I’ve been in my little office for a couple weeks now and am loving it. I’ve been working on Locavore, the photobooth, and another new iPhone app. I’ve been drawing pictures.

I’ve also got a little table with notecards: one notecard for each business idea that I am currently pondering. The freedom I have at this moment with what to build, how to build it, in which order, etc, is incredible. But it also requires serious thinking. So I sit on my couch (given to me generously by a friend) and move the note cards around, and think about how they link together, how they express what I’m trying to express with this business, and how the contribute to the world.

I’ve started spending more time on the couch this week and less time at the desk. I’m reading Small Giants, a wonderful gift from the Small & Special conference I attended last week.

I realize that this little company is a meaning-making machine. It is a vehicle for expressing ideas, and building them in a sustainable manner. The first chapter of Small Giants is about the freedom for a business to choose what it is. What does it want? Does it want to be rich? Does it want to be really big? Does it want to change the world? Or does it want to be great? Or does it want to bring out the best in its people? Or does it want something else?

How do these decisions get made? Who makes them? How do they get set in stone? How do they come to life?

The beginning of a company is a flexible time. The soul hasn’t yet set in the body. Like a comfortable chair, it has to be used in order to find its true personality. And with all of the volatility, there’s a chance that negative qualities can infuse themselves in the business. Perhaps the fear of failure puts claw marks in the couch. Perhaps the fear of not being good enough wears down the arm rest. Or can insecurity and fear be used to motivate and inspire? To push me to make the purest and most real decisions. This is my chance to make the right decisions and to build the right thing, and I fully intend on sitting in that couch as much as is necessary to get it right.

This entry was posted by Buster on Monday, July 6th, 2009 at 12:05 am. It is filed under Enjoymentland. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.