We’re profitable, and we’re looking to hire a smart all-around programmer as our first hire. It’s a cliche, but we want people who like tackling complicated problems.

…

Depending on the task, we program in Ruby (on Rails), Javascript (a lot of this), PHP, Python, Objective-C (iPhone), and Java (Android). Flexibility is a plus.

…we like people who don’t put themselves in a box. You should be comfortable thinking about the product as a whole, and how changes are going to impact the hundreds of thousands of people who use it regularly.

…

We’re profitable, make the lives of hundreds of thousands of people better every month, have a rapidly expanding user base, and napping is an encouraged part of our corporate culture.

…

Basically, you’ll get to be the first employee of a small successful startup, while getting a paycheck and equity, and feeling good about the impact you’re having on the world.

It’s so clear. I know what kind of person they’re looking for, I know what’s special about their company, I can start to picture what it would be like to work there. Without having to say much about their people or product, I can tell one thing right away: these are not bozos.

There are no buzzwords, no vague claims about the company, nothing unclear about the kind of person they’re looking for. These are the kind of people you would feel comfortable working with because they’re direct and human.

And hey, did you notice they’re profitable?

It’s a good pitch because within the confines of their stealth approach, it tells you everything you’d want to know without handwaving or hyperbole. For respecting your intelligence, it stands out. It builds confidence.

This is a rarity in tech companies. Other job postings are not so clear. Try this one:

The Front-End Architect will be a senior and leading member of the [Product name] development team and will be responsible for driving innovative consumer applications. The FE Architect will help make technology decisions, lead, design/architect, implement and mentor.

I just picked this one at random off of craigslist. It was the first one I clicked. How can you be both senior and leading? What does it mean to drive an innovative consumer app? What makes it innovative? What will they lead, what will they architect? Of course, it wouldn’t be a bullshit job posting without some poor bastard having to “implement” something.

These people have no idea what problem their hiring is supposed to solve.

Job postings are a great window into a company. They show you just how much clear thinking is demanded  along with how well people communicate. Those are two important factors for working with other people. What about more consciously public communications?

Let’s turn to the granddaddy of software development:

Windows Phone 7: A Fresh Start for the Smartphone

The Phone Delivers a New User Experience by Integrating the Things Users Really Want to Do, Creating a Balance Between Getting Work Done and Having Fun

That’s a headline and sub-head from a press release. (Thanks, DF)

What the hell does any of it mean? What do users really want to do? Absent Robbie Bach and J. Allard, I don’t trust the word “fun” anywhere in a new product announcement from Microsoft, either. They probably mean an optional Comic Sans UI.

Maybe they’re going to clarify in the first paragraph. I’m just being a dick with their opener, I’m sure.

The goal for Microsoft’s latest smartphone is an ambitious one: to deliver a phone that truly integrates the things people really want to do, puts those things right in front of them, and either lets them get finished quickly or immerses them in the experience they were seeking.

I’m missing the ambition here. It sounds like their goal is to create a hierarchical mobile user experience optimized for short bursts of interaction.

Which is what everyone else does.

They haven’t described anything that sounds even remotely like a “fresh start for the smartphone.” What they’ve got is a fresh start for Windows Mobile that brings it up to par with the last three years of mobile OS evolution. By all accounts, they’ve succeeded.

Also, what the hell have they actually built?

The much more interesting story here would be owning the fact that they fell behind, then dug in deep, then, wonder of wonders, finally met a ship date. I’m sure it wasn’t a small undertaking. But they want to convince me they, unique among all companies, have rebooted the smartphone concept.

Contrast that with Google, who, the other day, genuinely unveiled a chunk of the future:

We have developed technology for cars that can drive themselves.

Damn. Really?

Our automated cars use video cameras, radar sensors and a laser range finder to “see” other traffic, as well as detailed maps (which we collect using manually driven vehicles) to navigate the road ahead.

Nothing vague about that. It sounds like something out of science fiction. You could call your mom, read that to her, and she’d understand exactly what’s going on, maybe even share your excitement.

Who inspires more confidence: the bullshitters or the straight-talkers? The problem with bullshitters is that they start convincing themselves that this is genuinely how people talk. They bullshit themselves. They lose the ability to communicate with any sort of clarity, making up for it in volume of words.

The best people respond to authentic communication. The best conversations form around genuine excitement from concrete performance. Clarity inspires confidence.

The big, suit-choked, sales-oriented, PR spinmonkey companies are a lost cause. There’s no reaching them. But you and me, we have a shot. Resist the siren song of saying words that mean nothing.

Look how much more powerful it is to be a real person.

“What if we committed to overhauling our culture so that the customer always, always, always came first in our processes and our perceptions? Then people would stop falling through the cracks and getting pissed off on the internet. And word of mouth would get even bigger for us!”

Everyone looked at me like I was an alien.

Sometimes it’s delivered with a sneer, other times exhaustion, and occasionally, there’s even contempt:

“That’s idealistic.”

Ideals, it seems, are academic contrivances that hinder How Real Business Gets Done.

I can’t escape my idealism. Sure, I’ve launched v1 before it was perfect, accepted a minor bug or two in a release, fine. But at no point have I ever sacrificed the core of the user experience to any other cause. User experience is the compass by which I judge every decision.

I configure my values this way because I’ve seen first hand how powerful it can be. Not just in software, in web applications, in innovative, industry-changing businesses…

But also: in dog grooming.

I got my idealism from my mom. Whatever town she’s in, she’s the best dog groomer there is. After years of working for stupid, short-sighted shops, she set her sights on a business of her own. With nothing more than a GED and her ideals, she renovated a space and got to work.

And thrived.

The biggest challenge to scaling her wildly successful business? Finding people who were skilled enough to match her quality of work or genuine love of animals. It was impossible.

My mom had two options: hire on people she knew weren’t up to her standards or stay the size she was. She wanted growth – who doesn’t? But she knew she couldn’t just hire crappy people. Her shop’s growing reputation was built entirely on her quality of work. People loved the idealism that inspired outrageous standards of hygiene for the facility. People whose dogs usually couldn’t stand going to the groomers suddenly lost their fear, because for the first time grooming meant being treated humanely.

Ideals had created differentiation. Bad people would destroy that progress. In the short term, yes, her bandwidth would increase and more dogs could come through the shop. In the long term? She’d be just another grooming shop with tepid business – or no business. The worst part of all, I know now: she wouldn’t be proud of her shop anymore.

So she chose secret option C: Open a grooming school.

