1000x YES on the "aim high stuff is nonsense." It's cargo-culting, pure and simple. Copying the way an accidental empire was built is as silly as building a straw plane in the hopes that the real plane will come back. Or buying Aeron chairs and a foosball table.

As Basho once wrote, "Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise. Seek what they sought."

That said, can't agree with you on the statement that a lifestyle business is a business where the ambition has waned. Lots of people with "lifestyle" businesses are getting exactly what they wanted. Getting what you want is getting what you want, regardless of whether somebody on the outside deems your ambitions "good enough."

HNers seem to treat "lifestyle business" like a slur, while lionizing people with unlikely lifestyle businesses (hi patio11). I'd like to see that cognitive dissonance resolved.