Adam Chavez

So, I think that a common mistake that entrepreneurs make is they only think, “What’s in it for me? How can I make a quick buck? What will people pay me for today?” There is the rare person that asks these questions but also has the intuition to understand that you must ask these questions in conjunction with, “What do people really need? What do I love doing and am passionate about? What will benefit the people around me?”

The best entrepreneur is this latter, unselfish kind, (but who also understands the importance of a real business model, as “Art of the Start” author Guy Kawasaki put it once, “How do I get the user’s money in my pocket?”).

Sometimes, though, it’s not even entrepreneurship. It’s the other kind of creation. The kind where you do it just because you love creating something, and you would do it for free all day long if you could. “Maybe you can’t make money doing what you love” is a thought-provoking Seth Godin piece that explores this a bit. I recommend taking a look at it.

My friend Rich has been building something just because he’s passionate about it, everyday now, for the last 8 months or so. He built a site called MintyWhite.com, all about Windows Tools. He didn’t start it because he wanted to make money — and actually, not even because he thought it would turn into anything big. He did it, in his own words, because he “thought it would be fun.”

And it has been. If you ask him about it, he lights up. He loves talking about it, about how it’s grown to almost 2,000 feedburner subscribers, about how many people have personally thanked him for the cool tools he’s shown them, for the satisfaction in building something worthwhile. And, as the title said, somebody offered him $50k to buy it outright. So, needless to say, he’s hit a nerve, and he just recently hit a big growth curve in terms of traffic.

Now, this kind of “creating” doesn’t work if you’re a VC- or angel-backed Silicon Valley company, and it doesn’t work if your creation is your living. But I do think that it’s important to always keep in mind, “Am I doing something that I really love? Am I passionate about it? Am I creating something valuable for others?”

That’s my two cents. What do you all think?