I love how revealing the language of marketing can be some times. When marketers are insecure about their offerings, it’s a predictable consequence that the presentation will grow ever more over the top.

The long-standing “all-new” trend is a perfect example of this. When an advertiser is claiming something to be an “all-new” car/soap/computer/camera it usually means exactly the opposite. It actually hardly even means new, at best it’s most commonly just “marginally-new” or “just-a-few-tweaks-new”.

In any case, focusing on just the newness of something is usually a pretty weak selling point. How about you just focus on something that rocks about your product? If the product is great, your customers will most likely automatically be buying the new thing.

You gotta hand it to Japan – Our trademark certificates arrived today on heavy cardstock, printed with bright gold foil and striking red ink. I keep saying I want to frame these suckers:

These stand out because from the rest of the world, the same certificates look like this:

Thank you, Australia, for being particularly boring.

People who spout off about how they don’t have a TV always remind me of The Onion’s “Area Man Constantly Mentioning He Doesn’t Own A Television.”

But the #1 reason people have for not doing what they want to do is time. The refrain: “There just aren’t enough hours in the day.” And yet these same people manage to veg out in front of the TV (the average person now watches 4.5 hours of TV a day).

“How Dumping TV Allowed Me to Quit My Job, Create an Online Business and Fund My Retirement Account” gives the actual financial costs of watching TV:

It’s amazing the amount you can accomplish when you find an extra 3,285 hours to work on something you enjoy doing rather than vegging in front of the TV. Those hours helped us create a small network of websites and blogs which allowed both of us to quit our jobs and work on them full time a couple of years ago…

To put it into perspective, if you watch an average of 31.5 hours of TV each week (which the average person in the US does) and you value your time at minimum wage of $5.85 an hour, you are spending nearly $800 a month ($798.53) to watch TV. That comes to nearly $10,000 ($9582.30) a year. I would imagine that most people reading this value their time well above minimum wage, so the cost is likely several times that number. When you look at it from that perspective, watching TV is an extremely expensive and financial draining habit to have.

Seeing the costs broken down like that really shines a light on the problem. Life’s about priorities. If there’s something you want to be doing, ask yourself how much your TV viewing is getting in the way.

Choose your tube
The article above also offers some good tips on how to get your TV watching down. Something that’s worked great for me: I moved recently and didn’t get cable at my new place. My viewing is now limited to things I choose to watch on Hulu, Netflix, and YouTube.

The choosing is the key there. It means I have to actively pick things to watch instead of just flipping through whatever’s on. As a result, I watch way less TV overall. No more SportsCenter highlights, no more local news, no more American Idol. Before, I’d get swallowed up in any/all of those and realize hours had just slipped away. That’s no longer an issue.

Finding more hours
While I’m on the subject, another great way to deposit some hours in your free time bank: Don’t commute. Obviously it’s not an option for everyone. But if there’s a way you can work from home, even if it’s just a day or two a week, think of the extra time you’ll have that you usually spend in traffic, on the train, etc.

An hour here, an hour there. It starts to add up. Then you can use that time to build something on the side. A few hours a week on a project will tell you if you’re onto something. You’ll know if you love doing it. You’ll know if others care at all. Then you can decide if it’s worth throwing more hours at or if it was just a fun thing to try. Either way, you didn’t have to quit your job or do anything too risky.

Yip Harburg was a famous lyricist (“Over the Rainbow”, anyone?) who discovered himself during the hardest of times: the Great Depression.

I went into business… I thought I’d retire in a year or two. And a thing called Collapse, bango! socked everything out. 1929. All I had left was a pencil.

Luckly, I had a friend named Ira Gershwin, and he said to me, “You’ve got your pencil. Get your rhyming dictionary and go to work.” I did. There was nothing else to do…

I was relieved when the Crash came. I was released. Being in business was something I detested. When I found that I could sell a song or a poem, I became me, I became alive. Other people didn’t see it that way. They were throwing themselves out of windows.

Someone who lost money found that his life was gone. When I lost my possessions, I found my creativity. I felt I was being born for the first time. So for me the world became beautiful.

(From Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression, by Studs Terkel)

We usually publish product case studies exclusively over at the Product Blog but this one is so cool we wanted to share it here too…Sequence, an animation and design house with a strong focus on motion comics, has been working on a series of “Batman: Black & White” short form digital motion comics. The team there runs productions using Basecamp for project management and internal reviews of quicktimes/audio asset sharing/shot animation assignment. Sequence’s Ian Kirby tells us more below.

