Warning: Adult situations and topics ahead.

Have you ever heard these?

   Seize the day.

   Live each day as if it were your last.

   Live life to the fullest.

People like to say these things. But when it comes to doing, they tend to bring up other quotes like: “Oh, I can’t do that, need at least 8 hours of sleep or I can’t function.” or “I just can’t get that done, I have other plans.”

Every now and then I try to picture their conflict of desires and efforts and it looks a little like this:

“So you mean to tell me that if you knew you had 1 day to live you’d first make sure you had a really good night of sleep instead of doing something that would make the life worth living?“

Hi, my name is Vlad, I run marathons.

I am for all practical purposes an obese guy. 6’1”, 205 lb.

Yet every year I tell people that I run marathons and half marathons for fun. This year I did the “Goofy Marathon” at Walt Disney World which is a Half marathon on Saturday followed by a full marathon on Sunday. Over 40 miles including all the walking from the parking lot.

I’ve done marathons and half marathons all over Florida for years now because it’s the time I get to disconnect from my life and business and gain some perspective about how easy it is to give up and just how much nicer it would be to do nothing at all.

Yet, when I talk to people that are in far better shape than I am, I constantly hear one thing: “Oh, I could never do that. I just can’t do long distances. I just can’t do running. Or jogging. Or walking really. I can’t do cardio.”

The words “I did a marathon” don’t imply that I ran 26.2 miles and that it was down to me and a Nigerian who just happened to be a better sprinter in the last quarter mile. I was behind him. Way, way, way behind him. I’m pretty sure that by the time I was half way though my marathon the said Nigerian was already getting his first drink on his flight back home. You get the picture, I jog. For hours.

The Secret To Failing

I am not arrogant enough to tell you that I know a secret to success.

I am however experienced enough to tell you that I know the secret to failing. I’ve failed at stuff more times than I can count and it all comes down to one thing:

I didn’t try hard enough.

Now don’t get me wrong. I had fantastic excuses. Really, really, really good ones.

However… As I’ve gotten older and slightly less foolish I’ve realized that I have a rather limited amount of time around here (life) to do my thing and earn the kind of lifestyle I want.

If you honestly look back at all your failures you can probably track down at least half of them to the lack of effort, care or time you put into seeing them done.

The Reality

The reality is that yes.. you can do a marathon. People that survived horrific diseases make up an unusually large number of marathon participants. Practically crippled and astonishingly old do as well. Anyone can run a marathon. And trust me, you can make it through the day without 8 hours of sleep.

So you’re gonna go register for that marathon today, right? Wake up at 6 AM tomorrow instead of 8 AM? Yeah?

Of course not. Cause what’s in that for you, right? And I don’t mean what’s in it for you like a year down the road or four years later – what’s in it for you right now, immediately?

There is a reason why most people don’t have college degrees. It’s not time, it’s not money, it’s not brains – it’s effort. It takes a heck of a lot of dedication to pursue something that’s four years away for which you’ll be in debt for a decade and benefits won’t be fully realized even longer than that.

Yet, people are able to see beyond that. People are able to walk / run / jog. People are able to go to college. People are able to have kids, sleep 4 hours a night and keep on making things better with each and every day.

Optimism vs. Pessimism vs. Reality

I’ve fired a lot of people who felt their barely-40-hours-a-week were enough for them to keep their job. I’ve passed on a lot of resumes that felt cover sheets were not necessary.

The reality, whether you’re a pessimist or optimist, is that you’ve got to treat everything like it’s your own and your own benefit it on the line. If you’re cynical about that, you’ve already lost.  And that’s what happens – people go into things with the best of intentions but get cynical, tired, exhausted… they give up, slack off and ultimately they are out of work.

The same happens to entrepreneurs. We get excited about projects and potential revenues, we start building a business plan, we fund it, we build it, we market it, we start to really see the results but it’s just not enough right now. We want more. Faster. Different. We lose interest, we let someone else deal with the difficult stuff. We ignore the leadership we need in our business.

So… what now?