In hindsight, of course, this is obvious. It wasn’t then. It was risky. It cost a lot of time and effort to get licensing to train. Putting together course materials and a curriculum is a very different skill set than grooming dogs. Shifting from spending all your time grooming to most of your time teaching? Very difficult.

But it worked.

The revenue from a steady stream of students smoothed out an otherwise highly cyclical business. The option to have dogs groomed by students opened the shop up to new clients who had been unable to afford the previous up-market rates. Constant oversight meant even inexperienced groomers were sweating the details and doing things right. Daily bandwidth increased dramatically with only a marginal impact on quality. Best of all, when a star pupil came through the program, they could be immediately recruited after they finished training.

There were hiccups – students could definitely botch their work at times, but the risk was baked into the price, so it didn’t harm reputation. Picky clients could opt out of the student work at the old rates, and many did. Overall, everyone was happy, including the many animal lovers who discovered how to make dogs part of their professional lives through grooming.

True to form, my mom found a way to have her cake and eat it, too: way more money without sacrificing the quality of her work.

None of this would have been possible had ideals not played a huge role in making decisions. Absent ideals, I’m not even sure she would have gone to work for herself.

I can’t escape my idealism. And I don’t want to. My ideals are a map to build trust, solve problems and, in some small way, make the world a better place. The only article of faith I have is that, with a bit of work, that map leads to success. And in the end, without my ideals, I couldn’t build software, or anything, and enjoy it.

There are limits. You can’t pay for a sandwich with a song. Idealism is not a business model. Idealism is a tool. It’s a fulcrum for making difficult decisions and your flashlight in the darkness of ambiguity. It helps you understand the success conditions for every move  you make.

I won’t stop putting the user first and neither should you. Next time someone dismisses your idealism, look very hard: an opportunity could be lurking across the bridge they won’t cross.

And I guess it’s true. I mean, consider:

There’s Blockbuster. Keeping a broad inventory is a lot of work and expense. It’s easier, and more favorable to revenue, to stock only the most popular stuff. Also, you can definitely make a ton of money by charging late fees.

Hmm. The only problem there is that Blockbuster just filed for bankruptcy.

Okay, okay, that’s fine. How about Comcast? Having installers permanently on the payroll is a pain in the ass – paid time off, benefits, training costs, ugh. Outsource that action, let someone else do the worrying instead. Sure, these techs won’t care about the company culture (such as it is), and since they get paid by the installation, they won’t care about conducting business in a way that leads to a long-term positive opinion of Comcast. There will be less oversight, so they might screw up in ways that are embarrassing. Time management could be challenging for these local outfits and people might be late for appointments… But – revenue!

I guess the wrinkle is that kind of thinking tarnished Comcast’s brand so severely, they had to change the name of their consumer service. Maybe customer perception had nothing to do with it – rebranding is fun and it can’t cost much, right? Any long-established brand would want to do it, eh? Maybe not so much.

Fine, how about Yahoo? They made a really great play – push the portal angle really hard, don’t focus too much on search. I mean, if search works too well, people won’t stay in the portal and then how can you monetize all these millions of eyeballs? Nah, display ads. That’s where it’s at. Sell banners by the boatload. Bulk up that ad sales team!

That only worked until the dot-com bust, though. Now Yahoo’s market capitalization is a tenth of its biggest competitor, Google.

So maybe dicking your users isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, assuming you want prosperity to continue more than the next few quarters.

What about being good to users? How does providing an outstanding user experience change things?

Turns out the iPad is the fastest-selling non-phone product. Despite the fact that, as shipped, the iPad couldn’t print, can’t use Flash, and doesn’t have a camera, people are buying it in droves. 4.5 million units sold in the first quarter it was available. Maybe “being hip” is suddenly important to the broad cross-section of consumers who are buying it, and they have been convinced that upwards of $500 is a fair price for the privilege. More likely, though, is that a focused, task-oriented, touch-based interaction scheme where no one nags you about software updates is more enjoyable and intuitive than a netbook.

Apple is one of the largest companies in the world. Their focus on the user is not limited to the iPad.

Then there’s Zappos. Their values include being good to everyone – customers, employees and vendors alike. Their website has been consistently great for exploring their inventory and making informed decisions about shoes before buying. High quality images, easy to use filtering, detail-packed user reviews, all of it conspires to make purchasing easy. When you get on the phone with their customer service folks, you’ll find people empowered to help without rushing you back off the phone. They’ve long refused to outsource any activity that’s core to their business, including customer service and their fulfillment operations. They want to make sure these user-facing elements of their business are air-tight. This isn’t cheap.

Neither is the billion dollars Amazon spent to buy Zappos last year.

Then there’s Google. Say what you want about their creepy ways, Google revolutionized search. They made it work extraordinarily well, made it focused and made it fast. They’ve invested huge amounts of money on infrastructure to make sure their service is as snappy as possible. Instead of display ads, which would have been the easy but user hostile approach to making money from their traffic, Google borrowed Overture’s Pay-Per-Click advertising model. Paid search ads are perhaps the only form of genuinely useful ads for the user. They can actually solve the problem of your search.

At their IPO, Google shares could be had for around $85, already a respectable price. Today, they fetch over $500.

Creating a good user experience is important. It builds goodwill between your company and your users, yes. But much more importantly, it compels you to make a better product. Constantly re-evaluating your product for the benefit of its users future proofs your business. Look at Netflix, busy obsoleting itself by pioneering living room streaming. When you care about doing things well, your business moves at pace that’s very difficult to overtake. You’re a moving target and your products become much harder to compete with.

So can you dick over your users to goose your revenues? Absolutely. There’s a lot of short term juice in alienating the people you need most. Unfortunately, money is an addicting, distracting force. Before you know it, you’ll be dependent on the cash your user hostile approach to product requires. Ask Yahoo.

Anyone playing the long term game should approach the problem differently. Do it right and you’ve got the potential for a billion dollar business. Even if you never get there, gushing praise from your users is a lot more fun, and profitable, than simmering rage.

They really, truly give a damn about something.

It’s important to calibrate what I mean about this. Being a stickler about Star Trek trivia, parts of speech or state capitals doesn’t count. Affinity for political knee-jerk doesn’t qualify, either.

Giving a damn is about sacrifice and investment. It’s paying with something precious in the service of something you really, truly value.

My favorite leaders, consistently, gave a damn about good leadership. Years ago, during my college internship, I’d stroll into my boss’s office, politely interrupt whatever the hell it was he was doing, and have a conversation. This guy was the director of the department, working on a Master’s degree on the side, and was the busiest guy I’d ever met. But as long as nothing was on fire, he’d give me half an hour to answer my questions about anything. I figured out much later that the reason he did this was that he gave a damn about leadership and helping people grow.

