When I wrote the grant application, the plan was to work on Celeb.ly, a service that would provide fans the opportunity to participate in live video chats with their favorite celebrities. After receiving the grant, however, this service began to look less and less appealing to me, mainly because I have very little personal interest in chatting with celebrities. Even though it could be a successful company after many hours of hard work, I lack the passion necessary to put in the necessary labor and devotion.

On Monday, I met with professor Yechiam Yemini (a.k.a YY), a successful entrepreneur at Columbia who has agreed to mentor me this summer as I found the startup. We discussed, among other things, fruitful methods of generating startup ideas. In response to my question of whether I should seek unmet needs in businesses, he advised that I should instead look for potential new uses of recent technology research.

Since that meeting on Monday, despite numerous opportunities to look for commercializable academic technology research, I have hardly done any such searching. Why? In short, it is too broad of a task. The breadth of the task makes the task seem insurmountable, a procrastination-inducing prospect.

I have learned a few things about myself over the years, and one of them is that I can allow myself to become paralyzed if I wait for the “perfect” opportunity before starting a job, internship, or other personal endeavor.

We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil.

Donald Knuth

This quote is usually used in the context of constructing computer software, but it also applies in the context of my summer’s activities. Rather than sitting around researching technologies that could be commercialized, I have decided to go with an idea I have considered extensively earlier: buying and selling websites. Although this is less “startup-ey” than other options, I will have the opportunity to create a system that removes me from the most labor-intensive parts of the process, thereby generating value by orchestrating the efforts of others.

I’ll post again with more details on buying and selling websites. Please share your comments below.

He was right.

After thinking about it, I realized that when I compare myself with others, I look for ways in which they are failing, or in which I am doing better than they are.  Realizing this deeply concerned me, because I want to be a positive, inspiring individual, who genuinely helps them as they strive to reach the goals of their lives.  Secretly taking pleasure in the failures of others is not uplifting.  It is antithetical to finding joy in their successes.

What is the underlying motivation that causes me to make these comparisons?  I think the strongest reason is that it soothes the pain and guilt I feel when I am not living up to my own potential.  Rather than actually addressing my own shortcomings and working to overcome them, I have fallen into the bad habit of rationalizing my actions as being good enough, because they are better than those of certain other individuals.  This extends into many spheres of my life: spirituality, exercise, school, career preparation, work experience, and more.

I have made some resolutions that I hope will help me overcome this weakness as I go forward:

I promised Justin and Andrew that any time either of them catches me comparing myself to someone else, he can bring it my attention and I will give him a dollar.  Hopefully that will help me gain a better sense of the magnitude of the problem, encouraging me to work more actively to suppress comments of comparison.

More importantly, I hope that this will help me become more conscious of the thought process that occurs when I compare myself to others.  Being aware at any given moment that I am following a negative thought process will give me the opportunity to replace it with a positive thought process.  As I replace negative, harmful thoughts with positive, uplifting thoughts of love and compassion, my words and actions will reflect my more enlightened inner state.  I will become a happier, more considerate, more enjoyable person, who is more likely to follow the admonition of Paul to the Ephesians, as recorded in Ephesians 4:29:

Let no corrupt communication proceed out of your mouth, but that which is good to the use of edifying, that it may minister grace unto the hearers.