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A note to myself

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Re: A note to myself

#51
post #8

Always wanted to build something. Tried my hand at a few projects. Worked at it for 3 years, odd jobs kept the money flowing. Recently took up a corporate job. Signed the company contract which takes away my right to work on anything else(profitable or non profitable). Still want to build. Bidding my time.

I have seen those too. Do people really enforce these?

I would just do my own stuff anyway and just not tell the employer. Fuck whoever says I can't work on my own stuff in my free time.

Re: A note to myself

#53

The single biggest mental hack I have for getting around this is this. Just write it down. As soon as I write it down and stick it on a list of product ideas it's out of my head and I can focus again. As a bonus you've got a nice list 'o' stuff that you can go poke through whenever you get some spare tuits. At the moment I have (pause to look at trello) 57 items on the company "Product Ideas" backlog. Two have come o…

That's one of the central ideas behind Getting Things Done (GTD): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Getting_Things_Done

Getting things written down and out of my head definitely helps me to focus.

Re: A note to myself

#54
From the website's testimonials: "Prediction: @WorkFlowy and @Quora will each revolutionise significant parts of education in the next 5 years."

LOLOLOL.

Re: A note to myself

#55
post #31

The single biggest mental hack I have for getting around this is this. Just write it down. As soon as I write it down and stick it on a list of product ideas it's out of my head and I can focus again. As a bonus you've got a nice list 'o' stuff that you can go poke through whenever you get some spare tuits. At the moment I have (pause to look at trello) 57 items on the company "Product Ideas" backlog. Two have come o…

I feel like once I write something down in a list it will dissappear into the 'backlog' forever.

I thought that was kinda the point. Get it out of your head so you can continue focusing on your current project.

Re: A note to myself

#57
I had a really hard time finishing projects when I was younger. One day my college advisor said, "If you never finish your own projects, you'll work for someone else for the rest of your life." Of course, working for someone else isn't always a negative, but you get the gist...

Re: A note to myself

#58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this a parody? Not to be cynical, but I'm curious how a nested to-do list can have such an impact that it prompts people to say "this made me cry."

For some reason there's an endless supply of people who eventually have the thought, "I should make a to-do-list app."

Guilty! I think it's an entrepreneurial rite of passage or something.

Re: A note to myself

#59
An old friend sufferes from a very similar problem, and it's basically been following him around his whole life (sadly, I don't think he's gotten past it even in his mid-30s).

He gets _very_ excited about something. A new technology, a new idea, a new trade, whatever. He goes head-first into it. He becomes an expert (he's one of the smartest people I've ever met). He may even launch a company around it.

And then something doesn't work exactly as he thought it would. Maybe the trade isn't an profitable as he'd hoped. Maybe the customers didn't come banging down his door on day 1. Maybe the press didn't write about his new idea quite as glowingly as he'd hoped.

And then he just starts to deflate. And can't get out of his own way. The idea, the energy, the emotion, the passion - it just drains out of him like air from a burst balloon. He really, truly (I hope), wants to be successful, but once the balloon tears, he never gets that initial passion back, and ultimately he gives up and moves on to the next thing. I've seen it happen 4 or 5 times over the past 10 years, and it's truly disappointing because he has such totally unrealized potential.

The lesson to be learned is one that we all hear quite regularly as entrepreneurs -- it takes more than passion and drive and brains (and luck) to win, it takes more than anything a LOT of perseverance and ability to slog through those tears in the balloon.

Re: A note to myself

#60

Finishing stuff is nice, it took me awhile but i finally got there. The new problem i have is: now that i finished a project, how do i get people to know about/use it?

You show it to people who might want to use it!
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