This isn’t something you can half ass. Either you really, trully give a damn about leadership – or you’re just another one of those bosses.

Leadership is a universal one, but this works with anything. I’d rather hire someone green who truly gives a damn about the work than someone with both experience and apathy. Many things can be taught – giving a damn is not one of them.

It goes beyond picking your team or picking your boss, though. The very best companies, large and small prove that they give a damn, too.

In Delivering Happiness, Tony Hsieh explains that Zappos treats their customer service as a marketing expense to be padded instead of an operational expense to be reduced. It’s a very Keanu “whoa” moment when you ponder that. It flips everything around in your head – while being so entirely correct, you can’t imagine anything different. Organizationally, Zappos gives a damn about doing the right thing for people and backs this up with a significant investment.

Down the road from where I live, an immigrant family owns the best damned Chinese restaurant on earth. The food is consistently delicious, but it doesn’t end there. I’m greeted warmly, my picky custom orders are delivered with fastidious accuracy, and every meal is accompanied by a free appetizer or some on-the-house ice cream. These guys truly give a damn about creating an enjoyable restaurant.

If being a good boss is giving a damn about leadership and running a great business is giving a damn about customer service, what about great software?

Great software boils down to giving a damn about user experience. Take a look at your browser history. How much horseshit do you have going on in your digital life? Web applications take the cake for shameless apathy. When an exception turns up – when someone, miraculously, gives a damn about making their software work well, it’s a special moment.

Hipmunk is just such a miracle. Look at this homepage:

The text fields are huge, meaty, clearly-labeled things. Easy to find and click on. Instead of being relegated to a forgotten sidebar, the search activity itself is the focal point of the page. There are no distracting promotions or other crap you don’t care about. “You’re here to search for your flight, so let’s make it happen!” cries Hipmunk, grabbing you by the cheeks and shoving you into search land. Want to leave tomorrow? Type “tomorrow” into the date field.

For reference, let’s compare to another site.

Look at that shit!

From the two examples, which app gives more of a damn about helping you find your flight?

Travelocity can’t even be bothered to make their time of day dropdown fit the default selection.

Meanwhile: Hipmunk’s outstanding search results interface.

There is a sort option called agony. It’s the default. Hipmunk’s creators thought a moment and realized that lengthy flights and layovers are an important detail to make clear from the beginning. The layout lets you see a timeline for your flight date, letting you quickly understand when you’re leaving and when you’re arriving in local time. It’s also a great way to visually compare the lengths of multiple flights. These guys… well, you know what I’m going to say.

No matter what you’re doing, giving a damn matters. The things you do that you don’t give a damn about, I guarantee you’re doing poorly. You can’t give a damn about everything, but please, I beg you, find at least one thing.

And if you do give a damn: I cannot wait to meet you, work with you, be your customer or use your software.

For years I’ve been saying this:

Only two things have made flying safer [since 9/11]: the reinforcement of cockpit doors, and the fact that passengers know now to resist hijackers.

This week, the second one worked over Detroit. Security succeeded.

EDITED TO ADD (12/26): Only one carry on? No electronics for the first hour of flight? I wish that, just once, some terrorist would try something that you can only foil by upgrading the passengers to first class and giving them free drinks.

Bruce is referring, of course, to the new, rumored security procedures said to be rumbling their way out of the TSA’s nightmare bureaucracy and onto your next airline flight.

In a nutshell: planes must disable their seat-back in-flight entertainment, passengers can’t use electronics, get up or access their bags during the last part of a flight. Oh, and you can’t have anything in your lap.

Keep in mind, this is in response to a dim-witted “terrorist” who snuck a weak explosive onto a plane… inside of his pants.

Remember when shoe bomber Richard Reid tried to blow up his Reeboks? That resulted in a limit of one carry on bag per passenger, despite the fact that Reid’s plan had nothing to do with carry on bags. Then there’s the whole liquid limit for carry on bags, which also makes no sense given the simple reality that liquid re-combines very easily, even if you do happen to carry it aboard in small containers instead of big ones.

So the recent rumors of new policy, while wildly stupid, are just stupid enough. They carry enough non sequitur authenticity to be utterly believable. I was ready to believe them. Then a source contacted me. He’s inside the TSA and was desperate to leak the internal memo that brought the new rules into existence. Now it all makes sense: the non sequiturs, the absurdity, the utterly incomprehensible creation, amendment and abandonment of these policies.

The good news, if you can call it that, is that in a few places, it would seem the TSA exercised forbearance when it seemed like, even by their standards, they’d crossed the line. Here’s the document, reproduced without further comment:

Let’s start with this: I’m an idiot. I’m 24 years old and I don’t know anywhere near as much as I need to. I convince myself otherwise because without the strength of thinking I know at least something, I could never get much done.

That said, I do know this: there are only a few people who you should take advice from. I mean life advice: advice on how to be who you are, how to manage your world, how to grow as a person.

1. People who have demonstrated an interest in your success and years of loyalty. You’ll be lucky if you get one of these. I hit the lottery, and I have two. You’ll know them with this test: If they asked you to drop everything and save their ass (business, product, family, life) for a month, you’d do it without hesitation.
2. Your significant other. This is someone who spends a lot of time with you and sees all that you struggle with, all that makes you happy. You’ve been through good and bad and get wistful recalling both. My luck continues: my girlfriend is the wisest counselor I could ever ask for.
3. Yourself: If you cut the crap and take a long walk alone, you can ask yourself anything and usually get the right answer. Make the time to know your own thoughts: you might be surprised how much is waiting in your own brain.

That’s all. Here are people who should not be trusted for advice:

1. Some dick with a blog (even me). If you’ve ever read a top-ten post on a blog, you know the content is cranked out to drive pageviews. The author probably slapped the content together in the space of two hours to benefit an audience of thousands. Like with drive-by legal or medical advice, you’re a fool to assume you can get something directly applicable to your case from a one-size-fits-all post.
2. Parents. Your mileage may vary but parents are often too invested in your safety and security to be able to weigh the benefits of those risky life decisions with huge payoffs and incredible experiences. If your parents are batshit insane (thankfully not my case, but I have seen this) that investment may yield terrifyingly bad advice. Even if the advice you get is reasonable, there’s plenty we don’t need to tell our own parents.
3. Your social circle. Excluding a choice best friend or two, your social circle can’t tell you anything useful about how to run your life. Groups breed conformity and breaking from that might be consciously or even subconsciously discouraged.
4. Penelope Trunk. (cf. #1)

Penelope Trunk wants to tell you how to run your career. She presumes to be an expert on this subject. She’s not.

