Private Thoughts Made Public

My last post was a rambling, probably incoherent, summary of my life at the moment. And that sums up my life, rambling and incoherent. I set myself goals, start to work towards them, and then, for some unknown reason, just stop.
Here are just a few examples:
Health and fitness
In 2003 I joined a local walking club. I went out with them a few times, got chatting to a few people, enjoyed myself. Then one week I didn’t go. Then the next week it rained and the walk was cancelled. I’ve never been back since.
In 2005 I joined the local gym. I went three or four times a week for the first two months. Then I stopped. I started again in Feb/March but stopped again. Earlier this year they phoned me and asked if I wanted to restart my membership. I gave it a go, went three or four times a week, then stopped again. I haven’t been since Easter.
I bought a bicycle about three years ago. The first summer I had it I rode it quite a bit. Last year, not so much. I’ve been out on it once so far this year.
Business
I had an idea of setting up an e-commerce web site. Although you can have a steady income working for someone else, you’re never going to have financial independence. That only comes with running your own successful business. Now, I come from a technical background, and not a business one. I probably couldn’t sell shit to gardeners. So when I had this idea, I tweaked my technical skills and started building a web site that I could use to sell widgets. I’m not going to say here what the product actually is, in case I do ever manage to resurrect it and get it off the ground, but widgets will do for now. The particular type of widget I want to sell isn’t something that would fit into a standard e-commerce/shopping cart application, so I can’t use one of the off-the-shelf packages. I had to write my own.
I got it to the stage where the customers could browse the products, choose what they wanted, tweak the product to their own requirements and place an order. They could track the status of their order. They could leave feedback, read the latest news. I could print out the orders, and update the order status. It printed reports showing me what I needed to order from my suppliers. I offered discount schemes for loyal customers. It’s pretty much there, but it needs graphic design and layout, and integrating with a payment mechanism.
Now, if you’re planning on running an online business, you’re going to want more than just paypal for getting money from your customers, you want to be able to use credit and debit cards too. And that means setting up a proper company, and getting a merchant bank account. And that means persuading a bank that you’re going to make money. You have to have a business plan, projected earnings, all that sort of stuff. I don’t have that, and I don’t know how to start going about getting them. The product I want to sell is something that is used by millions of people every day, so there’s definately a market for it. I just don’t know if I can grab any of that market for myself.
Relationships
H’mmmm… this is a tricky one. I’m not sure if I’m ready to talk about this in such a public place just yet, suffice to say that I have my own ideas about how I want future relationships to work, and so far they haven’t worked out that way. And the reason they haven’t worked out is that I’m not sure I have a srong enough personality to make them work the way I want them to work. That probably doesn’t make the least bit of sense, but don’t worry about it. I’ll expand on this when I feel the time is right.