Or I can inhabit it, against all the messages of contemporary culture, as a legitimate way of being, an opportunity to focus all that longing on my hearts desire, whether that be a community garden or world peace. Her story provokes another: of the return of Mertons body aboard a military-transport plane from Thailand, Merton the pacifist mystic monk in his shiny black body bag amid a hundred and more dead soldiers in their shiny black body bags an image of solitude amid unity if ever one was known. Do competitors have the ability to deliver an immediate knockout blow? Terms of service Privacy policy Editorial independence. Erik Satie composed music in which the silences are as important as the notes. You will search for a long while, even though more and more of us are living alone, whether by choice or circumstance. Central question: how can you get the greatest benefit from the use of your time? Most new products and services are, in reality, incremental improvements to existing ones. Take OReilly with you and learn anywhere, anytime on your phone and tablet. Master the potential of new technologies. Then it is gone and my interest returns to corn pone and mustard greens, or rubbing a paragraph with a soft cloth. When this technology is combined with a sound business idea, any individual can create and grow their own business. Going IT Alone: The Handbook for Freelance and Contract Software Developers of your own streams and oceans; explore your own higher latitudes, with shiploads of preserved meats to support you, if they be necessary; and pile the empty cans sky-high for a sign. A must read for budding entrepreneurs.Added-value of this summary:Save timeUnderstand the key concepts Increase your business knowledgeTo learn more, read "Go It Alone" and get the advice you need to start your own business. Research is never as valuable as actual experience with customers. Business is started with minimal investment, and founder/founders retain full ownership and control of the business. I can see my life without sex as a way station, a year or a decade long, between sexual encounters. Rahawa Haile shares her story of hiking the Appalachian Trail as a queer black woman in the spring of 2016 traveling through hundreds of miles in states that staunchly supported Donald Trump in the election. Free Online Library: Going it alone, together. Learning is critical. The You Are the Customer" Test - with the range of possible products/services, would I buy the new offering? (Not part of core competence or business reinvention.). There wasnt any resemblance in her outward identity. Our community has done a great job of celebrating data scientists. But the monks now report their silent retreatants delight at the installation of the tallest cell tower Ive seen, the red light at its top a continual winking feature of the view from Mertons porch. (5-10) Measure the time spent doing this daily; it should be at least 1 hour. Emily Dickinson at her sunny, south-facing window, surveying the church she declined to attend, Buddha under the bodhi tree, Moses on the mountain, Jesus in the desert, Julian of Norwich in her cell, Jane Austen taking notes on the edges of the society she so vividly portrayed, Vincent van Gogh at his canvas, Zora Neale Hurston experiencing extraordinary visions while walking home alone for these people, solitude was a vehicle for the imagination. You become a valuable asset to other firms, and can negotiate more favorable terms, faster payments, financing, etc. Terms of service Privacy policy Editorial independence. Dont blame - take responsibility. The key to understanding your market is research, so make sure that you do this thoroughly and make use of reliable information sources. I miss the sadness. This is an attractive option to consider for your business venture when considering how Get Going IT Alone: The Handbook for Freelance and Contract Software Developers now with the OReilly learning platform. So the great difficulty lies in trying to transpose last nights moment to a day which has no knowledge of it. Dive in for free with a 10-day trial of the OReilly learning platformthen explore all the other resources our members count on to build skills and solve problems every day. Maintain an experimental and learning attitude at all times. View all OReilly videos, Superstream events, and Meet the Expert sessions on your home TV. (If not, can I acquire that expertise?). Released December 2016. Again and again the bachelor Giorgio Morandi painted vessels that float outside time and space in a world without surface or shadow, portraits of infinity. Despite that, very few people actually muster the courage to actually start a business. Only you can ask yourself the hard questions. With its mild humor and compelling, dynamic narrative, I found Haile's "Going It Alone," extremely insightful, and topical. Take advantage of the benefits of scale. Henry James, portraying the caustic corruptions of fortress marriage, living alone in Lamb House by the sea. Ben Franklin: He that has once done your a kindness will be more ready to do you another than he whom you yourself have obliged.". I want to consider solitary people and those who seek solitude as essential threads in the human weave figures in the carpet, to adapt the title of a Henry James short story narrated by just such a person spinsters and bachelors without whom the social fabric would be threadbare, impoverished. Ky.), From At the Center of All Beauty: Solitude and the Creative Life, published this month by W. W. Norton. Going It Alone, by Fenton Johnson [Folio] Going It Alone Adjust Share The dignity and challenge of solitude by Fenton Johnson All