The verbal intercourse between two techies results in a swap of favorite programming languages or database techniques, while the business guys exchange subtle off-white coloring, slightly thick — oh my God, it even has a watermark! — business cards. Opposite breeds walk away slowly, politely, on to another encounter.

Verbal differences aside, the roles of a tech guy or business guy in the early-stage technology company (or any company) aren’t that different: The tech guy works solo or with a team of other developers to write lines of functioning code. The business guy works solo or with a team of other business guys to communicate the value of the code (the product) so consumers buy/view/use it.

Think about what you do for the majority of your day: you communicate ideas and relay messages into text. Writing. Whether sketching code or prose, you are a writer. Now more than ever before, we’re all writers. Accepting this will make you better at your specific job, whatever/whoever it is you write for.

Now that I’ve convinced you you’re a writer, here are some simple ways to improve writing:

1. Read The Elements of Style. It’s old, but not dated. Half of the recommendations should be obvious if you completed a high school English course. The remainder will tighten up your writing. Anyone worthwhile I’ve received writing advice from cited the book.

2. Follow proper writing format regardless of output. Whether it’s an email, text message, post-it note — because you always leave a note — or essay, write as if you were a writer. If you think this will make you sound uptight…wrong. Writing well is writing for your audience, including the recipient of an inebriated text message.

3. Gain momentum by writing every day. This doesn’t mean forcing yourself into the role of a writer by smoking a pipe and pounding on a typewriter; it means treating the times you regularly write as a writer would. Regaining momentum takes more energy than sustaining momentum. Don’t stop.

4. Subtly display your writing skills unexpectedly. Tastefully include bits of humor or drama into otherwise dry pieces of business writing, or email exchanges. People will appreciate the creativity and will be more likely to remember your message.

5. Avoid common digital short-cuts like improper spelling, lack of (Or Overzealous) capitalization, little or no spacing, poor grammar, incorrect punctuation, and excessive abbreviations. Some might argue efficiency rather than laziness. But, I treat all writing as practice for the real thing, especially if I can avoid sounding like a 13 year-old girl exchanging text messages about the new kid in class.

6. Strip empty phrases of filler.

Related: Don’t abuse the convenience of writing. As communication funnels through the digital tunnel, we rely on it and ignore other, often more efficient, obvious forms of communication. You may be caught exchanging emails with someone with the intent to schedule a meeting for several weeks. This writing dilemma can be solved with a one-minute phone call.

Good writing isn’t obvious like bad writing is, and that’s the point. Something well-written traps the reader, sucks him in. Bad writing is distracting. When you strip away the job title, we’re all writers; we just write different things. Improving your skill set as a writer can only help you do whatever it is that you do — better.

Big, hairy audacious goals also sound like hopeful bullshit, especially when proposed as:

Change the world. Help people live better lives. Do stuff that matters. Make things people care about.

At best, they are a marketing ploy. At worst, they are a scam. In reality, they fall somewhere in between. It’s mock, or imitation motivation. Big, hairy audacious goals provide a glimpse — just from their description — of a possible, but never measurable big picture. It’s that grandiose thing you’re working towards, but rarely hit. An imaginable prize. They are for the dreamers.

Ironically, these motivation techniques hide the reality of accomplishing a goal. Reality is a painful process. A process requires patience — the patience of enduring the drudge of repetition, practice, deadlines and adversaries. Audacious goals cloak the existence of this process.

The opposite of setting audacious goals would be living and strategizing in stark reality. Realists, rather than dreamers, are inventive — not emotional like the dreamers. Realists are grounded and anticipatory of the process. They avoid audacious goal setting, because audacious goal setting softens any chance of accomplishment.

Realistic, grounded goals also lack excitement and artistic vision, missing the opportunity to motivate yourself or an organization beyond short-term accomplishment, especially when proposed as:

Write one song per day for the next week. Increase sales by 10% with more advertising. Donate $20 per month to a child in Ghana.

The reality and dream spectrum should be balanced, rather than abided to one way or another. The drudgery of reality should be alleviated by a sense of some bigger, more audacious goal. And, the visionary goal setting should be balanced by a clear idea of process — the painful, tedious, less exciting steps in getting there.

