Just recently a friend (this one is dedicated to you Eggman) sent me an article that was basically bemoaning the fact that being an entrepreneur does not give you freedom but instead does just the opposite. Being an entrepreneur, having lived in the Corporate America world (and also the government world, non-profit world, etc) I have seen all sides and know what does and does not work for me. The question remains though…does being an entrepreneur give you freedom?

The simple answer, yes.

Then again, it could be no.

I’m sticking with the former however. It DOES give you the freedom that you hear about. What you DO with the freedom however dictates what your life will be and what free time you have (which some people mistakenly associate to freedom). “Freedom” does not equal “Free Time”.

Life as an entrepreneur may or may not consist of the following:

• Get paid what you’re worth
• Find your own way to get paid
• Deal with your own tax issues
• Work with who you want
• Deal with HR issues if you have employees
• Work from home if you have the space
• Set your own hours
• Worry about every aspect of your business 24/7
• Take two weeks vacation without asking for permission
• Don’t take a vacation for three years because you have work to do

So which is it? You read article after article about “getting your freedom by being your own boss” yet you may know entrepreneurs who never have time to do things with you because they’re working until 11pm every night.

It’s what you make of it. It’s how YOU decide to structure your new company and how you decide live your life.

• Open Hours – You can worry about it 24/7 or you can “shut the office down” at 5pm
• Working Hours – You can take a four hour lunch on Tuesday and make it up Tuesday night or you can work a strict schedule
• Vacation – You can take one whenever you want or you can be a slave to your own company
• HR Issues – If you have employees you can worry about it all yourself and burn your time or you can hire someone to do it

I think you see my point here. You can choose to be a slave to your own company or you can structure your company around your life. The choice is yours. Having your own company isn’t for everyone. It requires discipline and it also requires you to know yourself. Many people have fallen for the “freedom” schtick thinking “freedom” means they can work  two hours a day and screw off the rest of the day. Sure, you have the freedom to try that. The freedom of being your own boss means you’re free to make your own decisions and this freedom can overwhelm people if they don’t know how to handle it.

• Software – Remember when you needed to be a programming genius and to work at a designated software development company to create software? That’s not really the case anymore with computers now being a household item and programming languages getting simpler and more powerful. There are more than a few iPhone apps that have been created at home in someone’s spare time.
• Manufacturing – Back in the day, if you wanted to make a small trinket you had to find someone to design it (and you pay for it), find someone to create some prototypes (and you pay out the nose for that), figure out what’s next, spend more money, you’re done…thus it was mostly for large companies with their own equipment or loads of money to do. Now anyone with a good CAD program (getting cheaper now so you can have this on your home computer) and a 3D printer like the MakerBot can create stuff right at home. Sweet!
• Writing – No longer do you need to toil on your typewriter, have an editor, hope you get a deal with a publisher, and cross your fingers to be an author. Now you can write and self-publish your books in various outlets, in various mediums (print, ebook, etc). If you can think it up, you can write it!
• Audio and Visual Arts – Gone are the days of needing to work at a top design firm or Disney to have access to the best computers, cameras, video cameras, recording equipment, and so forth. Now you can create, edit, add effects, produce, and distribute from the comfort of your own home. We all know how much the recording industry is loving this.
• Business Opportunities- The shrinking of the world has created opportunities for everyone. You can outsource programmers if you need, you can import/export more easily, collaborate with your team on the other side of the country, not to mention finding funding or being found is easier…it basically makes everything mentioned above so much simpler.

The barriers are gone…or at least lowered to a manageable level. What the hell are you waiting for? Get out there and create something. There’s really no excuse to sit around thinking you can’t do something. Many fortunes have been created by some industrious folks sitting around in their garage or dorm room recently. I believe it’s your turn to create some cool stuff. I’m working on it as we speak.

Three topics, seemingly unrelated, yet all quite relevant to any entrepreneur or business. Taken individually, they all make sense. Put them together and you’ve got a great recipe for success.

