How To Inform About Death Sample Letter: Fill & Download for Free

Author's Note: This answer is well over 3000 words. I believe it's my longest Quora answer to date. There is no tl;dr that can summarize it, though I have included bullet points at the bottom. I hope you will be as patient reading it as I was writing it, Gentle Reader.After writing this answer, it occurs to me that maybe I should have an introduction. After all, it's vain to assume that everyone reading this will have heard of me.I've had an interest in computer security since my early teens, but I began actively intruding on computer systems in the late 90's and early 2000's. Systems I broke into included those of Yahoo!, where I rewrote news articles into satire, Microsoft, The New York Times, Google's Blogger, MCI WorldCom, SBC, LexisNexis, and others.I was prosecuted for hacking NYT, Microsoft, and LexisNexis. After a week avoiding FBI agents while I negotiated my terms of surrender, I pleaded guilty and served six months of house arrest and a period of probation, as well as being ordered to pay restitution.Since that time, I have studied journalism and written & spoken extensively on issues of computer security and national security. I also played a key role in USG's investigation of Wikileaks and Chelsea Manning (soldier) and other cases, and continue to consult on national security issues with infosec connections for various parties.Adrián Lamo's answer to How often do criminals hand themselves in?Adrián Lamo's answer to What is it like to be a hacker / member of a cybercrime organization?Adrián Lamo's answer to Does Adrián Lamo feel justified in informing on Chelsea Manning (née Bradley Manning) to the U.S. Army?Adrián Lamo's answer to How was Adrian Lamo identified as a hacker?More than anything, I learned by doing, and by not ignoring history. Before I could be said to ever have hax0red anything, I read a lot about the history of the hacker community - especially in its own words - and practiced a lot.Isn't she beautiful?I first got into computers in the late 80's, when I was living in South America. There was no online community to speak of accessible to me then, and my first computer was a hand-me-down Commodore 64 (with a blazing 1mhz cpu and 300bps modem).When 300 baud was the bombCommodore 64 computerFairly early on, I was playing a C=64 text adventure game (the name is lost in the mists of antiquity) and came across an unsolvable section. Out of sadism or error, the programmer had neglected to include in a section of dialogue a critical word needed to unlock something or other.Frustrated, I considered ways around this, and came upon the "list" command, which would print the BASIC source code of the game. This allowed me to see the inner details of the game, including the password needed to continue.A minor workaround, certainly. But it helped me to realize from early on that there was more to technology than met the eye. There was the front-facing end, where things theoretically worked as intended and in pre-defined ways, and there was the less obvious side, where the behind-the-scenes work got done.I can't say whether it was "from that day on," but from a pretty early age I had a fascination with the less obvious side of things, whether it was experimenting on computers or sifting through teachers' trash bins for internal memos.Compute away!Reading Jurassic Park around that time also contributed to my interest in computers (and crippling lifelong fear of velociraptors). I was fascinated by the parts of the book describing computer control of the park, and how that control broke down. It led me to take a greater interest in computers and how they control the world around us. My dad owned an Amiga 2000 and an IBM PC XT around that time as well (he used the Amiga for video design), and I got to play with them occasionally, but I never really got to do much with them - they weren't mine to experiment with.A few years later, we moved from Bogotá to San Francisco due to a family emergency. The situation was a tragic one, but as with many things in life, had unexpected results. I suddenly found myself with access to high technology (for the time) and an online world (such as it was). My family had AOL, which at the time charged by the minute and didn't have Internet access (it didn't even have buddy lists back then), but there were also bulletin board systems available.I convinced my parents to buy me a Zenith Mastersport 386SL laptop, sporting (pun maybe intended) a screen capable of 16 shades of gray (also the title of my upcoming geek fetish novel), a 25mhz 386 processor, 2 megs of RAM, and an 84mb hard drive - well in excess of anything I'd had before. It came with no mouse, no modem, and no math coprocessor.It looked kinda like this, only uglierI found a 1200bps serial modem at a garage sale (the serial port, a/k/a RS-232 port, would be the ancestor to the USB port for you young'ns) and promptly put it to good use, red LED's blinking happily away.Bonus Adrian Rewards Points to the first person who can tell me what the letters above the LED's mean - points redeemable for valuable #&&*(% NO CARRIER"That's great," you may say, "But what does any of this have to do with hacking?" And that's a valid question. Possibly the most important aspect of my early computer experience was finally having a computer system that was mine. I could experiment with it. I could break it and have to fix it. I could mess up the settings and have to learn how to configure things correctly again. It was no one's responsibility or problem except mine. I'd spend hours going through the DOS directory, learning how each command and utility worked.But it was the modem that really opened doors for me. Having recently found a copy of The Hacker Crackdown at a used book store, I was keen on the concept of Bulletin Board Systems. I'd look through computer magazines for dialup numbers to