sacha chua living an awesome life

Hat-tip to Holly Tse for organizing this interview! At the end of the blog series, I’ll put them all together in a text file and a PDF that you can read easily, and I’ll add insights you and other people might share along the way. =) (Find previous entries) Here’s the tenth chunk!

Holly Tse: I heard you mention a lot about a blog being about sharing stories. We have a question here about Charles from Sydney. He’s asking, “What happens when you blog about something that’s private or could offend others if you were to publish it?” For example, he wants to write a blog article about the bad manners he encounters at his workplace, particularly inappropriate use of smartphones. What advice do you have?

Sacha Chua: It’s a tough question, especially since even with how careful I am on my blog to not offend anyone, I’ve accidentally offended people before. One time I was writing about my teaching reflections. I was teaching computer science in university, and I was writing about what I was learning in the process. The example I often bring in here is the Sartrian existentialism we learned about in philosophy classes in school where when you make a choice, it’s as if you were choosing for everybody. In this case, my writing about what I wanted to do made this friend of mine feel that I was criticizing the way he taught. We had a bit of a fight about that.

In terms of offending people… Accidentally offending people, there’s not much you can do, because you can’t control other people’s reactions. When you’re writing about something sensitive that you know might offend people… I often like to step back and look for the really, really positive way to look at it. Not the fake-positive and not the constructive-criticism “I will smile as I will tear you apart” – which unfortunately is the way most people put constructive criticism – more along the lines of “This is what we’ve got. What are some small things I can do to make this better?” When you’re talking about what you can do, whether it’s… In terms of modifying other people’s smartphone use, maybe I’ll take my conference calls elsewhere, or maybe I’ll mentally rehearse different things that I can say to people in case their conversations are disturbing me.

When you’re focused on what you can do about it, then you come across less “this is what you should do” and high-and-mighty and whatever else. Trying to bring that incredibly positive “Well, here’s where we are; let’s figure out how we can move forward” approach to it will probably will do you much more good. It will probably make you feel better in real life also!

HT: Once again, it’s like using your blog to figure things out. In this case, it’s a way to take a step back and try to step away from the heated emotion you might feel, and to think of a way to constructively write it… and that might result in a constructive way to approach it in real life.

SC: That reminded me of a time when someone close to me said something pretty mean–thoughtlessly mean, but still pretty mean–to me. I stopped and I thought about it. I managed to slow down and respond nicely during the situation itself. Afterwards, also, I stopped and I thought about it. I thought, well, how would I like to respond in the future, too? Do I want to take the approach I did (stay calm, don’t take it personally, and all that stuff)? I realized that having that space – being able to decide what kind of response I’d like to have, and maybe even rehearsing some of the things I might do in the future when faced with a situation like this – really really helped. It’s like a fire drill. The next time you find yourself in a situation like that, you’re not going for the knee-jerk reaction. You’ve already thought: okay, for the kind of person I want to be, this is how I want to respond. And I want to respond with love, even though sometimes people have a harder time maintaining their self-control. It happens. People are human, and that’s okay.

HT: So I take it then that you blogged about the incident too.

SC: I did. I wrote about it because people run into these situations. If what I’ve written or what I’ve thought about can help somebody else put in that little bit of a gap between something bad happening–someone saying something mean to you, or someone doing something that annoys you–that gap between that stimulus and your response to it–and the quote by Victor Frankl is one of the things I used in that post as a point of reflection… Between that stimulus and response is our freedom to choose our reaction. Writing about it, thinking about it–bringing your conscious or more positive or more loving mind to bear on it–really really helps.

I should say that it is also possible to use all of this writing and blogging to descend into a vicious circle of feeling really really bad. For example, if you wanted to take this as an opportunity to rant about all the things that are going badly in your life, and how miserable you are and all that stuff… Being able to look back at your archive will probably make you feel a lot worse. It’s a powerful tool. Be careful with it. Try to focus on the things that you’d like to see, because people do tend to find what they’re looking for. I like to focus on the really really good stuff, and I’m surrounded by it, surprisingly enough.

HT: Very true. We actually had a speaker last week talking about the “law of attraction” and she basically says the same thing. From a spiritual, metaphysical perspective, what you focus on, you attract into your life. You’re a great example of someone who’s very positive, and you’re surrounded by positive influences.