• First, let’s discuss creativity. When I say this, I don’t necessarily mean you have to be a designer. A coder needs to stay creative and focused while coding away. Yes, code requires creativity along with logic. A businessman needs to stay creative while thinking about new ways to grow the business. This article from Copyblogger titled “8 Bad Habits That Crush Your Creativity and Stifle Your Success” outlines a few ways to get keep yourself from falling into common pitfalls that keep you from reaching your maximum potential. It’s a great read and I recommend reading and taking the relevant ideas and using them yourself. We all need to keep those creative juices flowing and to continue pressing forward. Let’s stop those annoying habits or thought processes that hold us back.
• Next, an article titled “PlentyOfFish Architecture” from High Scalability that a friend sent to me recently. It’s a year old but still very motivating as it shows you that you don’t need to be a giant organization with a load of money and resources in order to run a very successful business. Highlights include the fact it’s ONE GUY running this entire process on two hours a day of work and raking in $10mil/year on Google ads. You should check out the other stats…truly mind-blowing…and exciting if you can use this as inspiration to do your own thing without fear of not having enough resources.
• Last…you just have to be patient. I don’t know of any great business that was TRULY an overnight success. Some things may have grown quickly, but that is a very small percentage of success stories out there. Look at all the great companies and you’ll see most of them have taken some time to ramp up. Some have had bumpy roads to success, others have had smooth sailing, but both ways it has been a bit of a journey. I want to remind others as I must remind some of my partners out there that sometimes you need to grow one aspect of the company before the other (ie, it’s easier to sell to a customer if you actually HAVE a customer-to-be. Get people in the door first). Be patient. Build the infrastructure, and have fun while you’re at it.

Many of my posts may seem to have an entrepreneurial twist to them. Perhaps that’s because I have an entrepreneurial twist to my mindset. Almost everything written here however can be applied to any organization anywhere. It may need a little massaging and manipulating but they can be applied and they can be beneficial.

Be patient.
Stay creative.
Start that project even if you’re  a small outfit with limited resources.

Tie all three together and the sky is the limit.

Quick random side note: I just finished putting a post up at WaxPorhetoric.com talking about keeping your eyes and mind open to new opportunities. I feel this is quite relevant in business also (my first example over there touches upon that) and it can serve us well all around. You should take a gander…I just didn’t feel like re-writing the entire thing to make it more business-oriented. Any astute reader can make the correlations though.

Now…back to the main topic of hitting our reset button. I recently spent a bit over a week away from Atlanta and made my way over to Santa Cruz, California. Great town…I’ve lived there before. I spent time catching up with friends, doing some networking, checking the local (“local” here also includes Silicon Valley. Perhaps you’ve heard of a few companies that reside in the region…Apple, Cisco, eBay, Netflix, Yahoo! and so forth) job scene, and taking it easy.

Did I get anything accomplished? On paper, maybe not so much. Set up a new blog (too cheesy to post here yet), updated the resume, put posts on two other blogs, networked a bit.

Would I call my trip a success? Hell yes. As my brain cleared itself of more clutter I was able to slam through a few things that had been bugging me. I came up with new ideas for business. I found new solutions to things I was trying to accomplish. And most importantly, I’m full of life and vigor and ready to crank on through new projects.

If you’ve got a full-time job, perhaps it’s time to take a little vacation. If you’re an entrepreneur, perhaps you need to go somewhere too. When you take some time off though, make sure you actually GO somewhere otherwise you’ll be thinking about and doing work. Why bother taking time off then if you’re just going to work?

One key thing I did…refrained from checking my email every day. In this day and age it sounds rather crazy, but if you set expectations right, the world will NOT blow up if you check your mail once a day or so. It was quite refreshing actually.

For me, I think these are the key reasons my reset was so successful:

1. Go somewhere far away…far from your home town – This should keep you from being around reminders of work and home stuff
2. Go somewhere FUN - This will help make the reset successful as your nasty home and work tasks leave the mind and you are filled with the fun experiences at hand. Snowboarding, surfing, exotic trip, good friends all around…whatever it is, make it fun
3. Leave the laptop at home - Each email can lead to you getting sucked into work and suddenly three hours later you’re still taking care of something that can be taken care of when you get back. If you can’t leave it at home, set aside half and hour a day to do spam control and look for emergencies (make sure you take care of ONLY emergency situations. You’ll be surprised at how many things can wait)
4. Make the trip fairly long – What good is a 3 day weekend far away when Day 1 and Day 3 are spent traveling? No good at all. Try for a week so you can actually settle into your new surroundings and immerse yourself into the goodness that is

There ya go…a simple prescription for a fun yet rejuvenating trip that will hit the reset button and have you refreshed and ready to tackle any task that comes your way. I can’t wait to see what kind of ideas I come up with on my next trip.