systems, and look for numbers to other systems advertised on those systems. One such system I found was TOTSE, or Temple of the Screaming Electron. It contained a wealth of text files that helped flesh out my knowledge about phone systems and computer networks. One such memorable set of texts was the Legion of Doom Technical Journal, which had stopped publication only a year or two prior, and which I read with great interest.Let me sing you the song of my peopleBut reading can only get you so far. At some point, you have to roll up your sleeves and get your hands dirty.I can probably point at three things in my early teenage years that helped decisively transform my passive, academic interest in hacking into active practice. The first came all the way from New Zealand with love, by Sneakernet.A business partner of my dad's had an older computer that he used for his work that'd suddenly stopped booting. He was aware that I knew a thing or two about computers, and offered to let me keep the machine if only I'd recover the data. I was interested, but had never performed any real computer repair before. Still, I had my endless hours of fiddling around with DOS utilities under my belt - maybe I'd be able to pull it off?It turned out that the computer was infected with the venerable (now much more venerable) Stoned virus, an ostensibly harmless boot sector virus that would sometimes mess up and corrupt disks and drives, rendering them unbootable. Restoring the boot sector to a clean one was pretty straightforward, but the consequences to my curiosity would be much more long-lasting.You see, unlike today's computer worms, DOS viruses - and especially boot viruses - relied on a very specialized ecosystem to propagate. For a boot virus to spread, it had to:Write itself to a disk. Let's say it's a floppy disk.The disk then had to be put in a drive, and inadvertently left there while the computer rebooted.During the reboot, the boot sector of the disk would be accessed, infecting the boot sector of the hard drive.The user would then have to insert another floppy disk, which would be infected.The user would have to give the floppy disk to someone or use it on another computer.Steps 1 through 5 would then have to repeat.And not only did this happen, but it happened all the way from New Zealand to San Francisco. I was suddenly fascinated by the idea that a few lines of code could impact someone's life from across the world, without any further effort by their creator. I wanted to know everything about the culture and the technology. Names and tech like Dark Avenger and Virus Creation Laboratory became part of my regular reading. I accidentally trashed my boot sector about 250 times.He's [the] real Nowhere ManAnd that regular reading wasn't exactly easy. Remember, AOL charged by the minute, and still didn't have access to the web, while BBS's only had so many files. I first started going to the San Francisco Public Library, where I used a serial terminal (VT220) to connect to a VAX/VMS system that would drop me into a Lynx (web browser) session, allowing me text-only access to the Internet.I remember the first time I accessed the web that way, probably in 1995, most likely through Altavista back when it was altavista [dot] digital [dot] com. I was taken aback by the sheer volume of information available. It seemed like a dream compared to downloading files over my pokey garage sale modem. I don't think it's exaggerating to say that it changed my life.I soon discovered that there was a card catalog dialup number that was literally never in use. Lynx was disabled when you dialed in, as the only username published for it was "dialpac", which had a captive menu. However, I found that the system allowed the finger command remotely, allowing me to list all logged-in users. I tried one of the usernames that seemed like it would correspond to the in-library terminals, and it dropped me into a Lynx session without requiring a password, allowing me text-based Internet access from home, for free.Why yes, I do have a thing for sunglassesThe next thing that drove my interest in infosec was starting high school at Lowell, having my first direct Internet access with graphics, and an ongoing rivalry with my then-netadmin, Doug Keachie.I freely admit it. I was a massive dick to him. He just wanted to run a functional computer lab, and I just wanted to see the world burn. But if it weren't for our love/hate, spy vs. spy relationship at the time, I never would have been as interested as I was, at least at the time, in finding ways to get around his network security, and he probably would have had about 50 fewer ulcers.Now that we're about 10,000 miles from one another, we get along fine, and I'm grateful for many of the lessons he imparted on me, even if it took them a while to sink in.I should mention that my next high school netadmin was not as fortunate. Unlike Mr. Keachie, he was not someone I could respect, nor was he competent. He wound up resigning in under two months, citing "job stress". I can't imagine what he meant.But what really made the fact that all the things I'd been reading about were possible hit home, that the things in the books and files weren't just cool stories, but rather things that were within my reach, was my first ex moving away to Hawaii when I was 15. Like any lovesick teenager, I spent long hours on the telephone. And for you current teenagers, long distance didn't come free with cell phone plans back then. Let's just say my parents weren't very happy.So I did what anyone would do. I defrauded the phone company.It's a crystal, nothing moreBack when I first started out, I kind of felt like I'd missed out on the golden days of hacking and phreaking. Looking back now, it seems like it's kids today who might feel that way. I'm sure that in the future, future kids will feel that way about kids of this era. But there were definitely some