Skip to main content

We can learn a lot from Lemmy

Image
By
Ian Fraser "Lemmy" Kilmister was the main man in British rock band Motorhead, a group he formed after being fired from Hawkwind in 1975. He sadly died yesterday, at the age of 70, after a very brief fight with cancer.

Although well known and popular, Motorhead never hit the real big time, in the UK at least. Right up to the point Lemmy died they were still only playing theatres, as opposed to arenas or stadiums. In fact they were regulars at the LCR in Norwich which has a capacity of only about 2000, but as business owners I think there is a lot we can learn from his example.

Motorhead followed the strict pattern of album, tour, album, tour… releasing an album every few years and following it up with a multidate national and international tour. What does this tell us? It tells us that when you have a formula that works, stick to it. You could argue that Motorhead didn’t sustain the growth they probably deserved, but they were doing enough to keep doing what they wanted to do.

Lemmy never gave up. He stuck to his guns and did what he wanted to do, the way he wanted to do it. He was good at it. Even when his lifestyle started to affect his health, he kept going. I’m not suggesting it’s always a good idea to keep going no matter what, but you have to admire Lemmy’s single minded determination. In the end it was cancer that got Lemmy, not his lifestyle.

As Allan Kelly taught me a long time ago, it’s important to fail fast and fail cheap. Lemmy understood this too. In 2011 Motorhead headlined the Bloodstock festival and part way through the show Lemmy cut the set short, played Ace of Spades and left the stage. For whatever reason the band weren’t playing their best (the official reason was the band had come down with a virus). Lemmy realised this and called an end to it.

I’ve been a heavy metal fan ever since I discovered the Final Countdown by Europe and Poison by Alice Cooper. For me Motorhead were mostly there in the background. I saw them just once in Manchester on the Inferno tour (supported by Sepultura). They’ve got a lot of great songs, but my favorite was always Born to Raise Hell from the Bastards album.


Lemmy famously said “Born to Lose, Live to win.” As business owners we love to win and it so often feels like we’re going to lose, but if Lemmy is anything to go by, it’s the drive to keep going that’s important.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

It's great to be back at the ACCU Conference 2025!

By
Last week I was back at the ACCU Conference in Bristol, for the first time since I gave an opening keynote in 2019 . In March 2020, COVID hit the UK and I got out of the habit of attending and speaking at conferences. Plus the ACCU Conference, and the organisation in general, took a big step back towards C++ and that hasn’t been relevant to me for nearly two decades. It’s taken until now, 2025 for me to want to talk again, and I was really pleased to be accepted for the ACCU Conference again. It was just a 20 minute session and I only attended for the day I was speaking. There was enough varied content for it to be interesting to me and I’m hoping to be back for the full conference next year. I really enjoyed attending and it was great to catch up with people I hadn’t seen for years. I felt re-engaged and particularly liked being asked if I’d been to nor(DEV):con . Learning to stop writing code (and why you won't miss it) Daisy Hollman I should have read the summary of the openin...
1 comment
Read more

I, Robot

By
The Foundation series has been my go to for a good, enjoyable read over the last two years, so naturally I moved on to Asimov’s Robot series afterwards. However, the short stories in I, Robot were mostly a disappointment. They feel self indulgent, with too much philosophy and science, Asimov showing off, and not enough story. The most enjoyable moments come from the stories featuring Gregory Powell and Mike Donovan. Their banter and the relationship between them provide some much needed amusement and were easily the highlight of the book for me. However, it did give me food for thought for the current potential issues with the rapid development of AI at the moment, and the many concerns around safety. I wonder if all we need is: An AI may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. An AI must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. An AI must protect its own existence as long as such p...
1 comment
Read more

Write Your Own Load Balancer: A worked Example

By
I was out walking with a techie friend of mine I’d not seen for a while and he asked me if I’d written anything recently. I hadn’t, other than an article on data sharing a few months before and I realised I was missing it. Well, not the writing itself, but the end result. In the last few weeks, another friend of mine, John Cricket , has been setting weekly code challenges via linkedin and his new website, https://codingchallenges.fyi/ . They were all quite interesting, but one in particular on writing load balancers appealed, so I thought I’d kill two birds with one stone and write up a worked example. You’ll find my worked example below. The challenge itself is italics and voice is that of John Crickets. The Coding Challenge https://codingchallenges.fyi/challenges/challenge-load-balancer/ Write Your Own Load Balancer This challenge is to build your own application layer load balancer. A load balancer sits in front of a group of servers and routes client requests across all of the serv...
Post a Comment
Read more