I’d been sick the entire day and all I did was lay around reading, snacking, and napping. After this exchange I ending up thinking about all of these business plans I have. In addition to that brilliant scheme for middle-aged shower products, I have pretty well developed ideas for the following:
- a luxury spa designed for working women
- a cleaning service with citizenship support for recent-immigrant cleaners
- a tinder-like book recommendation app
- a plus-size bicycling and outdoors clothing line
I’ve been obsessing over business ideas for the past five or six years, part of my long thinking process as I was deciding to leave my comfortable corporate job. During that time I read a ton of business books, some good, some bad, but the business idea craze was definitely kicked off by Chris Guillebeau’s The $100 Startup. I started to compose a post about this book but then I had a vague recollection that Elise and I had already discussed it. Sure enough, it’s in my email archives back from 2013.
Sweet! I’m so glad I had record of this conversation. These diatribes we’ve been writing to one another for 10 years have created such a great trail of breadcrumbs!
Anyway, so now that I know we both had the same point of reference for this book, I went to my Kindle archives to see what I’d highlighted in the book. I was surprised that despite how influential this book has been to my thinking, I barely highlighted any passages and the ones I did were not particularly meaningful. I flipped over to look at popular highlights (things other people highlighted) and that helped a little bit, but not really. I need to go back and reread the book. I kind of resent having to do that — I’ve got a whole thing about re-reading books. Re-reading books, even good ones, pulls me away from something new I could be reading. (I think that’s leftover PTSD from my days working in books — there was always so much pressure to be reading the newest thing that it felt sinful to go backwards in any way.)
But it made me think about a feature I’d like to figure out — as long as we’re making our CPBs digital, we should take advantage of the medium and make it collaborative.
Right now we each have a CPB going in Evernote, and we’ve shared them with one another which means that I can see Elise’s and she can see mine but there’s no obvious way to comment or highlight on one another’s entries. At least not that I can see.
I’m going to mess around with it to see what we can figure out.
In one of Elise’s recent CPB captures, she quoted Dale Carnegie — “Any fool can criticize, condemn, and complain but it takes character and self control to be understanding and forgiving.” — which is a great line, but every time I see it I immediately think of The Smiths song “I Know It’s Over”. One, I loved The Smiths (so dramatic) and two, that song in particular was one of my favorites. I used this quote in my high school yearbook.
So I wanted to make note of this in Elise’s CPB. There’s no obvious way to do that — I was looking for something like the comments you can create in Word, like a little bubble with the author noted. So I just wrote my comment in next to Elise’s and marked it in red, like so:
This is kind of a sloppy hack though. Elise doesn’t get a notification about my note; she has to be randomly reading through her entries to notice it. Does anyone know of a more elegant solution?
vgriff 
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