Once upon a time, as a young man desperate for growth and success, a blog specifically like hers, geared toward shameless career ambition, seemed like crack. Loyal readership taught me otherwise. Penelope Trunk is someone barely in control of her own life. That she is honest and open about her flaws is endearing but doesn’t change the fact that she cannot provide viable career advice based on personal experience. She’s proudly a trainwreck and while that may be great for her blog’s readership, would you trust a fitness trainer who doesn’t exercise and can’t stick to a healthy diet? Mental health counseling from a patient in a psychiatric ward? Computer advice from someone who uses Windows 98? Come on. I may be an idiot but at least my bullshit detector works.

Only when Penelope Trunk is viewed as a cautionary tale will you find viable lessons for your own career. I would never claim to be qualified to advise you on how to run your life. Nonetheless, if you take the things Trunk has done with her life and imagine the opposite, you may find valuable guidance.

Read on for these lessons.

Bullying is Okay

Earlier this year, Trunk was complaining about her kids. I don’t blame her — parenting doesn’t seem like a lot of fun at times and blowing off steam via Twitter is cheap, easy relief. Things got complicated when our thin-skinned heroine was sassed by some jackass in flyover country. What did Trunk do? For most people who aspire to the public eye, ignoring this would be right move. Maybe using Twitter’s block feature, if you’re an especially petty kind of douche, would have been called for. In any case, it’s hardly worth more than a few seconds of thought. I guess Trunk wasn’t busy enough with her family and leading her startup because instead of doing the grownup thing, she called his place of employment and saved their number with the intent of “ruin[ing] his life there if [she] ever felt like he needed to be taught a lesson.”

(I’m not sure crazy internet lady calling out of the blue and whining about 140 characters of abuse is something technically capable of ruining anyone’s life. I leave it as an exercise for the reader to determine what her true plan really was.)

Next, she called his wife. From the blog: “There was no answer. Maybe by then he had alerted his wife that he is being pursued by a psycho who maybe will kill her kids or maybe will kill him. Maybe they will never answer their phone again.“

(My emphasis.)

This is professional? This is what we do with our careers? There’s a word for this: unhinged. Self-revelatory stuff, right there.

Finally, Trunk penned a seething, rage-soaked blog post naming names and even the guy’s home town. She was impressed with herself, though, for having the maturity to not post his home phone number. Trunk was happy enough to ruin his Google mojo forever. She is, in fact, proud of that post to this day. (Notwithstanding the flurry of posts that came next, lasting just long enough to push the hatefest off her front page.)

Anti-Lesson: When you build a blog readership and a meager Twitter following, you should use these tools to bully the hell out of those who dare disagree with you. Anyone who tells you your behavior is unacceptable just doesn’t get it. It’s worthwhile to spend a significant amount of time and effort persecuting a grudge. You can use bad behavior to impress other people by appealing to the worst within them.

The real lesson: Self-control is important. In your life, especially as you become more successful, more and more jackasses will come out of the woodwork. How you respond to the least courteous of those around you speaks volumes about your true character. You can spend a lot of time getting vengeance against those who piss you off but the payoff is rarely worth it. If you want to make yourself seem smaller than you are, the best way to do it is to give attention to someone who doesn’t deserve it.

“Online Stars” Are Important

We’ve all been in this predicament before:

“So, D, who is really attentive and normal—two traits I have never had in a boyfriend, ever—is scary to me because I’m giving up the chance to enhance my brand by dating an online star.“

Yeah, I guess maybe not so much. Trunk is still in high school — approval of the internet cool kids is so important to her that not dating one who can improve her standing is a quandary worth blogging about. She has since resolved the quandary by electing to marry a farmer. He must be the retired co-founder of Skype or something.

Speaking of quandaries and farmers, the internet cool kids caused a conflict there, too. After accepting a reconciliation date from this then-estranged farmer fellow, Trunk realized she was double booked!

When I came out of my giddy stupor from his email, I realized that [the date] was the same weekend as maybe the biggest schmoozing event of my life: Guy Kawasaki invited me to spend a weekend on the USS Nimitz with Michael Arrington, Robert Scoble and others.

I said yes to the weekend, of course. Because how can hanging out with these guys not be great for me? It’s probably what I’ve been working up to my whole career: a weekend like that.

Guy Kawasaki is apparently a friend of hers, so we’ll skip him, but wow, Michael Arrington and Robert Scoble! Connected guys? Sure. But you know what? They’re also douchebags. 40-something Scoble, for example, sees no problem getting touchy-feely with 17-year-old female entrepreneurs. Arrington is just a pompous weiner who can’t handle other people’s low opinions of his douchery. Trunk ultimately did what anyone with healthy priorities would do: she spent the weekend with someone who loves her instead of with a self-important group of perpetual children whose only interest in Trunk is how she’s able to further their own interests.

Invitation to dine with the Obamas? With Steve Jobs? With the late Norman Borlaug? Yeah, the farmer could take a hike. But these guys on the Nimitz? No one will know who they are in 20 years. There is no conflict. These guys were a group of assclowns who have never made any meaningful contributions to humanity. They’re worth skipping for someone who cares about you. If you’ve spent your whole career working toward a weekend with them, you need a new career.

Anti-lesson: People who have convinced the internet they are cool deserve our time, reverence and attention. If you’re going to waste your time with people who aren’t internet cool kids, there had better be a good reason. You should spend your whole career getting to the point where you can possibly one day hang out with these cool kids.

The real lesson: Often with little meaningful or useful accomplishment, people can convince the internet they are cool. Maybe they truly are. Just as often, these flavors of the minute will be forgotten within a decade. Either way, they’re just people. You have your own people. You should measure the value of your people by what they contribute to your life rather than their Twitter follow count. If your career is itself focused on convincing other people you’re cooler than you are, you should switch to a career where you’re actually doing meaningful work.

You Kind of Suck and Can’t Be Incredible

Penelope Trunk wants you to know: “[Dooce] is a marvel. And you are not.”

