The Secret of Life
In the wonderful movie City Slickers, Mitch is lost in his life, and takes a cattle-driving vacation in order to find some meaning. Curly takes Mitch into his confidence and explains that the secret to life is just one thing. Mitch desperately wants to know—needs to know—what is the one thing that is the secret to life. Curly tells Mitch that it is up to him to figure it out himself. Not because it is inexplicable, but because it is personal. The secret to life will be different for each and every person, but for everyone it will be just one thing.
At the start of Getting Real, the authors advise that a new software application should aim to do less, not more, than its competitors in order to gain an advantage.
The advice in the movie and the advice in the book really say the same thing: ignore what’s unimportant, and find what’s important. Find what is important, get it right, and your life or your application will be successful.
I have given this quite a bit of thought, and I have asked myself what is the one thing that Charlie should do? Looking at the elevator pitch and the feature list, there is no identifiable driving force. I have not discovered the one thing that is the secret to Charlie’s life. If I wanted an application that allows a website owner to edit his or her own website, I could have chosen DotNetNuke. But the fact that I have avoided DotNetNuke means that while my head doesn’t know what that one thing is, my heart knows that DotNetNuke will not satisfy it. The elevator pitch and the feature list were products of my head, and DotNetNuke would have satisfied them. So, what did my heart want?
My heart wants for my business, Edition3, and my product, Charlie, to help others achieve what they want. That may sound like a sales pitch. I guess that it is a sales pitch, but it is not an empty one. Dale Carnegie has said that if you want to succeed, help others to succeed. Well I do want to succeed, and I do want to help others to succeed. How can Charlie help?
Let me tell you that I have just spent two hours trying to answer the question. The truth is, I don’t yet know. Many ideas occurred to me, and I started explaining each one. But each one felt a little bit wrong. My heart knows that I can create an application to help others to succeed (even if just in a small aspect of their lives). But my head cannot yet articulate how that can happen. So I will work my way through Getting Real, and will use this weblog as a way of documenting what I discover along the way.
If you think that all of my doubt and worry and indecision means that I should not be doing this, you are probably right. But another lesson from Dale Carnegie is, “Don't give up.”
by Alister Jones | Next up: The Secret of Life - Continued →
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