What did we really learn from the music industry?

The majority of fans don't care where their music comes from, whether it's Sony, EMI, Universal or Warner. People buy the music that they like because they like it, not because it comes from one label or another.

I know that seems obvious and it should be obvious, but we've watched the music industry blow that lesson time and time again.

If your audience doesn't care where the content comes from, why should you?

The old school answer to that is "if it's not our content, then we're not making money on it." Except that's no longer true. That's why I spent so much time talking about aggregators last time. Aggregators make money, not because they produce original content, but because people give them their attention. But we all can't be aggregators.

The mission statement here at Rudius is that we help artists make art. I like, and believe in, the content that we create. I read each and every one of the sites and I read each and every new entry that goes up on the web. I edit a lot of those entries before they go live.

If I tried to tell you that all I read all day was Rudius material, we'd both know I was lying. For the simple fact that we don't do everything. We don't do news. We don't do music. We don't do poetry. We're just getting into some video. (See this and the work Greg did at the production blog).

But we'd also know I was lying because there is good content out there on the web that Rudius simply doesn't have anything to do with. Maybe someday we'll get a chance to work with every talented person on the planet, but we're not there yet.

So if you all don't care where the content comes from, if all you want is quality content, why should I care where it comes from? I'm not so sure that I should.

Helping artists make art isn't just bringing them under the Rudius umbrella. Sometimes it's linking to them so that we can help them build the audience they deserve. Sometimes it's doing joint projects with them. Sometimes it's sending them to the writer's forum so that they can more fully develop their skills. And yes, sometimes it's bringing them under the Rudius umbrella.

I believe that if we do those things well, then we'll also connect all of you to the content you want. I believe that Rudius can become the platform that helps artists, whether they work with us or not, connect with their audience. In return, I hope that you'll come back from time to time to see what we've got going on here. If you like what we're doing then great and if you don't I'd hope you'd tell us why.

That's what we learned from the record companies. It's not about building it and marketing the hell out of it. It's about finding ways to connect people with the content they like. It's about aligning our vision with your vision so that we don't have to "sell" you on anything we create here. The quality of the material will speak for itself and you get to enjoy what you find value in.

The Huffington Post has a pretty good article on what publishing can learn from the music industry. The lessons are:

1. An iPod for Books Will Change Everything
2. Think Beyond DRM
3. If You Help Us, We Will Buy
4. Don't Be Afraid of Free
5. Find Out What Your Customers Want

Unfortunately the article doesn't go far enough. Making your material available in whatever digital formats are out there was last year's lesson. Just making the material available is too passive. It still assumes that if you build it, they will come.

And they're not coming. They may have come when there was five or five hundred or five thousand choices. Now though, there are unlimited choices. The scarcity is no longer the material, there's more quality material out there than people have time to consume it. What is scarce today is time and attention.

Looking forward, the winners will be the players who go beyond good content. It used to be that content was king, that good content was what separated you from the crowd. Now good content is assumed. Everyone who matters has good content. The problem is that good content is spread out all over the place. It's on blogs, forums, youtube, news sites, it's everywhere.

And that creates tremendous opportunity. Most people don't want to search for content. They let others find it for them and present it to them. And so you get content aggregators. Not just online but offline too. What are movie theaters? Content aggregators for Hollywood. Bookstores? Content aggregators for the publishing world. Tower Records? Aggregation for music labels. Blockbuster / Netflix / Hulu? All of these are just places you show up because the content is there.

The problem with a lot of these places is that when you show up, there's nothing to guide you. How do you know what's good? Critics? Recommendations? Those are all external to the actual aggregator. Offline, the aggregators are dumb. They just offer selves of content and let you figure out what, if anything, you want to buy. Some of these places made a half step towards solving this by offering employee recommendations but it was an afterthought.

I'm not saying anything revolutionary here. This has been known for the past ten years. Sites like Kottke, Slashdot and more recently Digg, Reddit and Drudge have all figured this out. And they've taken the aggregation business to the next logical step. Instead of dumbly offering a selection of whatever is out there, each of those sites has a focus and a bias. They've begun the process of picking the best of one subject and offering only that to their readers.

I bring all this up because publishing is facing the same old problem that it's always faced. And eBooks are not the answer. Going digital is not the answer. That's like saying "well, there are these new fangled bookstores. If we print our stories on paper, the bookstores will sell them. Score!" Going to the medium where your readers are only gets you in the game, it doesn't win it for you. We're still living in an era of too much content, too little attention. From Tim Ferris:

there are more than 200,000 books published each year in the US, and less than 5% ever sell more than 5,000 copies. On a given bestseller list, more than 5 spots could be occupied by unbeatable bestsellers like Good to Great or The Tipping Point, which have been on the lists for years.

