On a lazy Friday night in Hamamatsu, a Japanese city I used to live in, I was performing my usual routine; a pit stop at a convenience store for some drinks, and then off to the video arcade before the usual bar-hopping. That night, I saw something that startled me. In front of the 7-11 is a set of red stairs that lead up to popular restaurant. Out of sight, above the stairs … [Read more...]
Untemplater Businesses: Long-Term Focus
To conclude our series on a framework for building a business, we'll review some concepts that warrant your attention from day one - even if they aren't yet possible. (To review, we've already covered planning and business selection and designing operations.) So what's so important that you should be focused on it months or even years before you can achieve it? Three … [Read more...]
Ideas Don’t Matter
This isn't a post about ideas being a dime a dozen. While that might just be true, I wanted to pose a slightly more radical thesis -- that not only are ideas as common as badly fitting promotional t-shirts but that individual ideas have little baring at all on whether you create something great. Think about the last great inspiration you had that actually went somewhere. … [Read more...]
Bring Forth the Universe
"He who knows not why the universe exists knows not who he is... and could not say for what purpose he exists himself." Marcus Aurelius The big questions of life are old and clichéd. Not because they have been answered, but because we've stopped looking for answers. Life's mysteries have lost their mystique. Society today is mostly content knowing the how. The Big Bang … [Read more...]
What’s the Best Age to Start a Business?
ANSWER: 26 I’m not sure if HTML has a tag to visually depict sarcasm, but, if so, it could definitely be applied above. Obviously, there is no universally acknowledged answer – not all entrepreneurs and start-ups are alike. But, I think it used to be that there was a universally acknowledged threshold. Before the advent of the information and electronic age, starting a … [Read more...]