Since I’ve been driving a lot lately, I’ve been listening to a recorded book. I chose it largely at random, but it has been eye opening. The book is The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It, a book about a different way to think about doing business.

If you’ve been reading my blog for years and have total recall, then you may know that I used to manage a bookstore, that I lost my job a few years ago and ended up, by a set of curious chances, owning a successful little business.

I think that some people have found this encouraging. Reading of my bumbling progress toward this goal, they think, “OMG, if she can do it, then I sure can!” People teaching courses in entrepreneurial skills probably read out bits of my adventures in class saying, “See, class, what happens when you have no proper plan? See how she slowed down the growth of her business with her irrational, unbusinesslike actions?”

The E-myth isn’t exactly the story of my business. This book says that people are good at doing something (technicians) and then they have a fit of entrepreneurship and decide to go into business. This was not true of me. If it hadn’t been for The Computer Guy, I would never have gone into business at all, and the turning points in my progress from successful freelance web content writer to business owner are so peculiar and disjointed (…my unreasonable degree of loyalty… meeting the Web People… my brother’s death… being written up in the Wall Street Journal… my son’s decision to attend a really expensive school… my daughter’s romantic complications… ) that they wouldn’t even make good theater.

But I definitely recognized my business issues in the Describing the Problem section of the book. I’ve met with a couple of business counselors, and they look at my business and say that it’s doing fine and we should raise our prices. This book does what I had hoped the counselors would do: it says, “Okay, here’s where you’re making your mistake.”

I can see where the bookstore I managed went astray. I saw some of the problems at the time, and I could see the rest after I’m been in business myself for a little while. It seemed to me that my business wasn’t perfect, but the counselors saw nothing wrong (except needing to raise prices) and had little advice for me.

I’ve also read a number of business books that said to make a business plan and — well, I don’t really know what you’re supposed to do after that, because my reaction was always, “Nope. If I have to do that, I would rather not be in business.” I just went ahead and continued doing work and getting paid and hoping I was doing roughly the right things.

This book says: Start your business differently and do these things. I don’t know that I could have followed its advice from the beginning, what with having no plans to go into business, but it certainly is what I need at this point in my journey.

I think that if I had picked this book up in a bookstore and leafed through it (and I might have done so, for all I know), I would have been put off by the “Your spirit is a wild horse” and “The curtain lifted” kind of stuff and put it back down. I have little patience for mysticism. Since I was stuck listening to it while driving, I got through those parts and found many very useful parts. You might have a wild horse for your spirit, for all I know, and be utterly charmed by the part about curtains lifting.

I will say, though, that if you happen to be in business, you should go ahead and get this book. It gives practical steps the same way I give practical steps in my Freshman Comp classes for writing a research paper. If my students do those things, and have even the least little bit of ability, then they will end up with a research paper when they finish. I think this is true for the E-myth plan.

It does begin with some figuring out what you want from life. Once you’ve got that sorted, you make an organizational chart for your company. We did that, actually, in #2 daughter’s apartment last summer, getting crosser by the minute as we tried to figure it out. We determined that we needed 15 people, recognized that we had three, and figured that meant that we had a lot of empty spaces to fill in the future.

That’s wrong. You are actually supposed to put your people — even if it’s just you — into all those boxes. You do the work, and as you do, you figure out and document exactly what you’re doing. That is, I as a skilled web content writer figure out and document just what I’m doing so someone else could do it. When I get it all figured out, I can hire someone to apprentice and then to replace me in that position. You do this will all of your positions till you get them all figured out, documented, and filled. You keep one position for yourself, and “owner” is not a position in a business.

When you finish, you can sell the business because there will be something besides yourself and your own work to sell, or you can retire and know your business will continue successfully, or you can just keep your business humming along getting better and better with you as CEO.

There’s more, of course, but that’s the part I’m working on right now. It’s exciting, actually. I think it’ll be a big improvement for my customers and my workers, including me.

It’s also a glorious day out there. Once I finish my tea, I’m going to go out and enjoy it until it gets to cold and I’m driven back indoors.

Some knitting took place yesterday, along with errands and reading, Wii, housework, and cooking (see below).