Alfred Hitchcock is an example of an artist who reached for emotional, audacious goals while conscious of the drudgery of moving towards them. He was aware that the backbone of his art — stories — had their limits in reality, while still visualizing the bigger, emotional impacts of creating a film. He was anticipatory of the pain, or lack of fun, that resulted in accomplishing even a portion of the audacious goal.

“A story is simply a motif, just as a painter might paint a bowl of fruit just to give him something to be painting. Once the screenplay is finished, I’d just as soon not make the film at all. All the fun is over. I have a strongly visual mind. I visualize a picture right down to the final cuts. I write all this out in the greatest detail in the script, and then I don’t look at the script while I’m shooting. I know it off by heart, just as an orchestra conductor needs not look at the score. It’s melancholy to shoot a picture. When you finish the script, the film is perfect. But in shooting it you lose perhaps 40 per cent of your original conception.”

The realist sees only the drudgery, often not looking beyond it. The dreamer can see only the prize. Dreamers don’t think their ideas all the way through, relying on chance and the acceptance of petty mistakes. Realists consider only process, eliminating flow, natural reaction and instinct. Goal setting requires discipline — both audacious goals and an expectation of the gritty process — rather than just grasping today’s reality or reaching for some distant fantasy.

That’s right, I was just an intern. It feels so funny to say this now, because I always felt above the deprecating title. I suppose this was how they wanted you to feel, even as an intern: delusionally elevated.

Hubris is what makes Wall Street everything it is and isn’t: a mechanism of the functioning world markets while contributing to the dysfunctional perils of political and economic evil. And, the over-achieving, mostly Ivy League interns are all competing for the same end-of-summer “prize”: a high paying banking or trading position to continue the roles of the men (and all two, maybe three women) who came before them.

I beat myself up mentally during the time I was trying to break into Wall Street. So much that I when I look back, my actions do not feel like me and my words do not sound like me. Eventually, a few smart people and pieces of literature snapped me out of it, but the crowded memories still linger.

The following cringe-worthy recollections seemed appropriate, serious and even prideful at the time they occurred during my short stint on Wall Street. Now, they are telling, reflective and even funny.

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1. During an interview, an interviewer told me I was “intense,” and proceeded to recommend that I “relax.” I grinned, thinking honestly to myself “Yes. I fucking nailed this.”

2. I opened an interview proclaiming, before giving the two colleagues interviewing me a chance to speak, that I had just walked around the block listening to Rage Against The Machine’s “Killing In The Name of.” I then gave them permission to “begin the interview.”

3. I attempted to convince a group of high-frequency traders to use Google Reader for their media intake because it was “faster” than the tools they were already using in their terminals. This clearly wasn’t the case, but I thought it was because I was “internet savvy” and, oh yeah, they were writing advanced algorithms to trade 300 shares-per-second.

4. Barely a few months into my nascent Wall Street career, I wrote a how-to piece for college students eager to compete in finance. Upon publication, I immediately emailed the editor begging to take it down because the comments shit on me worse than I had already shit myself.

5. I signed all thank-you emails “Appreciatively” or what should have read “I hope you appreciate me sounding like a douche in the attempt of writing something different than ‘thanks.’”

6. I would openly tell my managers I was a masochist in hopes that they would assign me more work, while ironically complaining to myself all day how uncomfortable my shoes were.

7. I’d strategically place one “fuck” or “shit” in my enthusiastic “why I want to work here” pitch to the senior male managers. If I was pitching a women or minority, I’d always mention the “great diversity” the organization offered.

8. I used to wake up to so early for the train that the last-shift of b-squad prostitutes were still lounging on my street. I would shake my head in disgust, only realizing now that I should have said: ”You and I — maybe-a-lady possibly-a-dude in the five-inch heels and smeared lipstick — our jobs are not that different!”

9. An actual email written back to me once said “try to use ‘please’ and ‘thanks’ in your emails, otherwise they seem a bit arrogant. I don’t care really, but lots of ppl on the street dont like that.” Thanks, asshole.

10. I wrote Michael Lewis a long, self-aggrandizing email and closed with quite possibly the worst question ever. While I won’t reprint my question, Michael’s single-line classic response was “Alex: There’s no good or even useful answer to this question. Best, ML.”

