Jarkko Laine » Liberation

Start Building Your Minimalist Business Today

Jarkko — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 20:11:51 +0000

A month ago, minimalism blogger and writer Everett Bogue launched his second e-book, Minimalist Business, as a pre-release that was available for just 24 hours. Having read his first book, The Art of Being Minimalist, I knew this book was something worth waiting for, and was among the first ones to buy the book and read it in just a couple of days. Since then, I have been returning to the book for advice and inspiration as I work on building my own very small business.

Today, Everett has just made the book available again. The book has been further polished and improved based on feedback he collected from the pre-release, and this time it’s here to stay. It’s a useful, beautifully crafted book about building a really small business to support your goals in life. If that is something you want to do in life and you are not running such a business successfully yet, I believe reading this book and following its advice will be what you need to give yourself a flying start.

If you are not sure why you would want a minimalist business, keep reading. Otherwise, check out the book now.

Why Would You Want a Minimalist Business?

This idea has many names: Clay Collins calls it a freedom business, Jonathan Fields talks about becoming a career renegade, Chris Guillebeau labels it very small biz. In the minimalist movement, Everett Bogue adds some minimalist principles to the mix with great success and calls his version minimalist business.

What these ideas all have in common is the goal to create a business built around the things that matter to you the most while making the business effective and automating parts of it. This way you will have freedom to focus on the things that you care about in life rather than spending your best hours working 9 to 5 on priorities set by other people.

Everyone is different, and we all have different priorities in life. Maybe you share some of my reasons (spending more time with my family, sharing ideas through blogging, participating in my local community, and doing my part in helping reduce poverty in the world), maybe you are like Everett and want to be free to live anywhere you decide, or maybe your goals are completely different.

The beauty of a minimalist business is that when you put in the work and build one, it will give you freedom to focus more of your time on these things.

Out of these approaches I have been reading about (I have bought and read something from all of these writers — I guess that makes me a bit of an e-book junkie), I like Minimalist Business the most. For me, its beauty lays in the fact that by applying minimalism first to my life and then to the business itself, I can make the goal much more attainable than normal sized business could ever be. And the book itself is a work of art. You can’t really go wrong with this (and if you don’t agree, Everett promises a forever money back refund for your money!)

If You Don’t Want to Buy the Book

By now it has probably become clear to you that I am trying to sell you this book. That’s because, first, it is a great product and I have great respect for Everett Bogue’s work, and second, as an affiliate, I get a share of the purchases made through my blog.

But I do understand not everyone wants to buy the product.

If you are not ready to get Minimalist Business (yet) but want to know more about the topic, here are links to some free resources to get you started:

Check out Everett’s landing page for the book and read the first 37 pages for free. It’s a great resource even if you are not going to buy the full book
Read Everett’s blog, Far Beyond the Stars. Many of the ideas in the book have been covered in blog posts over the past months as well.
Read Chris Guillebeau’s blog, The Art of Non-Confirmity.
Browse my archives for my past experiments in building an online business, and follow my future posts as I report on building my own minimalist business.

And most importantly, just start.

It’s Not Supposed to be Easy

Jarkko — Wed, 19 May 2010 04:26:32 +0000

“Those who sow in tears will reap with songs of joy.”

An Easy Life is NOT The Answer

When someone talks about freedom, be it through minimalism, automation, passive income, or retirement, we immediately think he is looking for an easy way out. We might even think that this person is lazy and doesn’t want to do his part in the society. Sure, for some people, that’s what they are after. But for most, and for almost all of the people who make it, that’s not the point.

Freedom does by definition mean that no one can tell you what you do. Yet the implication is wrong: When you have the freedom, doing nothing is not going to make you thrive. And when you say your job sucks, it’s usually not because the work is hard but because the work is missing a meaning, a reason why it is worth doing.

In an interview regarding their latest album, Hello Hurricane, Switchfoot frontman Jon Foreman said something hugely inspiring (quoting Dolly Parton):

“If you ain’t crying, why are you singing it?”

Ask yourself this question:

If what I do is not for a cause that makes me cry, why am I doing it?
If what I work on isn’t touching something deep inside my heart and bringing it to tears, why am I working on it?
If this isn’t a thing I could die doing, why am I spending my life doing it?

