20120412

Doing everything (TLDR: you don't have to)

I am the kind of person, who wants to know everything, and I dispute that "wanting to know it all" and being a "know it all" are the same thing.

This is not a negative trait; it is good to be curious about the world, but especially about things that fascinate you and things that in your area of knowledgeable remit (e.g. your job, your hobbies, lolcatz).

Problem is that it is impossible to know everything. Even if you know it, you get to a point where it is impossible where you can do everything.

I think this is a lesson that all entrepreneurs learn:
  • You can set up your servers on AWS yourself. 
  • You can  write the RDBMS.
  • You can  write every line of code. 
  • You can  design a logo. 
  • You can  set up Maven for all your projects. 
  • You can  set up your own issues database. 
  • You can  do anything... (if theoretically required).
You can spend all of your time doing all of the things, of course you can, you are interested and intelligent. You may have done similar things before and you think it is probably within your best interest (and cheaper :-\ ?) to do it all yourself.

Let us assume for a minute that you don't have the unlimited time or capacity as a human to run for 25/8 and you come to the realisation that just because you can doesn't mean you should.

It is at this point you start to look at  employing other people, or at least employing different techniques for deployment and this is what the smart entrepreneurs do.

With a slight alteration, I think this xkcd strip explains it much better than me:
Replace "Smart Engineer" for "Smart Entrepreneur" and in the last cel "build" to "get"
Image Credit: http://xkcd.com/670/

Yes, I am stating the obvious.

But by doing so is to illustrate that "knowing something and understanding something are very different realisations".