Josh Padnick’s Blog

Okay, so watch this video for just a little bit before you continue reading:

One of the things I really love about music is that when we hear great music performed, we aren’t just hearing great music, we’re also hearing an individual who has risen to his or her full potential.

The guy in the video is of course Bono, U2’s lead singer. The song is “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For.” As you watch Bono singing to thousands of people, you can just tell that Bono has 150% embraced his role. You don’t get the feeling that he’s thinking “Gosh, am I enjoying singing this song? Is this really what I want to be doing with myself?” You can just tell that he is totally congruent with what he’s doing, and is expressing himself to his full potential. Sure enough, thousands of people came out to hear it.

This may sound silly, but sometimes when I’m working alone in a room and trying to accomplish what I think is my full potential, I think of myself as the “Bono” of my little world. The way that Bono sings on stage — with purpose, and passion, and strength — that’s how I want to build Omedix, or deliver our web services.

So what other jobs require that 150% embracing of your position in order to really truly be performed well? I think actors have to do that, too. If an actor half-asses a role, it just looks ridiculous.  Watch a random B-movie on Showtime at 2am on a weeknight and you’ll see what I mean.

But an actor like Russel Crowe who throws himself completely into every role he takes…he’s the Bono of his world.

In fact, I once saw a 60 Minutes episode featuring Russel Crowe. At one point he said:

“Do I feel in an odd way that there should be some kind of understanding between me and an audience now that if I’ve done the movie, regardless of the subject matter, you should turn up ’cause it’s gonna be a good film? I know that’s kind of wacky to say that, but, yeah, I do feel that.

I do feel after, you know, ‘L.A. Confidential,’ ‘The Insider,’ ‘Gladiator,’ ‘Beautiful Mind,’ ‘Master and Commander,’ ‘Cinderella Man,’ there should be some understanding between me and the audience that, you know, if I’ve done it. One, I’ve put a lot of effort into it. And two, there’s something about it that’ll touch your heart.”

You can’t help but notice the pride and passion in a statement like that. And again, in order to have that kind of personal investment in a professional endeavor, you simply HAVE to embrace it as your life’s true calling.

Other examples?

I think my Dad, a cardiologist, is one. He simply loves what he does. He loves being a doctor, and taking care of patients. He loves cardiology, in particular. I’ve asked him before, and he said he’d enjoy doing other things, but there’s nothing else he’d rather be doing…25 years into his career.

For myself, I had a weird epiphany sometime in early 2008. I just realized one day that I *love* business. I love the idea of having an idea, exploring it, analyzing it, planning for it, mobilizing resources to achieve it, and then going out and trying to do it…and maybe making some money from it, too. I can’t explain why, but that is incredibly exciting to me.

I really like computers, I really like programming, I really enjoy working with people, but my true calling is to be an entrepreneur and businessman. I feel like I have an endless fascination with how businesses are fun and how they succeed. I love to read about businesses and business leaders. I love to meet other entrepreneurs. I’ll work all day, and still be interested in those things. I think for myself also there really is nothing else I’d rather be doing.

And then there’s the opposite side of a spectrum.  I was in a doctor’s office a few years ago, waiting to meet with him about his practice’s Web strategy.  While I was waiting, there were two pharmaceutical reps there.  Apparently, a pharmaceutical rep has to prove that he did in fact talk to a doctor and give the official company speech on why a particular drug is so appealing to prescribe.  He proves that by getting a signature.  All he really needs to show at the end of the day is that he got that signature.

I watched one rep basically doing his job, and he hated it so much it was just painful to watch:

REP: “Dr. Jones, if I could just get a few minutes of your time to explain the benefits of Lipitor…”

DOCTOR: “Oh, um, I have to see a patient, and then I’ll sign your paper.”

The rep took a deep breath, lowered his shoulders, and hung his head.  “Yes, sir.  Of course.”

Ten minutes later the doctor returned: “Okay, let’s hear your speech.”