experiences that stand out.To people of my generation in the hacker community, a red box, a simple device which convinced a payphone money was being deposited, was something of a commonplace thing. That doesn't change the fact that when I first used one, first played the tones and had a payphone accept my fictitious money, it changed something for me - it made all the things I'd read about suddenly more real.But, I'm getting ahead of myself.Armed with instructions from 2600 Magazine, I headed to Radio Shack to buy a tone dialer and a 6.5536mhz crystal - along with a soldering iron, components of a red box. The tone dialer they sold over the counter, but the crystal was a special order item.I spoke with the lady at the counter, who turned out to be the manager. She seemed a little curious as to why I wanted the crystal. "It's ... a school project," I lied nervously. "Uh-huh," she clearly disbelieved. We went back and forth like that for a bit, until she straight-up told me "Look, I know what it's for - I'll pay for it if you'll build me one, too."So that day, I made a friend. And I spent a lot of time on payphones that summer. And moved on to hacking cell phones as well, which I did in a typically teenage fashion.Adrián Lamo's answer to When have you most successfully hacked some (non-computer) system to your advantage? (fun with cell phones)Historic colored phone phreaking boxes at textfiles.orgDeath to the enemies of PLA! What? I mean Phone Losers of America!None of these things individually or collectively make me a hacker. And honestly, I'm not even claiming to be, nor am I arguing the issue one way or another. If you want to say I am, that's fine. If you want to say I'm not, that's also fine. But I can tell you a bit about how I came to be in a position to do these things, and the more well-known things you've likely heard about.Read. I read everything I could get my hands on, exhaustively. Even if it was so old that it seemed inapplicable to modern issues. Sometimes even fiction. Some of the books I found useful included:The Hacker Crackdown (free online)The Cuckoo's Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage: Cliff StollCYBERPUNK: Outlaws and Hackers on the Computer FrontierThe Falcon and the Snowman: A True Story of Friendship and EspionageSnow Crash: Neal StephensonNone of the Amazon links are affiliate links. The author derives no benefit from sales.You don't have to ask questions. I never asked questions when I was uncertain about something. Part of that was severe anxiety, and part of it was a strong desire to figure things out for myself. If I didn't know something, I worked on finding the answer until I had it.I know that seems counterintuitive since I'm answering questions on Quora, but you may note that my questions don't focus so much on providing facts as they do on providing samplings of information and then focusing on ways of thinking and learning.I'm not saying you should never ask questions, but questions shouldn't be your first go-to. What matters is how you fare when you're alone, in the dark, with no one to help you. Who will you ask then?If you're going to ask questions, read How To Ask Questions The Smart Way first. It'll save you some grief.While I've linked to some of his writing (such as the link above), don't follow everything Eric S. Raymond says slavishly. He's unduly fixated on *NIX and programming as the end-all, be-all of "hacking". They're not. Many roads lead to Rome. (And remember, I don't program in any meaningful way - see "Adrián Lamo's answer to What programming language does Adrian Lamo use for hacking?")Don't be afraid to experiment and even break things. Getting my first computer that was actually mine was a huge turning point for me. If I screwed it up, it was no one's responsibility but mine. And since it was my only computer, I had to fix it, no matter how long it took. That's a hell of an incentive.Find like-minded people, but don't be afraid to strike out on your own. Having peers will help keep you tuned in to what's going on in the fields you're interested in, but their interests don't have to be your interests. When I started finding ways to bypass security, I made them up as I went along.As a result, I've often found systems totally undefended against them, because few people have tried them before. Would that be the case if I had done what all the cool kids were doing? Probably not. Don't worry about looking silly - good new ideas always look silly at first. I mean, who would hack using nothing but a web browser?Don't do everything I did. Just because I didn't go to prison doesn't mean you won't. Times have changed, and sentences are much more severe now. Don't take the chance - I promise I won't be impressed if you do.For more on this topic, see my PandoDaily article, It's a bad time to be a hacker in the United States.Don't be afraid to take the plunge and install Linux. It's gotten much easier since I first started using it in 1997, and had to manually compile specific modules into the kernel to get anything to work right.On the other hand, don't let anyone tell you that you have to install Linux to get into security. I performed many of my most public intrusions from Windows 98, one of the most maligned operating systems in history.Keep up to date on security news. Some good resources include:Krebs on SecurityThreat Level | WIREDNaked SecurityGraham CluleySchneier on SecurityRead the old scrolls. Know what came before:T E X T F I L E S - MagazinesThis is a late addition, but have no need for idols. No gods, no heroes. Trying to live up to someone else's achievements only limits you. I've never really had a sense of where I should stop, because I haven't been going by someone else's story. Sometimes it's gotten me into trouble. But managed right, it doesn't have to for you.