SC: I wouldn’t go so far to call it the “law of attraction”, which I don’t quite subscribe to. I’d say that you get better at seeing the things you’re looking for. For example, if you’re writing about the things that you’re grateful for–which is a great practice, by the way, if you need cheering up or if you want to make your life extra happy–if you’re writing about the things that you appreciate and are grateful for, then you get better at recognizing and appreciating those things. If you write about how you want to improve things, then day by day, you’ll find more opportunities to improve your life. It’s amazing when you build that habit of asking yourself these questions, or looking for the bright side of things… You do get better and better at it. And why, yes, I do have a blog post about this too. I think I called it the martial art of happy-do.

Tune in next Thursday for the next part in this series! I’ll add new entries to the Discovering Yourself through Blogging page to make it easier for you to find them.

Hat-tip to Holly Tse for organizing this interview! At the end of the blog series, I’ll put them all together in a text file and a PDF that you can read easily, and I’ll add insights you and other people might share along the way. =) (Find previous entries) Here’s the ninth chunk!

Holly Tse: People might think, okay, Sacha, you’re Generation Y, you’re in your twenties… What can you talk about motherhood? Do you want to share about your experience?

Sacha Chua: I can’t talk much about motherhood. I’ve got a sneak preview here. I have a stepdaughter. She’s 13. What I’m learning from that is that kids are learning all these incredible things. We’ve started doing math study groups. We nudge her to learn more about spelling and math and science and all of these things… But just watching what she’s learning… She actually has a blog too. She updates it sporadically. She talks about what she’s learning at school and her favourite video games and all these other things.

Just looking at how people are learning, and learning from their stories as well–that’s incredible. Whether you have kids or whether you don’t, whether you’ve got nieces and nephews or you don’t, whether you’re learning from your coworkers or people who are older than you, there’s so much you can learn from other people’s stories.

It’s a little difficult for people to tell everybody all the stories that might be relevant to them. It’s such a good thing when you can come across people who are also in the habit of sharing their stories with anyone in the very efficient way of doing it through a blog.

Tune in next Thursday for the next part in this series! I’ll add new entries to the Discovering Yourself through Blogging page to make it easier for you to find them.

Hat-tip to Holly Tse for organizing this interview! At the end of the blog series, I’ll put them all together in a text file and a PDF that you can read easily, and I’ll add insights you and other people might share along the way. =) (Find previous entries) Here’s the eighth chunk!

Sacha Chua: Writing is a tool for thinking, because it slows things down enough for you to look at it. As I’m talking at my usual nervous speed here, things are flying by pretty fast, right? I’m not going to remember a lot of these things until I go back and I write things down and I think through, hey, what did I want to say here, or what else do I want to do… Thought and speech and life move by so quickly. If you slow things down enough to write just a little bit about it, then you have something more to work with. I didn’t know that when I was in school. I’m glad I learned that, and I want other people to discover just how useful that is, because life moves too fast, and it’s great to be able to slow this down.

Have you ever noticed that life also goes too slowly?

HT: It can, yeah.

SC: Especially when things are changing just a little bit at a time. So you’re looking at your son, for example, and he’s changing. He’s in the early years, so he’s changing a lot, every month, but you’ll get to the point where today is kinda like yesterday, and the next day is kinda like today, and the day after that is kinda like the day before it. All these little changes are harder to see, but if you’re writing, you’ve got that record – even if you’re writing once a week about what you’re seeing and what you’re observing – then you can look back and say, “Oh yeah, a year ago, you were still learning how to speak.” “Oh yeah, five years ago you were still learning the multiplication table.” “Look at how far you’ve come.” Imagine how much he’s learned since then!

Life goes too fast, but it also goes too slow, and so writing becomes your way to get it to work at the pace at the pace that you can work with.

Tune in next Thursday for the next part in this series! I’ll add new entries to the Discovering Yourself through Blogging page to make it easier for you to find them.

Hat-tip to Holly Tse for organizing this interview! At the end of the blog series, I’ll put them all together in a text file and a PDF that you can read easily, and I’ll add insights you and other people might share along the way. =) (Find previous entries) Here’s the seventh chunk!

Holly Tse: Now you mentioned that when you had a written journal that you wrote it in rather sporadically. I know with your blog, you write more often. Do you have a recommendation as to how often someone should blog?

Sacha Chua: As often as you’d like to. Which is to say that you should never beat up for not writing often, and you should never beat yourself up for forgetting to write. It doesn’t matter if you come back to it after a couple of months or whatever.

