This is an email I sent to my mailing list a year ago. We miss you, Steve.

I’ve been following Steve closely for more than a decade. Most folks don’t know this, but I ran a Mac-oriented news & opinion site from 1999 to about 2003. Before that, I was “just” a rabid fan.

It’s not an exaggeration to say that if I hadn’t had a Mac, I wouldn’t be the person I am today. The Mac — thanks to Steve – taught me about how software should be. And how powerful it can be. And how few people are willing to do what it takes to make good on that potential.

During some of the rockiest times in my life, I got to make a (modest) living studying & writing about something that inspired me — the Mac OS.

I was paying attention when Steve came back to Apple, & I watched as everyone (including me) panned everything he did. I was in the crowd at MacWorld Boston in 1997, when Steve gave his first Stevenote. When the giant screen suddenly switched to Bill Gates’ face. When Steve announced the MS investment & patent sharing deal.

I booed.

I thought the iMac was cool — but that it would fail. I thought the iPod was going to fail, too. You’d have thought that by 2007, when the iPhone came out, that I would have learned my lesson. But I hadn’t — not yet. I “knew” that the a touch screen keyboard was less usable and that people wouldn’t want it.

But I was wrong, again.

Steve taught me to be wrong.

He showed me what it’s like to do whatever is necessary to survive AND thrive — when nobody believes in you, when even the “rational” market will not recognize the cash value much less potential value of your work, when even your best customers think you are going to fail.

When absolutely everyone in your industry is against what you’re doing.

Steve taught me that to succeed, you have to start small, think different, and do things that seem counter-intuitive… even distasteful.

Microsoft had always been the enemy. Mac fans like me viewed the struggle as a kind of holy war.

And Steve was smart enough to see exactly how limiting that was. How it locked Apple into reacting to MS, instead of being its own creature.

So he bartered with MS… he changed the game from competition to co-opetition… he secured the support of Apple’s worst enemy, secured vital pieces of software for the Mac… and freed Apple to fulfill its larger destiny, beyond the petty “Apple vs Microsoft” dispute.

Steve was brutal. He axed a lot of products that we all loved, like the Newton. He cut out just about everything: the printers, the scanners, the edu models, the vast panoply of Apple products, and cut Apple down to the barest metal.

And rebuilt it.

He played the long game.

He taught me that it’s not only possible, but incredibly powerful to break the rules. Steve killed serial ports. Steve killed the floppy. Steve killed the PowerPC (as far as Apple was concerned). Steve killed CDs.

Steve has already begun the process of killing optical drives, period.

Steve brought us wireless internet for our homes. Before the AirPort, wireless access points were thousands of dollars. Steve made them $300.

Steve democratized pocket computers, and made them something we’d actually want to buy, and use.

Steve made video chatting something anyone could do.

Steve led the creation of a market for software which led to billions of dollars in revenue for dev shops of all sizes.

And those are just the more well-known stories. He also built NeXT. And grew Pixar into one of the best — and only — studios for telling & selling stories. And without Steve, we wouldn’t have such a modern and gorgeous OS. Building a major operating system practically from scratch was an incredibly risky move.

Plus, what about Safari? Without Apple pushing the envelope, the web would look very different today.

And on and on and on.

Did he do all this single-handedly? Of course not. But that doesn’t matter, does it? Would his lieutenants have done it all without him? No. His fingerprints are all over everything.

I’ve never had a proper in-real-life mentor, so what I’ve learned I’ve learned from reading & watching & analyzing.

And there’s nobody I’ve disagreed with, studied, obsessed over, & benefited from — or learned from, and been inspired by — more than Steve Jobs.

I can’t believe he’s truly gone.

But I am damned if I’m going to let those lessons sit on the shelf, gathering dust.

You might also enjoy The iPad, and the Staggering Work of Obviousness.

My friend K is smart, vivacious, funny, driven, talented, passionate, and bubbling over with what the suits of yesteryears called “work ethic.”

