I feel it. I feel it now more than ever. I delete more tweets than I send. I leave more blog posts half-written than I publish. Increasingly, I do the very opposite of the thing I’m most passionate about. I reneg on my right to the freedom of speech.

Yep. 🙁

In my case I used to spend a ton of time as an indy communicating directly with my customers via my blog. It was easy to discuss what I was working on because I generally wanted them to know about it and didn’t have other folks on my end to worry about.

Now I’m spending a lot of my time trying to make sure we have the processes and systems in place to support a great development team at scale at Crowd Favorite. It would be inconsiderate of me to discuss those kinds of changes until they are first vetted through the team, but I’m hoping to start talking more about them as we implement processes and see the results. Both to share what we’ve learned, and learn from those who have different experiences.

The real answer is to spend a deep amount of time stepping into something to learn, because when you learn it, when you truly understand it, it can change the trajectory of your life.

People with deep knowledge of things are always interesting and awesome to work with.

There are many pretenders to the throne but I stand by LaunchBar.

And therein lies the problem of side projects. They will either muddle along as a fun side project and provide a necessary distraction from your main work, or they will grow and demand your attention. They want to be fed. The answer to “what if this fails” is easy. You shut it down. The answer to “what if this succeeds” is much harder. Especially when you’re not willing to walk away from your main job. And I wasn’t.

Moderate success is the hardest kind of success. This is exactly why we got out of our web hosting side project to focus on services and development.

[…] in the 15 years I’ve been doing this, the list never gets shorter, it only gets longer.

Yep.

A great post by fellow OwnerCamper Jeff Robbins about his role as CEO a Lullabot.

But the truth is that “replace yourself” is just a concept – an ideal. It could also be restated as “You can’t do everything. Find people to do the things you’re doing. Then find other things that need doing.” And repeat. It’s a switch from working on the work to working on the company.

I feel like I did this in a big way when I sold Crowd Favorite and stepped into the CTO role.

[…] ignorance isn’t the same thing as dumb. Lots of smart people are ignorant about a lot of things. It’s an issue of exposure. And you can’t deal with exposure via a law.

This is a hard, hard topic to discuss – especially on the internet. I really enjoyed having a chance to sit with Chris and discuss in more detail at WordCamp Orange County this weekend.