I’ve spent the last ten days sick.

Not the most inspirational start to a post, but work with me on this one. When you spend the better part of two weeks popping cough drops like they were Skittles, and the majority of your evenings willing your eyes open so you can finish up the work that simply must get done lest the powers that be strike you down, you learn some important lessons.

The first is that in almost every case, a good organizational strategy beats out a lot of “hard work.” As it turns out, we waste a spectacular amount of working hours trying to figure out what work we should be working on. When you are running on “flu time” you become intimately aware of these wasted cycles, and a lot more motivated to excise them from your schedule.

Number two is the subject of this post, and that is the importance of patience.

It’s a little scary how many businesses fail because people rush to put on the roof before the foundations have dried. It’s only when you are forced to slow down because your lungs are threatening to forcibly remove themselves from your body that you really recognize this. As sexy as it is to be constantly spinning out new ideas and expanding into new territory, it does you exactly no good if by doing so you are neglecting your core business.

Often the best thing you can do for yourself is to tie up loose ends, to look at all the projects that you have completed and see where you can improve them, to pause building out new features and instead take some time to see what people are doing with the ones you already have.

As simple as this seems, it’s the hardest thing in the world for entrepreneurial types. It means that you need to be willing to let your numbers flatline for a while. What’s addictive about constant expansion is that you are constantly finding new people to see your stuff. You’re marketing and people are coming in by the truckload and you feel like you’re actually doing something. When you stop expanding, those people start coming more slowly and while you are improving the experience for everyone who is already there, increased happiness is a metric that is much harder to measure.

Happiness, however, is the only thing that matters in the long term. If people like what you’re doing, they will come back for more. If they like what you’re doing, they will tell their friends. If they like what you’re doing, they will forgive you a delayed feature or a few extra weeks of stagnation. Patience gives you the clarity to see this and the willingness to stop every once in a while and make your projects better instead of just bigger.

There is no magic bullet solution to training patience, but if you want a little hint from me, getting really close with someone with the Flu doesn’t hurt.

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I am always surprised by how many small business owner’s decisions are driven by fear. Mostly, it’s fear that some other clever person, somewhere on the Internet, is going to steal their idea and capture 1% of the exploding gizmo market before they do.

These kinds of fears are completely unfounded.

First of all, you are never, ever going to capture 1% of any developed market unless you happen to be sitting on $3 Billion and you are a brand manager for Coke. Second, since neither of the previous two things are true, the last thing you should be worrying about is your competition.

Why?

The reason you got into business in the first place was because you thought that you had something unique to offer to the world. If you wanted to turn out the same gizmo as the next guy, there are plenty of other much less soul crushing ways you could have gone about doing that. The fact that there are dozens if not hundreds of other people doing something similar to you only means that you need to be absolutely sure that you establish what it is that you actually do, what makes you “special” and why you got into the space to begin with.

People see competitors for one of two reasons, either because they lose track of what it is that they are actually selling or because they start comparing themselves to huge brands and assume that small business works the same way.

Huge brands have to compete because the markets they are playing inside are already saturated. The only place they can get new customers is from each other. For a small business, especially on the web, you are building into a niche and as long as you haven’t chosen one that is completly filled (a bad idea) there should be plenty of customers floating around for everyone. The question isn’t how you are going to steal them from your “competition” but how you should capture the ones that are still out there, waiting for you and your offering.

Putting too much effort into competing is also an extraordinarily destructive force for a small business owner. Not only are you wasting energy and resources trying to make yourself look better by making someone else look worse, you are also closing yourself off to the opportunity to collaborate. Resources are scarce, even if you combine every small company that you call your competition into one, you would all still only represent a tiny fraction of a tiny fraction of the larger market. With so much going against everyone, you should not waste time sniping at each other, you should be spending your time looking for places where your business and your closest neighbors complement each other, and trying to find ways to use that to grow the industry at large.

Competition is a necessary evil and if you are really lucky you may one day grow a business that is sufficiently massive that you need to start worrying about it. Until then, understand that every second you spend competing is a second that could have been used doing something productive.

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It’s a sad statistic, even if it’s one I made up on the spot. Let’s look at the facts though, there are a lot of things that can kill your project: flagging economy, bad planning, incompetent teammates (everyone else), incompetent founder (that’s you) or just plain vanilla stupidity, but the one that strikes most often and most viciously is neglect.

We all know the story of entrepreneurs dumping hundreds and hundreds of hours into their projects. We all think that we’re working as hard as we can, putting every ounce of our strength into our ideas. We all sit around and muse about the fact that if we drank anymore coffee, Starbucks would name a day after us, but despite all of this somehow we manage to forget that projects are like children — no matter how much we think we’re doing, they are still going to wake us up in the middle of the night kicking and screaming.

