[TheForge] Re: marketing

[Peter Fels & Phoebe Palmer]

A remarkably rant-rich subject!...
We all have stories!    pf

Mike Spencer wrote:
> AndyV wrote:
> 
>> The conditions under which some of [our neighbors] live would
>> probably appall some of you.  Hell, the conditions under which *we*
>> live might. :)
> 
> I'll see your double-wide and raise you a two-holer. :-) :-)
> 
> If I had felt that I had to have a "respectable" place to live, proper
> furniture, median or better income, good wardrobe etc. etc. I would
> have just now retired from 40 years commuting to a lab or a garage
> or machine shop.  I would just recently have finished paying the
> vendor and the bank each $X for the nominally $X house, not to mention
> proportionate taxes, insurance and maintainance commensurate with
> aforesaid respectability.
> 
> If you want to run a business in a businesslike way, I have no
> argument with that.  If you're creative and inventive and make
> beautiful stuff, all the better.
> 
> But there's a line.  It starts out very fuzzy and eventually becomes a
> ridge between hollers: If you set target revenue, target income and
> set about to organize your life to produce that, your life, your time
> and your state of mind will go off down one path.  If you set about to
> do whatever you have a mind to do -- be it very substantial or largely
> whimsical -- with whatever you have at hand, your life, your time and
> your state of mind will go off down quite a different path.
> 
> Switching paths becomes harder as time goes on.  There are a number of
> blacksmiths who were brokers or scientists first.  I once met a
> hard-core computer weenie who had spent a decade homesteading in
> back-country Alaska. (You'd never have known he wasn't just another
> up-scale intern from Columbia U. except that he hadn't been able to
> give up chewing tobacco, a real shocker in the halls of prestige
> academe. :-) But -- baldfaced assertion without supporting hard
> evidence -- the path you start on colors and usually distorts
> your view of the path you jumped to.
> 
>> The funny thing about this market is that those clients with the
>> most disposable cash are often the biggest pains in the ass.
> 
> On the first path, that's just a cost of doing business.  On the
> second path, you may well say to yourself, "Do I need this $20K bad
> enough to spend my time hanging out with self-important numb-nuts,
> overbearing jerks or wealthy weasels?"
> 
> Enough. I could rant longer but you get the idea....
> 
> 
> FWIW,
> - Mike
>