Lone Gunman

I’m away on vaca­tion, and last week Alex J. Mann took over Lone Gun­man for the week and pro­duced five thought­ful posts:

• To Invest is to Aim
• See­ing with Tongues
• In Defense of Sam­pling: Why Steal­ing is Inspiring
• New Lit­er­acy Strategies
• Your Job as an Artist

This com­ing week, your host is Dan Zambonini—a true Renais­sance man.

Dan is the co-founder of the excel­lent Box UK (“cre­ators of amaz­ing web apps” and much more besides) and not only has his own tag here at Lone Gun­man but also may be the source of more posts than any other person.

Dan is a great per­son to fol­low on Twit­ter, and you can do that here. If you’re inter­ested in things web you should sub­scribe to Dan’s com­pany blog here, and if you love design, you should fol­low his per­sonal Tumblr-style blog here (where you can find fur­ther links to his many projects in the sidebar).

On top of all this, Dan also helps to organ­ise some fine events around the UK. I spoke at one not too long ago (Ignite Cardiff) and now the first Ignite Lon­don is cur­rently lin­ing up speakers—one to watch.

Thanks to Alex and thanks to Dan.

Right now I’m in Japan. I’ll be stay­ing here for another cou­ple of weeks before head­ing to south­east Aus­tralia for another few weeks. While I’m away your occa­sional Lone Gun­man fix will come from a selec­tion of fine guest writers.

For the com­ing week your host is Alex J. Mann.

Alex has his own tag here on Lone Gun­man thanks to the fol­low­ing posts:

• The Exe­cut­ing Your Idea series of posts–selected as one of my picks of Lone Gunman’s first year.
• Grad­u­at­ing into the reces­sion and what next?–an inter­view with Phi­laLawyer (LG).

As you can tell from perus­ing the above posts, Alex is a recent grad­u­ate, an entre­pre­neur, and a damn nice guy with brains to boot.

You can read more from Alex on his blog where he reflects on entre­pre­neur­ship, cul­ture and technology. As expected, Alex is also on Twit­ter and you can fol­low him here.

That’s not all, of course: Alex’s fan­tas­tic Deli­cious book­marks can be seen and fol­lowed here, and you can find out more about Alex’s fan­tas­tic startup, AM Ana­lyt­ics, by head­ing here.

Join me in wel­com­ing Alex–my first ever guest author–by leav­ing com­ments on his posts.

Thanks to Alex and to you.

For recent grad­u­ates, those in their early 20’s and, well, almost every­one else, the job mar­ket at the moment is over­whelm­ing bad. There’s hope, of course, and this inter­view between recent grad­u­ate and entre­pre­neur Alex J. Mann and Phila Lawyer dis­cussing what it’s like grad­u­at­ing into one of the nas­ti­est job mar­kets in his­tory is a good place to start in try­ing to under­stand what it’s like and where to go.

If there is one upside to the eco­nomic down­turn, it’s that sud­denly we’ve been put in the posi­tion to cre­atively fend for our­selves. For instance, when all of the tra­di­tional career options that a busi­ness major typ­i­cally approaches have gone thin, the des­per­a­tion is fol­lowed by a wave of exper­i­men­ta­tion. […] In my opin­ion, this is how it should be. Col­lege, or any form of edu­ca­tion, shouldn’t cre­ate a path or des­tiny. It should cre­ate options to choose our own.

The few ambi­tious ones are going into entre­pre­neur­ial ven­tures. But, the major­ity of stu­dents are too scared to take that respon­si­bil­ity, because soci­ety tells us oth­er­wise. A pos­i­tive sign is there are plenty of stu­dents attempt­ing to use the Inter­net to either mar­ket them­selves, or to attempt to mon­e­tize their ideas. There are mini-movements of stu­dents real­iz­ing that they can lever­age the Inter­net to do both what makes them happy and cre­ates cash flow (yes, both!). It is uncom­mon though.

[…] There’s a strong sense of entre­pre­neur­ship with peo­ple my age now, even if they aren’t all act­ing on it. There’s an itch to go do some­thing on your own.

The inter­view touches on many topics—education, entre­pre­neur­ship, gen­er­a­tional differences/expectations, the economy—and it’s also worth pop­ping over to Alex’s site to read a cou­ple of his after-thoughts.

Ser­ial entre­pre­neur Alex Mann implores us to take action, in this series of posts on exe­cut­ing your busi­ness idea:

1. Be An Executioner
2. Who’s Your Market
3. Build­ing Your Team
4. Gain­ing Momentum
5. Develop Your Moat

As Alex reit­er­ates in Gain­ing Momen­tum, this advice that orig­i­nally appeared in the com­ments sec­tion of the intro­duc­tion (writ­ten by friend and mil­lion­aire entre­pre­neur Derek Sivers) is impor­tant, if not imperative:

MAKE it, even if you don’t have the mas­sive programming-skill avail­able, then make a super lo-fi or no-fi ver­sion and just get started with a cou­ple friends and volunteers.

It’s SO much more impres­sive to hear some­one say, “There’s this thing that I’ve started doing that a lot of peo­ple seem to like.”