And a few days ago, K and I spent at least an hour going back and forth about her horrible, shitty, no-good very bad boss — hereafter known only as “Crazypants.”

The Ballad of Crazypants

• Crazypants refuses to pay for services the business needs.
• Crazypants makes unilateral decisions without consulting the team she’s hired to execute those decisions, who know more about the day-to-day running of the business than Crazypants does.
• Crazypants likes to take rapid freak turns off the project highway, such as demanding my friend choose a new mailing list service the night before sending out a newsletter.
• Crazypants takes advantage of her employees’ desire to do good work in order to get away with chaotic management (at best!).
• Crazypants takes credit for her employees’ ideas — not only to clients and other outsiders, but even inside the company.
• Crazypants does her damnedest to control and intimidate her employees.

And more.

Now, is Crazypants a bad boss? Yes, clearly. And Crazypants is hardly special or alone in her crazy.

Crazypants is also an excellent example of why employment is such an unholy crapshoot.

The Fundamental Problem with Employment…

… is that somebody else has the power to decide how happy you can be. Make no mistake, bad bosses can ruin lives — often temporarily, but sometimes permanently.

Because:

When you’re employed, you’re no longer the captain of your own destiny. Someone else is in control of whether you are allowed to do your best work, to feel good about what you do, to have an impact, to grow professionally and personally.

Yup, I said it: Somebody else is in control. Who? Whoever has the power to make your work and your work life suck. (From here on out, I’ll call that person “your boss” but it could equally be an evil coworker or ignorant client.)

Current emo self-help trends say, “Nobody can make you feel bad without your permission.” But how many happy campers do you know who can totally laugh off the effects of 8 hours a day under a bad boss?

We humans are social creatures, we need other people, and the other people in our lives have tremendous power to affect our feelings. It’s insulting and unrealistic to imply that if hurtful people doing hurtful things hurt us, it’s our fault.

“You Could Improve the Situation”

Okay, I hear you saying, so Bad Boss is Bad. But you can try to change the situation. That’s true. You sure can try. But when your boss is immune to change, how well does that work?

Then, when your suggestion-ballot-writing and helpful hints fail to create the change you desire, you could take things into your own hands and work covertly, on the down low. Engage in a little on-the-job civil disobedience.

But then, as it turns out, your boss’s attitude is making a dishonest person out of you.

How good can you feel about yourself, your work, and your contribution when you’re forced to rely on subversion and trickery to achieve it?

So, change is out, unless you’re lucky. Then once you eliminate change, there are only two well-worn little numbers left: Denial, and quitting.

Denial comes in two forms:

1. You can deny that anything’s wrong, that it’s not “that bad,” and justify your decision to stay. Or…
2. You can accept defeat, pretend you don’t care about doing good work, check out entirely, talk the talk of somebody who is cynical about working for “the man” but who’s willing to fleece “the man,” if the opportunity presents itself. (Many talk this talk, but few can walk it, not truly.)

And finally, you can quit. Quitting, of course, is the act of ripping yourself away from a huge part of your life — from your work, possibly years of it, and people you’ve spent time with and thought about and maybe even loved a little, from your dreams, your original high expectations, and your trials & triumphs — shredding it to little pieces, and stomping on it. Maybe setting it on fire for good measure.

Do any of these sound healthy to you? Have you done them? How’d that feel?

Pretty Damn Bad, if You Ask Me

Hell, when you combine all the “real” jobs I’ve ever held, I’ve tried ‘em all. And they all sucked. I felt like my heart was being stomped on. I felt like my passion and joie de vivre were being sucked out of my chest through a bendy straw.

Then I’d quit, and I’d try a new job (or, finally, consulting), thinking that the next one would be different. I’d be happier; they’d appreciate me more; I wouldn’t feel the slow withering death of passion that comes from the bad marriage between an employee and her company.

Of course, after the honeymoon period, all bets were off. Each new job sucked — in new and different ways, at least, but nevertheless equally. Each one left me disappointed and angry that the people in charge were so incompetent, that I was hamstrung, that, try as I might, it was if all my hard work — in fact my very existence — didn’t even leave a tiny mark on the institution to which I had so naïvely plead my loyalty for 8+ hours a day.