man's miseries derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone. Do I have the essential expertise to execute well within this focus? Like virtue, it defines itself in the doing. The echo is not coincidental. My monk friends, men and women, brothers and sisters, speak with passion and eloquence of celibacy as a conscious decision to fulfill oneself through a communion with all, rather than with a particular individual. You are giving up control, and thats okay - its essential. Go-it-alone businesses are oriented towards fast positive cash flow, growth driven by increases in cash flow, founders retaining control of the business, and focus on a limited number of employees doing what they do best. believes in destiny and believes that it has need of him, wrote Martin Buber, the great Jewish philosopher. Get full access to Going IT Alone: The Handbook for Freelance and Contract Software Developers and 60K+ other titles, with free 10-day trial of O'Reilly. Spinsterhood is a calling, a destiny. You want to in-house the brains" of the operation. The value of getting your business started is enormously high - the learning associated is very valuable. I do not wish to say that being solitary is superior or inferior to being coupled, nor that the full experience of solitude requires living alone, though doing so may create a greater silence in which to hear an inner voice. You never know whats going to work and it may take two or three separate tries before you hit on the right idea - keeping your day job allows you to retain the ability to test each of these ideas from the dispassionate viewpoint of someone who doesnt need them to work. Summary: Samar Ibrahim doesn't like her current office. This is why Buddhists say that we can learn what we need to know by sitting on a cushion. Dont allow resistance to develo Hit singles and doubles every day. The Vulnerability" Test - once Im up and running, what could happen that could kill the business instantly? The More Than a One-Trick Pony" Test - do you have any ideas of ways to expand your offerings? Such a vow places responsibility and struggle where they belong with the individual conscience. Launch and learn quickly. When this technology is combined with a sound business idea, any individual can create and grow their own business. This (1) reduces wasted dollars on failed launches; (2) limits time devoted to unsuccessful initiatives; (3) maintains competitive edge by encouraging view of business as evolving, flexible, and competitive. Four central problems that all service businesses must deal with: (1) unpaid time and effort selling the service; (2) balancing custom expertise with time involved; (3) getting and keeping happy customers while limiting number of customers who will never be satisfied; (4) the customers desire to pay a flat fee. A substantial portion of the founders time must be spent working on the business, not in the business. Do something instead of thinking about doing something. If you work for someone else, you will never be paid full value, and temporary workers typically cant negotiate a percentage of the rewards of the work. Some seek them in vowed celibacy. Summary There are different types of client that require different methods to work with. The crossword clue possible answer is available in 10 letters. Define outsourcing broadly to achieve maximum possible benefit - ASP, part-time workers, call centers for phone operations, contracting with other firms for warehousing/mailing/delivery, etc. Get full access to Going IT Alone: The Handbook for Freelance and Contract Software Developers and 60K+ other titles, with free 10-day trial of O'Reilly. Tips to overcoming it: Beware easy access to resources; it can prevent you from developing your business as strongly as possible. Although using math's is more complicated than simply guessing a price for quotes and estimates, the extra effort produces a result that is more informed and th There are typically very few relationships that determine the overall success of the business - find them and measure the heck out of them. After more than a decade of assembling evidence of his monastic orders history of supporting hermits, Merton received permission to retreat from the communal life of the monastery to a hermitage on Gethsemanis grounds. Beware of feature creep and over-analysis - they create complexity. (Important: when customers are involved, its important not to let anything slip through the cracks.) Evidently, to be worthy of the name something greater must be at stake. Scale allows you to grow revenues without expanding infrastructure/costs. Why/why not? Test - Can a supplier or partner replicate your business and eliminate the demand for your service/product? Outsourcing: even if a function is critical to my business, can it be handled as well or better and cost-effectively by an available service? O clement, o loving, o sweet Virgin Mary. Am I unique, or are there many competitors like me? Find ways to stretch it out to reduce risk. Get Mark Richardss Software Architecture Patterns ebook to better understand how to design componentsand how they should interact. Terms of service Privacy policy Editorial independence. Its a public-relations ploy, someone announced, to nods of assent. But it is somehow comforting to learn, even through suffering, how large and powerful love is. I would modify his eloquent condolence by substituting especially for even for how else do we learn the dimensions and power of love except through suffering? Exposing yourself to risk is a truth Miss Eckhart and I had in common. Be dedicated to making continuous, small improvements to efficiency and productivity. View