Dear readers,

Today is my birthday.

I’m 30.

I’ve had some trepidation. Misgivings. Confusion. Expectations! Mortality! It was all too much.

But, in the nick of time I have had some meaty realizations and hearty epiphanies. (Being at the beach for two days helped). So I’m feeling good about it now.

Realizing life is short is a good thing. It promotes focus.

A brand new decade! I feel some resolutions coming on.

In my thirties I will…

1. spend less time at home alone, and more time out with people I love doing things I love
2. judge my beauty and health by how I feel inside rather than how I look
3. let go of expectations of others and give myself what I need and want instead
4. consistently seek spiritual connection that keeps me grounded and my heart open
5. read more and kvetch less
6. give my body movement, play, stretching, and other things it wants
7. release the past and forgive
8. appreciate every day rather than constantly waiting and planning for better futures
9. be willing to spend money on things that make me happy, like staying in nice places at the beach or really comfortable chairs
10. hand the ultimate path of my life and its purpose over to whatever forces move such things, and focus instead on doing good, being kind, and having fun

Love,

Emma

I’m an advocate for small.

Maybe it was growing up with the Marxist idea that as the finished product of our labor gets abstracted from our day to day work, we lose meaning.

Maybe it’s because hierarchies and institutions seem like giant soul-crushing entities.

I like small business. And I hate it when a small business gets all competitive and stupid like a big business.

In a small business, a micro-business, the personality and uniqueness of the owner can come through. Business can be an expression of our truest and best qualities: our vision, our inspiration. When a company grows, its hard to hold onto that magical quality. It gets burnished out as all the edges get smooth.

Not that I don’t appreciate the smoothness. I love Amazon. Target. They’re great. I just also like the tiny people doing individual things that are cool.

I think of the people doing them as artists. Every day they wake up and decide to believe in their business and their work. They put it out there. They define their own value by showing up and stating it. It’s a claiming of power. It’s the courage to self-validate.

Sure, your customers give you feedback. But at the end of the day, nobody but you knows how much work you put into your business.

Like right now I’m working on tiny details in migrating a lot of Acorn Host data to a new system, much of which is for accounts and customers that are long gone, and probably a lot of it my customers will never see or care about it. I could do a sloppier job, and it would not affect my bottom line at all. Precision does not really pay in many cases.

But I care about it. And I like to care about it. And somehow all that caring and precision adds up to a service that is good and makes the world better. And that’s enough.

In micro-businesses, that kind of caring is embedded. Efficiency and profitability really isn’t the bottom line. It could be–but I don’t think most people are motivated by numbers alone. It’s when people get in hierarchies and the numbers start to be used to judge worth that numbers become meaningful. Without that, we do what we care about. I like that.