Like raising children, a business requires a heroic effort in order to do it right. Note I didn’t say “a great deal” of effort, I said a heroic effort. That’s right, Greek poets should be able to write epic ballads about the lengths you went through to keep your idea afloat. You need to eat, sleep and breath your idea not because it’s rational or even healthy but because it’s what is required of you.

The only way you are going to have any desire at all to go through this insanity is if you’re really passionate about what you are doing.

Passion won’t save your business.

As I pointed out, there are dozens of reasons why you could fail miserably any day of the week, but passion for the concept you are trying to build will save your business from neglect. It will give you a reason to do not only the work you must in order to keep things afloat (those hundreds of hours), but will also make you want to do even more. It’s that extra bit of motivation that shores up your project against the unforeseen disasters that you are bound to run into.

If you want an idea of the “passion” you’re going to need, imagine what you would do if you were jumping out of a plane, with a parachute that you had to finish stitching on the way down.

Yup, that should do just fine.

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Let’s step back a little and realize that when push comes to shove, none of us are really that unique.

No matter what your horoscope tells you and how many postcards from Grandma you’ve gotten over the years, deep down inside you’re pretty much the same as everyone else.

Before you get upset, recognize that if no one thought the same way, acted the same way, lived, loved and learned the same way, we would accomplish nothing as a society. We would be one big, rambling group of beautiful snowflakes floating around wishing that, “someone out there understood us.”

You would also be out of a job.

If you run a business, you rely on the fact that everyone shares a bond, that as a species we are uniquely similar to one another and because of that fact we need a lot of the same things to thrive.

If you create art, your work is to find those things that tie us together and express them in ways that matter. If everyone was “special,” if there was no common thread — music, writing, games, and film would be an elaborate, self-serving game of shadow-boxing.

We spend a lot of time embracing the qualities that make us different. It’s how creative types work, and it’s a good thing too because if you don’t think you’re special then pretty much no one else will. While it is important to keep this in mind, it’s just as important to realize that everything worthwhile, everything that works and grows, does so because it serves someone.

Don’t mistake this for “serving everyone.”

You don’t need to spend your life pushing out generic widget #27 to be successful, honestly, I don’t care if you are opening up an organic pomegranate juice bar as long as it’s fulfilling some kind of need.

What it boils down to is that you need to be honest with yourself about where you and your creative energy fit into the scheme of things, who you are really working for and how what you do helps to better the society that you are a part of.

Because let’s face it, as a great philosopher once said, “Of course you’re unique, just like everyone else,” so you might as well use it.

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We are bounding headfirst into a new season over at 93 Studios, but before that we spent some time looking at ARGs, the history of comics in newspapers and Grace Lee’s American Zombie. Also, for lovers of web video, this week we are officially opening up the Screening Room which is a project to tag, sort and categorize high-quality independent web series and movies and bring them to the masses. You should take a look.

Learn Something About ARGs

Learn about Alternate Reality Games, why they are great, why they are terrible and how we can make better ones.

Give Your Heroes Flaws

Everyone loves a good scar.

Make Use Of Ticking Clocks

On adding dramatic elements to your stories.

Learn About Newspaper Comics

With newspapers in dire straits no one ever remembers the comics. Learn about the history of newspaper comics and how they are dealing with the problems the industry is facing.

What Went Wrong?

A lucid look at some of the problems that went overlooked by the newspaper industry.

Citizens As Budding Reporters And Editors

Another segment to add to my all time favorite list. This is a look at the future of citizen participation in media from 1999, before everyone and their 90 year-old Aunt had a blog.

American Zombie

If you have Netflixs you should watch this movie. It’s a look at high-functioning Zombies and the problems of fear, prejudice and misunderstanding. It’s deep.

Zombies As A Metaphor

Speaking of deep, this is an exploration on how Zombies have been used as a vehicle for social commentary.

How To Survive A Zombie Apocalypse

This is what it all comes back to anyway so why not?

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This isn’t a statistic, it’s a casual observation based on talking to way more people about their careers than any normal person should. I’m convinced that most people dislike their lives, not in any robust way but with the kind of casual contempt that can be easily ignored by a society that prizes movement and action above just about everything else.

They dislike their jobs, they dislike their boss, they dislike the things they must do in order to make the living that will allow them to continue disliking their life.

They don’t yell and scream and complain about it, in fact, they shuffle their way through it peacefully enough and teach their children that life is hard and painful and that they should appreciate any ounce of goodness that the universe deems them worthy of.

I think that the older you get, the more likely it is for you to fall into my 80%.