#1 daughter came over to get most of the rest of her stuff taken over to her new place. We had California Club sandwiches, which you may know means turkey with tomato, bacon, and avocado, often on a croissant or whole wheat roll. When I was a little girl, my grandmother used to take us out for lunch and order Club Sandwiches.

Club Sandwiches involve chicken or turkey with bacon and tomato on toast, often using three slices of toast for one sandwich. My grandmother and my mother invariably had a little discussion before going to lunch. My grandmother would insist that we should have “a nice lunch” and my mother would assure her that “the kids would rather go to Orange Julius.” This discussion was repeated every single time we went to lunch, I think.

Lunch was invariably part of a trip to the shopping mall, where my grandmother would look for shoes that would precisely match her latest hand knitted Chanel-style suit. Naturally, since I grew up in a family in which people hardly wore shoes, let alone shoes chosen to match one’s suit, I considered my grandmother a very chic woman, and I have ordered Club Sandwiches in situations in which I wanted to seem like one of those. Avocado makes any sandwich better, though, and is much more wholesome than mayonnaise, so nowadays I go with that instead.

Club Sandwiches were supposedly developed at the famous Saratoga Club (whence comes the potato chip) in the late 1890s, in case you were wondering.

So #1 daughter and I had California Club sandwiches and talked about work. In the evening, I made Whole Wheat Happy Rolls, Chicken with Meyer Lemon Sauce, carrots roasted with herbs, and high-protein egg noodles. #1 son came over for dinner and we watched How to Murder Your Wife, a classic movie in which there is a courtroom speech arguing that any man would murder his wife if he could, so a man who does so should not be punished.

#1 son and I had, the previous evening, been discussing those classic problem questions in which you flip a switch to divert a train knowing that you will kill one person by doing so — but also that you will save 75 people (most people will do this) or throw one person onto the train tracks in order to divert the train and prevent the death of 75 (most people won’t). The movie involves one of those questions, in a way, but I think that such overt misogyny would keep the movie from being made now. In any case, we enjoyed the movie and the reprise of the previous conversation, and also the meal.

While sleeping in till 6:30 makes me feel like my normal self, getting up at 4:00, going back to bed at 5:00, and sleepin gtill 7:00 makes me feel even worse than the usual sleep deprived state.

That was my obligatory whine about how tired I am. I had a good week, though. Too many meetings, for sure — five or six, counting phone meetings, plus three classes to teach. I realize that there are people who hae meetings every day, several times a day, and live, but this is me. Apart from that, I got a lot done, got some new jobs, and enjoyed my work.

#1 son came over last night and we discussed literature, his future, and what circumstances would drive someone to kill another person. I think it was all about Iago to begin with.

Iago, you may recall, was the bad guy in Shakespeare’s play Othello. Othello promotes Cassio over Iago, who feels that he deserves the promotion. Iago therefore makes Othello think that his wife, Desdemona, is having an affair with Cassio. Everybody dies.

Iago is clearly jealous of Cassio, and perhaps also of Othello and Desdemona. He announces at one point that he hates Othello, though it’s not clear why. This seems like an adequate reason for Iago to decide not to go to Desdemona’s cocktail parties, but not really enough to cause him to destroy the lives of all three.

Envious Casca, Georgette Heyer’s masterpiece of a mystery novel, suggests that Iago just loved having control over other people’s lives. I mentioned this, thinking that such a desire could show a mental illness, a feeling that no one else should be able to thwart him without paying for it with their lives. #1 son said that the mental illness was the second step.

Anyone, he thought, might feel bitter or jealous and want to do harm to the object of that bitterness. Sane people just wouldn’t do it. I’m inclined to feel that wickedness is ipso facto evidence of insanity, on the grounds that sane people don’t want to do evil things — or, if they want to, couldn’t usually bring themselves to do those things in real life. There is a problem of circular reasoning here, I know, but really, could a healthy mind entertain the idea of causing someone else to commit a murder for very long?