Do You Have a Good Boss?

Sadly, caring about your work plus bad boss (or even “okay boss”) equals ennui, frustration, even depression. When you care about your work, and you work for a less-than-stellar boss, it’s nigh impossible to show up every day and give your all.

Maybe your boss “isn’t all that bad.” Maybe she “means well.” But you know what? An “okay” boss is a bigger problem than you think. You care about what you do. You want to feel like you’re accomplishing something, and take pride in the results, and share in the rewards.

To do all those things, you need a lot more than a moderate, do-no-bad-or-really-any-good Switzerland of a boss. An okay boss is just as bad as a bad boss, most of the time.

Eliminating a pain isn’t the same as creating joy.

Most Jobs Violate Fundamental Human Needs

Yes, really. Most jobs violate fundamental human needs. I’m not joking and I’m not exaggerating.

We all crave meaning. And we crave meaningful work. We all want to feel like we really exist, like we can really make an impact, like we’re really and truly here. That people really and truly see us, understand us, and appreciate us.

And when our daily work denies us these fundamental needs, we wither. We justify, we deny, and we quit, and we complain, and we look for greener pastures but rarely find them.

Continually doing our best for people who don’t appreciate it hurts almost as much as being thwarted. It’s like we don’t matter. Like we don’t even exist.

And yet despite this, we feel held hostage by our financial needs.

What we need is personal sovereignty.

Personality Sovereignty: What It Is

Personal Sovereignty is the solution.

Personal Sovereignty means you are in control of your destiny. Even the little bit of your destiny that plays out during the work day. When you have personal sovereignty, you’re the one in the driver’s seat.

You’re the one who gets to choose:

1. What to work on
2. Whom to work with
3. Whom to work for
4. How to do your work
5. When and where to do your work
6. Whose feedback to value

You get to pick your teammates and your customers. You get to decide when something is done. You get to choose the problems to tackle. You decide what your work should look like, sound like, feel like, taste like. You choose where to invest the most resources. You choose which days to work — and when. You are free and able to fire customers if you want to or need to.

You are freed from the fear of being fired if you make a mistake, or going broke if you tell a customer or two to eff off. You no longer have to hold your tongue, or keep to the shadows, due to financial tyranny.

Personal Sovereignty means that you’ve created freedom and power for yourself — so you can do your best work and be the best person you can be.

Since 2008, I’ve been working on achieving my own Personal Sovereignty. And by jove, I’ve finally got it. In January 2010, I reached my goal of being able to quit consulting, except for one client I really liked. Now, I do no more consulting at all. I live entirely off the income from products that I chose to create & sell — to people I like.

I get to choose what to work on, what to make, when to do it. I get to see the real impact my work has on the world, right away: When I do great work, I hear about how much my customers love it — customers who use what I make, whose lives I get to touch. Customers who show their love with money.

I answer only to reality: do my customers love this? does it earn more money? make my customers happier? No more do I have to worry about educating stakeholders or arbirtrary checklists, or client budgets, or anything else getting between me and doing my best work. There’s no one I must convince… except the people who actually use & pay for what I make. I have no proposals to write or egos to soothe.

No politicking, in fact, at all.

I have the freedom to do my best work. All the time. And if I don’t do my best work, then I have nobody to blame but myself. There’s nobody in my way any more.

I can do just about anything, now that I am the one who wields the Magical Scepter of Work Decision-Making.

That is Personal Sovereignty. And, unlike all the other jobs I’ve ever held, this one gets better over time.

Personality Sovereignty: How to Get It

First step: Admit you have a problem. Clichéd, but, well, clichés exist for a reason. If you’re justifying & making excuses for your less-than-lovely job situation, or pretending you don’t care, STOP. Excuses don’t help anyone, and they certainly hurt.

