A Solid Home

Cottage Swallow Tails, a photo by gingerpig2000 on Flickr.

When you are creating a business, there are places to spend your time, and other places where the return is less than the effort required to fix it. Which is rather an obvious statement.

Let's, though, take another look at the issue, see it from a different angle.

The picture shows the corner joints of a cottage, and at first glance it looks fairly basic, with rough-hewn timbers. But look closer - those joints are cut at a difficult compound angle so that the wall timbers are trying to slide down and inwards. That is traditional technology, and these joints will not fail until the timbers rot away.

The effort has been put into the joints, but what if the timbers had been squared off, the ends trimmed. How would the cottage look then? Well, like any other.

The parts left in their rough state give the cottage its character, it won't look like another. The same should be true of our business, it should be distinctive. So how do we make our business distinctive?

It might be easier than we imagine, all we might need to do is to do less work in the right places. Imagine that, more time to work on the important bits, and your character makes itself.

The trouble is, we might not recognize the important, character stuff. We might be so conditioned by society's expectations we may be working to eradicate the potential without realizing it. We may have been conditioned by life to believe that the core structure of our business must contain more than we need.

For example, take a look at this image. The original was taken by an early digital camera, at 640x480 pixels, and what you see here is just one small section of that image, I have cropped away 70% of the image. Do you miss those lost pixels?

I have only invested around 40 minutes on this image so far, less time than I have spent thinking about and writing this blog entry. I will spend another 6 hours to make this image 6000x6000 pixels and sharpened up ready to print. By practicing not doing things unless they are essential, I get better at only doing the things I have to do. What I have as a result is a distinct product, easy to make.