11. This was one of my favorite movie scenes. Okay, it still is.

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I started writing, mostly as therapy, in notebooks during my summers on Wall Street. The reason being wasn’t clear at the time, but it is now: a pen and paper was the only time I could be myself.

As much as I can laugh, mock and narrate my previous, often ridiculous behavior, what bothers me is that it really wasn’t me, not even at the time. It was me being someone else attempting to meet the expectations of a culture where there is no such thing as enough.

Sure, there are plenty of intelligent, rational people that work on Wall Street who enjoy their jobs, make a good living and manage perfectly stable lives outside of work. But for the most part, I found it a difficult culture and career to keep up with where the monetary rewards aren’t in line with the personal job satisfaction, and the only measure of success is a P&L statement.

My jump post-Wall Street to entrepreneurship-land was a selfish decision: I wanted to take the wheel. No bullshit, no acting and no playing dress up. I wanted to be in control, good or bad, of my own fate and monetary outcome.

The concept is popular because its applicability throughout the business food chain is all-encompassing:

Will the starters — the entrepreneurs — be successful with a glorious win or a rough, constructive failure under their belt? Do you hire a previous employee of a failed empire, or do you recruit one that rode the wave to an IPO? Do you invest in the team that has failed marketing a few previous, but promising ideas or that has already built and sold a product?

The answers to these questions might seem obvious, even trite. Of course, you would bet on the previous success! But recent research could sway you to answer differently.

Bob Sutton, in an article in the Harvard Business Review, summarized one particularly compelling study

Shmuel Ellis and his colleagues have really dug into this issue [of learning from failure] with, first, a field experiment with two companies of soldiers in the Israel Defense Forces, who were tested for their performance on navigation exercises. The critical difference between the two groups was that — following standard practice in the Israeli military — the first company had a series of after event reviews during four days of navigation exercises that focused only on the mistakes that soldiers made, and how to correct them. The second company, in its after event discussions, focused on what could be learned from both their successes and failures.

Then, two months later, these same two companies went through two days of navigation exercises. The results showed that, although substantial learning occurred in both groups:

Soldiers who discussed both successes and failures learned at higher rates than soldiers who discussed just failures.

Soldiers in the group that discussed both successes and failures appeared to learn faster because they developed “richer mental models” of their experiences than soldiers who only discussed failures.

One of the more interesting arguments in this realm would be to determine if the startup and founder ecosystem is engineered like evolution: Does Darwinism apply to early-stage companies and their founders? Does success actually breed more success?

I would define the success of a startup, first and foremost, as the construction of a sustainable, profitable business, followed by M&A transactions and liquidity events. Based on the typical longevity of these events, they must favor success by default. But, what about on a shorter¹ time-span? Do only the strong survive, or is the two-time failed entrepreneur more likely to have a third success over the two-time successful entrepreneur? I don’t have the data or the experience to answer this question, but it’s healthy to wonder how and why a previous experience, if any at all, matters.

My opinion is that we shouldn’t see failure as an excuse for not succeeding. That’s where I see the “failure is good!” research conditioning irrational behavior, which can be detrimental to entrepreneurs. Failure has certainly done more good than bad. Consider the Edsel, Newton or the Bob, all seemingly failures with positive, long-lasting outcomes. But, what about the failure of Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns and AIG? Have these atrocious events provided financial reform or simply conditioned the banks into believing it’s okay to fail at the financial expense of others?

Failure shouldn’t be celebrated or feared. If necessary, it should be reflected on, but never encouraged. Ultimately, the reward of failure is some experience. The reward of success is some experience and, that one thing that really matters, a successful outcome.

Failure is overrated. Failing is a hell of a lot easier than succeeding. The only thing you need to do to fail is nothing. I’m not arguing that anyone supporting failure as a learning mechanism has done nothing, but part of me believes failure is widely encouraged because the majority of the people preaching are trying to feel better for failing themselves.

The “failure is good!” mantra falls into the same trap that many other claims in entrepreneurship-world fall into: they are supported by a culture of echos rather than hard facts and data.