Children typically like life a lot. Teenagers are a little wishy-washy on it, but for the most part they think it’s the tops. The problem starts somewhere around the mid-20s, when we get thrown out into the world to do “whatever we want to” and we realize that the majority of that time will be spent surviving and helping others to survive.

Kind of a bummer, especially when you spend the majority of your early days looking forward to the freedom of being an adult. This realization is enough to cripple most of us, and very few who survive it make it through unscarred.

So who, you might be wondering, are the elusive 20% who are actually enjoying the ride?

The richly working.

More than any other criteria – age, class, wealth, sex, whatever – it’s the people who have a purpose, who have something they believe in and are willing to work on it despite whatever obstacles might get in their way who end up being happy. It’s the people who wake up and know they are moving in a direction, towards something that is important to them, that end up loving their lives. It’s the people who don’t think about retirement because whatever it is that they are doing is truly meaningful that end up being truly content.

Before you ask, you don’t have to quit your job and move into a commune to pull this off.

Having a purpose doesn’t mean devoting your entire life to that purpose. While the more you can do the thing you love the better off you will be, the more important thing is to identify why you wake up in the morning. You need to come to grips with something that you value and be willing to make sacrifices in order to move towards it.

It might take you 20 years to write your novel, but put a sentence or two on a page every day.

It might take half your life to save up enough to open your restaurant, but do save and make concessions, make sacrifices to see to it that you will eventually get there.

Don’t just hope that things will work themselves out, understand that you can make goals and as long as you actively pursue them it’s not foolish or crazy to think that you can really accomplish something.

A big part of happiness is having something that makes you happy. A bigger part is doing something with it, developing real, practical steps that you can use in order to reach your goal. You can work your entire life and never do anything that you like. Considering time is the only resource that is truly scarce, you have to ask yourself whether it’s worth it.

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You ever notice that the first budget to get cut when companies are tightening their belts is the travel budget? Which is interesting considering the fact that if you are planning your trips effectively, you know, traveling with a specific, actionable goal in mind, then by sacrificing that budget you are giving up opportunities to grow your business.

Its been my experience that while lots of work can be done virtually, deals are almost always done in person. Meeting someone face to face has a way of getting you over a lot of red tape and around a lot of misunderstandings.

Despite this fact, some businesses don’t really have a choice in the matter. At the end of the day, operational expenses trump everything else and if you can’t keep the lights on you definitely can’t send your marketing team on a three-week conference tour across the eastern seaboard.

How do you get around this problem? Well, one just happened to find its way into my mailbox a few nights ago from the good people at IZEA.

British Airways is running (and sponsoring) an essay contest and they are offering 100 companies an opportunity to win a Business Opportunity Grant. What is a “Business Opportunity Grant?” it’s a prize package that is pretty darn impressive.

• British Airways airfare for 10 round-trip Club World business class flights.
• 5 free British Airways World Cargo freight shipments of up to 500 kilos to worldwide destinations
• $1000 toward accommodation at Courtyard by Marriott
• 5 Regus Businessworld Gold Cards providing access to business lounges worldwide
• Canon PIXMA MX860 Wireless Office All-In-One Printer (yea, I’m not really sure either).

The application deadline is September 30th (you probably should start applying right now) and you will have to do a bit of work (create an account, fill out a little mini-survey, write a few essays about your business goals) but to have thousands of dollars worth of travel expenses covered this seems like a small price to pay.

Do I see any downside to this one?

There is no cost and significantly less data-mining than similar contests and the packages they are offering are really quite impressive. If you are an international traveler this is almost a no brainer, even if you only fly domestically this package might be the opportunity you were looking for to expand your client base overseas.

Take some time to enter the contest and tell me how it went. They are giving away 100 grants so if you win, be sure to leave something in the comments.

Overnight success.

You know, the two guys who throw together a brilliant idea in some West Coast garage, stitch it up with $10 hosting and a few week’s later sit down to give interviews for their Wired cover story. The media runs these stories because let’s face it, they make great news, even if they are entirely fictional.

There is no such thing as an overnight success, just like there is no such thing as a “four hour work week” (sorry Tim), both are the result of creative reimaginings of the word work. Most entrepreneurs who have had the meteoric rise to prominence that make magazine covers do so because of the months and years they spent in relative obscurity doing things that quietly failed. The project that brought them onto the stage was the direct result of these failures, the synthesis of everything they learned when the world wasn’t paying attention. Even if Twitter only took two weeks to build and SXSW to launch, it was really the years that Biz and Ev spent grinding away that turned it into what it is today.

Being successful as an entrepreneur is almost exclusively the ability to overcome thousands of tiny problems before you run out of money. The people who are great at it aren’t necessarily geniuses or visionaries, they are just extraordinarily good at finding solutions quickly and making more right decisions than wrong ones. The talent, tenacity and experience required to do this doesn’t come overnight.

