Looking sideways again…

We seem to be burning 2004 up at a great rate. Seems like it was a brand new year just a few months ago, and we are already on the downhill side of it.

As I noted many months ago, blogging allows me to look at what I am doing while I’m doing it. Now that blogging has become an integral part of my life, I find the trail of posts to be an interesting indicator of the changes that have happened in my life and in my thinking.

I started retirement thinking that I would write a novel to communicate some ideas I felt might be important. After almost a year of work, I put the manuscript away to “season” while I got on with the task of developing a business that would provide a challenge and more immediate income.

I also started blogging at this point and found that I could communicate broadly about issues and ideas are important to me and get immediate feedback.

This opened my eyes to the potential of this distributed publishing phenomenon we call blogging. I could see that there was real interest in useful and amusing ideas if they were parcelled out in bite-sized portions.

Our society has changed markedly in the last fifteen years and one of the biggest changes, to my mind, is that there seems to be shorter periods of time in which to read and absorb new information. Perhaps the novels of the future will be dispensed a few thousand words at a time.

If I am any example, I seem to read on the run these days. I get most of my news and much of my sense of the world from weblogs and articles on the internet. I really enjoy the transparency provided by embedded links in most of what I read. It is much easier to separate the author’s ideas from those of the original source.

I also find, to my surprise, that I still seem to have things to say about marketing, PR, and doing business in small and large theaters of operation. I had thought I would get that out of my system when I left the world of high-tech in 2001. Instead, I find that long unexpressed ideas rise up and refuse to go away until I give them voice on this blog.

I didn’t realize that I had stifled my impulses to communicate so much during the last ten years of my high tech employment.

As I moved from company to company, I became more and more aware of the gulf between my motivations and the motivations that drove the younger people who ran these large companies. Many of them were from another generation and their goals were primarily fixed on getting up the corporate ladder. Customer satisfaction and corporate profitablity ran a distant second and third to personal advancement.

It was in those final years that I realized that I had more in common with owners of very small companies. It was just a matter of time before I became one. A timely reduction in force gave me the shove I needed.

Now, three years into my “retirement”, I find my days packed with interesting demands on my time and a growing audience for ideas that have stood the test of time and experience. I have a growing backlog of designs to execute and have picked up a micro-business as a consulting client. I am stretching to find time to deal with these new experiences and to blog about them.

Life is good…and very busy. Hope yours is the same.