Going digital doesn't make those odds better, it makes them worse. Everything is "going digital" and since a blog can have the same reach as a magazine, newspaper or publisher the competition is even more cutthroat. People don't care about the medium. They don't care if they're reading a newspaper article, eBook or blog article. They care that they're getting the content they want, especially as we move to a world where it's all delivered on the same e-reader.

[In Part II I'll tackle where we should be headed. And what we really learned from the music industry.]

I just finished Happy Hour Is For Amateurs and I loved it. A lot of people who read this book are just going to see a collection of drinking / drug / sex stories and a lot of people are going to miss the point.

Most people don't hate their jobs, which is good. A lot of people dislike their jobs, which isn't the same, and they find ways to deal with it. They use their jobs to fund the rest of their life. They take vacations, they buy nice stuff and they come up with interesting hobbies. They have wives and kids and families that make their day job tolerable.

But if you've ever hated your job, then the regular outlets don't work. It's not enough to buy a nice TV or a new car and have that, on the balance, make up for what you force yourself to sit through every day. It's not enough because deep down you know that you'd go home and take a sledgehammer to the TV and an angle grinder to the car if it meant that you didn't feel like you were wasting every day behind a desk. Like at the end of twenty years or forty years the only real memories you're going to have are of an office you don't like and busy work that didn't mean anything.

I don't know Philalawyer and I'm not going to say that our experiences were even remotely similar. I do know that what connected me to this book was that when I was working in IT, I had a lot of the same thoughts run through my head that he describes in the book. Everything from being young and excited to do interesting work and having those impulses run smack into office bureaucracy, which will suck the soul out of even the most committed evangelical, to essentially having to split myself into two people: Work Ben and Not-Work Ben.

That split is terrible. I used to spend so much energy trying to suppress my personality to get through the day that happy hour wasn't ever just a drink to relax; it was therapy, liquid courage, a pep talk and a way to forget all rolled into one. It was the only way that I could slap a fake smile on my face and sit at a desk for eight or ten hours with the realization that I was as replaceable as the copy machine, that I didn't care about the work I was doing and that I was supposed to buy into this system that was boring and cruel. A lot of people will say that I was being immature but I think that's a wildly inaccurate label. In my early twenties I had two things, boundless energy and an almost endless want to believe in what I was doing. And so when I had to shove those two things aside to be able to function in an office, they had to go somewhere.

And that's why I think most people are going to miss the deeper point of this book. They've never needed that explosive outlet that allows you to go along with the fiction that the system is working for you and you're happy with it. So they see the drinking and the drugs and the sex but they don't understand the context underlying it. When you feel trapped, the first instinct is to escape. But when there is rent to pay and everyone around you is doing the exact same thing, instead of running away from what's making you miserable, you run to anything that takes the pain away. Philalawyer probably could have done a better job connecting those two ideas, that everything that happens in the book is an outlet to deal with the job, but it's not a fatal flaw. That theme will be instantly recognizable to anyone who's worked a job they've felt trapped at.

The book comes out on the 14th. If you're a long time reader of the blog, you'll see that some of the blog entries got repurposed into the book. I have mixed feelings about that, on one hand it kills some of the excitement and joy of reading a book for the first time. On the other hand, it was cool to see all of the stories laid out in a way that makes chronological sense and gives a narrative arc to both the character and the lost decade. On the blog they seem to be stand alone stories, but in the book there's a definite feeling of movement and change. I can't say too much more without giving away the ending, so I'll stop there.

Today marks the end of the second week since Jeff and I took over the Internet and Publishing areas of Rudius Media. Here are some thoughts from the first two weeks.

1. There's internet time and there's real time. I always sort of knew this, I think everyone knows this, but it becomes painfully real when you're trying to both run sites and plan for the future. I've had to start thinking on two entirely different timelines.

One is the world of instant publishing, entries on Rudius Media, editing, my own writing (which I've been neglecting). There's the day-to-day business of generating new content, finding new content, getting new content to those who want to consume it. And while people will gladly wait a year for a new book or a new movie, they won't waiting a week for a blog post.