In a brilliant display of absolutely zero passion, the rep proceeded to explain how studies show that Lipitor bla bla bla bla.  I didn’t pay attention to the science of what he was saying, just the intonation.  He hated what he was doing.  He hated “condescending” himself to the doctor.  He hated repeating the official company line, and he obviously didn’t believe in what he was saying.

After all of this, he sheepishly held out a piece of paper with a bunch of illegible signatures on it, the doctor signed, they shook hands and he was on his way.

Was this man living up to his full potential?  I don’t think so.  I don’t know what he would have been happier doing, but he was not Bono talking to the doctor.

Steve Jobs gave an awesome Commencement Speech at Stanford in 2005.  One of the things he said in it is that you should accept that eventually, you will in fact die.  He said that once you accept that fact, you realize that you really do have nothing to lose by undertaking pretty much any endeavor.  After all, if you’re dead, who cares?

He then went on to say this:

“If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I’m about to do today?  And if my answer has been ‘no’ for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.”

Whoah.

In a way, if you hate what you do every single day, aren’t you dying a little bit each day anyway?

There is, I think, one tricky twist in the road to doing what you love.  What if you are really passionate about your destination, but your journey is a pretty lousy one?  For example, having experienced emotional pain in its most visceral form in my darkest hours with Omedix — working 100-hour weeks, feeling completely demoralized, and then realizing I just lost $10,000 that month…and had no social life — I think I pretty much exhausted my tolerance for “suffering through.”  At this point, if I knew that’s what it took to get my company going, that the journey ahead would be THAT bitter, then I’d have to take a different road.  But I’m happy today, so what’s the lesson there?

I think the lesson is that if you know upfront you’re going to hate the journey, why not just find a different route?  If the journey itself is going to be that painful, can the destination really be worth it?  I think the corollary is that if you’re in the middle of your painful journey — what Seth Godin calls “The Dip” — sometimes it makes sense to keep on keeping on because the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow really is worth it; and sometimes it makes sense to get the hell out.

So what about more established career paths?  Is suffering upfront worth the rewards later on?  I remember at Wharton that many of the finance people said that they were dreading starting on Wall Street, but that if they could just suffer through the first two years, then they could basically work anywhere they wanted and they’d be set for life.

Hmmm.  Well, what else could you have done with those two years of your life?  And if you just suffered for two years, won’t it be hard to justify not taking those next easy steps?

Or doctors in medical school.  I meet a few doctors now and then who kind of hate being doctors.  One doctor even told me he’d rather do what I was doing (Healthcare IT).  I think these guys “suffered” through college, medical school, residency, and fellowship, only to realize that the destination wasn’t as great as they thought.

I guess what it comes down to for me is that if your journey is going to be bitter but your destination is sweet, maybe you can take a different road there.  I don’t know, though…this is not yet a fully developed thought.

Anyway, the takeaway of all of this for me is that we all owe it to ourselves to find our inner Bono, or at least to go looking for him. For each of us, in our own unique way, when we do find it, it’s just like we’re on our own kind of stage “singing” to thousands of people, sharing our own potential with the world, while celebrating that we have in fact found what we’re looking for.

Paul Graham is one of my favorite essayists. He is incredibly smart, but all his essays are written in a totally straightforward style. My latest favorite is about how society is always scheming to help us procrastinate by giving us distractions, and that while we might feel bad spending 2 hours watching soap operas in front of the TV, somehow we don’t feel quite so bad wasting that same time browsing around on the Internet.

I’ve been guilty of this, and it’s something I’m actively working to change.

Read the article for yourself!

This made me laugh, but that chicken does look disappointed, doesn’t he?  Incidentally, I found this at the Threadless blogкомпютри.  What a cool-looking company.

I’m reading the novella Siddhartha right now by Herman Hesse. It’s definitely not what I expected but I’m really enjoying it. There was one quote in it that struck me:

“A man can achieve anything if he can think, if he can wait, and if he can fast.”