You deserve to feel valued, like your work makes a difference, like you are a whole, adult human being. That is not a luxury, that is a fundamental need. End of story.

Next up, the Big Fix… and I can’t tell you what it is for you. There is no one-size-fits-all solution to the problem of personal sovereignty. What’s right is what makes you happy.

Maybe you have to be employed (or rely on the kindness of others) to have what truly makes you happy. But then again, maybe you don’t.

Me, I quit. I quit my job, then I quit another job, and then I quit one more and became a consultant. Then I quit consulting, for the precise reason that it was so very much like having a job.

Now I make & sell products, along with my husband and a team of smart & funny freelancers. We make software together, we teach programming workshops together, we wrote an ebook together, and I teach a class on creating & selling your first paying product.

I get to decide what to work on, when, and how; who to sell to, who to hire. I get to do the cost-benefit analysis for everything I do; I get to buy the things I need, hire the people I need and want. Fire them, too, if I need to.

We have many customers and each one pays a little, so no single customer is too important to lose. No one customer can hold us hostage and force us to do things that don’t fit our vision & our needs. We can simply refund their money and point them in the direction of somebody who fits them better.

I highly recommend making & selling your own products, if you’re a maker by trade or spirit, and love doing a wide variety of things, and like to interact directly with people who use the things you make.

That’s What Made ME Happy.

And if you think it’ll make you happy, too, and you’re really ready for a change — like my friend — and you ache to feel satisfied in your work, to serve the people who pay for and value the end result of your work (not your boss, but your customers), then you should seriously consider taking my summer class on how to make your very first profitable product.

It’s called 30×500 Launch Class and tickets are on sale now.

30×500 teaches you how to make a product that earns you money from the get-go. You’ll learn how to ensure you have buyers for your product before you even make it. You’ll learn how I went from $0 of product income in 2008 to over $300,000 in 2010… and the system I created that’ll help you do it, too.

This is the third time I’ve given this course, and it gets better and better every time. But you don’t have to take my word for it — just look at some of the products my students have launched or are launching:

• UserMood
• The Business Part
• FreelanceFunnel
• Refactoring Redmine
• FluxTracker
• AndBang
• a live, in-person Rails workshop (no link available)
• … and more in the works!

It’s clear: 30×500 works. It’s solid, it’s well-researched, it’s systematic, and it’s action-oriented — no vague, handwavy “get rich quick” fluff here. And 30×500 is made from what I’ve learned selling software for small business, a technical ebook, and JavaScript training.

Check it out, if you’re ready to make a change.

And sign up for my free super special email list for free samples & a $100 off coupon:

Name:

Email:

Whatever you do… DON’T SIT ON YOUR ASS

Nobody will ever care as much about your happiness in your work as you will. Nobody will fight harder for your passion than you will.

A lot of us fall into the trap of waiting — waiting for an opportunity to present itself, waiting for a new job offer to land in our laps, waiting for A Sign™ we should quit and move on, waiting for somebody to talk us into it, waiting for our situation to get better, waiting for somebody to swoop in and save us.

Stop waiting.

If you’re unhappy, stop underrating and undermining your own need to do great work.

Get serious about creating your own happiness — and get off your ass.

Take the wheel.

It’s an age-old story: Boy meets passion, boy follows passion, passion turns out to be a mirage and/or actually a big pain in the ass, despite how rosy it may have seemed from a safe distance.

(And, ladies? You’re just as susceptible to this as men. Don’t think I’m giving you a pass.)

Let’s Talk About You

So. You’re in love with a thing. Let’s say it’s coffee, books, design, code or solving interesting problems. You decide to open up a café to follow your passion for coffee. Or a used book shop, because you’re passionate about books. Or, because you’re passionate about solving interesting problems through code or visuals, you hang out your shingle as a freelance developer or designer.

Six months to a year later, and guess what?

Turns out that you hate running a café (or book store, or…). Turns out that running a café is as much about the coffee as raising a child is about snuggles. Yes, the coffee happens — and so do snuggles — but what really makes up the typical day is very little sleep and lots and lots of poop.