1. I realize this isn’t a perfect analogy to evolution because studying evolution requires analyzing a long time-spans.

I had just gotten off of the phone with the seasoned CEO and founder of a startup I was doing a gig for a little less than a year ago. I loved what the company was attempting to accomplish, but I believed the legal fees necessary to scale the company would absorb their cash reserves before a marketable product was ready to ship. The ecstatic screaming about the income statement was in response to my worrisome, while less experienced, remarks about their business model.

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The CEO was analyzing the accounting documents of public companies with similar business models and infrastructure. He realized, and I would also eventually, that just because the legal fees had the potential to barricade the company’s goal and marketability in the short run, it didn’t mean they couldn’t generate revenue concurrently by bootstrapping what they did have, rather than what they planned to have in the future.

It’s important to consider that businesses often appear as if they generate one revenue stream, but actually generate numerous, concurrent revenue streams behind the public eye. For example, UPS isn’t just a shipping company and Amazon isn’t just a retailer. Some of these unique practices are so obscure you’d never know the company was profiting from them unless you looked at their financial statements.

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When the phone call winded down, the CEO spit out a few examples from the complimentary companies he was analyzing. I remember the example he provided dealt with one of the few successful music startups at the time. The company was not only providing a consumer subscription service, but behind the scenes was licensing music to other platforms, selling ring tones and even providing anonymous user data to advertisers.

Consider these two models of concurrent revenue streams:

1. Moby has the best selling electronica album of all time, Play. While the album dominated the charts for a few years, Moby found success by commercializing his creativity to less obvious (at least in 1999) markets: licensing. According to Wired, the tracks on Play have been “sold hundreds of times for commercials, movies, and TV shows – a licensing venture so staggeringly lucrative that the album was a financial success months before it reached its multi-platinum sales total.” Listen to the album. Even if you’ve never heard of Moby, you will probably recognize a handful of tracks just from being alive during its prominence.

2. Google is now hiring bond traders. While most major corporations utilize financial analysts to hedge foreign cash flows, it’s rumored Google may be using their vast data sets to build and run a hedge fund. Legalities aside, they have the valuable data to pull it off, as would a company like Facebook

These are examples of concurrent engineering applied to sales and marketing. It’s similar to flipping the stick, except you aren’t flipping anything; you’re just being resourceful with your stick. Moby is a musician, but he’s also a brand and advertiser. Google is a search engine, but they are also a hedge fund and hundreds of other things.

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Since the original phone call, I’ve dispersed the concurrent engineering advice to not only my own company, but to numerous artists, musicians and brands. Just because the thing you eventually want to sell isn’t ready, it doesn’t mean what you do have, right now, isn’t marketable.

My inability to simplify, or habit of unnecessarily complifying, is an anxiety inducer. Expressing a well-thought idea simply is a complex process. Assuming an idea has bounced around the neurons, that single idea fought numerous other ideas before traveling to the tip of the tongue. Those ideas that express themselves have overcome intellectual hurdles, or what can feel like anxiety, to reach tangible expression.

My ideas live inside my head, often best expressed through writing as opposed to speaking, because I can move at a tempered pace. My habit for complexity has splintered certain of my capabilities, causing not only anxiety, but uncertainty surrounding my own ideas. It’s forced me to take blame for others’ mistakes because I’ve failed to express instructions in a way that made sense to anyone else besides me.

I sympathized with John Mayer’s reluctance to embrace simplicity that he described in the recently published Playboy interview, even though it causes friction with himself and his relationships. His overthinking, anxiety and inability to express ideas simply, he claims, have given him everything.

As soon as I lose that control, once I have to deal with someone else’s desires, I cut and run. I’m pretty culpable about being hard to live with. I have had a good run of imagining things into reality. I’ve got a huge streak of successes based on my own inventions. If you tell me I’m wrong or that I’m overthinking something, well, overthinking has given me everything in my career. I have a hard time not looking at anxiety disorder as being like an ATM.

The key to leveraging a trait that would otherwise be considered a character flaw is to recognize it and understand its limits. People often try to alleviate anxiety or remove it all together. But, my strategy is to control it and leverage it where it’s advantageous. I’ve learned to live with episodes of anxiety because it’s proven to be a more preferable state than simplicity. Without it, I’d feel dull, even with the extra mental distress.

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The standard four-year college plan and budding entrepreneurial skill set have always had a complicated relationship. While some entrepreneurs skip or drop out of college to start a venture, other academic institutions have taken the opportunity to teach entrepreneurial coursework. Starting a venture without a college education in entrepreneurship is feasible, as most factors in the startup process are serendipitous.