#10 includes me. This is why: Sine Qua Non, on Writer on the Storm.No one can teach you how to be a hacker. But if you already possess the hacker nature, these prompts may help you on the way. And even if you don't quite fit the profile, they'll still help you become more well-rounded in security and other areas, and more self-sufficient.And maybe, one day, someone will be asking you to tell your story. If so, please come find me. I would be honored to hear it.Or, hey, maybe you'll always be a n00b. I don't claim to have truly mastered anything. In a way, perhaps that's the better deal. Wouldn't it be great to always have more to learn?You can watch a documentary called Hackers Wanted about the mindset of hacking and hackers, including my own story, on YouTube below:Hackers Wanted (2009) | Don't get so caught up in the film that you forget to upvote ;)Resources:Are You a Hacker? By ReDragonConscience of a HackerAdrián Lamo's answer to Can Adrian Lamo hack Quora?Adrián Lamo's answer to Can you be a hacker if you can't code?alt.2600 / #hack FAQThe Jargon FileThe Meaning of ‘Hack’Hackers: Under the hood | ZDNetQ&A: Adrian Lamo, the hacker philosopher - CNETThanks for A2A's, Vaibhaw Kumar, User, & William Emmanuel Yu!Edit: Added author's note, intro, friendly castigation of Eric S. Raymond, item 10, clarification of red box, thx for A2A's.

Showing something ≠ Glorification.Triumph of the Will (1935) glorified Nazism. Inglourious Basterds (2009) while showing the heinous Nazism, is a period movie, didn’t glorify Nazism.The Birth of a Nation (1915) glorified the Ku Klux Klan. Django Unchained (2012) and more recently, Mudbound (2017) also showed the KKK, sans the glorification.The Green Berets (1968) and Pearl Harbor (2001) and We Were Soldiers (2002) show and glorify war. The Deer Hunter (1978) and The Killing Fields (1984), and Full Metal Jacket (1987) show wars and conflicts and soldiers, but do not glorify wars.Natural Born Killers (1994) showed and glorified killing. Funny Games (1997) showed killing and killers, but there was no glorification involved.I think the bigger question is why Swara Bhaskar would even expect a mosquito to be a bird, and write this open letter. Just because both have wings, doesn’t mean a mosquito = bird.Sanjay Leela Bhansali is known to be the director who makes larger-than-Bollywood cinema, a director who not only has the vision to embellish crap, but also knows how to do it flamboyantly.A still from Bhansali’s another sodomized epic story: Devdas (2002); Image Source: The 10 most expensive movie sets ever builtIf Bhansali wants to make a cinema on the fictional life of a hard life of a female mosquito, for example, the female mosquito, who knows that the thin line between death and life is just the other side of being able to suck blood — and still flies in order to live, knowing how death is lurking around the corner—rest assured, in a Bhansali film, that mosquito is getting gold-dust sprinkled wings, colour-corrected perfect eyeballs that would provide a glimpse onto its brain, and perfectly drawn eyebrows that lifts majestically when it spots food.That’s not all.In a Bhansali film on mosquitoes, which could be on its challenging journey to find food, the mosquito would find another female mosquito, and she would also find how they love the same male mosquito. To portray the celebration of that triumphant moment in finding a culmination of love interests, Bhansali for sure would make those two mosquitoes have a spectacular dance in the courtyard of Taj Mahal.What Bhansali does masterfully—make two female protagonists dance in flamboyant sets with dazzling costumes. Image SourceIt’s wrong then, based on the aristocratic vision of Bhansali, to ask why he glorified the sacrificial life of mosquitoes. Why couldn’t he portray the free spirit of birds?If Bhansali doesn’t have glory to sell, what else does he have?Right from the moment Bhansali wants to make Padmavati, you know it has to be a glory-fest of rajput “valour”, otherwise it won’t sell. Bhansali knows not only how to make grandiose costume-dramas, but the fact that he is a very successful filmmaker, is indicative enough of his acumen, in knowing and supplying exactly what the audience wants.Further, the film industry of which he is a part of i.e. Bollywood, is known to sell dreams and illogical warped thinking, with fantastic success.Seriously speaking, I find the aftermath of the article being viral and the comments section to be more educative of the current Indian mindset, regarding cinema, regarding women, and regarding the critical analytical ability of the general populace.Since when is Bhansali known to make movies that are particularly made from the woman’s viewpoint?Women in his films wear beautiful sarees, dance together for the same man, commit acts of jealousy, say poetic dialogues on love and what is not love, dance some more, have some weird fetish regarding some specific artefact in the movie, such as lamp or musical instruments, and so on.The audience pays to see beautiful women warring through dance, try to get the attention of the male protagonist, and how women mistake affection from a teacher as ‘EL O VEE EEE!!!’ in yawnfests such as Black (2005), as the audience moves towards the ending –the male protagonist dying away to establish the beauty of unfulfilled love.Bhansali is known to make ahistorical, illogical movies[1][2][3] [4] . He takes a name, a story, and dresses it up according to his taste of selling glorious cinematic dazzling sets and costumes and dance dramas.And that’s okay, because in India, artistic freedom is all about that.Make whatever shit you like, and embellish that shit if you’d like, as long as masses would lap it up. The entire Hindi film industry, the Bollywood is based on such artistic freedom, where stalking, rape, regressive level of misogyny is all embellished and saree-d in the name of ‘love’.That stuff, sells.Bollywood is known to glorify stalking and harassment of women, eulogized in India by