Starting is easy. Finishing is tough.

Two days ago I realized something about my book-reading habits: I start a lot of books but don’t finish them. Either the book gets boring or I get bored. Or I figure that I’ve learned enough about the subject matter that I don’t need to keep reading.

Either way, my bookshelves have become filled with books that I’ve started but never finished.

So on Thursday I went through my shelves and picked out every book that I started but never finished. I set them in a big pile on my bedside table. Then I picked one (the shortest one, fortunately) and sat down to read it, determined that I would finish this book before I would start on the next book.

Two hours later I had finished all 130 pages.

It felt so good. Yeah, it was a quick read. But it was a symbolic moment for me. I’m no longer just a starter, I’m a finisher.

Rob Fitzpatrick on what happened after his startup accepted funding from investors:

Turns out, we just wanted to make a living working on creative projects with our friends. The billion dollar dream was someone else’s. But throughout nearly four years, we never admitted that to ourselves. When one of the co-founders finally voiced his dissent, we crucified him as being disloyal and brought him back into line. But what was he being disloyal to?

Lifestyle businesses are something I’ve been thinking about lately.

Taking a long break from work is something usually reserved for holidays or big family events. This past week was neither; my wife and I just wanted to get away with some friends and enjoy some relaxation. We just got back from a week in a cabin on Seneca Lake in upstate New York.

It was our first time in the area. Everything was so beautiful. The Northeast has a beauty that is unlike any other area of the country. Our cabin was more like a house with its amenities and our agenda was empty enough to relax and sleep in almost every day.

This kind of environment is perfect for clearing your head of all the usual day-to-day distractions. It’s been a long time since I’ve sat in an armchair for 30 minutes, not falling asleep, but just thinking about life. That kind of downtime allowed me to ponder about, among other things, my career and what kind of work I really want to do.

I didn’t come to any shocking realizations about myself that I didn’t know before. Nor did I awaken in myself a mid-life crisis (quarter-life crisis?) where I don’t feel like I can go back into work on Monday. I did, however, re-discover some general principles of happiness and career management that I somehow forgot amidst the day-to-day grind.

My wife gave me a Fitbit activity tracker for my birthday. I’ve been using it for three weeks now and I really like it! Here’s the good and bad that I’ve found with it, hopefully this will help you make an informed decision on whether you should get one yourself.

This is a question I’ve struggled with for a long time. I desperately want to chronicle and record my life in a way that will be both useful for posterity and safe from unintended destruction. I want to own my journal and keep it private as well as have the content accessible so that I can easily find moments from the past.

Is there any one solution that accomplishes this?

Jeff Stibel’s latest piece in the Harvard Business Review disturbs me. He makes the case that entrepreneurs don’t need work-life balance:

As entrepreneurs, we have zero sense of balance. We’re all in, all the time. It doesn’t matter if it’s day or night, weekday or weekend — each of us focuses on our vision with a single-minded passion. I even know an entrepreneur nearing retirement age who plans on working 80 hours a week until he dies, at which point he says he’ll cut his hours in half.

[…]

If you’ve ever seen Thomas Edison’s laboratory in Fort Meyers, Florida, you may have noticed the little cot he kept next to his desk. Edison worked long hours, took small catnaps, and then went right back to work. I wouldn’t be surprised if Edison kept a basin under his desk, and used it for something other than garbage.

Working long hours at much sacrifice seems to be the entrepreneur stereotype. It’s because entrepreneur’s have passion. People like Edison (or Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg) are able to throw everything into something is because, at their point in life, that’s their main priority.

But do you think Gates and Zuckerberg are putting in 80 hour weeks like that today? No way. Now that their products have matured, and they have too, they’ve likely found more balance in their lives out of sheer necessity. Although there were some really crazy times, like all people, these two entrepreneurs appear to be reaching equilibrium and sustainability. At least I hope so – maybe Zuckerberg is still putting in crazy hours… I guess I don’t really know.

My point is that balance comes and goes in our lives. But we have to achieve it eventually. In Chemistry we learn that all systems naturally strive to come to an equilibrium.

Saying that entrepreneurs never need work-life balance is crazy. Few people, when brought low to their death beds, ever say that they wish they spent more time at work. Kyle Steed brought it all together for me when he tweeted earlier today: “the most important work you do in your life won’t be on a computer. Just keep that in mind.”