Students are ignorant to the amount of control they have over coursework. While certain foundational courses are required by the university, in my experience there has been a buffer of flexibility regarding the courses a student takes and how the credits are earned. With the right combination of courses, students can essentially create their own major. Although my major was labeled “finance,” a large batch of credits I received came from starting my business and working the right faculty and departments to document and vouch for my progress. Plus, figuring out loopholes in the university and exploiting them to your advantage is an experience relevant to being an entrepreneur in itself.

Throw an event:

Affiliating yourself with the relevant social circle can be beneficial in learning and practicing entrepreneurship. Organizing an event or conference with a group of entrepreneurs from a specific industry can be helpful in identifying the local community for that industry at your university. As an event organizer, not only will you have a chance to interact with the majority of attendees, but you’ll be viewed as a connector between them.

Work for a startup:

A hurdle small companies face is executing with limited resources, including people, time and money. Most early stage businesses would be thrilled for a competent assistant to help with business development, marketing, or, if you have the skill set, engineering. The issue with hiring interns, even remote interns, is gauging that an investment of time by the company will be less than the amount of time and / or wealth created by the presence of the intern. This is important to reference for your inquiry.

Find the engineers:

Engineers are the guts to the web presence of any company. Websites and business applications often go wrong for two reasons: 1) the initial idea was lousy to begin with, and the most common, 2) the idea wasn’t properly communicated to the engineers. The easiest way to communicate with engineers is to learn their language. Find them, hang out, collaborate and possibly sit in on a class or two to learn programming methodologies. You will meet again.

Take random classes:

Entrepreneurs are versatile individuals eager to learn new ideas and concepts to prepare for future endeavors. Starting any project, either on your own or internal to another company, requires knowledge outside of industry. This includes, for example, legal, writing, public speaking and marketing. College is an ideal setting for learning skill sets outside of your major. It only requires you to attend a class that isn’t yours. If the class is large enough, or if the professor doesn’t mind, it’s wise to take advantage of.

Teach a course:

Information acquisition, with the intent to know more than your competitors, is a skill set of an entrepreneur. Teaching a course, specifically a subject matter related to your industry of choice, can be a practice round for educating your future organization and stakeholders. It not only requires you to become a semi-expert on a specific topic, but it forces you to disperse information to a collection of peers who will be graded on their understanding. This is most easily done as a teaching assistant, but could also be organized independently if you can find a group of peers who are diligent to show up to your class every week.

Infiltrate the MBA program:

Most schools with MBA programs, and even some select undergraduate programs, offer an early stage venture capital course. In my experience, these courses simulate a portion of the fundraising due diligence process between entrepreneurs and investors. The startups trade their time for the opportunity be researched by the students with the assistance of a professor with a background in venture capital. In my specific case, I was able to compete with other startups in the course for a potential seed round of funding at the end.

Leverage your professors:

The professors worth taking, if you have the luxury of choosing, are the ones who are veterans of industry. Meaning, professors who have at one point in their career taken the painful path of entrepreneurship and can provide mentorship while you are at the university or enrolled in their course. I’d recommend seeking them and using them as a resource in and outside of the classroom. They’ll be willing to provide support, because at one point, someone did the same for them.

Write for your newspaper:

Part of the entrepreneurial process can involve becoming a thought leader locally. Most college newspapers have a small business section that covers local businesses. College newspapers are enthusiastic to publish stories about their students, and most students like reading about their peers. Contributing to your college paper’s business column is a great incentive to learn about local entrepreneurs while contributing to the university community.

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Entrepreneurship isn’t a choice. It’s a set of skills every student of life needs to be equipped with. And, these skills will only improve with maturity, practice and discipline. The activities I described above can act as entrepreneurial entry points for a career, but don’t necessarily transform you into an entrepreneur. Remember: there is no blueprint. All things considered, there’s no better way to learn entrepreneurship than to start a company. If you don’t need the practice, why not start as a student?

Entrepreneurs are the backbone of industry. They are the risk takers willing to bet their “jobs” on what they believe in. Entrepreneurs leverage limited resources to solve big problems. With the current state of unemployment, there aren’t jobs waiting for students upon graduation. Students may have to create their own jobs, simply because they have no other choice.