The thing that really helps me write regularly is that I don’t just use this as a way to look back. I don’t just see it as a way to build audience or do other things like that. I use my blog as a way to figure things out. Whether it’s “Do I replace the dead battery in my laptop? What are the pros and cons… Do a cost-benefit analysis…” (turned out to be worth it, so I did go ahead and do that) – so, making decisions, or whether I want to use it to do a quick review of what happened in the last week, what do I want to do in the next week, how do I want to improve things a little bit further… to things like, here’s a little thing I’m going to forget, but I’m going to need it sometime in the future, so I’m going to stick it in here so that I can Google it. This has happened. I have searched for stuff, found the answer on my blog, completely forgotten that I’d written it, but have been so glad that I did.

So yeah, write as often as these situations occur to you. I write whenever I’m trying to figure things out, or when I want to remember, or when I want to share something with other people. Let’s say somebody e-mails me a question I think other people might be interested in the answer to. I’ll write it on my blog and send them a link. That way, it’s there for search engines. It’s there for other people who want to share it…

There’s always those stories and tidbits. It’s not that you’re going to have any lack of material. There are a lot of stories you can tell. If you take the story that you care most about telling, and you do this as often as you’d like to build the habit… I block out time daily now, because I get fidgety if I don’t write for a long time. Block off some time to do it, whether it’s daily or weekly, or whenever you feel like doing it, whenever you’ve got a story to tell or something to figure out, and write.

HT: So you don’t need to be a skilled writer, like a journalist, to have your own blog.

SC: You don’t get to be a skilled writer until you write. This is something surprising, but it is true. You don’t expect to sit down at your computer and be the next Stephen King or Stephanie Meyer or whoever else you want to look up to. But you don’t get to that part until you write. Even if you never get to the part of being a professional Writer (with a capital W), the fact that you’ve got these notes and they make sense to you–maybe they don’t make sense to anybody else, but they make sense to you–even if they don’t make sense to you after half a year… As long as you’re going through that thinking process, it’s already okay. You don’t have to win a Pulitzer Prize, you’ve just got to write about your life.

HT: I think it’s a great time for you to share how you did in English class in school, and why–

SC: I did terribly in English class in school. I’m particularly good at taking standardized tests. It’s a little bit of probability and you rule out a couple of questions and all of that stuff… Anyway, what happened was that I did really well on the entrance test for my school, so they put in Merit English. Merit English consisted of sitting around in a circle with other similarly “gifted” students discussing English literature. Which is all very nice and good, but wasn’t something I really was interested in. Even then, I read a lot more nonfiction than I read fiction. So we were sitting around this circle discussing the Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and the irony therein… As I was telling you in our previous chat, back then, I was, “I’m a programmer. I don’t do irony. I want things to mean what they say and say what they mean.” So writing for me got stereotyped as this terrible effort to write something–an essay, a book report, a term paper–that ended up being measured against somebody else’s yardstick. You’re writing for somebody else, a teacher who… I felt like I was making stuff up. I’ve since then made peace with these teachers. (Facebook friends, we’re talking, we have conversations and all that…)

But it took me until past university, when I figured out that writing is a great way to learn about life. I went from taking my technical notes to writing about this cooking thing can be actually (inaudible) sometimes… So I was writing about my CookOrDie project. Writing about that, and writing about all the other things I was learning, was the thing that unlocked it for me. This idea that writing isn’t just something you do in school!

Tune in next Thursday for the next part in this series! I’ll add new entries to the Discovering Yourself through Blogging page to make it easier for you to find them.

As the de facto blogging geek in the family, I’m keeping an eye on my blog and three other (mostly inactive) blogs:

• My blog
• Friends of Manila Zoo
• The Business of Photography
• Adphoto Pressroom

I need to monitor comments that slipped through spam filtering, WordPress version updates, and so on. Fortunately, I don’t have to regularly come up with content for all four!

I wanted to make it easier to check comments on multiple sites. Instead of checking each site regularly or configuring them to send me e-mail (too much e-mail!), I used Yahoo Pipes to combine the blog comment feeds from each site into one main feed. Then I added that feed to iGoogle, along with gadgets for weather, calendar, and mail. Tada! Dashboard.

Do you manage multiple WordPress blogs? How do you stay on top of them?

Hat-tip to Holly Tse for organizing this interview! At the end of the blog series, I’ll put them all together in a text file and a PDF that you can read easily, and I’ll add insights you and other people might share along the way. =) (Find previous entries) Here’s the sixth chunk!