The other is the world of planning for the future. Sitting down with a designer to roll out the next generation of features for our sites, sitting down with Donika to talk about our current authors and projects, working with new authors to see if they'd be a good fit within the Rudius universe. All of these things have a horizon of months. It takes time to rollout site redesigns, create a working relationship with new authors and figure out what's working and what isn't. And it takes time to synthesize everything I've heard from all of you and figure out how to make it work with where I want to go.

There's nothing inherently wrong with this, but when you spend your day living in internet time, it's sometimes hard to accept that you can't redesign the network, rollout six new authors and generate internet crushing traffic all before miller time.

2. If you don't love it, don't take the reins. There have been at least two days where I've seriously wanted to say "fuck it" and walk away. And it's only been two weeks. If you have any doubts in yourself or if you don't 100% love what you're doing, then there's no way you're going to hack it. You really have to have an almost naïve belief in your ability to take a project from nothing to success or the doubts alone will crush you, not to mention the fires that have to be put out every day.

3. If you get the chance to take the reins, do it. For all the moments that suck, there are moments that are awesome. I tend to focus on the negative, because I'm bitter and angry and fuck you. But for all that, most of the day, I'm excited about what I'm doing, I like what I'm doing and I believe in what I'm doing. I'm not sure how many people can say that about their jobs. I'm 30 years old and I'm running a startup. For how much I've bounced around, it's a pretty good landing. This is by far the coolest chance I've ever had, but that's probably not something I'd admit to if you asked me right out.

4. Being a digital nomad doesn't always work. This is probably the hardest lesson for me to learn. I have an irrational, blinding belief in technology as the ultimate problem solver, akin to how people probably believe in god. I love the idea that with my blackberry, laptop and a wireless connection, I can work from anywhere in the world. But the truth is that nothing is as effective as face to face meetings, especially early on in the lifecycle of a project or startup. Later, when everyone understands where the ship is headed, then there's a lot more freedom to work remotely. But as I'm getting comfortable with the new Rudius, it's invaluable to be able to sit down with someone and really work through issues and ideas. Of course, I'm not talking about recreating some sort of bullshit office culture, a lot of my meetings happen over drinks, but they still happen IRL.

If you're interested in this process, building a community and the like, here are two things I read today that were helpful.

First is Looking for a reason to hide by Seth Godin. It's easy to fall into that trap of doing nothing, of adopting the 'wait and see' because it's almost always safer than taking a risk. I'm super susceptible to this, especially right now when capital markets are crashing, there's a presidential election, I never built a community like this, zomg aliens! It's probably not Seth's best post evar, but it helped to read it first thing this morning and realize "hey, if Godin thinks it's a good idea ... fuck it, let's make some moves, people." If you look at all the reasons I've listed, almost none of them have an actual bearing on what I'm doing, but that's the thing about indecisiveness, it'll grab any reason to keep you rooted in place.

Second is The Cathedral and the Bazaar by Eric Steven Raymond. I can't believe this is the first time I've read this, especially considering how involved I was with IT but it is. It's awesome and just between you and me, I consider it a pretty good blueprint on how to move forward with this whole project.

And as an aside -- How many people watched the presidential debates tonight? I don't want this to turn at all political, just mention, casually in the comments, if you watched the debates. A yes or no will do. I'll edit any responses that go much beyond that.

First I want to thank everyone who commented or emailed me about the Alpha Test post. I'm still processing it all and I have a feeling that I will be for the next few months. You guys confirmed a lot of my assumptions about what needs to happen going forward and you pointed out some stuff I would have missed as well. So I hope that the conversation started there continues, I have a feeling I'm going to be asking you all for lots more over the next year.

We're growing up as a company. In the past Tucker oversaw everything, determined strategy, direction and was the engine by which everything here turned. But now we've grown to the point where it just isn't feasible for one person to run every aspect of Rudius Media. In the past couple of weeks we've gone through a major reorganization. Tucker has shifted over to work exclusively on the movie and on his next book. So Jeff and I are now running the internet and publishing side of Rudius. For those of you playing along at home, yes, I just failed my way to the top.

Over the past few years that I've been a part of Rudius we've done some things very well and some things very poorly. Where I think we've been the weakest is in building a sense of community around our sites. There's the message board, strange universe that it is, but that's always been driven by Tucker and by TuckerMax.com. It's time for Rudius to grow its own community that TuckerMax.com and the message board are part of, not the other way around.

The techie in me wanted to go big. I wanted to redesign Rudius Media from the ground up. User accounts, aggregation, fancy web2.0 stuff. Spend all month playing with the technology and making it slick and shiny and useless. No one but designers get exited about how cool the blog templates are, and that would be fine if we were running a design company but we're not. We're running a content company and I had to stop myself and say "it's about the content, stupid."