This is not a simple question. There are reasons to carry on doing the less meaningful work for a while, but make sure to keep these questions in mind when you plan your next actions. Like Chris Guillebeau tells in his practical post: look for the thing that irritates you (or makes you cry) in this world and get excited to change it!

(P.S. Today is my son Oiva’s third birthday, and this blog also turned three six days ago. Thanks for still following!)

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Haiti

Jarkko — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 00:13:48 +0000

This world has a power to make us humble.

Many things I consider important are not really worth spending precious efforts on. And many of the things that are worth it are not getting the attention.

Poverty, I believe, belongs to the second group.

Habitat for Humanity is doing important work bringing shelter to the beat up people of Haiti. Let’s help them out by collecting the money to build one house for one family.

Donation Can 1.1 Released

Jarkko — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 18:21:49 +0000

Just a quick update to all Donation Can users out there: The first update to my Donation Can plugin is live!

Here’s a brief update on what’s new in this version:

You can now allow your visitors to specify the amount they want to donate. To do this, go to edit the donation goal and tick the check box that says “Include freeform donation option” in the “Donation Options” sections.
If you want to only have the freeform donation option, remove all donation options from the general settings and tick the checkbox mentioned above.
You can create goals without a target amount. For an example of this in action, check out the donation widget in this blog’s right side sidebar. To do this, just leave the “Fundraising Target” field empty and save changes.
You can embed donation forms to your blog posts and pages using a new quick tag. See this page for detailed instructions.

I have some bug fixes and new features (including support for recurring donations, different donation widget styles, and localization) still in the works and they will be released in a few weeks from now. And as always, I’d love to hear your comments and improvement ideas!

Go get the plugin here.

8 Photos That Will Turn You Into a Runner

Jarkko — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 20:00:57 +0000

Today, I decided, it’s time to turn you all into runners.

So here we go: a collection of eight shots that I’ve taken on my runs around the neighborhood.

This beauty around me is something I didn’t even realize I was missing out on before I picked up running. Now, I can’t imagine giving it up.

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Preview: Donation Can WordPress Plugin

Jarkko — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 04:06:34 +0000

At last, it’s getting time to announce the release of my first full featured free WordPress plugin: Donation Can will be released in one week from today, on Monday, August 24th, 2009.

In this post, I want to tell you a bit about the plugin and show one of the most interesting features, and hopefully get you at least a bit excited about what is coming up.

Overview

Donation Can is a WordPress plugin for collecting donations through PayPal. It was initially developed as an in-house donation tool for the Train for Humanity web site, but since completing the site, I have been polishing the plugin so that it can be released for a broader audience. Now, after all these months, I’m finally there, and you’ll get to try the plugin for yourself.

To support Train for Humanity a bit more, I’m releasing the plugin for free, only asking that it you find the plugin useful, you would support the humanitarian cause by sponsoring my training. Donating to Train for Humanity is also a fun way to see the plugin in action!

Easy Tracking

Whatever you are collecting money for, I bet you want to know how the fundraising is going. With Donation Can, I have tried to make it as quick and straightforward as possible to stay up to date with how the donations are going. The key feature in making this happen is the dashboard widget shown in the following screenshot.

In the screenshot you will also notice that Donation Can supports multiple causes or goals at once, each tracked on its own. This feature was created to make it possible to track sponsorships to each athlete separately, but it also works really well in a single-author blog, for example if you are simultaneously collecting donations for getting yourself a new computer and buying some food for your cat.

In addition to the dashboard widget, Donation Can makes tracking easy through email notifications. You can configure the plugin with as many email addresses you’d like and when someone makes a donation, they will all be notified of it. The email configuration can also be made separately for each goal.

This was the first look at what the Donation Can plugin offers. There will be another one still this week, but now I must get to work with finishing up the plugin and making it ready for the big date of next Monday.

Have a great week, and talk to you soon! I can’t wait to share the plugin with you.

How it Feels to Run 34 Kilometers for the First Time in Your Life

Jarkko — Sun, 09 Aug 2009 23:55:56 +0000

It’s 2:30 and I can’t sleep. That’s why after an hour and half of trying to fake sleeping, I decided to just get up and write a blog post instead. All the things I wanted to say where already filling my head anyway.

This feeling is new to me. Usually, I’m the first one in any group of people to fall asleep. And until today, I’ve believed that even running wouldn’t change that fact. I was wrong — I just hadn’t experienced a tough enough exercise. Now, in the past two and a half hours since finishing my run, I’ve experienced everything from exhaustion to feeling shivery, to feeling so sweaty that I thought I was melting, and now, this feeling of extreme alertness that makes it impossible to fall asleep. Just like trying to sleep in the middle of the day.