all OReilly videos, Superstream events, and Meet the Expert sessions on your home TV. Consider turning a product into a service. Build a business that offers real value to meet the needs of your target market, and other customer groups may follow; also, be in a position to quickly solidify and capitalize on any interest you see from potential customers who are part of a different target market than the one youre currently serving. Application Service Providers (ASPs) make products easy to use, instantly available over the internet for monthly fees. We hope you enjoy reading another article this month! You must establish a sustainable routine through which you can do your best work and flourish long-term. Provide a professional, extremely high-quality experience. If you solve one of these problems for yourself, you may also have invented your next career. Analyze how youre spending your time and determine if additional work can be outsourced. The more you plan for contingencies, the luckier youll be. No matter how good your technical and project management skills are, the success of the project will always be dependent on the client's commitment to the project. I salute the courage of those who make such declarations in public, but I admire more deeply those who honor their vows in the solitude of their hearts. OReilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O'Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers. Hiking is done all over the world, by all different types of people. Marketing benefits from scale. Practically, this means not linking time to compensation - time-dependent businesses kill leverage. If you can launch and maintain your business with a bare minimum of resources, your likelihood of long-term success is high. Advances in computing technology and their adoption by the mainstream public has opened many new opportunities for the design of software-oriented business mode The Rule of Decreasing Support Costs: services that are available today at high expense for large businesses will be available in 12 to 18 months on a plug-and-play outsourced basis to small companies at low monthly usage fees. Listen to Marianne Moore writing about Henry James: Things for Henry James glow, flush, glimmer, vibrate, shine, hum, bristle, reverberate. Use your intuition - is it really simple, or are there too many moving parts? Also, appearing professional" is easier when it is not known that you work from home or have very few employees. Hurston found them in her writing, her lifelong project of preserving in words the religions of Africa as they appeared after being transplanted to the New World. Recognize that there is no "A" for Effort - you must own risk completely; the startup world is more Darwinian. Specifically, technology in the form of e-mail, the World Wide Web and a broad array of off-the-shelf and https://www.mustreadsummaries.com/summary/go-it-alone/. Assume that if you are a success, someone else has noticed and is now competing with you. Present a high degree of professionalism. Develop quick, inexpensive processes for discovering what new products/services potential customers will buy. Summary Advances in computing technology and their adoption by the mainstream public has opened many new opportunities for the design of software-oriented business models. What is the point of the chatter and diversions of our lives, except to keep the demons at bay? The acid test is whether or not your business is simple to operate. . This allows for fast ROI, zero required infrastructure, unbeatable affordability, and unlimited scalability. There is no individual way to run your self-employment business. And yes, I miss even the arguments, because underlying the bickering was always this taken-for-granted certainty: How much I must matter to this person that I rouse him to such anger! An experimental attitude combined with flexibility is a sure source of increasing the odds of positive luck. The free man I find ecstasy in living the mere sense of living is joy enough, Dickinson wrote. Still Life, by Giorgio Morandi ARS, New York City/Alinari/Art Resource, New York City. Attempting to Expand from Focused to Comprehensive Services - there is a natural tendency to drift over time; fight to maintain your focus on dominating your niche. A vow may be taken for a lifetime, but its lived out day to day, hour by hour, one encounter at a time, by little and by little. I offer Eudora Welty, writing magical realism when Gabriel Garca Mrquez was a teenager. I offer the growing integration of the concept of sustainability into our everyday choices. Summary Understanding who you intend to sell to will allow you to clearly define what your business is about, who you intend to deal with, what you will offer, and - Selection from Going IT Alone: The Handbook for Freelance and Contract Software Developers [Book] Living amid the cultures obsession with erotic passion, a solitary exists let us not deny it in a state of continual suffering, which is to say, in a continual opening to the possibility and grandeur of love. Business strength is achieved when you become the fulcrum, and the business system you establish is the lever. While their biographies often suggest a lifetime of living alone (e.g., Henry James, Henry David Thoreau), more emphatically and more profoundly I see their solitude enacted in their work, which is their gift to us, their spiritual children. I can choose whether simply to endure my condition with my attention focused elsewhere and outward, wondering whether I will meet Mr. or Ms. Identify the important metrics. I thought the sections on extreme outsourcing and use of ASPs were particularly