Entrepreneurs don’t just talk about starting things; they take action. The beauty of acquiring an entrepreneurial skill set is that it’s beneficial regardless of your field and interest. The above suggestions are meant to be interpretative while displaying the practicality of starting anything. You don’t have to be running a startup to be an entrepreneur; you just need to leading something.

A bit of conventional wisdom echoed between traditionalists is “don’t do a job for the money.” This dictates that you shouldn’t chase a career for a paycheck that’s a means to short, material boosts of happiness facilitated by addictive consumerism. The advice implies you should only be pursuing a career for the intellectual stimulation, where the cash is merely a side effect.

The advice is misguiding. The goal of a job should be wealth creation, either for yourself or for your organization. I don’t think the “beware: money!” advice is bad in itself, but it’s taken too literally. The idealist philosophy gets in the way of building a profitable business, which is often a painful endeavor. Convincing yourself money doesn’t matter is the easiest way to justify a failure.

Part II

George Soros cringes when he’s called a hedge fund manager, financier, speculator, trader, banker, entrepreneur and probably even an investor. Soros, above all, is a philosopher who applies his world views to capitalistic endeavors.¹

This illustrates my bigger point: Soros prefers the title of a philosopher because he enjoys the implications of philosophizing more so than money managing. For example, take his view of credit default swaps, referred to as “buy[ing] insurance on someone else’s life and then hav[ing] a license to kill them.” If you talk to any trader on Wall Street, they call it a hedge, not a death certificate like Soros.

Soros does what he does–his craft–for wealth creation. His profit and loss statement is the major measure of success. He is, after all, a top-tier investor. However, he uses his interest in philosophy to make investing sound and feel, specifically to him, like a glorified hobby.

Part III

If you really would do a job for free, the job is either completely worthless or someone smarter than you is absorbing the value creation. Every time I hear someone say, specifically an eager young person, that “they aren’t doing it for the money,” I hear someone being foolishly naive about business and avoiding the ultimate judgment of a potential failure. Money is the market’s way of signaling value. If you aren’t making any, or slated to make any, you’re doing it wrong.²

I’d be willing to bet the most popular jobs are those most difficult to measure, simply because they make hiding behind failure easy. I blame the marketers, simply because they are the easiest target. They’ve convinced a whole class of aspiring creatives that you can base a career on building relationships, community evangelizing and blogging. These descriptions may sound productive in text, but they are skills people say they are good at because there is not an easy way to measure financial results. They aren’t quantifiable, measurable or testable. These skills are valuable if you can determine their ROI (and the talented, versatile marketers can), but if you can’t measure, you’re just overhead.³

Part IV

The more I dive into my career, craft, path, journey or whatever you want to call it, the more I realize that I’m absolutely doing it for the money. I love what I’m doing, no doubt, but I inevitably know that the measure of success will be judged by how much wealth I create for my organization and its stakeholders. Going into business without the intent to make money is like crossing a busy highway without looking both ways.

Do it all for the money. Not necessarily to spend it–but to make it and measure it. Long-term wealth creation proves economic tangibility. To pursue anything else besides money will put you out of business.

1. Like Soros, Charlie Munger was keen on “philosophizing,” rather than just “investing,” even though he did the latter. Many entrepreneurs, especially Marc Andreessen, live by his almanac.
2. An interview strategy relevant to this point would be to proclaim you will make an organization more money than they are slated to pay you. From the employer’s stand point, this is obviously their the goal.
3. Stock traders are a good example of the ultimately measurable career, although the majority of the ones I know hate their job. It’s possible that too close of an association between P&L and the job can be mentally counter-productive.

I suspected that Entrepreneur’s Disease might be not just a correlated affliction, but a condition springing out of the very nature of the entrepreneur itself. I’ve heard over and over again that “startups will consume your life. No, really, they’ll totally consume your life, and you can’t even envision the extent of the utter completeness with which every non-startup aspect of your existence will be decimated and the earth beneath it salted.” Sounds like the victims of Entrepreneur’s Disease have not just heard that but embraced it, internalized it and loved it.