That's why I haven't done anything to the front page of Rudius Media yet but start treating it like a blog. If content is what people get excited over, then that's the first and most important thing to get right. Dynamically building pages is awesome, if there's something worth dynamically building.

And that's why this is all pre-alpha. I want to build this from the ground up and I want to make sure it's uniquely Rudius. There are a lot of models out there; Slashdot, digg, kottke, etc. Most people would look at one of them, copy their model and call it a day. It certainly would be easier and quicker to do it that way. But we're never going to be a better fark than fark. We have to figure out who we are and do that well.

I want to give a chance for everyone who is interested to get involved in this community. I'm sure that mostly that will mean people calling me an asshole when I get things wrong. Or calling me an asshole if this ever hits a certain level of success or calling me an asshole if we don't hit certain levels of success quickly enough. That's all part of the game and it's a whole lot better than the old way of doing things. Design a service in secret, call everyone together, wait breathlessly for the big moment, and hope and pray that when the curtain goes up there is wild applause instead of crickets.

And for everyone else who just reads this thing because sometimes I like to get drunk and break stuff, I'm sure there will be some of that as well.

Lets face it. The RudiusMedia.com site kind of sucks. Sure it's got some information about who we are and what we do, but it's this sort of high level, 30,000 foot view of us as a company. It's boring and if you've been there once, there's no reason to go back. RudiusMedia.com is the high school science fair of websites.

Lets change that. We're a media and entertainment company. RudiusMedia.com should reflect that by bringing you media and entertainment as its first priority. All that "mission statement this" and "f.a.q. that" should be secondary. No one gets excited by a company with a cool "about us" page. Lets give people something to get excited about.

I've started to play around with the front page. It's not perfect, hell it's not even good but it is a start. I want to spend the next few weeks figuring out what works and what doesn't. It's not beta yet, it's not even really alpha but if you've got suggestions I want to hear them. And don't worry about sending me the obvious. There's a lot I know I need to do but I miss things, so send the obvious, the not so obvious and the down right esoteric. Any thing you see that we could be do better would be awesome.

If TuckerMax.com is the sun of the Rudius Media universe and GaijinSmash is a super massive planet, then I'm not even Pluto. I'm closer to asteroid 28978 and for once, that's a good thing. It means that we have a chance to develop something really cool before the rest of the Internet finds out about it. All that stuff I've been talking about for a year? Now is the chance to play around with it, practice it, test drive it and see what melts the tires.

So here are the sort of broad guidelines:
-I want to showcase the content created in the Rudius Media universe.
-I want to point to cool stuff we find out there on the Internet.
-At some point the tech will catch up with the community, so there will be user accounts and moderators but infrastructure without anyone to use it doesn't do anyone any good.

I'm not looking to recreate digg or boingboing or metafilter or anyone else. I want this project to have it's own unique feel. There are plenty of other places to find funny pictures of dogs and honestly, I don't think that's what Rudius does best. So lets identify what Rudius does well and create a universe around that. Lets create a community.

Of course I have all my own opinions on all of this but I want to hear what you guys have to say. Maybe my assumptions are wrong, I'm never going to know unless you all tell me. So leave any suggestions you have in the comments of this post and we'll start trying things to see what works.

This is why the rest of the country doesn't really know what to make of San Francisco. In fact, it's shit like this that makes me not understand San Francisco. WHY IS HE WATERING THE BUS?

I'm off to San Francisco for the weekend. Suck it LA. Suck it long, suck it hard.

During my undergrad, I worked in a small computer lab in the student government building. It was pretty much the perfect job because most shifts were long afternoons with nothing to do but surf the web and read. Occasionally, if it was particularly slow, I'd sleep.

There were only a few times a year when I actually had to do anything that resembled work. Every so often, student groups were able to apply for funding to hold whatever awkward beer soaked social they had planned.

The process for this used to be, if not simple, at least rational. You, as the president or officer of your group, downloaded the application -- a word document. You then filled it out (in word, they're required to be typed) and turned it into the office by 5pm at which time you also signed up for a hearing slot, so you could present your awkward beer soaked social to the board that gave out funding. When you showed up at your hearing, you were expected to bring seven copies of the application, one for each member of the board. Since these applications run between 15 and 60 pages it can get to be a lot of paper.

Then, in an effort to do ... something, save paper maybe, management decided that we were going to "take the process digital" -- a phrase I heard a lot -- the end result being that the applications would be posted to a website instead of printed out.

