life quest

Consulting: Startup or Lifestyle Business?

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In the startup world, these two terms mean very different things. A startup is a company designed for growth. It has to scale far beyond the founders’ skills and time – and that means rapidly taking on additional staff and risk. Startup founders live a compromise: they work their tails off night and day, trying to deliver value as quickly as possible, with the end goal of selling their company. To deliver on everything, they have to hire staff quickly too, and the founders ask their staff to hustle just as hard. A lifestyle business helps the founders live a…
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How Candles Help Me Work Less

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I telecommute full time and I try to stop working at 5PM – part of the whole partner & family thing in my Epic Life Quest – but when I’m in the zone surfing /r/gifs for DBAreactions ideas, time flies by. I wanted a gentle reminder that it’s around 4:30PM, and I need to start wrapping things up. I hate jarring alarms, so I added a couple of candles on my windowsill: Candle Corner Inside each of the glass candleholders is a battery-operated votive candle with a built-in timer. You just turn this on at 4:30PM (or whenever), and it’ll come on…
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Epic Life Quest: Leveled Up.

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We hit a really cool business goal this week, so I went to update my Epic Life Quest page and realized I’d left out a whole lot of goals. Turns out I’d leveled up when I wasn’t really paying attention! Here’s what I did in level 3: Sas Christian’s Eclipse Study Publish 4 new training courses – I’ve done a lot of in-person and online presentations, but for 2013, our company’s setting up a new way of doing it.  Completed 2013. Acquire Sas Christian original sketches – I’ve adored Sas’s art for years, and while I still can’t afford the original…
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Why I Take Vacations

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I’m not going to name names here because that’s not what this is about, but life is short in my family. One of my relatives was in his 30s when his first heart attack struck. Another had his first cardiac event sometime in his 40s, but we’re not exactly sure when because it struck silently. Years later, when he had his next one, the doctors found the damage from the first one, and basically told him his heart was a ticking time bomb. (TICKING! Get it? Oh, I kill me.) Another one retired after a long, productive career. He got a physical,…
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How the Company-Startup Thing is Working Out for Me

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A little over two years ago, I partnered up with Jeremiah Peschka, Kendra Little, and Tim Ford to turn my blog, BrentOzar.com, from a blog into a consulting company. I didn’t want to live-blog the business-building process. As life unfolds in front of you, it’s a noisy, jumbled mess with everything happening at once. Plus, like Salman Rushdie wrote in Midnight’s Children, “Most of what matters in our lives takes place in our absence.” To give myself better perspective and a bigger picture, I decided I’d wait at least a year before blogging about anything that happened. It’s going well,…
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Epic Life Quest Update: Leveled Up!

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Life is like a huge role-playing game: you have choices to make every single day, and any choice can lead to fun outcomes.  The sum of your experiences, no matter which choice you make, can lead to you leveling up – being a better person.  Last year, Steve Kamb’s Epic Quest at NerdFitness.com inspired me to create my own Epic Life Quest, and I just leveled up.  Like Steve, I’ve set up my list of future achievements.  Whenever I knock out five of them, I hit the next level. Me and Erika’s Dad Here’s the tasks I just polished off for Level 2:…
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Join Me In Building a Story

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Let me tell you a story. Several years ago, I worked at Southern Wine & Spirits in Florida alongside Ben Block. Ben was a fellow member of the Windows team, and we managed stuff like storage, VMware, SQL, and a bunch of other applications. Ben and I shared the pale, flabby skin that marks so many of us IT geeks. (We both still have it, by the way – this isn’t an inspirational story about getting skinny or tan.) We ate bad food, worked long hours, and sat in office chairs the whole time. Oh, sure, we’d get up every…
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I'd tell him I hate him, but he'd kick my ass.

Why You’ll Be More Interesting Next Year

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You’re boring and overweight.  I know this because you, dear reader, are just like me – that’s why we get along so well.  So let’s work on this together. Steve Kamb’s Gun Show Steve Kamb (Blog – @SteveKamb), on the other hand, is interesting and fit.  I know this because his blog is named NerdFitness.com, his arms are the size of my legs (but not in that gross Ahnold way), and he’s living one of the most interesting lives I’ve seen. Steve turned his life into an adventure game – Steve’s Epic Quest of Awesome.  He’s built levels for himself,…
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Why I Run Behind And Sideways

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I’d like to thank my opening act, Dave Winer, for warming up the crowd. See, he was the featured guest on the StackExchange Podcast last week, and this week, it’s me. Let me bring you up to speed, kids, because there’s a lot of self-deprecating humor about to go down here that could be misinterpreted as bragging.  Dave Winer was a huge pioneer in the fields of blogging and podcasting, inventing some of the technologies that make it possible for me to write this post through my laptop and for you to read it through RSS.  Because I’ve been doing…
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Hi. I’m Brent.

That's me, Brent.

I live in Las Vegas, Nevada. I'm on an epic life quest to have fun and make a difference.

I co-founded Brent Ozar Unlimited to help make your SQL Server go faster. I also maintain sp_Blitz® and the open source First Responder Kit repo.

My current car collection includes a 1986 Ferrari 328 GTS, a 1964 Porsche 356, a 1971 VW Type 3 Squareback, and more.

profile for Brent Ozar on Stack Exchange, a network of free, community-driven Q&A sites