... A garage start-up of today will unseat a giant tomorrow.

In the late 90s, Sabeer Bhatia, co-founder of Hotmail, was given a tour of Microsoft's campus. Bill Gates pointed to one building and said, "That's Microsoft Word." Then he pointed to another building and said, "That's Excel." Then he pointed to another building and said, "That's Outlook." The point was to make Sabeer scared that even if Hotmail decided against selling out, Microsoft could just make another building and devote it to webmail.

Sabeer wasn't scared, and against the pleas of his board, he turned down a $250M+ offer.

Because at the end of the day, what the Bill Gates's, Michael Dell's, Steve Jobs's, and Sergey Brin's of the world know deep down inside, is that the little guy in the garage start-up is the one they have the most to fear.

Microsoft came back with a $400M offer, and finally Sabeer accepted.

I think the reason why it's so easy for a garage start-up to unseat a big boy, is that simply put, the way people do things is always changing, and big companies are systematically slower to adapt. As time marches forward, the rate at which change happens will be increasing, and so agility will be more favored in the future than enterprise.

Reading Julia Cameron's The Right to Write is interesting because of all the different angles at which she tries to jostle readers into just picking up a pen and writing.

One of the interesting angles is that she talks about how everybody is a writer. Everybody thinks, has ideas, and wants to express their ideas.

Which has got me thinking that if you take an inventory of skills in a career-finding test, there will be a subset of these skills that belong in the "everybody is" category.

I can think of a couple off the top of my head.

"everybody is a singer"

Everybody wants to sing, and enjoys singing (barring physical handicap). If they're bad, they like to sing in the shower. I think that's largely the appeal of American Idol. (And now in the US, karaoke).

Here's another one.

"everybody is an entrepreneur"

I believe that everybody has had a moment like, "somebody should fix this" or "somebody should offer this." I think I'd feel comfortable going on a crusade to have everybody, and I mean everybody, try creating a start-up. I feel like that would be a universal good.

A cynic could say, "well, not everybody has good ideas, the world doesn't need more half-baked ideas." I think that would be B.S. because we don't know which ideas are half-baked and which ideas are not until they're attempted. I've had a lot of start-ups ask me to do things which looked ridiculous on paper, but once fully expressed became a "why didn't I think of this."

A lot of good companies started in downturns. GE, Disney, HP, Hyatt, Microsoft, FedEx, MTV, CNN.

Five reasons a recession is a good time to start a company.

Starting up in a down economy.

I had a thought today that I think relates to the concept of fear and writing. It's the following:

Writing is an attachment.

What I notice is that the process of writing, of committing something to paper, is an expression of the form, "I'm not willing to part with this." Think of the most basic form of writing, a little shopping list or a TODO list. We do these things because we "don't want to forget." By extension, I think we write ideas down because we want to keep them, to pin them down. Inevitably we become attached to what we write, and so sometimes we intentionally write something down to form a bond.

Is a fear of writing, in some cases, some sort of attachment-anxiety? An unwillingness to be tied to a particular idea? There's a fear, perhaps, that if I put something out there, in writing, I'm forever bound to these words and these ideas.

In that most important tome of positive psychology, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, Mihalyi talks about how athletes get "in the zone" or when workers "lose themselves" into their work. This is being in "flow" and Mihalyi argues that it's possible to live everyday in flow. The idea is to achieve the appropriate balance between challenge and skills. This graphic is key:

In the later chapters, Mihaly extends the concept of flow to the rest of our lives, and believes that happiness comes from leading an entire life in flow. To understand this requires looking at the graphic a little differently:

You know that saying, "follow your fears"? I think that's precisely what this is talking about. While you may be challenging yourself everyday at work (I know I am), if your career as a whole isn't a challenge for you, how can you expect to be growing appropriately?

In the last couple days, I've thought a lot about what I cling to for safety. I've tried to challenge myself and see where I can let go.