As a person who hopes to rule the world, I am always reading as much as I can about startups. The book Founders at Work is one of the most inspirational books that I have come across and here is another piece of wisdom from one of the Y Combinator alumni Mr. Paul Graham: http://www.paulgraham.com/13sentences.html.
These are some really good points and I think I'll try to follow them a bit more rigidly moving forward. I can really relate to the bit about distractions. I was looking over some code that I had written for a survey application about 6 years ago that could have been a seriously viable product by now. I started building a CMS product 4 years ago that has features that are only now becoming available in CMS packages like visual content layout and the ability to drop different content types on a page. Neither of these are production ready. There are several reasons for this but the one that is by far the biggest reason for them not being completed has to be distraction.
The influence of money on small businesses is tremendous. A lot of the time start ups don't have a constant revenue stream and it is difficult to live (especially for those of us with families) without taking jobs that pay the bills while your next killer app is in development. I am beginning to realise this and moving to focus more on the things that will enable my ideas to see the light of day. I am not saying that my ideas will be hugely successful, I just need to be able to deploy them to find out!