And who has a passion for poop?

A Perfect Example, in the Flesh

The small cafe connects to the fantasy of throwing a perpetual dinner party, and it cuts deeper–all the way to Barbie tea sets–than any other capitalist urge. To a couple in the throes of the cafe dream, money is almost an afterthought. Which is good, because they’re going to lose a lot of it…

Guess what, dear dreamers? The psychological gap between working in a cafe because it’s fun and romantic and doing the exact same thing because you have to is enormous. Within weeks, Lily and I — previously ensconced in an enviably stress-free marriage — were at each other’s throats.

— Bitter Brew: I opened a charming neighborhood coffee shop. Then it destroyed my life.

Another well-meaning passion-follower falls victim to The Cute Little Café Syndrome. The Cute Little Café Syndrome will never die — it’s too damned appealing. It’s romance, it’s magical princes, it’s Happily Ever After with a side order of delicious Vienna roast and the absolute best croissants.

It’s Follow Your Passion.

And it’s hardly limited to real-life, actual cafés. The Cute Little Café Syndrome applies to any situation where you blindly follow your passion… and it leads you to a pit of despair (or at least, a pit of debt).

Battling the Cute Little Café Syndrome

Don’t want to find yourself chewed up & spat out by The Cute Little Café Syndrome?

There’s only one thing for it: abandon meatless aphorisms like “Follow Your Passion!” and take stock of reality.

In reality…

• Turning your beloved, refreshing hobby into a job can kill it.
• Doing something you love for yourself isn’t the same as doing it for others.
• You can love something and not know the slightest thing about it.
• You can love something and not be good at it.
• You might not know what Your Passion™ is, at least not with enough fiery motivation to get you going.
• You may believe you’re passionate about a subject but it’s likely your true deep-down-fulfillment passion is about actions, connections, or environment.
• Or, your logical conclusion is that you should engage in actions when your passion is really a subject.
• The Poop Factor is ever-present: most of what goes into running a real business is very different than what you fantasize about.
• Finally… some things just aren’t money-making propositions. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t love them.

So. Does all this mean your working life is doomed to be dull and loveless? That you should go bet on “a sure thing” that you don’t enjoy?

Not at all.

Smokey Robinson Has the Answer

There’s nothing wrong with passion. Passion is a good thing. A good thing you nevertheless need to approach with your eyes open.

Take a page out of Smokey Robinson’s book:

Try to get yourself a bargain, son.
Don’t be sold on the very first one.
Pretty girls come a dime a dozen.
Try to find one who’s gonna give you true loving.
Before you take a girl and say I do, now.
Make sure she’s in love with you, now.
Make sure that her love is true, now.
I hate to see you feeling sad and blue, now.
My momma told me, you better shop around!

Yep. Shop around. Eyes open. Don’t take your passion and assume that its ultimate manifestation, the thing you should do, the thing to follow, is the very first idea that pops into your mind.

Don’t assume that just because you love coffee, you should open a café.

Or because you love books and cozy reading nooks, a book store.

Or because you love photography, a tool for amateur photographers.

Or because you love programming, a software dev shop.

Or because you love design, a freelance design co.

These are obvious top-of-mind ideas. And heck, you might end up loving them. But the likelihood is that you won’t.

After all: would you rather use your passion, or sell it?

Ask Yourself…

Would you still feel passionate when you were struggling to pay the bills and hire wait staff? Or struggling to deal with the clients that inevitably come with solving interesting problems on a freelance basis? Or what about handling customers who are cheapskates and not even particularly tech-savvy?

If you want to run a successful café — and enjoy it — you need to love a lot more than coffee. You’ve also gotta get some kind of pleasure, even grim satisfaction, out of the daily grind. (Ha ha.) Which means, of course, interacting with customers, hiring & managing wait staff, handling the day-to-day necessities like ordering supplies, cleaning, paying rent, marketing your butt off, and dealing with customers who want to squat on your valuable tables all day for just $2 of brew.