the term of “eve-teasing”, and is replete with various levels of sexist and misogynist thinking.Whoever mistakes Bollywood to be a Khan Academy history lessons course, is largely (and may I say, ridiculously) mistaken. Further, I request the reader to go through a sampling of sentiments regarding ‘sati’ and *cough cough* the glory of it, right here on Quora: What could be a possible justification for Sati system?Not too long ago, an IIT professor on Quora was writing of how “sati is an act of love, made by women who’d like to burn themselves on the funeral pyre of their husbands, and how modern feminists won’t understand it because they don’t understand what is love”. The answer is now deleted, and I’m kinda quoting from memory here, but there…you have the answer of how to view “honour” of women.Unlike how the practice of Sati used to actually happen, where unconscious, unwilling and drugged, widowed women would be dragged to the funeral pyre of their husband:An 18th century painting of Sati; Image Source: By Unknown (production) - V&A Search the Collections, Public Domain, File:Sati ceremony.jpgJauhar was a practice of self-immolation of women to avoid capture, enslavement and rape by any foreign invaders.For example, if you are making a film on ISIS, and there is a scene where a to-be beheaded captive has the option of immolating themselves, that’s a Jauhar-ification of sorts. If you play a dramatic mellow anthem like melody while captives are walking away to fire, with slow-motion shots, close-ups of possible semen aka sperms or future children who could have been born, with defiant expressions of “standing up to the enemy by not giving our lives to them”—as a filmmaker, you are trying to evoke some emotions.Swara Bhaskar makes the following point as to the “glorification” part:Then in the climax, breathtakingly shot of course – hundreds of women bedecked in red like Goddess Durga as bride rushed into the Jauhar fire while a raving Muslim psychopathic villain loomed over them and a pulsating musical track – that had the power of an anthem; seduced the audience into being awestruck and admiring of this act. Sir, if this is not glorification and support of Sati and Jauhar, I really do not know what is.I felt very uncomfortable watching your climax, watching that pregnant woman and little girl walk into the fire. I felt my existence was illegitimate because God forbid anything untoward happened to me, I would do everything in my power to sneak out of that fiery pit– even if that meant being enslaved to a monster like Khilji forever. I felt in that moment that it was wrong of me to choose life over death. It was wrong to have the desire to live. This Sir, is the power of cinema.Your cinema particularly is inspiring, evocative and powerful. It can move audiences to emotional highs and lows. It can influence thinking and that, Sir, is why you must be responsible as to what it is you are doing and saying in your film.Source: ‘At The End of Your Magnum Opus... I Felt Reduced to a Vagina – Only’; bold font added.Cinema does something very magical, apparently. It not only creates meanings, but we also create meanings as taken from our life experience while watching cinema. Cinema has to rely on particular tools to evoke emotions, where our psyche gets pasted with the protagonist’s psyche. The protagonist’s journey becomes our journey.Or not, depending on whether or not we can relate with the protagonist.So, cinema often have to rely on particular artefacts, gears, deployment and cinematic storytelling to evoke emotions, and make us relate to the protagonist – like dress it up, if you will. So, how you show things in cinema, definitely matters.The task of cinematic storytelling thus begins by identifying the audience you would like to warm up to. Quite understandably, Bhansali didn’t have feminists in their mind as his target audience. Feminism in India and feminists in India are not loved segments. Therefore, it’s understandable why Swara Bhaskar might not find any agency in Padmavati, the warrior princess from Sri Lanka. She has been watching the film with her own take on how women should think, and her questioning on Bhansali is strongly hinged on the expectation that Bhansali should show the women’s viewpoint in less patriarchal terms—but well, that’s her expectation.It’s like expecting that comments which use phrases like “Thanks and Regards”, “With due respect” “XOXOXO” “I don’t mean to disrespect you, but…..” while saying how they would like to:rape and kill you or wish you were deadwish you didn’t have any children or how you were not bornwondering whether your mother or father was raped by persons of interest and fantasy to them, out of which you were bornwonder whether you are as ugly as the mentality you show….it is like believing in those attempts which say: “I have a reason to be all negative towards you and intend to hurt you, but I want to do this with all kinds of respect, by using the word ‘respect’ and other associated words, so that you place much attention on such pronouncements”.It matters even more so, when the allegations are of ‘glorification’, the textbook definition of which is “the action of describing or representing something as admirable, especially unjustifiably.”I don’t see a Sati in Padmavat. I do see a Jauhar, and yes, it is definitely glorified. Along with Swara Bhaskar, many others are also saying so:‘Padmaavat’ review: an insipid love letter to RajputsWhy I feel being Padmavati brings no glory in any centuryThe deafening silence of feminists in the Padmavati fracasPadmavati Was Never A Role Model For These Rajput Women, And Now She's A CursePadmaavat: The artistic flair of Bhansali's film can't mask the glorification of a privileged caste- Entertainment News, FirstpostFootnotes[1] Opinion: Dear Rajput brethren, as a Bengali I ask you to chill[2] Bajirao, No Hindu Nationalist, Was Hated By Most. All He Fought For Was Chauth - A Form Of Tax![3] What Padmaavat Gets Wrong About Alauddin Khilji[4] Bhansali’s ‘Padmavati’ is a Case For Very Bad Historical Accuracy

