  Having spoken with some experienced business folk before, I knew to expect tough questions.  The interesting thing was, I didn’t get many questions.  Mostly, I got straight advice about what I was missing or had failed to present in my case.  There was some talk around the product and some push back on a couple of feature ideas, but not many questions.  Anyways, thanks for the advice, and the laughs!  I really appreciate the honesty that occurs when talking business.  There is a zest to life when I can trust my audience to be completely blunt with me.  Hard knocks, have been rare for me to manufacture in my spoiled life, but I begin to appreciate their power more and more.  I just hope that the lessons learned the hard way stick longer than they do, when I skim nearby one or witness others lessons.

On the way home, I realized I have a recurring problem, not only with my ego, but with one of my strengths.  I am a futurist.  This strength helps me design the product of the future, but it hinders me when selling it to the people of today.  I have a romanticized version of what my product will do, because I can see how it can be used.  Translating that vision is the tricky bit that I’m learning to do.  Also, I’m pretty sure I have good marketing ideas, but my execution is sloppy and amateurish.  Of course, successful marketing should be neither of these, so there is lots of work for me to do before those ideas will be fairly evaluated.

This points me at what I have to do in the short term and based on my strengths what my priorities are:
1) Screens.  Prototype screens. Tasks: Do it and make them look good.
2) Defining my customer requires market research. Task: Survey development and deployment.
3) I have to build a clearly packaged idea of what I envision. I suck at packaging. Tasks: Find help and create a packaging to-do list.
4) Selling my business to investors is pitching.  I need to pitch me first and then the product. It’s all I have that I can be credible with. Task: rework pitch with more dazzle and include screens.
5) After 3), find mentors, who buy my vision (as packaged) to help with the parts I can’t claim credibility on. Tasks: Enter New Ventures BC contest by April 19th and/or join VIATec and/or connect more with ACETECH.

Also, my special sauce slide was blank.  The pictures didn’t show for some unknown reason.  It didn’t matter, it wouldn’t have solved any of my clear deficiencies, even if it had shown.  Though it may have advanced more product questions.

So I got my advice and made some people laugh.  If only I was a comedian, instead of a CEO.  On second hand, maybe Comedic Executive Officer could work.

Thanks for reading!

First Pitch: failed, sorta by jazzmann91; Encouraging you to Question Everything.