Shanti’s Dispatches

This time on How to Do What You Love.

To do something well you have to like it. That idea is not exactly novel. We’ve got it down to four words: “Do what you love.” But it’s not enough just to tell people that. Doing what you love is complicated.

If you know me or have read this blog for a bit, you’ll know this is something I also feel passionately about (along with sleep schedules, that is :)).

On School and Tedium

The part on school being tedious reminds me of a story about a friend, now a member of the rock band Ludo, when he was in grade school.

He went to a Montessori School, and from everything I’ve heard about these new agey schools, I really wish I had had the opportunity to go to one for a while.

Andrew Volpe, for an entire month straight, simply counted to a million. When he went to bed at night, he noted down how far he had gotten. When he woke up, he continued on his quest to a million. I guess it took him about a month.

Not really sure of the point of that story, other than an example of doing what you love (or maybe just what you want to do), as opposed to traditional boring/tedious schoolwork.

I went to college with Andrew for several years until he finally dropped out and just went for it with his band, living out of their van and crashing at random houses on the road. You da man, Andrew.

On Prestige

Prestige doesn’t really appeal to me so much as Respect does. These days, especially in the webapp / Web 2.0 world, “respect, yo” as Ali G would say, is hard to come by.

The competition is just insane. Everyone and their grandma, it seems, are building a new whiz-bang Ruby on Rails / Ajax powered, social-networking whirly-gig.

On Money

I fall into this trap, too.

It seems like ages ago, but for a while there, I really thought that I was hot stuff for selling a website and having a fat chunk of stock in a publicly-traded company. Boy, how naive. (the stock was restricted at the time and is now worth next to nothing)

When you honestly believe you don’t have to worry about where the rent money / etc. will come from for the next 6-12 months, the feeling of freedom is incredible.

That’s when I started the networking group / Human Capital Investment Group, Menlo Park 2.0. It was fun while it lasted, and it’s still an idea I hope to revisit if the opportunitity presents itself.

What I’ve learned since starting MP2 is that idealism, ambition and dreaming big are one thing (they are awesome & a pre-requisite for ‘going big’), but, at the end of the day, unfortunately money still talks. Not to mention pays the bills.

SproutIt.com’s Suite of Web Apps: Enablers of Doing What You Love?

Only time will tell. But that’s what appeals to me most — the vision of a suite of hosted web apps for small businesses.

And of course, starting your own small business is all about doing what you love, no?

Over on Sprout’s blog The Big Act: Charles Jolley talks about Mailroom and doing what you love.

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