Entrepreneurs must find balance. The sooner you can find a sustainable way of following your passion, the better. Besides, not all business ideas take 80 hour weeks. If that were the case then I’d never be able to start something to get me out of my crummy day job, now would I?

I almost deleted my Facebook account a few months ago. But alas, I chickened out, and now I halfheartedly check Facebook every day on my phone. How did I get captured in this world that I don’t really want to be a part of?

Facebook used to be really cool when I was back in college. In fact, that was a time when you had to be in college to get an account. You had to prove that you had a .EDU e-mail address in order to sign up. That made it seem like a private, close-knit community of people your age that you wanted to hang out with.

And then Facebook opened up to everyone. At first this was really cool. After all, what was Facebook going to do when I graduated college? Delete my account? Unless it wanted to deliberately stunt its own growth, Facebook had to open up to everyone sooner or later. I understand that.

I admit that it was quite novel to see my parents and grandparents creating Facebook accounts. Witnessing these digital immigrants take their first steps into a new era of online social networking was like watching Dorothy wake up in a bright, colorful munchkin land.

The fun wears off, though, when your parents start asking you to find a home for little lost sheep that wandered on their farm. Or your friends’ mom revealing the color of her bra to the world. That’s awkward on a level that Dorothy couldn’t even match when she dropped her house on the wicked witch.

So why don’t I just leave Facebook? Because it has me trapped. Although the culture of the site annoys me – especially the slacktivism like sharing your bra color – Facebook’s where everybody’s at. I don’t want to leave because I’m afraid I’ll miss something. I’m afraid that if someone needs to contact me, they won’t be able to find me. Why can’t everyone be on Twitter?

Of course if someone truly loves me, they’ll find a way to get a hold of me… right? Phone, e-mail, Twitter, LinkedIn, you name it. There are so many ways. I just need to get away from the irrational fear of not being a part of the crowd.

Repost this to your status if you agree. Heh.

In The Innovator’s Dilemma, Clayton Christenson describes two kinds of innovation: sustaining innovation and disruptive innovation¹.

Both types of innovation are necessary for survival in the marketplace. To anticipate market changes, companies usually follow a “sustain-sustain-disrupt” pattern of innovation; several bursts of sustaining innovation are followed by a disruptive innovation that starts the process over again. This is a healthy pattern that allows a company to accurately anticpate market changes².

Unfortunately, innovating in this pattern is more difficult than it sounds. As a result of their age, culture, and other biases, companies frequently have the core competency to innovate in only one of the two types of innovation – if they have the core competency to innovate at all.

Sustaining Innovation Only

Older companies tend to favor sustaining innovation. Take RIM for example – they’ve been trying to milk the profits from their Blackberry phones for so long that they’ve sentenced themselves to irrelevance. Their products have improved year over year, but it’s just been sustaining innovation: a new touchscreen here, a software improvement there. Customers had already started fleeing to iPhone and Android by the time RIM realized it was in trouble. My guess is that within the next few years they’re either going to be bankrupt or acquired by some other sucker who can’t spot a bad bet.

What RIM and other sustaining-innovation-only companies need is a hacker to come in and shake things up by creating something new. Hackers are natural disruptors that can come up with a completely new solution to a changing marketplace’s problems.

But the stodgy old companies won’t encourage disruptive innovation. Sustaining innovation looks too good on paper. Why choose a more risky project with an uncertain rate of return when you can choose a tried-and-tested project that you have good experience in the past? What got you here today will certainly take you where you want to be tomorrow, right?

That right there, my friends, is the Innovator’s Dilemma.

Disruptive Innovation Only

On the other end of the spectrum, startup companies tend to favor disruptive innovation. That’s because the founders of these budding companies are the aforementioned hackers that truly know how to get stuff done. They can spot opportunities in the marketplace and create products that can handily unseat the oblivious incumbents.

This penchant for disruption can only benefit a startup for so long. Soon the fledgling company begins to grow and its products begin to mature. At this point, disruptive innovation naturally moves to the backseat as sustaining innovation is now needed to continue to grow the business. Things start to get boring for the hackers, and it becomes time for the MBAs to come in and make sure the sustaining innovation arrives on time, on budget, and on specification.