It’s a long, dirty, uneven and frustrating evolution. It’s built on the bones of dead end jobs, lost projects, work that leads nowhere and failure.

Lots of failure.

Ignoring all the background work and focusing on the soundbites has lead many entrepreneurs to believe that if they haven’t made it in 3 months it’s all over for them. This is simply not true. The web makes business faster, more efficient and cheaper but it doesn’t take away from the fact that businesses need real work to succeed.

This week in 93 Studios we took a look at murdering your darlings, the journalistic code of ethics and the anthropological significance of zombies eating your neighbors. We also took a nice, long look at bad movies and put together a list of some of the worst movie lines you’ll probably see.

Murder Your Darlings

One of my favorite segments of all the storytelling segments we’ve done this season.

The Heroes Journey

One of the more controversial structures in hallowed halls of storytelling, explore Joseph Campbell’s monomyth and see whether you buy it.

George Orwell’s “Why I Write”

George Orwell explains why he writes, and in the process gives us a great look at why people write in general.

Journalist Code of Ethics

Understand the ethical conventions of journalism.

Reading Newspapers on Computers

What would the world be like if we could all read the newspaper from the comfort of our computer screens? Radical computer scientists in California explore this possibility.

Learning To Love Lower Profits

If I’ve learned nothing else about newspapers it’s that they’ve been in a pile of trouble for quite a while now. Take a look at some of the problems facing the industry years before the Interwebs took center stage.

Three Cases of Zombification

Zombification from a medical perspective. See three purported cases of Zombification, and what medical science discovered when they investigated.

Zombies Ate My Neighbor

You really can’t have a story about Zombies without looking at this game.

What To Do In A Zombie Attack

One of my favorite Zombie “civil defense” videos out there.

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It has been almost a year since our economy flirted with collapse. It was about this time last year when Lehman Brothers, AIG, Bank of America and a ragtag group of multi-billion dollar megacorps made their way into our collective conscious and reminded us all how fragile our economic system is.

To say that our financial system was close to crumbling would be an understatement, the part of the story that matters though is that it didn’t crumble.

We overcame politics, private interests and a host of compromises, any one of which could have been a death knell, and we came out of it with our heads still firmly attached to our shoulders.

The question that remains is, where do we go from here? That’s what Forbes editor, Carl Lavin asked me to comment on.

Before I get into that, let’s look at a few facts.

• The number of jobs available to graduating college students has diminished.
• The competition for the jobs that remain has increased.
• The barriers to entry to becoming an entrepreneur or freelancer have been toppled by the web.
• Social Media, Social Networking and the web as a whole has made it incredibly easy to collaborate, create, remix and distribute ideas.

When taken apart, none of these points is particularly interesting. In aggregate, however, they are changing the world. We are living in a era where more young people are starting down the path of entrepreneurship. More interesting still, they not only have the skills but the resources to make a real go at it. Never in history has it been easier for someone to get out of college, open their own business and create something that people actually use and investors will actually look at.

Take a peek at Twitter. How many entrepreneurs do you see ambling its halls that haven’t hit 30?

20?

Hell, more and more you are seeing people like Mark Bao whose barely old enough to drive but has probably sold more companies than most of us will start in our careers.

Add to the equation investors who are starting to understand that age isn’t a boundary on the web. That youth and beauty can, in fact, be a significant boon in a world driven by media. Even in a downturn, even with everyone pulling back, they are investing in teams that can adapt and change, often led by people whose only qualification is depthless, raw talent and the drive to push an idea forward.

Finally, Social Media and the growth of the web in the corporate arena has opened up incredible opportunities for people who understand it well. Smart, capable and well read freelancers (many of them young) will have the opportunity to get their foot in the door of huge corporations who need their expert opinions. These people who have been blogging for years, who truly understand the ever shifting landscape of the networks, will be the ones sitting in the boardrooms, not as employees but as trusted consultants.

The United States is a nation of small business owners and small business has and will continue to make up a significant portion of our economic growth. In 2010 I predict that the startups that began their lives in 2007 and 2008 will begin to come into their own or die trying, that the freelancers who are starting their career this year will start to make an impact on corporations hungry for good advice and that entrepreneurs of all stripes, who began their businesses because they couldn’t find a job, will begin to generate new jobs of their own.

The world we live in is shifting. The “dream” is shifting. Fewer and fewer of our best and brightest want to spend their lives working from 9 to 5 doing things they have no passion for. For the first time ever, fewer and fewer of them have to.

How the entire thing will shake out is anyone’s guess but it has never been a more exciting time to be on the front lines.

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