This video is rather amazing. First, the woman speaking is a Harvard neuroscientist who herself suffered a stroke that temporarily disabled her left hemisphere. To hear her describe the experience in such detail is just…incredible. It’s just fascinating, actually.

The second thing is the insight she has from the whole experience, which isn’t revealed until the end, but which is such a simple and powerful message: basically, go with the flow. One of the best web videos I’ve seen.

Although I love what I do, one of the more frustrating aspects of running a business is that YOU are always the bottleneck for everything. The reason we don’t produce sites faster is because I, personally, have to review them. The reason sales are at X but not Y is because I personally have not yet hired the right salesperson and because I personally am too busy to proactively follow up with every single lead. The reason we haven’t developed our new products faster is because I personally have to do some user interface designs but have been busy with other things.

It sounds awful even just writing all that! Actually, the obsession with “I personally” is ultimately I think the completely wrong attitude when it comes to growing a company, but that’s the topic of another post I’ve been germinating lately.

Anyway, one unfortunate side effect of being the bottleneck is that it creates a feeling that I’m never finishing everything I want to, which is stressful. In school, we were always taught that finishing 100% of our homework was a good thing. You worked and worked until you finished what you had to do, and then you go have fun.

But what if you’re in a situation where you will literally NEVER finish all your work?

That was by far one of the most frustrating aspects for me of entrepreneurship. I was never “done”; I was never “caught up”. My personal productivity was always less than the amount of things that needed to be done.

So what do you do with a situation like that? Do you just raise the white flag and mentally adjust to “I’ll do the best I can”? Do you enlist the support of others to lighten the workload? Do you try to alter the whole dynamic of it all (stepping “outside” the problem)? Well, yes.

I actually have adjusted my attitude on this to three Key Ideas:

(1) I can only ask of myself that I do my best.

By definition, I can’t possibly do better than “my best.” So it stands to reason that all I can expect from myself is my best, and anything beyond that is simply unreasonable. This was a pretty helpful realization because it relieved me of the stress of trying to get everything done and instead made me realistic about what COULD be done.

(2) Enlist the support of others.

If I want our company to increase revenue by 5x this year, can I work five times as many hours? Can I work fives times as productively. Well, no. And yet there are companies that have grown by more than 5x in a single year. Where does the magic come from? It can only be through leverage: by enlisting the support of my colleagues, by enlisting the financial support of investors, by squeezing more juice out the oranges our vendors send us, by capitalizing on the relationships we have with our clients, etc. I’m still not nearly as good at this concept as I’d like to be, but I’m starting to realize it’s the ONLY way that great companies are ever built.

(3) Make the mental choice: Is your life a series of stresses or a series of adventures?

And finally, after a long talk with my Dad one day, he summed it all up for me so well: “You can either choose to view life as a series of stresses, or life as a series of adventures.”

Wow.

It’s so true. I realized after he said that that there will ALWAYS be something to stress about. Those stresses don’t get in the way of life; they are PART OF life! And so, when the next stressful event comes up, we can choose to be stressed (which is natural, and often healthy even), but we can also choose to see it as a fun little adventure. I mean, in the grand scheme of things, here in the USA most of us have our safety, a roof over our heads, and food in our stomaches, not to mention friends and family. At the end of the day, whatever we’re stressing about isn’t really life or death most of the time.

So those are my three big Key Ideas. I don’t practice them perfectly yet, but at least when I go to the office tomorrow and realize yet again I won’t be able to get to everything that I want to, I’ll have some perspective on it!

Maybe it’s bad form to take business inspiration from a movie about the rise of a drug lord, but, bear with me for a minute here.

I just finished watching American Gangster, which depicts the true story of New York super drug dealer Frank Lucas who — and this is not a typo — amassed over $250 million in wealth from the sale of heroin. I thought the movie was very well done anyway, but they also did a good job of showcasing Frank Lucas’s talents as businessman, even in the world of drugs and organized crime. Some of the business higlights:

• Before Lucas, heroin was imported by a single supplier, diluted to allow for more distribution and resold to a number of dealer-organizations. Essentially, heroin was a commodity.
• Lucas found a way to import directly from his supplier. By controlling the supply, he avoided the dilution and also avoided paying the middle man. He could therefore offer a “better” product at a cheaper price.
• Lucas actually branded his product by stamping every packet of it “Blue Magic”
• The movie even shows Lucas taking charge when he felt that one of his distributors was committing “trademark infringement” by buying the pure heroin wholesale from Lucas, diluting it, and then reselling it in diluted form under the same brand name.

