I got an interesting question from one of my friends / readers that applies to both athletes and entrepreneurs. Can you share with me what kind of mental “training” you undertake before, during and after competing in a marathon? I understand that training for a marathon involves a lot of physical training. But how do you mentally prepare to run 26.2 miles? And how do you maintain your mental “stamina”during such a long run? Finally, how do you mentally “cool down” after competing?

I got several emails from folks at Microsoft in response to my post titled *#)$()@#$% Internet Explorer offering to help me with the problem I was having and suggesting solutions. Several of these came on July 4th – within hours of when I wrote my post. While I wish I hadn’t had the problem in the first place (and – as my first partner Dave Jilk suggested (and I summarize) – “hey Brad, it’s beta software – don’t bitch”), I was impressed by how quickly several folks at Microsoft responded, especially on their (and everyone else in America’s) day off.

At dinner I was pondering the answer I gave on the post How An Entrepreneur Can Protect Himself Post-Funding. Something was bothering me about it and I thought to myself “do I practice what I preach?” (Amy suggested that I should be bothered by my title of the post, which should have been “… Can Protect Himself or Herself …”) My first reaction was that I had never had an employment agreement with any company that I’ve worked for. As I thought about it a little harder, I realized that I’ve had a few employment agreements, but they never gave me much protection – in each case they protected the company I was working for more than they protected me. In addition, these agreements were either tied to a non-compete associated with an acquisition or as part of my role in a public company.

On this spectacular fourth of July (at least in Homer – it’s 60 degrees and not a cloud in the sky), I was enjoying disk 2 of Atlas Shrugged (I’m about 300 pages in) on my run today. I’m deep into the section where all the competent people are quitting and walking off the playing field and the looters are ratcheting up the rules, which have the unintended consequence of destroying the world as they know it. Hank is still fighting it out trying to hold everything together in an increasingly bleak world and Dagny is on her quest to find the inventor of the motor as she naively thinks that will solve everything. The contrasts of the section I’m listening to lingered in my mind long after my run, especially as I pondered the state of affairs (good and bad) in our country 230 years after our birth.

My post on talking more about failure resulted in a surprisingly large amount of email and positive feedback. In addition to plenty of private emails and a few comments, Andrew Fine emailed that he was inspired to write about the recent failure of his company Cryptine Networks. He’s just put up a post titled Key Lessons From Cryptine Network’s Failure. While I don’t personally know anything about what happened, Andrew writes a balanced and thoughtful summary of what he thinks went wrong. Praise to Andrew for being brave enough to write publicly about this in a way that is instructive.

I know I’m in a bitching about my computer mood. I’m particularly grumpy because I’m on day two of the update / reboot cycle, which is just stupid. Among other things, my Microsoft Outlook config in Homer isn’t connecting to our Exchange server because we modified our email configuration about six months ago. Ross is on vacation until tomorrow so I don’t want to bother him, so I figured I’d just use OWA, which works fine. However, I noticed that I was running the IE 7.0 Beta 1 (which I must have installed 10 months ago – we are just now on beta 3) so I decided to try to upgrade to IE 7.0 Beta 3 since there are lots of noticeable bugs (and a weak feature set for IE 7.0 Beta 1.)

I’ve been in Homer for 24 hours and my desktop computer – which I turned on for the first time in 10 months yesterday – is still downloading software, updating itself, and rebooting. I caught a note by Alex King about the same issue (he’s only been away from his PC for two weeks.) I’ve got four desktops (Eldorado Springs, Homer, Office, and Treadputer) that have “identical configurations.” It’s remarkable how much “updating” is going on to this one, and I’ll still only have current versions of the software on it – my configuration is far from the same as my other three machines (which are pretty close, but each have their own special software quirks.) 

Irving Wladawsky-Berger – IBM’s VP of Technical Strategy and Innovation (and one of the few “must-read” IBM employee blogs that I’m aware of) has a good post up summarizing Eric von Hippel’s work on Democratizing Innovation. Eric was my doctoral advisor at MIT (I didn’t finish) and has built 30 years of really important academic research (and a worldwide research community) on the idea he stated around 1978 that “innovation comes from users, not manufacturers.” Today we might say something like “yeah – uh huh”, but in 1978 this was a radical thought.

My long time friend (since 1984 – wow) and extremely experienced entrepreneur / CEO Will Herman has another great post up today – this time it’s about firing someone. Will’s advice – When Firing Someone, Focus on Those Who Remain – is important and well articulated.