On the same day that a tragic event happened at the Boston marathon, another tragedy on the other side of the world occurred. US airplanes in Afghanistan came under anti-aircraft fire and responded with close air support bombings… but one of the bombs missed and hit a wedding party killing 30 people and wounding 120 more.
When I founded Coalition Technologies I did it with the express intent to hire only the best possible people and with a very strong aversion to hiring family or friends. At the time, I believed it would be impossible to be run the business efficiently if I had a family member or friend working for me. Now, I don’t see things the same way. I have 24 employees total and of those 4 are related to me in some way.
Actually, my very first employee hired one year after I first founded the company was Tara. She and I had been having a long distance relationship for the first year of my running the company and when she moved down she started doing my accounting for me. Immediately afterwards I hired my second employee David to do SEO and basic web design work. David is long since gone, but Tara is still working here two full years later. About 6 months after hiring Tara, I hired Jordan as my first salesperson. Finally a month ago I hired Josh and Jimmy.
So why did I change my mind and decide to hire family members?
Benefits of hiring and working with family members:
Pitfalls of hiring and working with family members:
Rules for hiring and working with family members:
I consider myself to have been pretty lucky in terms of the family members that I have hired. At this point, I have not had to fire any of them although there have certainly been some difficult times.
Working with your significant other:
Tara and I especially have had some struggles since we live together and work together. When you are around someone twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week working and living and even taking vacations together even the smallest things can rub you the wrong way. We have had epic battles over very insignificant matters.
Frida (our mascot) and Tara (my girlfriend)
On the plus side of living and working with Tara, I have found that she is almost as committed to the business as I am. Over the last two years I have averaged 70-80 hours of work per week and she has averaged 50-60. Her advice has been invaluable to me and a lot of improvements to the company are thanks to her.
Tara is also not afraid at all of telling me when she thinks I am steering the business in the wrong direction (which can be good or bad depending on what that direction is). I find it generally to be helpful to always have a knowledgeable second opinion on decisions and business situations.
One very scary and unpleasant aspect of working and living with your significant other is when personal fights carry over into the workplace. I have tried very hard to separate personal from professional, but sometimes a personal fight carries into the workplace and makes all of our employees extremely uncomfortable. I think Tara and I both try to avoid this at all costs but when it happens its ugly and embarrassing.
In a personal relationship though, few things can bring you closer together than sharing the common struggle and burden of building a company. Going through battles together and pushing through down periods tightens a relationship in pretty incredible ways.
Working with your brothers
Working with Jordan over the last year and a half has gone very well. Jordan has helped to sell more for the company than we have ever sold before.
Josh is left, Jordan is right
Our biggest difficulty has been in getting him to follow processes and policies. This is no small matter as having everyone play together as a team is crucial for success. I have been working very hard with him to get this issue resolved.
Our personal relationship has grown. When we were young children, Jordan and I were best friends but as we grew up we grew apart. I only talked to him every couple of months before we went to work together. Now we talk every day and are much closer as a result of having gone through the struggles and joys of building the business.
Josh just started working for me as a lowly intern before he leaves for college at Washington & Lee. Perhaps one day he will earn his way up the ranks if he chooses to work hard and be committed.
Side note: Owning a business is like having a new, very important, family member
In general owning a business is a lot like having a baby. The amount of time, care, love, devotion, effort, and focus it pulls out of you is massive. Early on the business is very immature and incapable of fending for itself. You are confused at how to handle this strange new beast and have little emotional attachment. Over time the business starts to take on a personality of its own and starts to crawl, then walk, then run. One day you wake up and realize that you are deeply emotionally committed to it and that it has taken on a life all its own.
Consider these following facts to know if you are getting old:
Living with my grandparents while I was growing up, I heard quite a few old timey sayings from them and their friends. One saying that has stayed with me through the years is “youth is wasted on the young”.
When I was younger, my take on the saying was that it rang true but the meaning didn’t really apply to me. Actually experiencing growing older has forced me to experience it myself. It’s very hard for young people to visualize what it will be like when your body and mind reach physical maturity and how your body will even begin deteriorating before then.
When you have nearly bottomless energy, no wrinkles, and a fresh excitement for the world it is very difficult to understand you have a finite number of days to live and where you spend your time & energy is extraordinarily important.
Youth makes you think that you can party like a rockstar forever, you can spend your time on silly things, and with unimportant people. Age & experience teaches you that taking care of yourself and people important to you is your top priority.
I may sound a bit silly as I’m only 26 years old, but I most likely have now lived a full third of my life (and the majority of my most active days). I want to live my life to the fullest and without regret.
And the world didn’t explode.