I have a few thoughts from the movie, but before I share those, let’s travel to another “strange place” where you would probably never expect entrepreneurship. I give you For Those I Loved by Martin Gray.

What’s that book about? It’s the memoir of a Holocaust survivor. The book was absolutely fascinating, but what made it even more engrossing for me personally was that Martin — the autobiographer and protagonist — was an entrepreneur at heart. And what was really cool was that I realized he had an entrepreneurial instinct early on in the book, and he later went on to found his own antiques importing company and did quite well.

So what gave away Martin’s entrepreneurial instincts early on? In 1942, Martin and his family were forced to enter the Jewish Ghetto in Warsaw Poland. Among the many reprehensible acts of the Nazis there was to restrict the intake of goods to the Ghetto. Only so many loaves of bread, so much water, so much meat, etc. was allowed into the Ghetto each day. Considering there were 500,000 people, the goods imported were far less than what was needed. Martin and his family were beginning to starve, so Martin innovated.

The Waraw Ghetto was in a central part of Warsaw, and many of the locals living outside needed to pass from one side of the Ghetto to the other. So the Nazis operated a streetcar that passed through multiple times per day. The streetcar was patrolled by both Nazi soldiers and local Polish policemen, known as “The Blues” because of their blue uniforms.

Martin found a way to jump on the streetcar as it passed through the Ghetto in a way that avoided detection. He was then taken straight to the outside, and was free to buy as much food as he could pay for. His next problem was to get back in, and here’s how he describes his solution:

…I waited for the streetcar at the stop before Teatralny Square. I was going back [to the ghetto], willingly, and full of vigor, air, and white bread. At the last stop before the ghetto, the Blue jumped on the platform of the second car. I was there, close by him. He was a plump man, he took no notice of me. I barely glanced at him but I stayed by him: I still had some money. It was a gamble. He tugged at the leather bellpull: the streetcar moved off again. It was a gamble. I touched his hand and without a word slipped him some notes. He crumpled them up and pocketed them, without looking around.

Martin now had a product — food — and plenty of buyers. The rest seems to take care of itself for him:

I went down Gesia Street, clutching my bread, holding my cakes. People were looking at me.

“How much?”

The man placed his hand on my sleeve. He was elderly, wearing a smart hat and coat.

“Don’t stay here, come with me.”

He nudged me into a porch. I was on my guard; a few stairs to the right, up which I could escape, reassured me.

“I’m buying,” he said. “How much?”

“I’m only selling the bread.”

“How much?”

I named a figure which seemed enormous.

“They each weigh two pounds.”

He wasn’t even listening, he pulled out his wallet. Outside was the grayish-black crowd, outside was the sound of footsteps and voices.

“I’m a buyer,” he said. “Every day, if you can.”

So Martin had actually sold his goods for a profit. Here’s Martin’s own summary of his morbidly exhilarating day:

I looked in my hand: it was full of zlotys [the local currency], my zlotys. I’d gambled on the streetcar, gambled on the German, gambled on the Blue, gambled with my life, and I’d won; here were my winnings.

Now, what’s so interesting about that little vignette is that Martin didn’t stop there. He then found a buyer on the outside so that he didn’t have to go to shops and buy the food himself (and risk detection). He paid the buyer a small fee, and simply rode the streetcar in and out to pick up and deliver. He had to pay off the Blue to avoid detection, but that seemed to be okay. And once he had the goods, selling them was a non-issue.

Fascinatingly enough, he scaled his “business”, employed other resources, developed a steady stream of buyers, and actually amassed a decent amount of wealth in this otherwise starving prison.