Now, if I was going to design this system, I'd keep it simple. It would be easy to set up a webpage where you could sign up for a hearing at the same time you uploaded your completed application. Then since computers are fancy, there's all sorts of thing you could do automagically. Turn it into a PDF. Post it to another page so board members could look at it, etc. Boom. You've gone digital.

What we ended up with is neither simple nor rational. You, as the president or officer of your group download the application. You fill it out then print it and bring it to the office before 5pm where you sign up for a hearing slot. Then someone takes that application, pulls all the staples out, Xeroxes any double sided pages to be single sided, and brings it to someone like me. I take that application and scan it into a PDF. Since using a regular scanner would have been asinine, we bought a $3000 digital sender. It's a scanner with a network card so the PDFs get copied to the webserver automatically. Since the digital scanner has a crappy touch screen, we use abbreviated names for the applications. The abbreviated names don't make sense to anyone but the person who scanned them in, so we create a spreadsheet that maps the abbreviated name to the real name. That spreadsheet is posted to the website, along with all the PDFs which still have cryptic names, by the webmaster.

The old way used to take one person half a day. Once all the applications were in, one person looked through them to make sure they had all the requisite signatures and information before putting them in the appropriate box.

The new way takes three people three days. It takes one person to ensure that all the applications are ready to be scanned, it takes another person to scan them in and it takes the webmaster to actually put them online with the spreadsheet. I've never seen technology used to so thoroughly de-automate a process.

So the next time you wonder why higher education is so expensive, this is it. No one has a clue what they're doing.

Ian pretty much sums up my feelings on punditry. So much of this blogging shit is a shell game. Comments on comments on comments, all under the cover that "the blogosphere is all about the conversation."

When it's actually about the conversation it's brilliant, revolutionary and when the history is written, Gutenberg won't have shit on the internet. But too often it's not really a conversation, it's 9000 people in a room shouting "me too!" just to be heard.

The best blogs are written by people who have gone out and done something. It's who they were before they sat down to write that makes their writing great. It's their perspective and experience that we all benefit from.

This isn't to say that everyone shouldn't have a blog. I'm probably too optimistic in who should write. And since it literally costs nothing to start a blog, there's no risk in trying. But writing isn't sitting down and hammering out what you think someone else would say. It's not parroting the opinions of other people, no matter how accomplished they happen to be. That's college. Save it for your professors.

This space should be more authentic. It's your life as original research, your life as performance art, your life as narrative non-fiction. This is the one place you can be truly be free. Where you can scream anonymously into the void just to see what resonates back.

Don't lose that freedom trying to pass off some polished image of yourself. Every other part of your life is going to be constrained by the expectations of others. Make this a place where you can be free of those expectations, even if it's only for twenty minutes a day.

When we switched our hosting to Amazon's EC2 service, we spent a good bit of time looking at other hosting providers that were out there. There was one company* that I was super impressed with because they have this "fanatical support guarantee" where, if your servers go down they'll kill themselves getting everything back up and online. They're fanatics. Whoever has to die to get your servers back online, they're willing to kill. They even offer goats in blood sacrifices to the gods of IPv6 to ensure that uptime is maintained. At least, that's how it was described to me.

I like that a lot. They're not competing on price, they're competing on customer care. They're willing to say "Yes, you might pay more with us but when there's a problem, no one will work harder to fix it." Any idiot with a cable modem can offer hosting. It's something else to take care of your customer.

So it's pretty disheartening when they send me sales pitches. Not that I mind them trying to get my business. What bothers me is that they're sending me form letters.

Dear Ben,

[We put our] customers first. It's what we do. Anytime, anywhere, and any way imaginable. In fact, our driving purpose is to take care of your business. And The Fanatical Support Promise guarantees that we will. No excuses. No exceptions. It's a support commitment that no other hosting company could ever live up to. Blah, blah, blah.

And the email goes on from there. Can you really claim that you're going to put my business first when the best you can do is send me a form letter that went out to 100 or 1000 other people? The whole point of the support commitment is to say "you are special, you're not going to get lost in the shuffle." Unfortunately, their sales pitch says "you're a lead to be generated."

This is one of those times when it would have been so easy to get right. They already know a ton about me. They've worked up quotes based on the hosting we need. I've spent time on the phone with their sales people going over what kind of traffic we do, what kinds of services we need and what kind of backups we run. I'm sure that's all saved in a database somewhere. It would have been really easy for them to take two minutes to look at my record and just write "This is where you were at six months ago. Has anything changed? How can we help?"