Stop drinking your own kool-aid. – If you are not brutally honest with yourself, you can’t make informed decisions that will truly improve your company. You will hide behind excuses and spin stories to yourself explaining away why you have to keep doing the rest of the things on the list. You can’t believe all the stories you tell. You need a healthy dose of skepticism (not the same as self-doubt or lack of self-belief) to make real forward progress.Stop being so busy all the time. – Does an early stage startup founder really need to spend time evaluating every HR alternative instead of focusing on customers and product? Some people think that being the CEO means being involved with everything. But what they are really doing is getting in the way and usually just slowing down progress. Surround yourself with smart people and delegate delegate delegate. There are only a few things you should not delegate in the early stages of a business like customer engagements, raising capital and finding product-market fit.Stop working yourself to death. – As the founder, you often feel like the world is on your shoulders and you have to be working 100 hour weeks to set an example for your employees. Startups are a marathon, not a race. The average successful exit takes 7-10 years. If you don’t take time for yourself and take care of yourself, nobody else will. Relax, take breaks, take walks, take days off, get massages, pamper yourself. You can’t take care of others if you do not take care of yourself first.Stop half-assing it. – On the other hand, I have tried countless times to build a startup idea as side projects, and it doesn’t work. I am not saying that it is impossible to start a startup on the side. I am saying that to make a real play at doing something investable, you are going to have to make the leap and do it full time sooner than you will feel comfortable doing so. It always works this way. Nobody will invest in you if this is not what you do all the time, no matter how good the idea is.Stop hiding behind fake traction. – Founders often highlight what looks good and hide what looks bad. This is fake traction. Like: “All of my users love my product!” Sounds great, but if you only have 12 users, your sample size is two orders of magnitude too small. If you find 1000 people who can’t stop talking about your product, you are on to something big. Or another is “I have 300 people on my waiting list to buy my product!” Awesome, how many of them are willing to pay you for it up front? None? Haven’t even asked yet?Stop counting your eggs before they hatch. – An investor who expressed interest in investing but hasn’t called back in a few weeks isn’t money in the bank. Close close close. Convertible notes aren’t perfect, but at least you can do a rolling close cheaply. A potential customer who says he may pay if your product did such-and-such is not money in the bank. Close close close. What will he pay for today?Stop trying to get around paying lawyers. – You are running a complicated legal entity that may take funding from individuals and VCs, and could eventually IPO or be acquired. This is not a mom-and-pop business, LegalZoom and RocketLawyer are not good enough. Do it right. Don’t even try to out-smart yourself here. Expensive in the short term? Yes. Worth it in the long term? ALWAYS. Your future self will hate you if you try to save too much money here.Stop trying to serve two kinds of customers. – You can’t do two things great. You don’t have the time, money, or resources to figure out the product-market fit for more than one product doing one thing. It is always so enticing to try to follow new opportunities that come up, but don’t fool yourself. You can’t be great executing two go-to-market strategies at once. The split focus will mean you will be at best mediocre, but probably terrible at both. If you really think the new opportunity is better, pivot the company and go all in.Stop believing that your product is your company. – Your company is the value your provide to your customers, not your product. Often your customers couldn’t care less if what happens behind the scenes was done by the best Scala code in the universe or a thousands monkeys… as long as it works reliably and timely. Your customer value and your team is your company, not your product. Focus on making your team happy and your customers happy and all else will follow.Stop avoiding your customers. – How long has it been since you last talked with a customer? On the phone or in person? Not to sell them stuff. Not to offer support. To listen. To build your relationship with them. To ask questions. Please don’t tell me it has been more than a week or two. A founder, and especially a CEO, has no excuse not to be in continuous communication with customers. Don’t have customers yet? Call your prospects.Stop avoiding your team. – There are often times you want to curl up and cry, but a leader can not hide behind his desk no matter how much he might want to. A leader must be visible in good times and in bad. Especially in bad times. When a child is scared and hurt he needs his parents the most. Your team is your company, keeping them happy is one of your top priorities.Stop pretending to be superman. – A leader doesn’t need to be perfect. Don’t pretend that everything is always fine and that you never make mistakes. You might think it makes you look strong and brave, or makes people look up to you. In reality, it comes off fake and inauthentic. You don’t have to flaunt your failures, but hiding them is unnecessary too. Just talk about them honestly and ask people how they think you could improve.Stop being so secretive about your idea. – You may be scared someone will steal your idea. Don’t. Just don’t. Such a beginner