Likewise, if you love slinging code, but hate interacting with people who don’t understand you immediately, then you’re going to be miserable doing training or providing support of any kind. If you love creating dramatic illustrations of people and places, but chafe at people who tell you what to do, being a freelance illustrator is going to rub you raw.

And everyone’s heard the story of the guy or gal who quit the rat race, retreated to a cabin in the woods to write a novel… and proceeded to go absolutely bonkers from loneliness, without even a single chapter to show for it.

That’s what Following Your Passion can do to you.

The Solution: 6 Steps

So what’s the alternative? Go to law school? No. (Not unless you’d love being a lawyer. Which means, by the way, a lot more than enjoying reading about torts and arguing.)

What you really need is to:

• Figure out what your passion(s) really are — process? environment? action? subject? connections?
• Ask yourself all the different ways you could work that passion into different kinds of businesses — less obvious than coffee->café
• Add in the Poop Factor for your fantasies — all those daily things we never imagine when we’re fantasizing, you’ve got to confront them head-on — in advance
• Imagine selling it, or dealing with clients, or a certain type of customers — and be honest how you’d feel about that all day long
• Honestly appraise the potential for sustainable income — by studying other people/businesses doing the same kind of thing, and comparing it to how much you want to live comfortably
• Take your best shot from all of the above

It’s true that this won’t all fit in a three-word slogan as eminently tweetable as “Follow your passion”. But how about this?

Practice open-eyed passion.

Or, as Smokey would say:

You better shop around.

Naomi Dunford of Ittybiz threw down the gauntlet, in the form of a challenge to all us small biz types to answer the following tough questions. I did it. You should too.

What’s your game? What do you do?

I challenge smart, creative people to stop whoring themselves out for the pleasure of clients and bosses, and whore themselves out for themselves!

I taunt, tease, and tempt — til making your own products is the itch you have to scratch. I help you destroy every “but,” murder every reluctance. Myths about business (and magical rainbow-pooping unicorns) stand no chance against me and my rapier wit.

Then, after a hard day’s work destroying unicorns, I replace their sparkly farts of untruth with a practical, sensible, repeatable framework for success.

Why do you do it? Do you love it, or do you just have one of those creepy knacks?

Creepy knack, totally. Actually, a creepy lack of a knack.

When I was 13, I decided that what I really wanted to do as a career was build and sell businesses. (Yeah, I was reading business books at 13. See what I mean about “creepy”?) But, because I was a giant wuss, I didn’t even begin to create my first real product until over a decade later. I got caught in the freelance treadmill. I was scared. I was a terrible procrastinator; I figured, if I can’t even work effectively as a freelancer, how on earth will I ever run a business? I figured it would just happen one day. I did a lot of figuring.

Something rotten in Freelance-mark

Then a bunch of things happened that led to me realizing that freelancing (though I called it “consulting” by then) was killing me, I had to make my own products or I’d be miserable, and that I actually, really, loved shipping things. I had a Shipping Come-to-Jesus moment. I realized that the awesome feeling of Shipping felt way better than any pain deferred by procrastination. Shipping felt better than pretty much anything I’d ever felt in my life.

Then I sold a bunch of ebooks

Up til the point where I shipped the beta version of our first ebook, and instead of selling a wished-for 50 copies up front, we sold 400. Then that felt better than pretty much anything I’d ever felt in my life.

I can’t express how awesome it was to touch down after a 12-hour flight and be surprised by the fact that there were 400 orders in my inbox.

That I created something, that wasn’t even done, and 400 people looked at it, and said to themselves: “Fuck yeah, gimme that. Please take my money. Please, please, take my money.”

That was lifechanging. Amazing. I’ve had that experience a few more times since then, and now I want to bring it to everybody.

Hindsight is satisfyingly irritating

Looking back, I’m often irritated at how I let myself fall into the trap of stuckness — and I want to help other people be just as annoyed with themselves in retrospect, viewed safely from atop a pile of successful products!