If your whole business model is based around superior service and customer care, the time to start taking care of your customers is before they're customers. Not after.

*I'm not going to name names. I want to focus on how to do good and not calling out companies on their mistakes.

I'm not normally squimish. I love Chuck Palahniuk's Guts and I can read through Butchering the Human Carcass for Human Consumption no problem. I've spent days reading through the Alt.Suicide.Holiday FAQ because the methods section is fascinating. I'm not suicidal, I just have a dark sense of humor.

But this New Yorker article broke me. I couldn't finish it. Couldn't even get through the second section. Even writing this out, I'm on the edge of my seat because I HAVE TO KNOW WHAT HAPPENED TO THE WOMAN but just opening the article makes me shake and if I think about it too long, I start trying to dry my hands on my pants OCD style.

And now, if you'll excuse me, I've got to go lie down.

I found out the other day that a friend of mine is four months sober. That's not something you wake up one morning and realize. Like "hey, I haven't been to the bar in a hundred and twenty days, oops." Four months sober is something you keep track of, it's a key chain. It's something that you talk about in rooms full of people, about whom you only know first names, over cups of watery coffee.

Four months sober is a phrase that carries a lot of weight. Implication. It says that I'm now old enough to have friends who have to go to rehab. Friends who have to work steps and have sponsors on call. I'm not really ready to be old enough for all this.

Don't get me wrong, I've had friends who have had to go through court-mandated programs. We are a group that enjoys a good time after all. But a court mandated program is like getting grounded by your parents. Yeah, you did it. Yeah, you got caught and so yeah, you've got to do the time. But getting grounded, even if it's by the state, is just a temporary thing. Eventually you get your TV privileges back and we'll see you at happy hour again.

My own relationship with alcohol is, in facebook parlance, complicated. I know I drink more than I should, probably because alcohol is the only thing that really helps me with my insomnia, which I've suffered from for as long as I can remember. And alcoholism sits so squarely at the center of my dad's side of the family that we set a place at the table for it at family reunions. It's always been one of those things that I know has the potential to be a problem, has been a problem in the past, and yet as long as I'm managing now, I try not to look too closely at.

And knowing this, knowing that I might be living in a beautifully constructed glass house, it gets a little uncomfortable when your friends start tossing around rocks with names like substance abuse and problem drinker and need help. It doesn't matter that they're inadvertent rocks or that they're not really aimed at you, glass houses are rarely built to code.

It's easier to fight than it is to work. It's more satisfying to fight. It's more fun and there's more passion.

You can win a fight.

And we love fighters. We call them world champions, award them belts. We say fighters have heart.

What can you say about work? Not much. Most people only show up because there's a paycheck involved.

Sometimes working and fighting are the same, or at least they feel the same. When I first got into IT both my parents were convinced that I'd need a college degree to be successful. While I'm sure that they thought they were giving me helpful life advice, I was 19 and full of anger. My response was probably something like "Fuck you. You don't know shit. You can't fucking tell me how to live my life." I was a joy to raise.

Consequently, I didn't think about going to work every day as simply going to work. I saw it as a battle. My worldview against theirs.

It made me a handful for my bosses. To them, work was about finding the best solution to whatever we happened to be working on. To me it was about proving myself. No matter the problem, we had to use my solution. No matter how well my solution worked, I always had to be right. Even when I was clearly wrong, I'd argue my point until I ran out of breath. Luckily I worked for some very understanding people. Raise your hand if you've ever said "You're so fucking smart, you tell me" when your boss has asked you a question. I was a joy to work with.

It also probably kept me in IT much longer than I otherwise would have stayed. When you see life as a constant fight, you spent your time fighting. Even when I had made it to my ideal job in IT, I was still looking to prove myself. I was still looking for something to fight against. I was 25 and I had the job I'd dreamed of having for six years. I'd won and I was so focused on fighting everything around me that I couldn't recognize it.

And although I should have realized how unhappy I was, I couldn't see it. There's this proverb "After a victory, tighten your helmet." That was me. I was so intent on the next battle, the next fight, proving everyone wrong that I never stopped to ask myself if it even made sense to be fighting anymore.

Don't get caught up in it. At first it's exciting and powerful to see life as you against the world. But it's a shell game, you're just moving pieces around a board so you have something to stay mad at. Something to fight against. Ultimately it's a shitty way to live. It's not you against the world, the world doesn't care. Stop fighting and find something to enjoy.