Dooce is, in fact, a marvel: a blog that pays her bills, millions of Twitter followers and a self-directed life right from the comfort of her home. Without even meeting you, though, Trunk dispenses the above defeatist advice: you’ll never be that, even if you want to be. Dooce is not an overnight success by any stretch: she has been writing her blog for eight years. While she is certainly talented in relating her thoughts, one of the greatest contributors to her success is her simple willingness to keep showing up, year after year. Woody Allen will tell us: 90% of success is just showing up. He should know — a large swath of the population finds his self-indulgent New Yorgies unwatchable. (I am on the fence.)

Anyone with a modicum of interest in an activity and a willingness to keep showing up over and over again will become a marvel. Malcolm Gladwell calls this the 10,000 hour rule.

Imagine if Penelope Trunk had given Dooce that advice, before she became a marvel? Imagine if she had told a young Heather Armstrong she’s not much of anything and should stick to doing jobs she doesn’t much like. Imagine if Dooce had believed it. (Not that it seems she would — by all accounts, Dooce is someone who does whatever it is she wants.)

Dooce is exceptional because she chose to be, not because a supernatural event anointed her with that status.

While the overall advice of Trunk’s post is so blindingly obvious as not to need saying (blogs won’t immediately make you money), the evidence used is part of an overall theme of her blog: Penelope Trunk thinks you kind of suck and you should just quit trying to build your career if the path you’ve chosen isn’t immediately marketable. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Anti-Lesson: Things that are hard aren’t worth doing. Other people are better than you. You shouldn’t even bother trying. You kind of suck.

The real lesson: You’re in control of how great you are (or aren’t). You decide how quickly you reach 10,000 hours of anything. You’ll become incredible only if you choose to be: by doing the near-impossibly difficult work necessary to get there. Just like everyone else who ever chose to be incredible.

Unethical Behavior is Just Fine

If a company pays you to say something about them, Trunk says, there’s no real reason to disclose that. That’s for newspapers. You should just trust that she’s making money from smart companies, and that makes it all okay.

The trust of her readership is for sale to highest, smartest bidder.

The FTC, unfortunately, doesn’t agree that this is acceptable behavior. They’ll be going after companies who pay bloggers to endorse their products without disclosure.

Is it unethical? Of course it is. There’s a big difference between caring about a product or company for its own sake and caring about it because you’ve been paid to. Penelope may dance around this by saying she only picks good companies but that doesn’t change the fact that she failed to disclose a paid relationship. Her estimation of a post’s value after the fact doesn’t excuse the lapse, either. This kind of ends-justify-the-means rationalization is the hallmark of a crook.

It doesn’t matter if the conversation is between a newspaper and its readers, a blog and its subscribers or a friend and a friend. When one party is giving advice that could be influenced by an outside force, it is essential that the influence be announced openly. Anything less is simple dishonesty.

Anti-lesson: It’s fine to build a loyal readership and then sell their attention without disclosure. The rules of ethical behavior only apply to old media. You make your own rules — honesty is less important than cash money.

The real lesson: Don’t build trust and then quietly sell it for money.

Don’t Do What You Love — Do What is Easy Based on Your Existing Resume

“One of the worst pieces of career advice that I bet each of you has not only gotten but given is to ‘do what you love.’”

Yeah, she said that. Supporting evidence: “I am a writer, but I love sex more than I love writing. And I am not getting paid for sex.”

Trunk even had a talent for combining these things, writing “the best sex scenes” her writing professor had ever read. She gave up on her erotic literature career, though, because she believed it wasn’t important enough work.

“So if you are overwhelmed with the task of ‘doing what you love’ you should recognize that you are totally normal, and maybe you should just forget it. Just do something that caters to your strengths. Do anything.”

Hmm. So because Penelope can’t do it, there must not be any way at all to find a way to build a life and career around what you love, huh? Because you can’t immediately find a way to make your work impressive to other people, it must be impossible to find greatness in it?

Bye, Adam Savage. You love scifi, building things and using your imagination. Can’t think of any way you can parlay that into an enormous, satisfying career. Be a bricklayer.

Bye, John Gruber. You love details, design, Apple, and writing. There’s no way those things can possibly come together as a lucrative blog that lets you be your own boss. Go scrub toilets.

Bye, Phil Tan. You love music? What do you think you’re going to do with that? Go buy some CDs or something.

Bye, even, to my mother. Someone who didn’t even have the benefit of a complete high school education somehow found a way to turn her love of animals into a career that let her be her own boss while keeping me fed, clothed and housed my whole childhood. Seriously: there is not a thing this woman loves more than animals, as her past ownership even of ostriches will clearly demonstrate. The result of that and years of hard work is that she’s the best pet groomer in whatever city she’s in, bar none. She can do that because she cares about her clients’ animals in ways that other groomers, just paying the bills, never could.

I guess she should have just gotten a retail job and stuck with that, right, Penelope? Hey, you said do anything.

Anti-Lesson: Don’t do what you love. It’s hard! Since Penelope Trunk never figured out how, you shouldn’t bother, either. Instead of dedicating yourself to something you’re great at doing, absolutely love doing, become the founder of an also-ran social network for young people that provides none of the value of its competitors while alienating the sort of older, more accomplished professionals those young people need to meet.

The real lesson: Your passions give you deep, generous, unique insight into specific problems. With some luck, a little imagination and a ton of hard work, you can focus your career around the things you care about. There’s a significant chance that career will matter a whole lot more to you than just “doing anything.” You’ve got a better chance at finding happiness in work you find meaningful rather than trying to fit into roles that other, faceless people will deem great.

Does Penelope have a strong writing style and a compelling blog? Absolutely. Does she have a gripping sense of honesty and transparency? Sure. But let’s be clear: as a vendor of career advice, she is a charlatan. If a career of settling for second-best, letting other people decide the value of your passions and giving up on your dreams is what you seek, then you seek Penelope. If you want your self-worth to be short-changed, then get yourself over to Trunk. If you want to improve your brand image by writing psychotic screeds against nobodies in Ohio, then boy, do I have the role model for you!

In the final equation, the case of Penelope Trunk is a sad one. By letting other people decide what matters, what’s important, she took her passions out of the driver’s seat of her career too many times. By worrying constantly about other people’s estimation of her potential greatness, she condemned herself to a life of mediocrity. Her blog and its continual churn of the latest misery, the most recent stress, is a chronicle of the results of those decisions. I don’t want that to be me.

Trunk needs to do everyone a favor, herself included, and cut the career advice crap. She is at her best when she writes about herself. The drama queen schtick all on its own is more than enough to build content around. Her sycophantic hoards of hysterically, irrationally loyal commenter fans are evidence enough of that. While her bad choices make for poisonous, self-defeating career advice and a needlessly stressful life, they nonetheless make for entertaining, instructive, even inspiring reading. That’s a great focus and the best part is that it doesn’t presume to be qualified to tell other people how to manage their lives.

