A Few Rules to Live By

I’m spending a typical Sunday night scanning the blogs that I missed during the week, and as usual, there are the seemingly never-ending lists of new Web 2.0 sites fortified with AJAX and Ruby on Rails, or whatever the latest programming paradigm is this week. Before my brain turns to mush trying to figure out just what market opportunity these people think they’re pursuing, I offer A Few Rules to Live By:

1. Technology is a means to an end, never an end in itself.
   
2. Just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should.
   
3. Just because you think there’s a market for your idea doesn’t mean that there is a market.
   
4. If you can’t explain your new product or service in one or two (reasonably short) sentences, you’ve probably got the wrong idea.
   
5. If you can’t convince someone who’s not a coworker, friend or relative that you’ve got a good idea, it might be time to rethink your idea.
   
6. If you don’t think you have any competitors, you’re wrong.
   
7. You can never know enough about your business, market or technical specialty.
   
8. The two most important resources for success in business are time and money. Like matter and energy, they’re interchangeable, but only under extreme circumstances.
   
9. At the end of the day, there will be a helluva lot more losers than winners. Never take success for granted, and never assume that it’ll last forever.