People are nazis when it comes to self-policing their names online. Many people hide all of their activities under various pseudonyms.
Under their own names, they are only willing to do super bland & inane activities like create a LinkedIn profile or write an Amazon review. Many of these same individuals then go to other websites and spew hatred, racism, child porn, troll comments, and many other idiotic activities under hidden pseudonyms like “2Cute4U” and “YourMomisaHo56382932847″.
I would like to make much of the internet traceable back to specific human beings… you would see most of the riff-raff clean up their act. Privacy is only useful for criminals.
If you want to share offensive comments like “I can say fuck on the public internets!”, then go for it. Just have some courage and say it under your own name so that people recognize who you are.
For certain activities, such as whistle-blowing, it is necessary to have a few sites online where people can be completely anonymous…. but the whole internet does not need to be anonymous as many child molestation advocates like Rebecca Jeschke, Michael Ostrolenk, Chip Pitts, and Susan Grant. Those four people are leaders of some of the strongest privacy advocacy groups online.
In this post, I am discussing hiding your blog with a pseudonym… not your illegal downloading activities.
95% of my blogging friends disguise their blogs so people can’t figure out who they are by just looking at the blogs, nor can people Google them and find the blogs. People generally disguise their blogs because they think family & friends will judge them or that their boss will fire them. I hold the opposite point of view: sharing yourself online helps create more human connections even when people disagree with you or find your ideas distasteful.
Hiding your blog is wrong for 3 reasons:
So why do people hide their blogs in spite of these 3 strong points?
The points can be answered easily: Even when people disagree with you, they are still getting to know you better. Most of the time when you know someone you care for them more its basic human nature. Anyways, if you go through life hiding & disguising who you are, what’s the point of living at all?
If your opinion is ignorant or silly or incorrect, why would you want to hold it any longer than you already have? Posting your theories, ideas and beliefs publicly opens them to examination by other intelligent people and may lead you to better understand the world. You can always go back to an old incorrect post and put a link at the top pointing to a new post on how your opinion has changed.
Three blogs that need to go public:
My title, “Tradition is Evil”, may surprise and upset you. Human nature is to avoid change and cling to the status quo. Please understand this and consider the thought I am about to lay before you carefully. I suggest that instead of blindly clinging to tradition that we use data, logic and rational thought to govern our lives.
Since before the time of the early Greeks, mankind has thought that everyone should have his place and that change should come slowly if at all. Plato claimed that tradition is justice. His utopian society was one in which there would be three classes and people would rarely switch between them. Plato’s system of belief laid much of the philosophic foundation for later totalitarian regimes, from monarchies all the way to communism and national socialism.
People today continue to have the same mindset of avoiding and resisting change. I believe the default human reaction of fighting change is something that is genetic since many changes can be potentially bad and you are less likely to come to harm by sitting tight.
Many traditions though cause direct harm to humanity. Most countries incorporate some form of class system into their government to keep people in the same roles they were born into: this prevents the strong from rising or the weak from falling. Carried to an extreme, you end up with Medieval government structures with inbred idiots ruling countries and intelligent people forced to do manual labor. Galileo was executed for having correct ideas that opposed traditional ideas. Many other great ideas have also been suppressed throughout history by tradition.
Tradition, by definition, is not necessarily what is best for people. It’s just how things have usually been done or how human myth says they should be done. Much of the strength of superstitious beliefs come from tradition: if people logically thought about whether knocking on wood, astrology or prayer affects real life outcomes and studied the actual evidence they would quickly discard those beliefs.
Even supposedly harmless traditions aren’t good: dressing in ridiculous outfits and singing old songs keeps people from accomplishing tasks related to human progress. If people wish to study history and performing these traditions helps, then it is a positive. I think it is probably overdone though.
In business and political life, America has been turning away from using evidence and logic to decide outcomes and has begun to rely upon tradition. The Kennedy family’s political power and George W. Bush’s election is a prime example of this: much of the reason they achieve office in our country is because of family name recognition and not any amazing achievements they have done in their own right. The bailouts of the automotive companies and the banking corporations is another example of tradition defeating logic & evidence: if those companies had failed, it would have made room for newer & better corporations like Tesla Motors, SpaceX and Mint to take market share. Instead, trillions of dollars were wasted to maintain the status quo.
Democracy itself is a concept based on using evidence and logic to run the government instead of tradition. If you don’t want a king, queen, emperor or aristocracy determing your fate then you should think twice next time your mind defaults to maintaining the status quo.
Use your reason & observed evidence in the world around you to make decisions, not just the default tradition that first comes to mind. Listen very carefully to anyone who uses arguments based on tradition to justify their positions. Oftentimes, those positions won’t be in your best interest.
