trying to win the internet.
Relationships are hard and our egos make building, maintaining them, and growing them very difficult.
In fact, most of the time we have all that we need to have very healthy and successful relationships but we self-sabotage our chances because of our pride, our ego, and even our own anxiety.
I’ve been spending a little bit more of my time working with my brother recently around his YouTube Channel and his new community site and what we’re looking at doing now is filling in the gaps of what we now understand as definitive needs within the community.
I’ve shared previously my history with alcohol and, more specifically, my really bad relationship with booze and I’m happy to say that I’ve continued to stay strong and haven’t had a drink since I quit cold-turkey late last year.
I’m very, very excited to celebrate the one year anniversary of one of the most significant decisions of my life and I know that I’m going to make it.
Was having a brief but impactful conversation with a colleague about mental illness and he mentioned something that forced me to quickly (and hopefully kindly) interrupt:
A challenging thing for any startup team to work and manage through is competition and the growing number of projects and companies that are competing directly in your space.
Or entering into it.
The internet is so entertaining… it allows you to encounter all sorts of people from every corner of the planet (or almost…).
Unfortunately, a lot of that engagement is more frustrating than fun which is why I’ve turned off a lot of my social media and even made one of the best decisions in my digital life to turn off comments on my blog.
There is a phenomena that all software programmers are aware of and have experienced which is the unexplainable behavior of software.
In other words, a ghost in the machine is something that we will say when we simply can’t explain a malfunction (or even something working properly!) related to something that we’ve created or something that someone else has written.
I’m just inside what I feel like is the final lap for my 365-day YouTube challenge, which I started (and rebooted) back in November of last year.
In 2 months I’ll be there and I know, at this point in time, that I’m going to make it. But, man… it’s been one helluva grind.
When you start a new and exciting project you can, fairly easily, find other folks to join you in that quest early on. You don’t have to look (or go) too far to find interested folks who share your passion for X, Y, and Z project.
But those folks are, and will always be, the easiest to acquire. On the flip-side, they are the hardest to retain.
One of the strangest challenges that a startup or a new project has is over-engineering everything. You would think that a young team would find this issue easy to avoid but it’s actually not.
I think this is made even more difficult if you’re an experienced business-builder. Part of this is because you simply know too much about what is required and so you’re constantly trying to optimize today’s work with what you know will be tomorrow’s work.