When I left college, I started my career as a software engineer. I was good at software and quickly won the respect of my peers and management. Within a few years, I was informally running the entire department from a technical perspective and my managers made a fateful mistake: they made me a manager. I lasted less than […]
Category Archives: Thoughts
Four years ago, I wrote a post here on this blog that I still think about from time to time. It is a post about debt in business and is my personal story about business debt. Read it here: https://greghowlett.com/blog/thoughts/083012.aspx Since I wrote that post, the company (Vitabase) that I was talking about sold. It was a […]
First of all, congratulations to James Burton for winning the free copy of The Emyth Revisited that I mentioned in my last business post. James, send me your address to [email protected]. One other bit of housekeeping: I was glad to see that the new season of Shark Tank has started. If you want an entertaining […]
A few weeks ago, I discussed my children’s business in the basement and I was surprised at how many of you responded positively, asking for more business posts. Others asked for advice on different business matters. So, I think I will do a series on business over the coming months (along with my series on […]
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Three years ago, I sold Vitabase, a nutritional supplement company we had built from the ground up. When I sold, I assumed I was out of the health business for good. However, there were a few websites not associated with that sale that we held on to and we moved that business into the basement and gave it to the kids […]
Note: This blog post is sort of a follow up to one I wrote a few weeks ago and is geared to those interested in the professional side of music, especially publishing. Yesterday, I emailed a book of arrangements to my editor at Lorenz. The book will be published next year and is a Christmas […]
I am not one who pines for the “good old days” because I know that the good old days were not really so good. However, there are strengths and weaknesses to every generation and I want to talk about one of our era’s weaknesses: why do we seem to have a dearth of real men today when compared to the […]
Before I get on topic, let me give a brief update on what is going on here and why I am not writing as much these days. Truthfully, I am just incredibly busy right now. I have not announced this previously but I am recording a new album next month. It is a piano-only project again, and […]
I talk to people occasionally that liken their life to that of a hamster on a spinning wheel. I think homemakers in particular struggle with this because of the nature of much of their work: washing clothes, cleaning, and cooking are all jobs that seem endless and sometimes lacking in significance. The politically correct thing for me […]
I have always been interested in the topic of beauty. From a musician’s standpoint, beauty is obviously an important issue but it is not just about music. Beauty is all around us in many forms beside the arts. The term that is often associated with the study of beauty is aesthetics and there is (predictably) a lot […]
In 1999, I invested $500 into my first business. Today, that seems like no big deal but at the time, I was very scared even though I was making a very good living in software and did not need the money. My hangup came from life conditioning that I had received in which I had been […]