Regarding “getting rid of people”, while I would also appreciate an entry regarding it, I think the simple answer is probably correct. It’s just a tough situation to have to tell your friend that you don’t want to be friends anymore.

I have a few friends that I don’t see much anymore. We just drifted apart. No burnt bridges. No anguish (well, except the periodic, “I never hear from you!” which prompst me to remind them that the phone works both ways). On the other hand, there is one person who I basically got tired of dealing with. She would be flaky and I basically decided not to try anymore. If she contacts me, that’s fine, but I’m not going to make the effort to contact her anymore. When she found out that I was upset with her, she actually got upset and we haven’t spoken since.

But I don’t think I can remember a time when I told someone, “That’s it. We can no longer be friends.” Nothing so blatant.

what I’m worried about though are the bigger changes in life. in particular, I remember Steve mentioning that in order to grow his business and life, it was necessary to get rid of certain
friends and people. but getting rid of people is not as easy as removing a link to some forum
I currently find myself in such a situation where I wonder about my future if I would still be in contact with certain people.
sometimes it is better to end relationships but it is also really really hard.

I would love to see a blog entry or article on this topic as I’m clueless about how to identify the right way out of such a situation.

Good luck with your new career. After all those thoughtfull long posts on the old indie developer forums I’m suprised I didn’t guess where your life was leading.

Having a full-time job is rarely the best way to raise capital for a business, and going to school is rarely the best way to learn. Both methods are usually slow and tedious and don’t really fit well with the fast-tempo entrepreneurial mindset required for launching and running a successful business. My guess is that you might be feeling as if you’re bogged down in quicksand, where progress is slower than you’d like. While you’re trying to adopt the entrepreneurial mindset of launching your business, you’re simultaneously reinforcing the opposite mindset (slow learning, slow accumulation of capital, i.e. the “employee” or “student” mindset). I can’t see how that approach will work; it seems to me that it will just perpetuate “stuckness” month after month.

If you’re absolutely certain you need capital to start your new business, then you might consider other options for getting it more quickly. And if learning new skills to run a business is required, skip the schooling and employ faster methods like finding other business owners and learning from them directly — that will shave years off your learning. Think like an entrepreneur now, and approach the problems of raising capital and obtaining new knowledge like an entrepreneur would. Get it done quickly and efficiently.

If you spend most of your time hanging out with other successful entrepreneurs, you’ll quickly realize how different their thinking is from that of students and employees. The employee/student mindset is very, very slow tempo. It’s stable and steady, but it takes forever to get anything done. Students are taught to do in weeks what an entrepreneur would solve with a phone call. This is one reason a lot of entrepreneurs-to-be drop out of school; they just don’t fit with the slow-paced student mindset.

If you really want to start your own business, my advice would be to shift things around such that the six people with whom you spend the most time are all full-time business owners. Through osmosis their mindset will infect you, and you’ll come to realize that you just can’t wait for your job to slowly accumulate the cash you need or for school to teach you what you need to know. You’ve got to be a lot hungrier than that and acquire the cash and knowledge far more quickly. Otherwise, month after month will slip by, and you’ll still be in largely the same situation.

I could quit the job, but I need the capital for my business, so the job has to stay. The schooling is something I want to finish so I can’t just get rid of it. And I don’t want to be the one to say to my girlfriend, “Sorry, I don’t have time to see you this week. I want to make a video game.” B-)

So quitting my job or cutting back on hours isn’t really an option currently, but what this article did suggest to me was that I need to do a better job planning out my time. How much time am I spending during a day at work? At school? With friends? Where am I able to schedule time to work on my business? If I can’t schedule enough time, then something needs to give.