So what happened?

Tonight, at 8:15 P.M., I set out to run for 30 kilometers (I didn’t think the timing would have been that bad, and after all, as a working dad, I didn’t want to waste too many of my precious minutes of family time). My previous top distance was 27, so I thought it would be good to increase it by three kilometers. 27 had been no big deal at all, so 30 should be easy too, right?

Maybe. I will never get to know that as I got lost in the beginning of my run and ended up running four kilometers more than I had planned, jumping straight from 27 to 34. And that’s not all, I also noticed that when you are lost, you instinctively run faster, trying to find your way back to your original route, or any familiar route whatsoever. Because of that, I ran the distance in 3 hours and 45 minutes — faster than the 27 kilometers from last time!

At the end of the run, for the first time, my body started refusing to run: My feet ached all the way from toes to knee, and my brain was telling me to just stop running and walk instead. But when I tried walking, I noticed that counter-intuitively, running was easier: during the few steps I tried to walk, all I could think of was stopping for good. That wasn’t an option, so I decided to just keep running.

Oh boy, it felt good to make it all the way home. Not sure how long a distance I had covered, I opened Google maps and updated my route, exhausted and starting to feel a shiver of cold go through my body.

Lessons learned: Do your longer runs in the morning rather than at nigh if you enjoy your sleep. Carry a map with you if not sure about every twist and turn in your route. Don’t run too fast if you get lost.

My practice continues: I don’t think I will run tomorrow, but definitely the day after tomorrow, and in four weeks, I will be racing the Finlandia marathon in Jyväskylä. Wish me luck, and check out the cause I’m training for: peace and development — children — in Darfur.

There is so much I want to say about running, but if I don’t want to ruin the nice focus of this blog post, I have to stop here. Stay tuned, if running is something you’d like to experiment with!

It Doesn’t Matter If You Win or Lose

Jarkko — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 06:47:26 +0000

In his recent talk at the London School of Economics (listen the podcast here for free), Thomas L. Friedman, bestselling author of The World Is Flat, and Hot, Flat, and Crowded, made a great point about the financial crashes in history and compared to that of today.

His reasoning goes like this:

In the late 1800′s, when the US railroad bubble collapsed, it left the country with an amazing railroad network.
In the early 2000, when the dot com bubble burst, it left us with a highly developed Internet infrastructure.
When this latest credit bubble broke at the end of last year, it left us with nothing more than half-built condos and worthless credit.

This got me thinking: In the end, companies go down all the time, people lose their jobs every day, and there is no such thing as financial security. The world is fragile and unpredictable. If my employer went bankrupt, pretty much no one would notice. Or even more, if my tiny home business didn’t fly, who on earth would care?

That’s why we need to ask ourselves a new question: If your company went down today, what would be the legacy it left behind?

The One Secret To Success: Do Something

Jarkko — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 09:12:02 +0000

I’ll start by a contradiction: No matter what the title says, just doing things is no guarantee for success. Read Malcolm Gladwell’s latest book, Outliers: The Story of Success, and you’ll hear that success is a combination of hard work, one thousand hours of practice, and equally importantly, pure luck. Being in the right place at the right time. And if you want to challenge your thinking even more, check out anything written by Nassim Nicholas Taleb (I suggest Fooled by Randomness). He will show you how most of the things we see as cause and effect really are just manifestations of randomness at work.

Both authors make valid points, but I think Gladwell does us a favor by laying out a more actionable approach on success: There is a great deal of randomness involved (The young Bill Gates just happened to be at a place where he had unlimited access to computers at a time when most didn’t) but there is also a lot we can do to make the most out of the luck that comes our way (Bill spent all his waking hours learning the secrets of those first computers, building the expertise that later led him to start Microsoft and become a millionaire).

This is what leads me back to the title of the post. Even no one can promise that action always leads to success, success requires a fair deal of action. The surest way to nothing is never taking action. And the other one is taking the wrong action.

Based on my own experience, I argue that the second way to fail (or delay your success, as I like to look at it), is just a variation of the first one: You take the wrong actions when you know what the right ones would be — just because doing the thing you know you need to do feels too serious, too difficult, or you’re afraid it will make others laugh at you.