I have met men and women who have done incredible things. I have found role models in people who came from nothing, who had nothing but passion on their side, and who now spend their days being paid to do incredible things they absolutely love. It’s real. It’s possible. But I, for one, will never find that place by listening to someone who says I can’t. Who comforts herself by telling you that you’re not good enough. That’s poison. That’s quitting before you start. That’s being someone else’s person, fitting into someone else’s expectations, living someone else’s shortcomings, instead of being who you yearn to be.

My advice? Don’t listen to me. Don’t listen to anyone who tells you things online. Make your own decisions based on your own values, your own passions, your own drives, your own strengths. If you must, get advice for managing your life’s direction from people who know you, who care about you, who you can trust. Most of all, get it from people whose lives and careers approach a level of sanity and stability you’d like to emulate. If you must get advice on running your career from the internet, this is the only source I’ve seen with viable information:

Merlin Mann and John Gruber at SxSW ’09. They’re talking about blogs but their advice is broadly applicable to any career where you choose to do what you want to do.

Final advice, which you also should not take just because I’m saying it: Instead of writing comments on someone else’s blog when they piss you off, write your own post. Your content is yours — don’t fuel someone else’s blog with it. That’s their job. Also, don’t wait years to write that post. You’ll be stuck writing a long-ass screed like me.

But they called me. I had a job.

And I loved it. I’d never had more fun in my life. Thanks to a handful of adult mentors, I went from being shy and insecure in front of strangers to being outgoing, helpful and outrageously courteous, as befitted Publix’s customer service mission.  I got to meet people, learn about their lives and help make their day better, all in the time it took to bag up an order and pack in a car. Publix has a firm “no tipping!” policy and this was spelled out on a button affixed to my apron at all times. Despite this, not a week went by where a kindly retiree or harried but grateful parent didn’t stuff a couple bucks into my hand or pocket, buying me a sandwich or drink to end my shift. With a home life that was terrifyingly unpredictable and school that was tedious and unsatisfying, Publix, the people and the tangible benefits of my work there, became an escape that I craved.

There was plenty of reward in the fun of the job, but I found that throwing myself into my work with such gusto had other perks. When all of the front service clerks got reviews, there was much kvetching in the break room. Nickels and dimes, my teenaged colleagues moaned. They barely gave them anything for a raise. When my turn came, my boss, Mr. Starkey, called me into his office. After rattling through his estimate of my performance, I was given a fifty cent raise. It was the largest, Starkey confided, that anyone in my group had gotten. In retrospect, too, I realize that I was rarely tapped to do cleaning chores, since my management seemed to prefer me in front of customers as much as possible.

It was all so perfectly Randian, in a way that satisfied my then-Randroid brain. I gave honest effort in exchange for honest reward and recognition. Love your work, I thought as I pushed a pile of carts back into the store, and nothing feels like work.

Of course, it wouldn’t last. Home, as was its wont, took another lolloping, staggering jolt. For the second time in less than a year, we were moving away. Mr. Starkey was crestfallen. He’d been eager to groom me into cashiering and beyond. These were remarks that were and remain deeply flattering – it didn’t seem like he especially enjoyed terribly many of the other kids who had my title. At my request, he eagerly typed up a letter of recommendation. My favorite line, then and now:

“I would rehire him immediately if he were to return to Sarasota.”

I enjoyed it both for the heartfelt endorsement and for the tiny, whimsical implication that I was somehow in control of my existence.

I went on to be a salesman, an intern, a marketing manager and a project manager. With each job, I hoped to find the feeling I knew at Publix. The feeling of throwing myself into my work, enjoying every minute, and always hungry for more.

To be sure, I had some amazing jobs in the years since. Tremendous opportunities that provoked growth and change. But none of it could ever recapture the lost innocence of that first, magical time I worked at the supermarket. This realization, each time I started a new gig, was always a tiny disappointment.

For almost a decade, I’ve drawn a paycheck from someone. Until now. Not having been to the office, or any office, feels vaguely like retirement. Except there’s a ton of work to do.

And it’s back: that magic Publix feeling.

I love my new job. I’ve spent the last week building a new iPhone app from scratch. My new boss, me, really likes how it turned out. This is the most incredibly rewarding productive activity I have ever chosen for myself. The app is about done; I’ll have more to say about it soon. The most tremendous and powerful discovery came through its creation: I love developing applications for the iPhone. I can do it all day and night until my fingers hurt and still want more. It’s the most satisfying thing I’ve ever invested my working time doing. All I want is to get better and keep building.

Like Publix ten years ago, it doesn’t feel like work. It’s fun. It’s… wonderful.

Time will tell if this feeling and the products it creates will be sufficient to feed and house me. For now, I’ve got enough to hold out for awhile and give it everything I’ve got.

It’s a scary prospect to abandon security and regular cashflow, move across the country, and go into business for yourself, all the while hoping to hell everything will work out okay. Like many projects, it’s one of those things where if you truly took the time to consider all the attendant difficulty, complication and risk, you’d never bother to do it all.

It’s the best decision I’ve ever made.

There are no words to convey my excitement.

For as long as I’ve existed, there has always been an obligation to someone else’s rules lurking just beyond the horizon. Even on vacations, where time is theoretically mine, there was the lingering, ever-present knowledge that before I knew it, I would go back to a world of obliging someone else’s whims. For the first time, I’ll escape those bonds. It’s a feeling of freedom I’ve never known.

It must be stressed that while Full Sail has been a great place to work and I’m grateful for the experience, I had a job there and I have a handful of problems with working any “job,” no matter who supplies it. When I say job in this context, I mean any paid activity wherein you provide 40+ weekly hours in exchange for a regular paycheck, benefits and perhaps a reasonable approximation of social interaction. I’m a difficult, demanding, even impossible person, so these problems loom larger for me than perhaps they do you.

Ownership

When you arrive at your job and get down to the business of working, you are addressing problems that are not yours. These are the problems of whatever organization has hired you for your job. Depending on your level of career advancement and achievement, the problems you solve may range from the tedious (data entry) to the complicated (project or team management). No matter the complexity of your daily tasks, though, you can be assured that none of the problems they address are actually your own. While it is true that, through initiative, hard work and persistence, your handling of the organization’s problems can enrich your knowledge, experience and career prospects, this doesn’t change the fact that you’re doing someone else’s work.

