Growing up in the Gen-X / Gen-Y, post-TV world of my youth has obvious advantages. But it lacks some of the nuance of yesteryear – like a framed copy of your first dollar.

Making money on the internet, at least at a small scale, is exactly the opposite of making money in the real world. Trying something is so cheap, you should just keep trying things until something works. Unfortunately, just because it works a little bit – doesn’t mean it’ll work much more than that.

I started writing software when I was seven years old. Most of the years I clung to the idea that, someday, I would write a piece of software that people would pay money to OWN. When I began working, first as a coder and then later as a software architect, I still held out dreams of building the next Google – a gigantic, brilliant piece of engineering that would make me the richest man in the world.

And then I discovered Toyota.

This was also just about the time I was going broke, chasing one of these big, complicated visions. Read the rest of this entry »