Iago is an interesting character, and I have a novel from his point of view to read. I may begin that today. First I plan to do housework. There will also be knitting and possibly sewing. I don’t intend to do anything evil, apart from a little sloth. I’ve toggled 53 work hours so far this week, though, so I bet I could get quite a bit of slothfulness in before it would count as real evil.

The picture here is of one of my gussied up clipboards. #1 daughter saw the idea at Pinterest and I made it part of my office transformation. I need a round thing, I think to go in the open space at about 11:00 in the picture here.

No doubt you are wondering what happened to the meat blob. It turns out that cloned meat is not something that will happen soon. Another option that also probably won’t happen soon is the food pill. The size of the molecules for fats and proteins make it impractical, but the book Taste of Tomorrow goes into both conventional food pill technology and the nanotechnology that may make it possible eventually.

Would you want to give up food entirely? If you could be kept alive with nano-sized radioactive robots implanted in your body, would you do it?

Before you agree, think seriously about strawberries and cream.

The more likely future possibility is African food.

I finished the book last night and this morning (still getting up at 4:00) I spent an hour or two grading papers, did some social media and blogging for clients, and headed off for a meeting. #1 daughter and I had a lunch meeting, then I had a phone meeting, and skype and IM and emails and stuff at the same time.

It was too much. While I can now stand three meetings in a week, three in a day is too much, even if one of them is with my beloved daughter. Maybe also a 14 hour workday is too much.

I thn had more blogging and more grading to do, but I didn’t finish it. I was tired and stressed and bad tempered, I’m sorry to say. My husband had made dinner for me, bless him, and I watched TV and sulked.

I feel better now. I’m going to bed, though.

I got to sleep in till 6:30 this morning, so I feel fantastic. I think that all my problems could be solved by sleep. Not that I have a whole lot of problems. Having done all kinds of useful domestic tasks yesterday, I went to bed with a good book, The Taste of Tomorrow: Dispatches from the Future of Food.

Taste of Tomorrow is an enjoyable read. It’s as much about the author’s feelings and responses to the people he interviews as it is about the future of food. I was fascinated by the initial chapters, which focused on salads. The history of salad greens is suprisingly dramatic, and I am really looking forward to grilling some radicchio once it gets above freezing outside. I’m rethinking genetically modfied foods, too.

The book has now moved on to in vitro meat: meat produced by cloning, I guess. Cells from muscle tissue are grown in a medium, a sort of broth, until they reach the size of a cut of meat — some time in the future, since it hasn’t happened yet. I can only enjoy meat (and I do) by thinking as little as possible about what is is and where it comes from, so I’m not appalled by the prospect of in vtiro meat — or no more than I am by the meat we eat now. However, the author gets the maximum weirdness into the descriptions.
 
He interviewed Jason Metheney (and I’m probably spelling that wrong) and made him sound weird, just for sounding so completely reasonable. Click that link and you’ll find a brief YouTube intreview, and it sounds completely reasonable. The book includes Australian performance artists serving in vitro frog steaks and attempts to exercise the in vitro meat. This ups the weirdness factor considerably.

However, I think that everyone I know well will have just one thing in mind during the whole discussion: the meat blob in Better Off Ted.

In trying to find a film clip for you, I dicovered that many, many of my fellow web writers have the same reaction. I don’t know whether this will harm the chances of in vitro meat in the marketplace or not.

Other candidates for the future of meat aren’t very futuristic. Schonwald (the author of the book) considered rabbits, but lots of people already eat rabbits. In fact, it is odd of us, when seen in the whole panoply of time and space, to limit ourselves as we do in the U.S. to pigs, cows, and poultry. Schonfeld is Jewish, so pork is presumably off the menu for him as well, and he has to alternate among beef, chicken, and turkey. He was able to find a new fish for the first course of his futuristuc meal, but couldn’t see trying for a goat meat revivial, so he went to the lab instead.

I went to a lab, too, this week. Not an in vitro meat lab but a high density electronics lab, and you can read about it at our education website.  I found it fascinating. Schonwald is like me in this, I think: he likes to find out about new stuff and see where people work, be it a radicchio field or an in vitro meat lab. No wonder I’m enjoing his book.