Time

Unless you’re working at some sort of hippy, ultra-progressive company, you give 96% of your weeks to your job. That is a shitload of time. When I write it out like that, the egregious criminality of giving away that much of your life to someone who isn’t you seems so obvious, I can’t even come up with anything else to say.

Direction

I’ve spent a lifetime resenting any condition where someone else had authority to direct the discharge of my energies. The trade you make while collecting a paycheck is that in exchange for the money, someone gets to tell you what to do with 96% of your weeks. Even with the best boss, this deal is crap: Who wants to spend this much of their lives following orders?

Wealth

In the typical job arrangement, I would  show up each day and give a significant amount of time, energy, imagination and passion to the tasks of the organization. If I worked exceptionally hard while not being a douche and doing my best to help others be successful, I could earn promotions and more money. I would not become wealthy. Meanwhile, assuming successful management of the company, those who own the organization would increase their wealth. For many people, maintaining the wealth of others in exchange for a job’s security is a fine trade. That doesn’t work for me. If there’s anyone who should be wealthy off the sweat of my brow, I’m the first person on that list.

This is also including the assumption that whomever it is who owns the company is making the right decisions, which is absolutely not a given. There’s an illusion of security in a paycheck that comes crashing down as soon as layoffs or bankruptcy are announced (hello, domestic auto manufacturers). I’d rather have control of my fate than leave it in the hands of someone else.

Alignment of Interests

If your company did not need you, you would not exist there. This is a simple, business-driven reality and under no circumstances would I ever begrudge any organization this simple fact. Business is not and should not be charity. Still, think about it. The interest of the business is always and will always be the business. Never you, as an individual. This is an important fact to remember as you commit 96% of your weeks to the job that has hired you. You are the only person you can trust to have your own best interests as a top priority. Rest assured, if the business felt as though it could get more of your time while paying you less, it would surely take that arrangement. It’s just business.

The Game

You show up early, stay late. You take on extra projects and complete them in your spare time. You’re good to your coworkers and can always be relied upon in a pinch. Congratulations, you’re on your way to promotions and potential raises.

The trouble is, if you gave this level of effort for clients instead of your boss, you’d make a whole lot more money.

If you’re following the thread of my argument, you might be thinking “hey, wow, having a job is slavery and my company is screwing me over!”

Two things to note: Having a job gives you incredible opportunities to learn, grow and network while giving you the stability to develop yourself over the long term.

Secondly, unless you signed some sort of contract, you can leave any time you like. If you’re prepared.

So prepare yourself. Maybe I’m young and idealistic, but I firmly believe that the pursuit of things I genuinely love will bring me infinitely more reward than being paid to worry about someone else’s problems. I believe that dedicating the bulk of my time to my own growth, wealth and self-selected challenges, rather than to the development of someone else’s business, is the only conscionable use of my time. I believe that investing myself in an organization whose best interest is something that isn’t me would be to ignore one simple fact: I’m going to die one day. I need to make the most of my life and working for someone else isn’t going to cut it.

You may be following this, finding none of my assessments about having a job objectionable and thinking to yourself that I am, in fact, absurdly difficult and demanding. If that is so I salute you: your expectations for your life are much more easily satisfied.

I’m stuck wanting something else for myself. Thankfully, I’ve got some role models to help me handle this drive for a self-directed life.

Adam Savage

I heard Adam Savage give a talk where he mentioned that his line of work is mostly freelance. This perked up my ears. If you’ve spent any amount of time watching MythBusters, you know that Adam has a singular passion for the creative work that he does. He currently has the best job in the world because he desperately, obsessively craves the joy of making things. He’s incredibly good at it. I’m certain he never could have attained his world-class skills without first loving the work to begin with.

Nick Popovich, Super Repo Man

If you need a defaulted plane retrieved from a deadbeat, you call this guy. Nick had some flight skills and did his first repo on a whim. Now he owns a $20 million business grabbing planes from all corners of the globe. He’s good at it and he enjoys the work. Imagine the waste of his talents if he had stuck to being a traditional pilot and never realized his unique ability to resolve impossible, dangerous situations.

John Gruber

John is obsessive about details in design, typography, user experience and software development. He’s also obsessive about Apple. It shocks me that time and again, John is able to render completely accurate predictions about Apple’s direction and upcoming products. It’s a level of insight no one else on the web can match. It also puts professional investment analysts to shame. Is it incredible that six-figure salaried analysts can’t match the insight and prescience of a guy working from his home on a blog he maintains by himself? A little bit, but it should not be surprising at all. Only a love and passion for his subject matter could have made John the authority on all things Apple on the web.

My mom

I don’t know that she feels great about me saying so here, but it’s important to the legend: my mom didn’t finish high school or go to college. She does have a GED. She’s a minority for whom english is a second language. In pretty much all the ways a single mom can have the chips stacked against her, she had.

My mom loves animals – always has. It’s truly an obsession with her. In my childhood, I can recall the ownership of three ostriches, a donkey, six geese, dozens of chickens, an African Grey Parrot, dozens of dogs, some cats and multiple generations of coral reef tanks with tropical fish that made the house a viable field trip destination.

When I was very young, my mom took a certificate program at the New York School of Dog Grooming. To pay homage to James Herriot, no capped and gowned don ever looked back to his years among the spires of Oxford with more nostalgia than did my mother to her two months at NYSDG.

If I am difficult and demanding, then my mom truly is impossible. Nonetheless, she endured years of working for shitty bosses at shittier dog grooming shops. I don’t know how she did it, but one day, she had enough. I’m not sure where she got the funds, but she put together enough money to lease and renovate a commercial space, adding all of the kennels, baths, and other equipment necessary to provide absurdly clean, professional dog grooming services. For pretty much the rest of my childhood (and to this day), she was self-employed, her own boss. Despite the statistics for small business failure, my mom was and continues to be wildly successful at her trade without any training in business, marketing or finance. She doesn’t need it: she’s just incredibly good at what she does, wanted to provide the best possible service and has always loved her work. Not many other people can offer this. This was enough to ensure I never went hungry as a kid.

The message is clear: if you love the work you do, you can become so good at it that whatever rewards you seek become attainable.

I’ll say it again: I’m going to die one day. I don’t know if it’s next year or many decades from now or somewhere in between. What I do know is that expending my energies within the narrow, limiting, self-denying confines required by the traditional job is a complete waste of whatever existence I have at my disposal.

Aubrey has brought many incredible gifts of insight to my life, but chief of among them is this: you shouldn’t spend any significant amount of time doing something you don’t want to do. I owe so much of my evolution to that crucial realization.