mistake, not even an amateur mistake, it is just a total rookie mistake. You will never find product-market fit by keeping your idea secret until it is perfect. You need to talk about your idea. A lot. To a lot of people. Because honestly, your idea probably sucks just as much as you are secretly afraid it might. One of the reasons many founders are so secretive about their ideas is because they don’t want to be told it is a stupid idea. This is just denial. Don’t be in denial. Anyhow, the people you are so afraid will steal your idea are too busy working on their own big ideas to steal yours.Stop falling in love with your idea before product-market fit. – “The counterfeit innovator is wildly self-confident. The real one is scared to death.” —Steven Pressfield. The more confident an early stage startup founder is, the more concerned I am for them. Of course they can’t just go around telling people they are scared to death all the time. But when you are an early stage founder and really in love with what you built, you will never seek the changes necessary to really make your product great. Read the Instagram Story to get a great example of a team who wouldn’t stop until they really found product-market fit. If their love of Burbn (predecessor to Instagram) had held them back, they would probably be out of business by now.Stop ignoring marketing. – Even before you launch your product, you should be marketing. By marketing, I don’t mean press releases and media attention. The best marketing is word-of-mouth. Getting people to talk about you. You only get word-of-mouth by creating real fans. You create fans by adding real value to people’s lives. You can add value to people’s lives in many ways besides your product or service. You can write tutorials and provide useful blogging content that isn’t directly related to your startup at all, but related to your industry. Some excellent examples of this include Signal v. Noise from 37signals, DigitalOcean Tutorials and The Buffer Blog. Create fans, not just users. Most startups don’t even try.Stop comparing yourself to other startups. – Startup envy isn’t a good enough motivator to get you through the tough times. Thinking that such-and-such startup was just acquired for hundreds of millions of dollars and you are so much smarter than them is not a productive thought. I have written about how to cope with startup envy before but it is better if you just prevent yourself from getting envious in the first place. In fact, it is probably a fantastic idea to stop reading Hacker News and Techcrunch altogether until after you don’t work for your startup any more.Stop ignoring history. – Trying to raise venture capital for the first time? You are not the first person to do this, read as much as you can and surround yourself with people who have raised money recently (not 10+ years ago, within the last 2-3 years). Trying to build a payment company but never built a payment company before? Don’t try to rediscover everything that worked and didn’t work for others, surround yourself with advisors who have done it before. Get introduced to Peter Thiel and Max Levchin. Read their biographies before you meet them. Pick their brains. Offer them stock in your new venture. Hustle smarter, not harder.Stop procrastinating the launch of your company. – Procrastination is just giving into your inner demons. You don’t want to know if it will succeed or fail, but all you are doing is shooting your own feet and cutting of your legs and arms. Go read The War of Art, now. I’m serious. Steven Pressfield calls procrastination a form of your own personal ”Resistance”. The closer to launching your startup, the stronger the Resistance feels. You will make up excuses, you will do anything to put it off another week, another month. You can’t find product-market fit unless you have a product to try to fit with.Stop launching too early. – Launching a “Minimal Viable Product” or MVP does not mean building the crappiest proof of concept and launch it as quickly as you can. Though “Lean” startups are a hot trend right now, many founders misunderstand what a MVP is. Build a product worth using, not a proof-of-concept. If an MVP was a proof-of-concept, it would be called POC instead. Build something that someone would pay for. This means making the product look professional and polished. This means finishing enough details that it doesn’t look like a fly-by-night endeavor.Stop avoiding thinking about revenue. – Stop comparing yourself to Twitter and Facebook that didn’t worry about revenue until many years after being founded. Stop saying you are the next Instagram. I’ll believe you about as much as I would believe you told me you are holding a winning mega-lottery ticket. Growth is great, and great growth can be wonderful to experience, but cash-flow is king for almost all startups. Don’t tell yourself that you are an exception, you are risking too much if you are wrong.Stop using your lack of funding as an excuse. – With today’s technology, you do not need to spend millions of dollars to validate most startup ideas. You can usually validate that people want to your product in some form or another, or even pay for it, with just a few thousand dollars. Haven’t built your product yet because you think you need funding first? Build another product that won’t cost so much. Haven’t started selling your product because you think you need funding first? Richard Branson built a billion dollar business without venture capital. You are making up excuses, go find solutions.Stop just following your passion. – Passion is an energy that can power and motivate you, but easily blind you too. Passion can blind you to truth; it can deceive you. I have seen many founders blind with passion. Passion can blind you to know when you need to pivot or change your product. If the Burbn founders had been overly passionate about their first app, they would have never