Some founders don’t want to lose control of their companies, though. They don’t let the suits come in and do their job. Sometimes I fear that Facebook is doing this. Mark Zuckerberg is truly a hacker at heart. He knows how to create a brilliant product that, in its day, disrupted the entire online social networking market.

But now Facebook is at the sustaining phase of its product lifecycle. As a public company it needs to be more concerned about balance sheets and revenue forecasts. It needs to worry about producing the ever-growing revenues that shareholders demand.

I’m interested to see how Zuckerberg can play the role of sustaining innovator – at least long enough to get Facebook back to when disruption is needed again. Knowing the half-life of the social media industry, that could be pretty soon.

The Happy Medium

So, hackers are happy when they are disrupting. If you put them in any other place then they’re going to be stifled, unhappy, and likely to quit.

Same thing goes for the suits. They’re happy when they’re sustaining existing products. You can’t ask a company man to leave his corporate job after 30 years and start his own company. That’s basically a death sentence.

There needs to be room for both types of people in the same company. Managers and supervisors need to know what kinds of people they have and make sure the culture of the company encourages both types of people to fit in. They then need to make sure each employee is working on either the sustaining projects or the disrupting projects that fit them best.

Notes

1 - Sustaining innovation is when you incrementally improve a product to stay relevant in the marketplace. An example might be Apple’s recent incremental update of the iPad; the improved retina display and memory boost have incrementally improved the existing iPad to keep it relevant in the marketplace.

Disruptive innovation is when a different or unexpected product (especially one that was heretofore inferior) suddenly displaces an incumbent product to accomplish the same job. The original iPad was a picture-perfect example disruptive innovation, since people no longer needed to lug around clunky netbooks or laptops in order to surf the Internet on their couch, in the airport, or wherever else people wanted to go. The iPad could provide the same (if not better) functionality in a different, disruptive form. [Back to top]

2 - This may be obvious, but it’s worth noting that innovation can happen anywhere in a company, not just on its product lines. Innovation is deliberately making things better for your products, processes, people, ideas, whatever. How’s that for all-encompassing? [Back to top]

Today YCombinator announced that they’re now accepting applicants without an idea:

Why are we doing this? Partly because we realized we already were. A lot of the startups we accept change their ideas completely, and some of those do really well. Reddit was originally going to be a way to order food on your cellphone. (This is a viable idea now, but it wasn’t before smartphones.) Scribd was originally going to be a ridesharing service.

I think they’re on to something here. I’ve found that if you think you have a good idea, chances are someone’s already tried it anyway. There are very few web business ideas that haven’t already been tried in the last decade or so. Someone’s already thought of it, maybe even started a business from it, and maybe even lost their life savings trying to make it work. So what makes you any different?

That’s not to discount ideas, however. People often say that ideas are cheap but execution is king. I agree with this statement as long as the idea has at least a few good legs to stand on. Lots of ideas that seem good on the outside are really just rotten eggs on the inside.

But even with the best idea, if you don’t have the right team behind it then it’s not going anywhere. I love Daniel Tenner’s advice in his classic article ”Where To Find a Business Partner”:

The way I like to put it is that networking to find a cofounder is like going to a party to find a wife. You might meet lots of interesting, and potentially eligible, [business] partners while out networking/partying, but those who respond favourably when you mention what you’re looking for on the first “date” are probably not the ones you want to marry.

The reason is because founders come before ideas. You need to have a relationship with someone BEFORE you try and start a business with them. Because two (or more) good people working together can accomplish great things with even mediocre ideas.

That’s what I feel YCombinator is trying to accomplish by accepting applicants without an idea. They’re hoping that a dynamic duos, trios, or more will apply and be able to come up with an idea that works for them.

I can support that.

Rian van der Merwe wrote a great blog post today about why he’s sticking with Instapaper even though a newer, albeit more glitzy version of Readability was just released:

My loyalty comes from the fact that I’m unable to separate Instapaper from its creator, Marco Arment.

Marco does something really smart that gives him a big advantage over the makers of other, similar apps: he makes himself extremely visible. But even more importantly, he does so as himself, with his own personality, as opposed to some tightly controlled and measured “social media brand engagement” thing.

I second this notion. I’d like to add another reason that I’m sticking with Instapaper: its revenue model is straightforward. I can pay five bucks and get a great app. Readability’s monthly donation model seems shady and unsustainable and I’d rather keep my distance from that.