Spanaway elementary school was small and all the same kids were in the same classroom every day. I spent every year with the same group of friends. Upon reaching middle school, those kids all dispersed to different schools and I was completely lost. I had no idea how to make friends and was desperately lonely and needed my old friends back. It took me two years to learn how to make new friends and establish a new group of people. In the years since that first time, it has become easier and easier to leave old friends and establish new ones. I love all my friends I’ve had through the years, but I no longer need them. I desire to spend time with them, but that desire has slowly been tamed from an intense need to a peaceful want. I am not so silly as to think I don’t need people, but I’ve realized that I can make friends and establish a strong social network for myself wherever I go. Each type of friends, old and new, have special qualities that I enjoy.
Dating relationships have gone through the same cycle. Becky was my first love and when she broke up with me it was extraordinarily hard. It felt like I would die if I didn’t have her with me. Two months went by before my hysterical desire to see her faded, and occasionally I still think of her wistfully to this day. Breakups after her have become easier and easier, just like the cycle of not seeing old friends as often and meeting new ones has become easier. I understand that my first girlfriends and first friends were not necessarily better than my later friends, but that I have become a more mature and seasoned person through these experiences.
Maturity in friendships and relationships has given me a fierce independence and freedom. I don’t need any one person and am able to make new friends and find lovers wherever I find myself. People are vital to a happy, healthy life but no one person is irreplaceable to me now. I love my friends, girlfriend and family and they are very important to me. I am also happy to be a free, independent person who does not need any one person and can freely spend time with people I want to be with. True love is not based on need, it is based on want that is freely desired. Think of abusive relationships… why do beaten wives stay with drunk demon husbands? It certainly isn’t because they freely desire and want the treatment they get… it’s because they are emotionally dependent and need their partner. The most beautiful relationships are ones in which both parties are happy, strong and independent and can leave at anytime and still be happy… but they choose to stay with one another. Those are the relationships I want in my life.
My strength came through circumstances that were forced upon me and my reaction to those times. I wonder if it is possible for someone who is never forced to go through such circumstances to develop into a robust, free person? I’m not sure. I can say that many people I know who either have not been through those problems or reacted badly to them are in need-based relationships, not want-based love. What do you think? Do you have any need-based friendships or relationships?
Amazon had good ratings on a book, “The Stranger” by Albert Camus so I bought it. Reading it took only about two hours tonight and I found it to be a fascinating book about a man who kills another man and goes on trial and is condemned. Throughout the whole ordeal, the man just does not seem to care much one way or the other, he only exists for the moment and the short term future. Interesting philosophy that made a bit of sense to me, though I think there are some fundamental flaws to it. Too much I have seen in life is highly structured and ordered for me to believe that it doesn’t matter how you live your life. My joy is quantifiable and reacts directly to the world around and inside of me. I am able to directly manipulate it through my actions and observe changes in it from the actions of others. I can agree with the viewpoint that one man’s life may have a different path to joy, but it is still a defineable and usually manageable path. I also think that many people think that they are more unique than they really are; our DNA is 99.99% the same and satisfying the same basic needs gives universal joy. Still though, existentialism makes much more sense than any religion.
I attended the Fremont Summer Solstice Fair yesterday and had a blast… lots of sun, hippies, drinks, and fun. I actually sadly missed the nude bicyclists, but I did see about a thousand of them in Portland last weekend.
I do have a question though: As much as I like naked bicyclists, isn’t it against the law? Do the police just not enforce nudity laws on one day of the year because their is too many people doing it? This doesn’t make much sense to me: what if a local UFC team decided to have a “Fight Club” parade and walked down the road punching people? Would the police not enforce assault laws either? Hmm… that may not be the best example since no one is physically injured by nudity- though viewing some of the older, plumper cyclists may cause intestinal distress lol.
Nudity is something that I’m all in favor of, but I think that the law should be changed rather than just have the police selectively enforce it. I understand the concept of passive protest, but these naked cyclists should still be arrested and pushed through the court system. Then if nudity is something that should be allowed, people can campaign to change the law.
Some individuals were arguing on the SeattlePI website that nude cycling was a form of “freedom” that people who want freedom from the government in other areas always seem to oppose. I disagree with this viewpoint: I want the freedom to spend my money as I please, but these same people who want free nudity also want my money to sponsor their government handout programs.
Oregonian judges have made the best argument for public nude bicycling: they claim it is a form of “protected expression”. Basically, that the bicyclists nudity is a political statement and thus covered under free speech. I am a bit skeptical of this, but it certainly makes more sense than things I’ve heard.
What do you think? Is it joyful free-swinging wangs or unlawful conduct flaunting order & justice?