How to Fail

Let’s say you want to create a profitable, useful web site that can make a difference. You have read your blogging advice, and know that the right thing to when starting is to pick a niche that you are passionate about but at the same time covers a need that people are desperate to find.

Some people do the work: they do the research, test their ideas, and then start working on the plan. Others just start writing about the first thing that comes to mind. With this blog, I did the latter. And while it didn’t lead to a complete failure, it made the work harder and I ended up in a very long blogging dip.

But for the sake of the example, let’s say you get lucky (or do the research) and get the first step right. You then carry on with the plan, and after putting in hundreds of hours, you are close to launching your first great product. You have completed most of the work, and all that is left is polishing the product, finding its coolness, and presenting it to the world.

That’s a risky moment: doubt creeps in your mind, you realize that the polishing is a lot of work, and start asking yourself: “What if no one will like this? Should I do something else instead?”

It’s just easier to quit. And that’s what most do. I have quit many times. And I have regrets for each of those times.

The problem is that success can only happen if you fight the doubt and finish the product. You can create a top seller if you never sell anything.

That’s why I’m telling you: Keep doing the things you know you need to do. It’s the difference between the $2,500 (minus expenses) I made last year, and the $200,000 Naomi Dunford did in the same time.

The Challenge

Check out my new project, Text is Art, subscribe to the mailing list on that site, and follow me as I prove this point by putting it to action. And then, when you see me do it, you’ll know that you can too.

If I can make this happen, you have no excuse. You have to do it as well.

Better Ways to Measure Success

Goodwill and Motivation

Jarkko — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 05:16:43 +0000

Why good people do good things?

I don’t find the question of good people doing bad things nearly as interesting as the one of good people doing good things. We are a greedy, sometimes quite ignorant bunch of people. We seek to do the right thing (which makes us good enough), but still can’t help but think, “What’s in it for me?”

The opposite question is much more interesting: What makes us beat ourselves to help out, to change the world, and to work towards a common goal instead of focusing in selfish short term gains?

Train for Humanity

Last December, I found some answers to this question as I offered to help Mark Hayward and his Train for Humanity team bring the next version of the Train for Humanity site to existence. Work is now well underway, and it won’t be too long until Mark can finally announce the launch of the project’s second phase.

Train for Humanity is an exciting initiative to collect money for humanitarian causes by combining everyday athletes’ training efforts with social media and blogging. The cause is good and important.

But why did I join this team and not some other, equally good and important, non-profit? Why am I not giving my time and money to Greenpeace or the Red Cross instead? What motivated me to act this time when in my past 28 years I have done so little?

Investigating My Motives

I am not saying that these are the only reasons why someone would do good deeds, but I thought it would be interesting to share my motivators and see if you share any of them:

An opportunity to work with great people: I have a great deal of appreciation for all the guys who started and built Train for Humanity to what it is today. I wanted to get to know them better and work with people I can learn from and who seem to share many of the values I hold dear.
Being part of a movement: ”getting fit + social media + blogging = social good” is a tag line and mission statement I can believe in. I see it as a part of a bigger movement of using the world of social media and blogging to create meaningful connections to build a future that we can be proud of. Something I hope could be the movement that our generation will be remembered for.
Doing something meaningful: I have labeled the year 2009 with a keyword, MEANINGFUL, which means that I want to make all my actions count. Things can be meaningful in many ways, so what is great about Train for Humanity and the things I’m working on in the project is that it combines so many meaningful things into one: learning more about WordPress development, doing something to help the poorest people in the world, getting fit (see next bullet), and so on.
Getting fit: Working in an office, I have gained a few pounds more than I should and haven’t done all the training that my body craves for. That’s why, around the last months of 2008, I decided to fix all that and resume my running habit. Being a part of a project that is all about training should be a great additional motivator to keep me going and actually completing my first racing event!

The cause itself matters: I want to bring humanitarian relief to this planet and, just like anyone, I’d love to eradicate poverty and make the world a fair place for everyone to live in. But, as painful as it is, I must admit that this hasn’t been enough of a reason for me to become active in the past.

I needed the additional motives. If I didn’t, I would have already been out there helping all the various charities a long time ago.

What are the motives that make you do good things? Or what keeps you from doing them? Let’s talk! And if you haven’t yet, check out Train for Humanity. And stay tuned for the web site update in the near future!