(Also, secretly, I believe a revolution is afoot. Everybody in the know’s calling it a freelance revolution. But I’m quite sure, with the right push at the right spot, we could transform it into a product revolution — which would be much, much better.

Consider my beret as good as ordered.)

Who are your customers? What kind of people would need or want what you offer?

In short: designers and developers, freelancers or employees, who haven’t entirely sold themselves on the idea that “communicating client objectives” is the richest use of their time. Who love to create more than they love wrangling RFPs. Who occasionally sit back and wonder what it would like to interact directly with those people who actually touch their work, rather than please the committees that stand between them. Who are willing to do what it takes for more fulfilling work, even if they’re not ready yet — and even if they’re not sure what it does take, exactly.

Designers and developers?

“Designer” can mean interaction designer, graphic designer, print designer, logo designer, illustrator, or others I haven’t thought of. Developer can mean front-end, back-end, any language, any level of skill.

The key thing is that my audience is Creators. People who are already accomplished at creating things, and know what they’re good at — but just need to get over the hump of believing that they can actually make and sell their own products instead of dooming themselves to eternal servitude. And then, over the hump, could use a little help with the practicals.

But, really, I say designer & developer because I know those worlds best. If you’re a savvy copywriter who carefully designs every sentence, or an Excel spreadsheet ninja, I count you as capital-C Creator.

What’s your marketing USP? Why should I buy from you instead of the other losers?

Sparkly unicorn farts. Where else can you get solid business advice that conjures up images of glittery rainbow-poo, tied up nicely with a pop neuroscience bow? Nowhere!

But seriously — I’m a hustler. I’ve made money doing just about every legal thing you can imagine (and a couple that were a bit iffy). I know all the creepy Internet Marketing stuff, as well as the traditional small business and even Harvard Business School stuff, because I’ve read 20 or 30 business books a year since I was a teenager.

More than a hustler, I’m a systematizer. When I want to learn something, the first thing I do is look at 100 examples of that thing and make careful notes. Then I read the top 3 to 5 books on the subject and cross-reference them.

In this (admittedly creepy) way, I build up a solid, testable sense of The Hidden Rules of How Things Work.

Then I go out and test that system, by doing. In this case, that means designing, coding, marketing and selling my own products.

Miraculously: it works!

So far, it’s been working great. I have an ebook, live training courses, a semi-live online class (the 4-month 30×500 Launch Class), and even a subscription software app (Freckle, a time tracking tool).

My systematizing works. I can turn The Hidden Rules into products that sell. And, thanks to my slightly scary hobby (armchair psychology), I’m really good at planting The Hidden Rules into people’s heads in a way they can use.

I am my target market, plus 3-5 years

Also… I’ve been there. I’m a designer; I’m a developer. I procrastinated for years. I wished, I dreamed, and then I went back to doing the same stupid shit that got me stuck in the first place. Even when I had enough to quit consulting, I kept going longer than I had to. Out of fear. I’ve been there — and I’m no longer there. I got out, and so can you.

What’s next for you? What’s the big plan?

Revolution, baby! But I don’t know exactly what or how — I’m still figuring it out.

I’m gonna keep moving til it comes to me, though. It’s hard to have world-shaking ideas when you’re lying on a divan, being fed peeled grapes by a sultry manservant. (In the interest of science, however, I’d like to test this theory thoroughly.)

In about a week, I’m relaunching my class for developers who want to create their very first product, the 30×500 Launch Class. It is New and Improved, the second time around.

Then, I’m in talks with three exciting individuals about smaller joint projects. And I want to create some mini-courses or mini-guides for different steps of the process. (Like, if you’ve already launched a product and need post-launch support. Or, how to create a winning info product.)

In short: I’m going to keep creating.

Beyond those rough ideas, all I really know is that there’s a revolution afoot — and I want to be a person pushing on that one, perfect spot, to tip it over from being a freelance revolution to being a product revolution.

How about you? What do you do — or wish you were doing? Try answering Naomi’s questions for yourself. Link your post in my comments!