Developers and entrepreneurs can get frustrated over a great many things. But one thing I have noticed that they don't get frustrated about is what people think about them. They are too mightily focused on doing something new to worry what someone's conformity will seem like to them.
This post was written by Douglas Crets, Community Manager, Microsoft BizSpark, a community created for the distribution of free software and the development of technology solutions.
Besides, people's greatest adulation and praise for you, and people's worst complaints for you, will be saved for when you are gone. You will never hear the last of it anyway. There is no last of it.
I've gotten to know a lot of you in Microsoft BizSpark as your community manager, and you have taught me a few things. Here is what you so far have taught me.
And pay attention, because this really is the mission of BizSpark.
We have a choice to live in one of two realities. The reality we are introduced to is the one formulated by our habits. The second is the one discovered by exploring other people's habits.
Entrepreneurs, developers, and people of high technical skill are really good at taking their own problems and their search for a solution and identifying with the lives of others. This simple choice, or gesture, enables them to live in a new reality. They live in one where through facing the struggle of what it means to be alive, they can give a sense of freedom to other people through their work and their choices. That's a more satisfying life.
All great success is born out of struggle. Where life is absent of struggle, there will be no success. But it is a unique kind of struggle, one only the real hacker or the real entrepreneur must experience.
Carl Jung, the great modern psychiatrist and thinker, said that in an individual's crisis lies his or her greatest opportunity to grow and evolve into something great and unique, in comparison to the rest of the world and the other suffering bastards around you.
Inherent in that observation is a deep truth.
Your crisis, though it is unique to you, is also something relevant and experienced -- in its own ways -- by the great wash of humanity.
Your choice, as many of you have so elegantly set out to do, is to develop something that someone else can use, because your hunch, at first, tells you that someone else might feel this way, too.
It turns out that you are not alone. It turns out, your customers are not alone. They also know people who have that problem, too.
You build to solve.
Aseem Badshah will be graduating soon from the Azure Accelerator. He is BizSpark.
The BizSpark program was born out of a desire to help those who build, to help those who need a problem solved. And that is what we have set out to do. You can get free software from us, true. You can also network with us in the community groups that we have set up in Facebook and LinkedIn.
But the greatest thing that you receive -- if I may humbly submit it -- is membership. Not entitlement. Not access. Not reward. Membership. You belong. You are a tribe of people that has found other people, and other problems to solve.
Yours is the incredible momentum that inspires us to create things like the first and now second class of the Microsoft Accelerator for Windows Azure.