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That drives me to work harder, keep improving my skills and stay on the lookout for projects that will make me valuable on the developer market and maybe bring in revenue.
2. Whatever gets me in a state of free association:
- Semi-randomly browsing HN/wikipedia/the-web while learning new concepts got me a fair number of new ideas.
- Running or any physical activity (preferably outdoors) that occupies my body while not requiring a lot of thinking so that my mind is free to wander.
Now those are only ideas in my head. Right now I obviously can't launch three businesses and learn many hobbies while rebuilding my city, wish I could, I'm already committed to other things. So I write them down for later when I'll be asking myself "what's next?" otherwise I can't focus on the task at hand.
Here's a couple of examples, one business focussed and one more personal.
Story one...
A few years ago one of my developers quit because I forgot their job review. Bad times followed as we were busy and replacing a good developer is not easy.
Once the dust had settled I looked for a web app to ensure this problem never occurred again. I couldn't find anything, and so my company built a HR app to simplify our HR processes and automate the heck out of them. A couple of years later www.staffsquared.com was born. So this was us building a tool to scratch our own itch, which is a common approach.
Story two...
My other half is obsessed about checking her bank account. She logs in twice a day to see what's happening and to ensure that her card(s) haven't been used. She's worried about identify theft. Thinking about this, I came to the conclusion that it'd be really cool to have a text message service that alerted my partner to any "strange" transactions. Some banks in the US provide this, but in the UK it's not a thing. I haven't had the chance to pursue this idea any further just yet.
So my approach is scratching a personal or professional itch. My co-founder and CTO at my software company takes an entirely different approach. He likes to build things because he gets a kick out of making cool technical shit work. I can't roll like that, I have to have an understanding of the problem and how my proposed solution will fix it. It needs to address a pain. I am technical, but I don't get a kick out of building things for the sake of building them to learn, experiment etc.
All of mine successful projects was created while learning new thing. I did learn Portuguese and can't find flashcards tool that I like, so I create mine, did learn to play piano and needed some way to practice sheet reading skill, so I created tool for that. I am also wine maker and in need of one analytical tool and found out that it costs 30k, amount I can't afford (or even justify for business my size) so I found…
What inspires me is fear. Fear that I'm stuck in a dead-end job that won't give me any options or marketable skills. That I won't be able to pay for my children's education, that I'll be a burden to them when I retire. And most of all, the fear that if I get hit by a bus today I leave them with nothing. That drives me to work harder, keep improving my skills and stay on the lookout for projects that will make me valu…
http://ecorner.stanford.edu/newsletter_iphone.html?material=...
All of mine successful projects was created while learning new thing. I did learn Portuguese and can't find flashcards tool that I like, so I create mine, did learn to play piano and needed some way to practice sheet reading skill, so I created tool for that. I am also wine maker and in need of one analytical tool and found out that it costs 30k, amount I can't afford (or even justify for business my size) so I found…
Hey where is your tool for learning sheet music? I never finished mine :(
It is actually really simple, just answer the notes displayed using keyboard or buttons bellow.