"It's my dad's fault"
So yesterday my friend and I were sitting in a bar bemoaning the fact that our consulting business hadn't done so well this year. The truth is we both got happy and lazy with our day jobs of late, and our side enterprises have suffered as a result.
"It's my dad's fault," my friend said.
"How's that?"
"When I was a kid, I decided I wanted to start a paper route to earn some extra cash. Dad tried to discourage me, by pointing out how early I would have to get up, and how I would be a slave to the routine, with no choice but to venture out in all kinds of horrible weather and never have a single day off and so forth.
"I think he thought all that would dissuade me. Then he asked me, 'So are you sure you still want a paper route?' I thought about it and then said "Yes," and he replied with, 'Well, you're stupid.' I never did the paper route, and I think that one experience destroyed my entire entrepreneurial drive for the rest of my life."
I explained to my friend that he is a whiny pussy. "How do you ever expect to get anywhere if your ambition is so easily thwarted?" I asked. "Do you think Bill Gates or Larry Ellison or Michael Dell could have had their motivation completely derailed by one, single negative comment?"
Pussy.
I explained to him that his lame-ass story was just an excuse, and the real reason for our mediocre financial year was that we spent too little time working at our side jobs and too much time sitting in the bar bitching about them.
Anyway, we've got a new year coming up soon, so I'm sure we'll both resolve to do better in 2006. There's even wireless access in the bar, so next time I'll bring my laptop and maybe even write a few lines of code while we drink.
And uh...
Yes, I'm still bored here.... Is it that obvious?
Comments
That is one of the most ubiquitous excuses around and its as heartless as it is gutless.
Neither a bad start, nor some early disappointment &/or discouragement ever doomed anyone. We doom, or redeeem ourselves with the choices we make or don't make.
We own ourselves are responsible for whatever happens to us, good or bad.
Only a slave-mentality seeks to blame others for its own failures.
Nobody else owes us anything, we owe it to ourselves to make the best of ourselves in whatever ways we can, with whatever opportunities are available to us.
Posted by: JMK | December 12, 2005 01:33 PM
And we owe it to ourselves to scream out to anyone who will listen when assholes like Bush and Cheney interfere with the free enterprise system. It doesn't mean we stop working and trying to beat the rigged system, it simply means that morons who have never started up anything need to shut the fuck up.
Posted by: Bailey Hankins | December 13, 2005 01:04 PM
This is where you go (OK went) off the deep end.
There are a lot things this administration has done wrong - they've dragged their feet on the border issue and still don't want to offer a real solution, they bungled Social Security Reform and failed to offer a timely defense and explantion for why it's vital we win in the Mid-East, but "interfering with the free enterpise system" ISN'T one of them.
We haven't had anything close to free enterprise/free markets since about 1933, when FDR took office.
Since that time we've had what best can be described as "Corporatism."
First you blame Bush for expanding the H1-B visas, when it was Clinton who expanded that cap and presided over an increase from under 100,000 in 1993 to just around 900,000 in 2001, when he left office. Bush maintained those caps through 2003 and THAT wasn't what killed programming jobs in the U.S. - it had already been done over the previous eight years.
Just as the last swing of an axe alone doesn't fell a tree, just because you felt the effects of eight years of increasing H1-B visas after its precipitator left office, doesn't change the root cause of those effects.
Posted by: JMK | December 13, 2005 09:46 PM
Because that wasn't what ruined the industry, dumbass. Bush has completely intefered with free enterprise, because he allows "American" corporations (who bribe him and his ilk day and night) to use offshore near-slave labor and export American innovation for short term profit while controlling exactly what American consumers are allowed to buy.
Posted by: Bailey Hankins | December 16, 2005 01:32 AM