I had a very productive day today. I cleaned my kitchen thoroughly and the pantry and living room with less vigor but still more than I’ve done for a while. I did the grocery shopping, taking an hour to hang out in a bookstore and see what was new. I did the topstitching on my jacket and an inch or two of knitting. I made Yuzu scented bath gel, sorted through my closet and got a bag together for charity, and bought much-needed linens. I had a “clean” dinner of salmon, qinoa, and broccoli. I changed my sheets and pillowcases and remade the bed.I sewed up pillow covers for the daybed in my office and did laundry.

It’s amazing how much other stuff you can do if you’re not working.

A box of decaffienated Yorkshire tea arrived marked “Royal mail.” I realize that royal mail is the ordinary British mail, but it seemed very special. Royal, after all.

Having accomplished all these things, I read The Taste of Tomorrow, which is getting excited about radicchio and genetically modified food. Now my husband is watching one of those cowboy movies in which a strange white guy rides into a town in Mexico and saves the indigenous people, all of whom are unaccountably clueless, to the accompaniment of wordless choral music: “Oooooh, oooooh, oooh.”

My whiteboard is getting fuller, but my office is still tidy and pleasant to work in, so I have no complaints. We’re trying to streamline our systems so we can get more work done in the same amount of time.

The rest of the house is not tidy, and we’re filming an intereview here tomorrow, so tidying is definitely on my list for today.

#1 daughter and I went out yesterday for fun, admiring high priced furniture and having a girl’s lunch at one of those places where your meal arrives on a triangular plate, stacked and sauced to look like hat trimmings. We made a hair appointment and really didn’t accomplish much of anything else.Then we split up and I went to do the grocery shopping while she went and spent a packet on electronics.

We have to spend a packet on electronics every now and then. Can’t be helped. At least she enjoys it.

I also did some knitting. The Nantucket Jacket is growing nicely, with the waist shaping done so that there’s a bit of a peplum. I was concerned that the edges weren’t even,but it’s clear by now that this is a design feature.  See the photo below to see how the peplum undulates gently as the stitches change.

I’m enjoying the knitting. This is Elann’s Highland Wool in Cedar. It’s a sturdy yet soft yarn that works up into a good basic fabric with a nice hand.

I knitted up the second skein yesterday while watching lawyer shows on Netflix and chatting with #1 daughter about love and life and haircuts. 

We talked a lot about business, too. You will not be amazed by this because it’s all I seem to talk about here, ever. There was a time when you could come over here and find a discussion of good and evil or evolution or underwear, but now it’s all work all the time. I think this is why I post so rarely. I get bored at the mere thought of writing more stuff about business.

However, in real life it’s fairly exciting.

At the moment, I’m comparing online project management and customer relationship management tools. It happens that I encountered the blog of another knitter/ tech guy who faced the same task, and she outlined all the pros and cons of a whole bunch of programs. The fact that she’s a knitter caused me to put greater faith in her thoughts on PM/CRM tools than I otherwise would have, and how irrational is that?

I suggested to #1 daughter that we figure out our workflow and then find a tool that worked with it, but she disagreed. We must find a tool we like, she says, and then develop systems to leverage its power. We tried Salesforce, the CRM the aforementioned knitter favors, and liked the robust data capture and reporting — but didn’t have time, in the year we paid for it, to learn to use it properly. We’ve now been using Solve360 for a year, but it doesn’t seem to support collaboration as well as Basecamp did — but Basecamp’s associated CRM seems pretty lame. This is the sort of thing that makes the decision difficult.

#1 daughter has served notice that she dislikes change and expects me to pick one and stick with it rather than having to use something new each year. If you have advice, pass it along.

I’m going to revisit Basecamp, though the knitter who wrote about it pointed out that it’s all about what has already been done. I feel as though it’s easier to assign and follow up on tasks in Basecamp, and easier to collect project files there. Right now, we send stuff back and forth to client/designer/animator/linkbuilder with Dropbox, Desk, Google Docs, email, and various other tools various other people use, and it all gets messy.

We also don’t have the data we need when we need it. I liked the fact that Salesforce assisted with projections and showed the sales pipeline and how we were doing.

