03 February 2014, Monday

Ken Rockwell's Updates 03 February 2014, Monday

Smart Choices vs. Easy Choices

These are entirely different, and often opposite.

I realized this in a fast food restaurant on Saturday. All around we see promotional material pitching Smart Choices, subconsciously implying that so long as we read these things that we're good to go, and don't actually need to follow through with any of these choices so long as we've at least read the PR.

Well, no: smart choices are often the difficult choices; the choices that require more hard work and less instant gratification.

It's like talk radio; people think that by listening to it that they are part of an intelligent conversation, and that by listening to it they're helping some cause somehow. This stuff is compelling, but only deliberate action, not reading or listening, actually counts.

Take for instance computers and iPads. We can relax and play video games and watch cats sing on youboob all day long, or we can take more time and develop apps and websites and become billionaires instead in the same amount of time. Some kids dropped out of math class back in the 1990s and created Google while some other kid created eBay, all just by writing some code. They didn't even have to get out of their pajamas! I took this as a sign.

When I quit my real job exactly ten years ago today to work on this website full time, I sent everyone I knew in my former multi-billion dollar company a goodbye letter and admitted I was crazy, just like Neil Armstrong and Christopher Columbus and plenty of others who took crazy chances and won. I let everyone know that the Internet was an even bigger opportunity than were railroads in the 1800s or radio and TV in the 1900s, and pointed out that there were billions and billions to be made by anyone who at least gave it an honest try.

I've been right more times that I could have realized; KenRockwell.com was already known worldwide ten years ago as some kid created Facebook as a goof to rate girls. Then some guys came up with a way to share everyone's videos after the company Christmas party that would actually play on everyone's computers, and they sold that idea to Google for billions. It was called YouTube.

Many of these new billionaires weren't even born in the USA! Google's Brin was born in Moscow and eBay's Omidyar is a Persian born in France, for instance. People come here from foreign countries and are astounded at what unlimited opportunities there are here in America, and are equally astounded at how many Americans just sit around and complain instead of doing something about it.

Today, look to apps. Just throw together some code to do something simple that people need, and you're retired. It's far easier than working for someone else doing a real job. For instance, some teenager just sold a simple app to Yahoo and collected $30 million. Not bad for a kid still too young to buy beer.

Hint 1: think of something that annoys you or that's too complex, and solve it with an app. As I understand it, all that teenager's app did was aggregate news from a few sources to save him the time each morning of looking around.

Hint 2: Forget inventing an online photo community. Not only has it been done, I still get pitched every week by someone who thinks he just invented the idea for the first time and who wants me to write articles for it. Likewise, photo sharing and people trying to aggregate photo reviews have all been done already, so you need to identify some bigger and more universal annoyance you can help remove from daily life, and bingo, instant millions if you don't mind actually spending a little time on it instead of watching TV or otherwise wasting your time.

Hint 3: I stopped watching TV many decades ago. I've spent those decades learning and creating while half the developed world lies catatonic in front of their screens. Today, it's the lazier people wasting all day on youtube or facebook instead of making something useful.

Hint 4: Spend a lot of time with your kids. Kids are more creative, with much more active and flexible minds than grown-ups. Think like a kid, and your mind will be much more open to crazy ideas, and one of them might be the next Amazon. Who would ever buy something using a computer? Crazy!

Hint 5: Develop your apps while you're still working instead of wasting your time on Facebook during working hours.

Heck, you couldn't even write apps for smart phones until Apple opened it up to developers in March 2008. There are still billions to be made for anyone, anywhere, who can invent a better way to do something we all do. It's all about making it fast and SIMPLE. Making things simple is usually lost on technical people, which is why few tech people get ahead because they just can't make things simple enough for normal people to be able to use.

It doesn't take any more time today, it just takes more dedication to make the smart choices to use our willpower and create something valuable, versus taking the easy choices and putting off quitting your job until tomorrow. Tomorrow never comes.

Quit your job today and be the next billionaire. None of these billionaires would be that way today if they were distracted by jobs working for other people. You need to be free to dream, not worrying about your job performance making someone else rich.

 

http://www.kenrockwell.com/tech/00-new-today.htm

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