If you’ve come up with any great ideas on a trip, share them with the world and let’s rock it. If you think there’s something missing from the list, let’s add to it.

Happy resetting!

So just where IS the land of opportunity? Is it everywhere? Is it in special pockets of the country? It doesn’t seem as if you can just create an opportunity wherever you may be.

It can be said that surrounding yourself with creativity makes you more creative. I believe this to be true. Likewise, surrounding yourself with self-starters will help fuel your fire of creating something. We can all feed off each other’s energy, share ideas and help each other avoid problems. It’s also much easier to solicit help (ANY kind of help, be it financial help, work, bartering for work, etc) when everyone has the same mindset. Imagine going to a rigid banking institution and trying to get a loan for some “idea” that hasn’t been proven yet. It’s much easier to do when you can approach someone that has seen other start-ups, that has helped start-ups, that knows what it’s REALLY like out there.

Go forth and prosper. Look online and find the pockets of people and organizations that have the same interests that you do and start shooting the shit with them. If you need to make a big geographic move and you believe in your project, just do it. It’s much easier to do something high tech in Silicon Valley than it is in Death Valley. Not that it can’t be done, but it’s a hell of a lot easier when you’ve got all those tech resources available to you. Charlotte, Atlanta, New York City are all known for their business centers. Perhaps you should give that a try. Hollywood is the obvious choice if you’re trying to break into showbiz.

Immerse yourself amongst others that have that same drive, that same passion, and you’ll be surprised at how much energy you gain from this and how easy it is to get rocking.

On a very related note, I’m writing this all up while sharing some office space at the NextSpace office in Santa Cruz. The creativity, the energy…wow…it just drips from the walls here. I highly recommend joining if you’re nearby or finding a similar type thing wherever you may be.

There’s opportunity out there…we just have to grab it! Surround yourself with good people and let’s get to it.

I thought of all this while babbling about life over at WaxPorhetoric.com. I was thinking about how having this ability to laugh at yourself simply makes life better. I then started thinking about how it’s helped me in business and in my entrepreneurial ventures and thought “damn! That’s good stuff! I gotta share it with my business folk!” So…here I am.

As business and techies are reading this I’ll keep it short and to the point.

How Laughing At Yourself Helps Business

1. Being too serious will keep you from doing things – If you can’t laugh at yourself, you may be afraid to start that new company. “What if I fail?” So what. Laugh about some of the silly things you did (did you really need to buy 5,000 t-shirts for your three employees? Funny stuff…lesson learned) and move on.
2. Laughing at your mistakes is a sign of confidence – When you screw up, laugh at yourself for making some silly decision, learning from it and moving on, others will see that as a sign of confidence and know that you will continue forward until you get it right.
3. It’s easier to accept criticism – This one is two-fold. First, when you can laugh at yourself, I’m pretty sure you won’t get all bent out of shape when someone says “you were a dumbass to order those fliers and put them out in a hurricane”. Laugh about that (I mean c’mon, that’s funny shit) and then take that criticism to do it a bit smarter next time. Also, if you can laugh at yourself, people will feel more at ease to say “hey jackass, that font is atrocious” and you’ll simply clean it up and have something that looks better rather than getting all defensive and shit.

These three points alone help illustrate just how important it is to be able to laugh at yourself in business. I’m not saying you should put on some clown suit and tell jokes at your next client meeting…instead I’m saying you should stop taking yourself so seriously (if you are) and instead laugh at your silly mistakes, learn from them, and go kick some ass out there in the business world.

Here’s what we have to look forward to in the next few upcoming posts. I started a comparison of two different virtualization apps, Sun’s open source VirtualBox and the non-open source VMWare Fusion. I started testing these two side-by-side on a MacBook Pro with both Windows XP and the Ubuntu distro of Linux. My initial notes and thoughts will be posted and I’ll let you know what I eventually ended up using and why.