created Instragram. The trick is to get passionate about product-market fit, not about the product as it is today. Keep tweaking until you find the fit. You will know when you found it, there won’t be any doubt. ”When I was a commercial loan officer for a large bank, my boss taught us that you should never make a loan to someone who is following his passion.” –Scott AdamsStop asking people to sign NDAs before discussing your startup. – Early stage startup ideas are not worth protecting because they almost all suck. Yes, your baby is ugly. Sorry, but it is the truth. After you raise a few million in venture capital and you are setting up a meeting with a large public company, then you can ask to put an NDA in place. However even then, you will have to sign their NDA (they don’t do special NDAs for every startup they talk to) and thus you won’t likely get much protection.Stop lying to yourself when things are not right. – How long have you been telling yourself that the employee (you know which one I mean) is not pulling his weight and is causing more harm than good? How many times have you turned the other way hoping it will go away? STOP IT. DEAL WITH IT. TODAY. NOW. REALLY. You can’t afford to put problems off to the side at a startup. There is no time. Deal with your problems today, stop putting them off. Stop hoping they will resolve themselves. This is business, do your job. Deal with your mess.Stop trying to get away without knowing your unit cost. – Unit cost is how much your service costs you to run per customer. “But I’m a SaaS, Lucas!” Stop it, you are a business, right? You have customers? You have service bills? Take out the fixed costs, then divide the rest of your service bills by the number of customers you have. Find out how much it costs you to support one more customer on average. Make sure you are charging your customer a lot more than their unit cost, otherwise you are a charity, not an investible business. You can’t start calculating unit cost too early. It is key to understanding cash-flow and profitability.Stop believing that hiring sales people will cure your revenue problems. – Reality check: sales people don’t figure out how to sell your product. You do. The only reason you should hire a sales person should be because you don’t scale and you have been doing more sales meetings than you can handle lately. A founder/CEO doing sales calls? YES. Never done a sales call before? Doesn’t matter. Start now. It is your job to figure out how to sell your product. You need to perfect your sales pitch. You need to create a great deck that works. Once you know it works, you let a sales person shadow you until they can say the same things you do.Stop postponing the calculation of your cost of user acquisition. – Cost to Acquire a Customer (aka CAC) is one of the most important metrics an online business has. If you watch Shark Tank, you know they always ask entrepreneurs for the number up front. It has been extremely well studied by top tier investors like Bessemer who have published great resources on learning about CAC. To calculate CAC, you will need to know your business numbers inside and out, which you should already know. If you don’t, then figuring out how to calculate CAC will get you asking the right questions. Hire an accountant to help you double check your work and assumptions. Like lawyers, don’t try to skimp here, you future self will thank you. Like unit cost, you can’t start calculating CAC too early.Stop hiring contractors instead of employing great engineers. – It is so so so tempting to just say: “fuck it, I’ll just hire a part-time contractor to build out my prototype.” Don’t do it. don’t give in to the temptation. Hiring full time employees takes longer and is harder and can cost more, but the long-term benefits will always outweigh the short-term gains. A startup is not about the product, it is about the team. A great team will always out-do a great product. Hiring full time employees is about building a team. Hiring contractors is a band-aid full of dirt and bacteria. Startups are a marathon, not a sprint. It is more important to slowly build an excellent team, a motivated team, the right team… than it is to get your product out of the door faster.Stop ignoring your Ideal Customer. – “All novels are really letters aimed at one person.” –Stephen King, On Writing. That person is called the Ideal Reader. Novels are subjective, not everyone will like any given novel, so you don’t even try to please everyone. You try to please your Ideal Reader. Stephen King’s Ideal Reader is his wife. Whenever he gets stuck, he thinks of his wife and asks himself: what would make her laugh/cry/pee her pants? When you get stuck, always ask yourself: Who is your Ideal Customer? Who are you trying to make pee their pants?Stop picking such small problems to solve. – Will someone pay for your app that increases Twitter followers? Yes. Can you grow that into a $100M/year business? No. It is a small idea. It is a small market. There is nothing wrong if your goal is to create a small business that augments your income or might even support your whole lifestyle. But that kind of business will never get venture capital, nor should it, so don’t even try. You are wasting investors time and your time. A real startup’s goal should be to change the world for the better. If increasing Twitter followers is a temporary revenue-generating bootstrapping step to a next-gen marketing platform that improves the connection between brands and customers… that is a big problem to solve. That is an investible idea.You can download a free printable version of this list that you can put over your desk here: Free Printable Version of “30 Things to Stop Doing as a Startup Founder” PDF…These Quora posts are just the tip of the iceberg. If you liked this post, subscribe to the Craftsman Founder newsletter to get instant access to much more free content.