I’m excited to be in business for myself. The nagging feeling that plagued me for so long, the feeling that I was somehow missing the point of life and wasting my time, is completely gone.

I’ve discovered a list of things that I absolutely love to do. I’m already good at some of them while others will require years of time to develop. That’s no problem – the love makes it easier to get through the rough spots. I’ve spent years aggressively growing myself to reach this point. I had no idea where I was heading.

Now I know. I can’t wait to be able to focus on what’s truly important, free from the distraction of minding someone else’s business.

GlobeJot 1.0 removed from sale pending rewrite

A couple of months back, a Washington DC-based intellectual property attorney from a prominent national firm came for a tour. Let’s call this guy Rich. I was tapped to run the tour, but when one of the owners decided to come along, I spent the bulk of the morning opening doors and walking quietly alongside the conversation. I was extra quiet when the subject turned to the recording industry. Rich explained that he wasn’t terribly popular for representing the recording industry but that it was important work. He then trotted out the same tired old tripe suggesting that a decline in recording industry revenues was caused by piracy — a decline Richard assured us could be reversed if only young people were educated on the importance of respecting intellectual property.

This is Bullshit

I listened to all of this and swallowed so hard I bruised my own throat. First of all, as has been mentioned, piracy is murderous, ruthless work done by indefensible criminals. What these guys mean is bootlegging.

I failed to ask Rich if it were possible, just even the slightest bit possible, that recording industry revenues were on the way down because the record companies make over-priced garbage. I failed to mention that education is indeed necessary… for the luddite morons who ran these businesses into the ground in the first place. I failed to point out to Rich that if each pirated track really represented a lost sale, any miraculous absence of bootlegging would have to also transform the economy dramatically as to permit people the opportunity to drop $20,000 on a half-filled iPod Classic.

I failed to say any of it. Whaddya want from me? I’m not my own man for another few weeks yet.

Even so, the encounter was instructive. I learned that there still exist real, living, breathing people who believe this bullshit. Not to be ageist, but I suspect being over 30 years old has a lot do with this, though surely there are exceptions in either direction of that mark.

The recording industry has spent millions of dollars on technical and legal measures to prevent bootlegging. The pinnacle of that achievement? A multi-million anti-piracy measure that was defeated with a Sharpie and the most impressively tarnished image of any industry that doesn’t make guns or pollution. I’m talking out of my ass, but I expect that the number of people who partake in bootlegging has only grown since this crusade began. Talk about money well spent. Can you imagine where their business model would be if, instead of wasting their money fighting an unstoppable force, they’d instead took a good hard look at the way the wind was blowing and invested that cash in reinventing their business model in such a way that made bootlegging irrelevant?

The result would be a recording industry that neither you nor I could recognize.

Instead, the RIAA makes a habit of suing the very people to whom they’d like to sell their product while attempting to destroy any service or platform that challenges the traditional ways for people to discover music.

Unstoppable Force

Anywhere there exists a non-scarce encapsulation of value, that value will be reproduced and distributed outside the bounds of the author’s license or intent. Put another way, if your shit is digital and desired, your shit will be pirated. The question with piracy isn’t whether or not it will happen. The question, rather, is whether or not your digital property is valuable enough to be worth the trouble of pirating. Trouble, here, has a very flexible definition, depending upon how much stands between wanting to distribute and being able to distribute. This varies from platform to platform, from absurdly simple with digital music to decently pain in the ass with console games.

Why? There are two simple reasons. People want things and, as we know from economics, the capacity to produce is infinitely outstripped by the capacity to desire. Secondly, and most crucially, distribution is gratifying. People feel good sharing — that’s simple human nature. In many cases, too, distribution of something digital, something protected, requires solving someone else’s puzzle. The high that comes from accomplishing something intended to be impossible is well-known nerd crack.

Piracy is Always Possible

This recipe creates a world where the dreaded boogeyman of scary piracy will always exist. Any business model where a 100% lack of piracy is integral to success is doomed to failure. What to do about this truth is a difficult question — one beyond the scope of what I can tell you here.

What’s important to understand is that time spent fighting the unstoppable is almost always time wasted.

By definition, anti-piracy measures require an investment of development time that will never benefit your paying users. Who are you working for, if not your paying users?

You have a choice. You can allocate 500 hours to one of these options:

1. Building an incredible feature set that your customers love
2. Developing a new anti-piracy scheme that will be defeated in X weeks and may genuinely annoy your paying customers

Which do you choose? The exhausted Microsoft vs. Apple comparison is apt here. If you’re Microsoft, you roll out Windows Genuine Advantage and truly piss off anyone who ever has to reinstall Windows. If you’re Apple, you sell a five-pack license and let your customers buy on their honor. I’m sure there’s a decent set of folks who install Leopard on more than their purchased share of machines, but the Leopard family pack is ranked #201 in Amazon’s software sales and was an even better seller when Leopard was new. And you know what? Apple makes more money through the family pack than if they were dicks by using anti-piracy measures and only selling single-user licenses.

I’ve Got One Boss

And it’s not me. The boss is the customer. By definition, my customer doesn’t give a damn about the boogeyman. They want the very best features in a piece of software that does everything it possibly can not to annoy them. As far as I’m concerned, every minute I spend on anti-piracy measures for my apps is a minute I should have spent making something incredibly useful. I’m in this to make people happy with incredibly useful stuff. If can’t focus my time on that, there’s no point.

The only time I should worry about writing code related to users who haven’t paid me money is when their existence will affect users who have. If pirates adversely impact resources essential to your paying users’ happiness, by all means, write a bit of throttling code that gives their requests a lower priority.

You’ve Got a Decision to Make

Whether or not you spend time writing code that benefits you instead of your paying customers is a personal choice. I can’t tell you what you should do — that conversation is one you need to have with your collaborators and moneymen. The temptation is a strong one. I remember how angry I was when I discovered Tallymander being distributed by iPhone bootleggers for the first time.

Still: last week, I submitted my latest app, GlobeJot, for App Store review. GlobeJot’s source contains precisely 0 lines of copy protection code.

The choice is made easier for me by Apple’s inclusion of good-enough copy protection for iPhone OS apps. Even without that, though, I wouldn’t bother putting up much of a fight. I want to make money by creating honest relationships with paying customers who appreciate that I spend every last ounce of my energies making something they will love to use.

If that ideal one day ceases to be realistic, I’ll find somewhere else to put my productive ability.