I’ll also be setting up a new social networking site or two. I had started to set up one site using BuddyPress but eventually nixed that. Stay tuned and you’ll see why. Next up will be me evaluating other social networking frameworks such as Elgg, Dolphin 6 from Boonex, and possibly PHPibazi. If anyone has any thoughts on those solutions or others let me know and I’ll take a look into them.

I’ve also picked up a few side projects toying around with concrete5. I had tried it out maybe a year or so ago but didn’t stick with it. However, after trying it out again a couple months ago I must admit I like what I see. Dubbed as CMS by some and a “website builder” by others (that’s how it is labeled by some ISPs and they even have SimpleScripts installations on various ISPs). I will of course report on my findings, likes, dislikes, and the such.

What’s going on with Sprint?!? I know, I know, you’re all used to me reporting and commenting on Sprint Nextel’s latest news. I will once again be getting back to my analysis of the number 3 cellular carrier in the US.

Can the Palm Pre survive? Who knows. It’s a pretty damn good phone but…where the hell are the apps? If Apple has taught us anything with the iPhone, it’s that apps are key to the next successful smartphone. There are plenty of smartphones out there. How many can you name? Coincidence? I think not.

It’s funny how companies can change…sometimes it happens immediately (Give Me a Mac went from a “please help I need a new computer” concept to this new vision within half a week of inception) and sometimes it takes decades (remember when IBM made typewriters…moved into the computer hardware arena and now they are a software and services company).

Change is good. Helping out the needy is good. It’s good to see that entrepreneurs still care about the community (yes, I’m talking about myself here but mad props also go to the Woz and, as much as I’m not a fan of Microsoft business practices, I’m fairly pleased with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation).

Go check out Give Me a Mac, donate your old Mac if you can (not looking for money…just computers), and ponder how we can use technology to improve the lives of others. Once you’ve looked it all over and pondered it all shoot some comments and ideas on over and we’ll continue to teach the ways of being a computer geek to those that need it.

I’ve touted the goodness of networking before but sometimes feel I must reiterate the power of proper networking and that it can happen at any time, at any place. The following events are from this past weekend (and a more social spin on it can be seen at TheSocialBeast.com) and had this entrepreneur giddier than hell.

It all started with what was supposed to be a quick meeting with a friend who also does promotions who was going to help with setting up the festival and help with getting a local beer distributor involved. We were going to discuss the upcoming Jakestock Festival (June 20 and 21 in Atlanta, celebrating Jake’s Ice Cream’s 10 year anniversary with bands, food, art and other goodness) and what to do. We met at a local bar and started chatting away. He got in touch with a friend that represents Sweetwater Brewery (he’s also a decent music producer if anyone needs that) and I got some insights there. Suddenly I’ve got a couple other friends showing up, one of whom is darn good at doing video work. I started getting everyone tied together and now we’ve got my video guy partnering up with Brass Knuckle Surfer to do a music video. Soon I was talking to another guy who popped up to say hi to my friends and he was telling me about his new venture of offering a culinary treat of Persian/Southern fusion. I totally enjoyed chatting with my new acquaintance and am looking forward to adding him to the list of Jakestock vendors. Awww yeah! And to think…this was just my first stop…

After that we headed to a couple other places…another bar, a BBQ place, chilling with managers, meeting owners, talking about the festival, getting insights on running successful campaigns…all good stuff to know as I take on my first festival.

The networking goodness continued on Sunday evening. While hanging out at a local bar for happy hour I met someone who I found out was a fellow Carnegie Mellon Alumn like myself. We talked about CMU for a while and then ended up talking shop as he was telling me of his company, an open source CRM company. We talked shop about his company, the industry, and everything in between. As I was speaking with him I saw my Persian acquaintance from Friday slide in the bar with his business partner. We talked more about the upcoming festival and then about how his business and my business could help each other out. I live for this!

Let that be a lesson (or a reminder) to us all. You never know who you’ll meet out and about. Keep plenty of business cards handy, be open to discussing anything and everything, never judge a book by its cover, and network your ass off while enjoying yourself with friends. The results can be extraordinary.