#1 daughter says it’s user error. If we used 360 correctly, she maintains, it would have all the data we wanted and we could communicate and collaborate perfectly well with it.

What we need is something that will do for our PM/CRM what SproutSocial does for our social media management. We can put all our clients in there, work from within the dashboard instead of having to work elsewhere and then go add stuff later, and it gathers the data for us and creates reports (albeit inaccurate reports, according to #1 daughter).

On the other hand, it appears that Mavenlink offers groups health insurance, so I’ll check it out, too.

My whiteboard is getting fuller, but my office is still tidy and pleasant to work in, so I have no complaints. We’re trying to streamline our systems so we can get more work done in the same amount of time.

The rest of the house is not tidy, and we’re filming an intereview here tomorrow, so tidying is definitely on my list for today.

#1 daughter and I went out yesterday for fun, admiring high priced furniture and having a girl’s lunch at one of those plces where your meal arrives on a triangular plate, stacked and sauced to look like hat trimmings. We made a hair appointment and really didn’t accomplish much of anything else.Then we split up and I went to do the grocery shopping while she went and spent a packet on electronics.

We have to spend a packet on electronics every now and then. Can’t be helped. At least she enjoys it.

I also did some knitting. The Nantucket Jacket is growing nicely, with the waist shaping done so that there’s a bit of a peplum. I was concnerned that the edges weren’t even,but it’s clear by now that this is a design feature.  See the photo below to see how the peplum undulates gently as the stitches change.

I’m enjoying the knitting. This is Elann’s Highland Wool in Cedar. It’s a sturdy yet soft yarn that works up into a good basic fabric with a nice hand.

I knitted up the second skein yesterday while watching lawyer shows on Netflix and chatting with #daughter about love and life and haircuts. 

We talked a lot about business, too. You will not be amazed by this because it’s all I seem to talk about here, ever. There was a time when you could come over here and find a discussion of good and evil or evolution or underwear, but now it’s all work all the time. I think this is why I post so rarely. I get bored at the mere thought of writing more stuff about business.

However, in real life it’s fairly exciting.

At the moment, I’m comparing online project management and customer relationship management tools. It happens that I encountered the blog of another knitter/ tech guy who faced the same task, and she outlined all the pros and cons of a whole bunch of programs. The fact that she’s a knitter caused me to put greater faith in her thoughts on PM/CRM tools than I otherwise would have, and how irrational is that?

I suggested to #1 daughter that we figure out our workflow and then find a tool that worked with it, but she disagreed. We must find a tool we like, she says, and then develop systems to leverage its power. We tried Salesforce, the CRM the aforementioned knitter favors, and liked the robust data capture and reporting — but didn’t have time, in the year we paid for it, to learn to use it properly. We’ve now been using Solve360 for a year, but it doesn’t seem to support collaboration as well as Basecamp did — but Basecamp’s associated CRM seems pretty lame. This is the sort of thing that makes the decision difficult.

#1 daughter has served notice that she dislikes change and expects me to pick one and stick with it rather than having to use something new each year. If you have advice, pass it along.

I’m going to revisit Basecamp, though the knitter who wrote about it pointed out that it’s all about what has already been done. I feel as though it’s easier to assign and follow up on tasks in Basecamp, and easier to collect project files there. Right now, we send stuff back and forth to client/designer/animator/linkbuilder with Dropbox, Desk, Google Docs, email, and various other tools various other people use, and it all gets messy.

We also don’t have the data we need when we need it. I liked the fact that Salesforce assisted with projections and showed the sales pipeline and how we were doing.

#1 daughter says it’s user error. If we used 360 correctly, she maintains, it would have all the data we wanted and we could communicate and collaborate perfectly well with it.

What we need is something that will do for our PM/CRM what SproutSocial does for our social media management. We can put all our clients in there, work from within the dashboard instead of having to work elsewhere and then go add stuff later, and it gathers the data for us and creates reports (albeit inaccurate reports, according to #1 daughter).

On the other hand, it appears that Mavenlink offers groups health insurance, so I’ll check it out, too.