As unappealing as the life of someone in the heady midst of Entrepreneur’s Disease might superficially sound to me — and probably sounds to many readers — I must admit my unquashable attractions to (a) bold, audacious moves, (b) complete self-determination, whether it leads to success or failure, (c) endeavors the odds are against and (d) the amassing of fuck-you money. Especially (d). So I probably front like I understand entrepreneurship less than I actually do.

Colin has become one of my favorite voices on the internet and is an emerging star through his four quadrants: broadcasting / interviewing, writing / essayism, film / video and sound / music. Subscribe to his blog and listen to his interviews if you don’t already do so. Here are a handful of my favorite pieces and respective quotes:

What It Is

“I’ve realized that charting one’s own course in terms of other, previously-charted courses hurts as much as it helps. As much as claiming that you’re working toward becoming like Joe Icon satisfies others’ questions about your slightly unconventional aspirations, it’s no recipe for originality.”

Thoughtspace

“I’d submit that this all comes down to clarity, the condition that keeps the junk outside the brain’s purview and the meaningful stuff inside. Clarity demands the absence of sonic, visual, informational or personal noise.”

Less

“I also prefer a multiplicity of small, minimally-designed spaces, both aesthetically and intellectually. I fear not that my next place will have too little room, but too much; I worry not that I will have too few possessions to my name, but too many. My dream is to have several available dwellings, absolutely no larger than I require, in select locations across the globe.”

Cargo Cult Creation

“To reiterate what’s been written before: don’t think what they thought, think how they thought. Don’t do what it does, do it how it does it. Don’t think of what it’s about; think of how it’s about it.”

Buffering, Please Wait

“I call this “the buffer.” In this specific case I mean the financial bulwark between you and the dole line, but the importance of the buffer in all resources cannot be denied. Amassing a sizable amount of cash on hand for the proverbial rainy day, coloquially referred to as “fuck-you money” (FYM) — not an expression original to me, though I do use it all the time — is a goal toward which I work.”

I also like his interviews with Philalawyer, Merlin Mann, Ben Casnocha and Andy Mckenzie.

A common theme in Chuck Palahniuk’s writing is this idea of an obsessive addiction. His work typically contains human characters that develop implicit scams to trick others into meeting the emotional, addictive needs of the scam artist. It’s a sick game beyond reason that Chuck accentuates through the use of psychological extremes such as addiction to brutal, physical violence or addiction to unstable, emotionally and sympathetically empty sex. The stories are raw, layer-free metaphors used to make a point about human relationships.

The writing style contains parallels to a method used in most redundant Hollywood tales, except directors riddle them with the necessary layers to keep a shallow audience dimly entertained for two hours. The story unravels like this: a group of hustlers attempt somehow, someway, at the dismissal of a higher ranked power, to get their hands on a vault full of cash. The prized money, the audience must assume, will be used to buy fancy addictive things like drugs, sex, clothing, surgery or vehicles, all which would have been otherwise previously unattainable. Presumably, these things have the purpose to meet a temporary emotional need of the character which the audience is purposely made ignorant of.

Chuck, a frighteningly talented emotional poet, understands the layers better than we do. He guts the organs, slashes the flesh and injects flasks of emotion into his character’s twisted narrative. The glittery walls of Hollywood are torn to the ground, and a path ending with a prize of hope and control is paved. On the path lies the emotional need–a brave addiction–the character is attempting to fool others into offering. The cost to the other characters is usually their failing sanity. If you’ve read any Palahniuk, you get it.

Entrepreneurship can become an obsessive passion, or, a coping mechanism for dealing with this operation we call business. It’s a way to trade one compulsive behavior or habit, many of which we have, for another. The difference is that the obsession can become choice. The story can become yours, not someone else’s. It’s about choosing a future, instead of relying on a past, without an appearance orchestrated by an externality.

The engine of an entrepreneur runs like the prose of a Palahniuk piece. The layers of excess, the masks of deceit, the rules of the office and the suits of common professionalism are removed to bring the courageous entrepreneur one step away from their prize of emotional security. The entrepreneurial journey itself becomes a coping mechanism for what’s generally accepted as business. It doesn’t matter what you do, but if you view it from the perspective of the entrepreneur, I guarantee you’ll be one step closer to whatever it is you’re after.