Nobody is going to go run a marathon as a result of all this, nor are you going to go get a college diploma or put in any more hours at your job.

The point of this blog post is to understand how things fail.

Do you want more than what you’ve got? Do you want a better life? Well, then you’ve gotta do more than you’re doing now and do it consistently and persistently.

If you need the qualifiers like how much time, for how long and how hard – then don’t bother. Desire for success is an internal quality and work ethic is something you build every day. You’ve either got it or you don’t.

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So this is a brief introduction to my answer I promised in this post. The first question in trying to determine if you need to continue or quit is in being honest with yourself about your current predicament. Did you get yourself in this position and do you believe that by working harder or longer you actually have a shot. If the answer is yes you’re on the right path.

So I sat on this topic for a few days now and ran it past several of my peers in the business that all got their shops started with their own money and blew them up into successful multimillion dollar companies all on their own without help.

The last post (“Success”) generated the most commentary… ever… for any post ever published on Vladville.

Almost all of the emails were quite gut wrenching, some even desperate, pleas for help. Lot’s of people that are in the SMB IT are struggling and wondering if this is just the time to close up shop, sell or carry on. Ouch.

I have not yet responded to the emails because almost all of them were quite personal and as much as I love this Vladville persona, there is a real Vlad behind it and I just don’t know how to help you address the same problems that I’ve had to figure out in the past. As soon as I come up with something coherent to say, I will post it here.

In the meantime, try to be honest and realistic – not every great idea pans out, not everything can be fixed with money or effort alone. Everyone has problems. You have to focus on just being a little bit better with each passing day, establish a support system and find partners because no matter what you’re doing, it’s better when others go along with it with you.

Keep your head up.

Earlier today I was sitting at lunch with the guys from work talking about the new line of business we’ll be launching this year and the discussion turned to certifications:

Vlad: I remember a long time ago when I was taking my first Microsoft MCSE exams and dealing with questions like: “You have an active directory with sites named AMSTERDAM, LONDON, BOSTON and SEATTLE…” and I thought to myself – I will never have to deal with a global scenario!!!!”

Everyone laughed. Then everyone groaned – because that’s what we have on our hands – a growing global company.

It wasn’t that long ago that Pablo and I sat in a garage making jokes about what it would be like to build a company and a network this large – while we watched gcc fail repeatedly on a Gateway 386 DX. Every now and then I look at my life and can’t even imagine what I did right to be this lucky. This morning I was planning a short day because I thought my flight departed earlier than it actually did. What did I do with my spare time? I went to buy a Porsche at lunch.

I am not telling you this to brag, I am telling you all this because I know many of you are dealing with a tough economy, tough job market, tough competition and the world is not a very happy place. But one thing I can tell you is that if you put up with adversity, welcome it and do all you can to address the challenges life gives you – you will succeed.

Nobody will give you anything – you’ve got to fight for what you want. You constantly have to bite off more than you can chew and constantly overdeliver. You gotta fight to improve your game every single day. And when you do, the rewards are more than what you even expected. That’s the difference between the average – where everyone is – and the good stuff.

I for one have been blessed with a lot of luck and even more Mountain Dew – and a wonderful wife that makes each day better than the previous and feeds my insanity.

Forget the negativity, don’t dwell on your woes, focus on what you want and go for it.

Something that has been on my mind as of late, and on the minds of OWN senior management, is the level of difficulty required to obtain our services. Here are the polar issues involved:

Our stuff is too difficult to setup!

Problem & Solution: Alrighty then, let’s simplify it and make it easier than Gmail to get into. Design the UI, run it past the retards and see if even they can get through it without impaling themselves on large words.

Effect: Support loads explode because lowering the bar brings in the people that are incapable of reading and solving kindergarten-difficulty puzzles.

We need this advanced feature, now!

Problem & Solution: We expose a more sophisticated control set and a complicated feature.

Effect: Clients complain that it takes too much effort to get something together and that it’s too complex.

The Reality

I spend half my day trying to simplify the things that we do so that we don’t get the same type of negative feedback, but the vendors we work with create impossible hoops and requirements for us to achieve so I get to feel the kind of sentiment my clients get.