helpful. The most successful businesses have the discipline to focus on one skill and practice that obsessively." Let us acknowledge that solitude and celibacy are related to but not necessary conditions for each other. Success leading to complacency - when things are going well, the drive to improve is diminished; you let your guard down. Subscribers can find additional help here. It is possible to amplify your own power by creating an effective business system. If your private life includes a go-it-alone enterprise, you dont want to actively keep it a secret, but you shouldnt go out of your way to make it a part of your work persona. You must maintain discipline. Ninety-eight years old, she grows ever weaker as I write these words, and in her honor I inject some leavening into my treatment of what should be a cheerful topic by citing Zora Neale Hurston, who wrote in her autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road: Under the spell of moonlight, music, flowers, or the cut and smell of good tweeds, I sometimes feel the divine urge for an hour, a day, or maybe a week. For exemplars closer to our time, I study the lives and work of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Paul Czanne, Hart Crane, Dorothy Day, Emily Dickinson, Marsden Hartley, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Henry James, Thomas Merton, Flannery OConnor, Eudora Welty. Focus on your core competence - what you do best that allows you to create something valuable to a customer. Take OReilly with you and learn anywhere, anytime on your phone and tablet. Never get too far ahead of your customers. I mean, do you think its possible for a healthy person to be celibate? Debate on this question ensued. Extraordinary risk is essential to success. We invite you to read it, both for the beauty of its language and also, most importantly, for its thought-provoking content. It looks like we don't have a Synopsis for this title yet. Printer Friendly. After more than twenty years of living alone, I launched an investigation of how these authors lived out solitude in a world that seems so exclusively to celebrate coupling up, that sees bachelor- or spinsterhood as tragic. You must build in the time for business analysis and reinvention daily, or rapid change will kill you. Keep your curiosity and willingness to experiment alive. Engage and enroll others in your vision. Start with a bias to outsource everything, then ask these questions: If answer to both is yes, outsource. This saves tremendous amounts of time and energy you can use to build the business. entrepreneurship, money & success, strategy. This leads to more specialized businesses. Monks and priests have left their religious orders on a moments notice; lifelong bachelors and spinsters couple and marry late in their lives. Small companies can be nimble. Also use productivity-enhancing software to increase your effectiveness on what you spend your time on. In our solitude, might we devise ways of supporting and disseminating ascetic virtues without monasteries? Custom-designed solutions kill your speed advantage. It is easier to sail many thousand miles through cold and storm and cannibals Eating alone at a restaurant means being confident, independent, and self-assured. 2023, OReilly Media, Inc. All trademarks and registered trademarks appearing on oreilly.com are the property of their respective owners. Need to create a login? This is upside potential only - businesses change so rapidly that buyers would be purchasing a platform that must be constantly revitalized, not a sure thing. What animates me and possesses me is what drives Miss Eckhart, the love of her art and the love of giving it, the desire to give it until there is no more left. Are there specific types of business strategies or innovations that are particularly effective when combined with extreme outsourcing? 2023, OReilly Media, Inc. All trademarks and registered trademarks appearing on oreilly.com are the property of their respective owners. There's also live online events, interactive content, certification prep materials, and more. Franchising - there are benefits: (1) proven business model; (2) systematized by nature; (3) pre-created marketing and national marketing scale; (4) economies of scale in purchasing; (5) training and support. Terms of service Privacy policy Editorial independence. I want to rethink our understanding of solitude and of solitaries, of those who live alone or who dedicate much of their time to being alone. The internet makes many things possible; unbundling and outsourcing. Imagine potential pricing innovations - the goal is to create a pricing system that makes sense to the customer and permits a far easier yes than what already exists. Find the shortest possible path to profitability. 8/12/2019 In Paris in 1931, an orphan named Hugo Cabret, who lives in the walls of a train station, is wrapped up in a mystery involving his late father and an automaton. You must be determined enough to find a way to succeed. I am not offering a rose-strewn path. Make it easy for partners to say yes" without bogging you down in analysis. Business models that are successful in one industry may also inspire successful innovations in other industries. The best solution is to automate everything except the core focus of your business, using inexpensive plug-and-play services, even when these services only provide 60% of the functionality you want. Develop an analysis process that improves the returns of your decision-making. They took charge of desire and so successfully focused it inward that they could then turn its energy outward.

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