When your company consists of just a few people, a daily chat is all that’s needed to keep everyone up to speed. However, when a company grows to 10 or so people in a very short time, keeping everyone on the same page is easier said than done (especially when the workload is heavy). Enter Basecamp.

The Batman Black and White motion comics started with flat artwork scans – we literally received scanned comic books. That’s it. Our artists take these pages and break them apart, separating characters from backgrounds, redrawing scenery, extending frames to fit a 16×9 aspect ratio for HD delivery, etc.

Preproduction, flattened artwork is brought into Avid and timed with dialogue. We do a locked timing pass so that music can be scored and each shot (panel) can be given animation direction and duration – this is where we really rely on Basecamp.

Each shot’s page and panel number is entered in the Basecamp to-do list along with, again, a frame count and direction. Depending on workload of other projects, shots might be assigned to ‘Sequence’ or to specific animators. If a shot needs 3D, or has heavy facial animation, they’ll be assigned to the animator most fit for the job. We all have our strengths.

I love when people call what we do at 37signals a “lifestyle business” — but probably not for the reasons they think. When the lifestyle card is pulled from its tired deck, it’s usually meant as a pat on top of the head. An “oh, that’s such a pretty drawing, dear little boy.” Ha!

It’s the archetypical false dilemma. Either you 1) let your business devour your life and you’ll be incredibly successful or 2) you balance your life with other things than work but are relegated to paying-the-rent success. Double ha!

It’s been a long time since there was a direct correlation with the number of hours you work and the success you enjoy. It’s an antiquated notion from the days of manual labour that has no bearing on the world today. When you’re building products or services, there’s a nonlinear connection between input and output. You can put in just a little and still get out a spectacular lot.

Here’s where I put on my pocket psychology hat. I think that it’s very hard for some people to come to grips with this new reality. It’s a lot easier to deal with your lack of success when you can rationalize it by saying other people just work harder. That leaves the door open to think, “I could have that too, if I was just willing to give more. But since I’m not, I’ll be content with what I have.” That’s a comforting, ego-protecting notion.

It also works if you’re already having reasonable success and you want a life distraction. You can assign your success to the insane hours you put in and then not feel so bad about giving up everything else. If you convince yourself that the only way that you can have success is through total immersion, you don’t have to make excuses to yourself or your surroundings. The sacrifice is justified.

I’m not saying that you can’t have success by pouring in all your waking hours. Of course you can. I’m saying that you don’t have to. That the correlation between the two is weak.

We’re living proof that you can work much less than popular entrepreneur lore would have you believe and still run a very successful, multi-million dollar business. And still have time for taking flying lessons, learning to play the guitar, nurture your garden, go hiking, enjoy cooking, socialize with people outside your tech circle.

It’s your choice.

The term entrepreneur feels outdated. It’s associated with people who work brutal hours, invest their life savings, and risk it all on a dream.

But these days, you can do a ton with just a little. You can build a business by working just a few hours a week. You can keep your day job and start something on the side. Software and technology that used to cost a ton is now free (or very cheap). You can easily work from home and/or with people thousands of miles away.

In this new landscape, people who would never think to call themselves “entrepreneurs” are out there starting businesses, selling products, and turning profits.

Take Markus Frind. He works a maximum of 20 hours a week yet runs one of the largest websites on the planet (PlentyOfFish.com, a dating site) and pays himself more than $5 million a year.

Jason Kottke and John Gruber are writers who work from home on their own terms. Their blogs have built huge audiences with revenues to match. And they’ve done it without asking anyone’s permission, finding a publisher, or signing a distribution deal. That would have been impossible 10 years ago.

Soniei, profiled here, is a painter from Nova Scotia who sells directly to customers through eBay, Etsy, and her web site. She makes a decent living, loves being able to work on whatever she feels like working on that day, and says she can’t imagine doing anything else.

Beth Terry sells and ships toys under the name Iron Chick’s Toys (see this PDF). A few years back, she would have had to rent out a warehouse and hire people to fulfill orders. Now she uses Amazon.com’s fulfillment service to do it for her. Instead of sending 50 boxes to individual buyers, she sends just one box of 70 items to Amazon. Instead of spending thousands on storage, she spends just $60 per month. Not bad when you consider she’s selling an average of $900 a day (with sales that increased at least 25 percent month over month during her first year).

These people are thriving without risking it all or leveraging their lives. They’re succeeding without MBAs, business plans, and all those other credentials you’re supposed to have before starting a business. You just don’t need that stuff to build something great anymore.

It’s time to get over the idea that risk and reward are so intertwined in business. And maybe we need to come up with a better term than entrepreneur to describe this new group of people out there building businesses. Any suggestions?