Since graduating university, where I studied to be a biomedical engineer, I have experienced a potentially life-threatening skull injury, traded my original career path for a life dedicated to a different pursuit entirely, and experienced setbacks and failures one after another in order to learn how to succeed. (I’m sure that last bit sounds pretty familiar to anyone who has spent time programming!)
A question I occasionally ask myself when I look back on the last year and half while this has been taking place is, “why did I forgo such a promising and high-demanding path in the medical industry for this?”
The answer for me is very simple, but arises from many complex things. Specifically, I’m referring to the planetary information superhighway that we refer to as the Internet, which connects the massive body of collective human knowledge irrespective of country borders. In case you didn’t know, the Internet makes it possible for anyone to access practically any knowledge they seek, given enough dedication and practice searching and sifting. Therefore, it gives one the unique opportunity to reinvent oneself and make rapid life changes.
That’s my complicated way of saying my answer was that I found a way to follow my heart.
Of course, that’s where the journey starts, not where it ends. I believe it’s true of anyone to say that our actions are guided by our beliefs, or our deeper philosophies. One of my nearer and dearer beliefs about life is exemplified in a widely known aphorism: ‘If you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day, but if you teach him HOW TO fish, you feed him (and his family!) for a lifetime.”
The underlying nugget of proverbial gold here is the idea of human empowerment. It’s a fairly vague term, but to me, it means to give opportunity and responsibility to individuals. Give someone opportunity alone, and they can take advantage, but that advantage can be short-lived. Give a person responsibility alone, and they may be burdened, unsure in what ways to leverage it for their (or the greater) good.
However, if we give an individual person responsibility AND opportunity, they now can play a part in anything they wish to set their sights on. This powerful concept, coupled with my intense inner drive to inspire others and create lasting positive change in a world (which in some ways is growing more agitated and chaotic), has created the energy that I channel into the business my good friend Will and I are starting, Communi.
Communi is the name of our Community Leadership Development platform specifically designed to spread networks of mentorship and leadership, as well as popularize the virtues of personal development by leveraging the relationship structure of interest groups, clubs, teams, and organizations. Its purpose is to empower people to increase their personal and team success in the areas about which they feel most passionate. People will work hard for money, but inner passion will carry people to the ends of the Earth. Instead of trying to follow the strange trend of trying to incentivize people to resist their inner drive, we intend to help them cultivate it by providing a digital space to coordinate with those before them who have succeeded. By facilitating mentor/apprentice relationships and integrating robust and flexible goal-setting processes, complete with customizable rewards, people will harness the power of the Internet in a relevant and directed way that contributes to their success directly, and through them, teams, organizations, and entire communities will thrive.
As fantastic as I know the idea sounds, it would have never gotten past being scribbled designs on pieces of paper without the right tools. Enter, LiveCode. Both Will and I were biomedical engineers by training… great with math, numbers, and scientific principles, but without much computer savvy. LiveCode could not possibly have been more perfect. It made so much sense to us because it…
– Is easy to learn, even with no prior programming experience
– Enables extremely rapid prototyping to help us validate our concept
– Drastically reduces interface complications arising from the multiplicity of device screen specs
– Offers a fast and easy testing process, even when developing for all platforms
– Has fantastic community support via LiveCode’s forums with powerful externals available from fellow LiveCode developers
Though we know now, Will and I did not realize at the outset that we were taking on such enormous responsibility by doing the development ourselves: every single detail has to be perfect, and every possible problem has to be explicitly made impossible or it WILL happen (glass shatters in the distance). However, LiveCode’s approachable language smoothed our learning curve drastically, giving us the opportunity to make progress on our own just by improving our skills. This saved us tens of thousands of dollars in outsourcing the work, and preserved the integrity of our vision. We became empowered to make our dream a reality, and have since been crunching away at our application, blazing the trail for future innovators in Silicon Valley of California to quickly and powerfully actualize their entrepreneurial vision.
We are nearly finished building our prototype, and are looking to the community for contributions of resources such as platform-specific expertise, technology business insights and connections, and anything else one might think of to help us move forward as we assemble our team.
To summarize, LiveCode is the low-hanging fruit on the tree that somehow manages to whisk the one who grabs it up among the branches where the rest of the plump morsels grow. (I could have stuck with the fishing metaphor, but truth be told, I’m a vegetarian, so work with me, here!) It is accessible and easy to pick up, while still giving access to powerful capabilities at the cutting edge of human technological advancement. It is a living language that grows and adapts to its users’ needs, which at times means there are growing pains as brand-spanking new features reach maturity, but in the longer run means there is more flexibility available to its developers. We are particularly looking forward to the time when the community will have the ability to extend LiveCode using the LiveCode language itself upon the arrival of a waterproof LiveCode 8. We’re also excited about the ability to place LiveCode in browsers with the upcoming HTML 5 Web Delivery feature, to whose campaign we were glad to have been able to contribute.
The most exciting part of all this is that you can take part, too! If you are inspired to make a dream come to life in a digital experience, do as I have and get on LiveCode!
If you would like to see a tool made that is designed to help you and others succeed in creating an abundant life by pursuing your passion, support us as we create Communi.
Just as we hope to one day serve the international community by providing our incredible technology platform, so, too, do we need support from the LiveCode community in creating it.
If you or anyone you know would like to contribute or even join us on our mission, please connect with me, Phil England (LiveCode forum name Gage), or my business partner, Will Jamieson (LiveCode forum name William Jamieson), by private messaging us on the forums.
In parting, I hope you find an opportunity to take on responsibility worthy of your passionate efforts. For LiveCode, business, or anything in life to succeed, it is up to us, so hold tightly to that which empowers you.
Find out more about Phil, his company (App Inspired), and Communi here.
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