But here is the bottom line…

The bar is there for a reason. It’s there to keep people who are not ready for the complex solutions from being able to hurt themselves with it. If you’re complaining, the bar is not the problem: Your inability to get above it is. We all may bitch and moan about the limitations that are put in place on the iPhone, but wast majority of people will not jailbreak their handset to enable advanced functionality.

At the end of the day you have to know your place. And if you’re not happy with it, it’s up to you to step up. Nobody will lower the bar for you.

Snowed in and got nothing to do?

Join me for a demo of ExchangeDefender – I’ll walk you through the configuration, deployment, best practices and weseal-like tactics that will make you more profitable as an ExchangeDefender partner. It starts in about an hour and requires free registration:

http://bit.ly/a4SkTN

Hope to see you there. We’ll have professionally recorded demo this weekend (February 15th) but this is your opportunity to see it live and unfiltered and ask questions.

Starts live at 2 PM EST, 2/11/2010.

This is only going to be funny / amusing if you’re a nerd. You’ve been warned.

We recently built in a web filtering solution as a part of ExchangeDefender. It’s agent based, free and has over 80 categories that you can selectively drop connectivity to as a matter of corporate policy. Well, Hank was playing with it today and blocked all the “Ad” sites which would redirect all the requests to ad content to our nasty-grammed web site. Take a look at what that did to the Instant Messenger window.

Instant branding baby

P.S. If you’re wondering what’s new here, we’re hard at work at adding OTP / two factor authentication to ExchangeDefender and Shockey Monkey. If you’d like to test it, open a support request and ask to be put in the dev queue for OTP. You have to either have an RSA SecurID token, an AuthAnvil token or for our free OTP/2FA an iPhone/iPod Touch 3 with access to iTunes.

Back from my first big (3 days) conference trip of the year, I’m full of ideas and suggestions that I can’t wait to share with the team and see how we can implement them quickly. Here are a couple of the thoughts that are on my mind:

My buddy Howard Cunningham (www.macrollc.com) is having back surgery this week. Howard is perhaps the most valuable employee of Own Web Now and ConnectWise while not receiving a $1 paycheck from either company All around a really great guy and a tremendous resource for the SMB community. If you’ve had a pleasure of working or talking with Howard I hope you pull for him this week.

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On an entirely different note, when you live in a public eye and share your life with people, you have to have a sense of humor. When you don’t – and you confront people with it – that tends to backfire and spread like fire through people who both like and dislike you. End result: instead of laughing at a joke, you become a joke. It’s really sad to see but it is a reminder that for all it’s benefits this “social networking” stuff isn’t just a great tool but the real people behind it have real feelings and if you can’t handle that, blogging / twittering / facebooking / etc probably is not for you.

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The missing piece is the track record. Everyone has a great idea now and then. It’s not that difficult to raise a hand, buy some PR and say you’re the next big thing. For each brilliant innovation there are dozens of existing things that are already successful at it. The difference between everything that looks pretty much the same is the track record: because everyone has ideas, few people can actually show results.

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Don’t ask me to talk about disposable email addresses. Seriously, even gmail.com supports an on-demand email address: vmazek+whateveryouwant@gmail.com – you can even find out who shared it with someone else using the search and see how many times it was reported. And I understand that some of you think this is the coolest thing since sliced bread and love that we too support it, I am not going to make it a part of my presentation. Sorry. I can’t stand in front of people for half an hour and talk to them about SOX, SEC, HIPAA, explaining the policy management, policy violation notifications, traffic shaping, routing and business continuity, blah blah blah… oh, and by the way, just append a dot at an email address to bypass all that shit. Maybe if I didn’t have encryption, web filtering, web sharing, LiveArchive, compliance archiving or routing policies to speak of I would mention it but in the meantime, if you need your viagra orders to get by the spam filters just do everyone a bit of common sense and don’t use your business account for it

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// By the way, the rant above sounds much better when I’m yelling it out loud at Brian

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Redeye flights suck