Now THAT is entrepreneurship.

What do I take away from drug lords and the oppressed? I take away that “business” as we have all become so accustomed to it today is just a modern platform for deeper entrepreneurial instincts. Frank Lucas (the druglord) had a horrific childhood and grew up surrounded by drugs, but he was also enterprising. He applied his business skills in the only forum available to him. Martin did the same.

Richard Branson’s first undertaking was the founding of Student magazine in the 60’s or 70’s. It was the first magazine of its kind and distributed throughout the country. It sure sounds pretty cool, but he actually started that because he had dropped out of secondary school and had nothing else to do.

Before Mark Cuban started his first company — a computer consulting company for small businesses called MicroSolutions — he was working at the equivalent of CompUSA in the 80’s. He became knowledgeable about computers and software and started become a great resource for customers. One day a customer asked him to meet onsite to discuss a large purchase. Cuban chose to show up late at the office so that he could meet with his customer. He was fired on the spot, and then went on to start his own company.

For myself, I think what I’ve always wanted more than anything else is the feeling that I’ve become successful on my own, without handouts or “advantage” or “connections”. I could have gotten higher-paying and more prestigious jobs out of college than hunting for work as an amateur web designer who sucked at graphic design, but in my world with the impulses I had, that was the only real “forum” available to me.

The other takeaway for me from all of this is that there ARE in fact fundamentals of business. Obviously, Frank Lucas never got an MBA. Obviously, Martin Gray, never had formal training in “supply chain management”. But their instincts gravitated to the same principles:

• Determine what service you’re going to offer
• Determine a consistent, scalable way to deliver it
• Sell it at a profit
• Establish a brand name and customer loyalty
• Keep growing

I don’t presume to capture all of business knowledge into 5 little bullet points, but this post is not about the fundamentals, per se, but about the fact that they exist at all…and sometimes in the strangest of places.

Meet my new Chumby. What the hell is a Chumby? Well, you can see for yourself at http://www.chumby.com. Basically, though, it’s a cushy little household device that has a built-in wifi adapter and can use any of hundreds of Chumby Widgets. That means I can be hanging out on my couch and glance over to see the weather, or, the reason I could justify buying this, maybe even get them for clients so they know if they have pending appointment requests.

I can’t wait to load flickr pictures on this puppy, though, and tell my friends they need to upload them to flickr so that I have a web-fed dynamic picture frame. Now *that* would be cool.

So, I’m in Park City, UT for a conference right now. I was working on my laptop where I have a “Call Controller” installed (see screenshot at right). I got a call in to my office line, chose to have it instantly forwarded to my cell, took the call and now that’s one less phonecall I’ll have to catch up on when I get back.

Suppose I had missed the call. If the caller had left a voicemail I would have received an email with an attachment of the voice message and the caller ID information, so now I don’t have to “call in to check voicemail” anymore; I can just check my email, which I can do on my cell phone anyway.

For support calls, multiple people at our company receive the same voice message, and that voice message can be easily passed around from one person to the next since it’s a WAV file. Finally, I can login and check our company call log for the day to see if anyone else called and maybe didn’t leave a message.

I know some people think technology makes their life more complicated, and I can see that, but for me, technology is like a little assistant who does a bunch of little helpful tasks for me that just make life marginally easier and more enjoyable. My props go to VOIP, for making telecom so easy today.

I’ve been putting a lot of thought in the last few months into “learning how to learn.”

Given enough time, is it not true that anyone could learn practically anything? Also, to what extent should learning be “painful” versus purely enjoyable? When do we learn the quickest? When the slowest?

I realized that one of the best ways to answer these questions was to try my hand at something I don’t think I’m particularly gifted at naturally. Enter salsa dancing! I’ll be honest. I’m very thankful for the genes I inherited from my parents, but I’m pretty sure virtually none of my ancestors was seen anywhere near a Latin dance floor. I just noticed also that some people just have a natural knack for learning how to dance whereas for me, it was just…hard.

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