Holly Tse: So, I have to ask you then… When you started blogging, or even today, do you ever sometimes read your posts and go, “Man, I’m boring, and oops, I think my grammar’s funny”?

Sacha Chua: Occasionally, I let embarrassing typos slip through. A lot of the times, I’m looking back at my posts from two years or six months ago and I’m thinking, “I wrote that?” Most of the time, it’s a good “I wrote that?” though. Sometimes it’s a “Wow, I’ve come a long way since then” kind of “I wrote that?” But it’s fascinating because when you give yourself enough time to be unfamiliar with the things that you’ve written down – which means that you’ve been writing for a while and you’ve made a habit of it – and you have it in a way that you can refer back to, not like… So, in my pre-blogging days, I kept a journal sporadically. Most of the time, I’d get a fourth of the way through a notebook and then I’d misplace it, or I’d lose interest in all that stuff, and it would be hard to go back to those notes again.

But with a blog, especially with a blog that’s backed up, I can go back to old stuff. And that’s how I can see, oh yeah, here’s where my thinking is different now. Back then, I used to think that having a relationship would get in the way of the cool things I want to do with my life. Now I can see that having a good relationship can support the things I want to do with my life. You get to do that kind of spot-the-difference thing, and that helps you learn even more about who you are and who you want to be.

So yeah, I’ve had those moments. I’ve had bugs in my published code. I’ve embarrassing typos. I’ve had places where I was just plain wrong, and places where I’ve changed my opinion, but that’s part of being human. All in all, I’m really glad I’ve got that record.

Tune in next Thursday for the next part in this series! I’ll add new entries to the Discovering Yourself through Blogging page to make it easier for you to find them.

Hat-tip to Holly Tse for organizing this interview! At the end of the blog series, I’ll put them all together in a text file and a PDF that you can read easily, and I’ll add insights you and other people might share along the way. =) (Find previous entries) Here’s the fifth chunk!

Holly Tse: What would you advise them for someone to get started? What’s the quickest way to get started?

Sacha Chua: I think the quickest way to get started is to ditch your expectations. A lot of people think: Oh, I’m going to start a blog, but it has to be really interesting, and it has to get plenty of comments on the first day in order for it to be worthwhile. That doesn’t really happen. What you want to do is you want to write just for yourself. Whether you want to start off writing a private blog or a journal, or maybe you want to just go ahead and tell stories even if no one’s around to listen to them… It’s already worth it, just for you. It’s already worth it if you can write down a single thing that you learned that day, or once small thing that you would like to do better the next day. If you can keep doing that, then you’re going to get better at remembering all these little things that you would’ve forgotten. Being able to get a sense of perspective about how far you’ve come. Being able to figure out, okay, how can I build on these improvements further?

I think that if you change your expectations to that–so instead of thinking, oh, I’m going to write this, but then I have to be famous and then people have to comment, and get to be like a New York Times columnist–to: I’m just going to write about my life. Something small. It doesn’t have to be profound. It doesn’t have to be interesting. It’s okay to bore yourself. In fact, you might as well do that, because you have to dig deeper to find all these things that only in hindsight turn out to be interesting.

Anyway. It’s okay to bore yourself. It’s okay to write small, simple things, just slices of daily life, just questions and ideas to help you grow. That is totally okay.

You don’t see a lot of that advice in books about blogging because they’re all focused on–well, not all, but many of them are focused on how people can grow side businesses through blogs, or how they can change their search engine rankings. You know what? You can use a blog to just write, to explore, to ask questions, and maybe connect with other people, and that is totally all right.

HT: Now, it’s interesting that you mention that you may bore yourself at first. You said that you need to dig deeper to find the interesting gems. Can you share more about that, please?

SC: This is totally something that happens. You don’t understand these patterns until you start writing. You know how you end up talking about some topics again and again, because it turns out those are the things that you’re really interested in? Or you might think, oh, I think I’m going to be interested in sewing, but then if you look at what you actually do day by day, it doesn’t really rank high on your list. When you start capturing these things in your life in a form that you can look back on, whether it’s keeping track of how you’ve been spending your time or going back over your archives and seeing what you write about, the things that you keep coming back to–the things that you keep talking about, the things you keep writing about–those are the things that have a lot of interest for you. The more that you think about them, the more you learn about them. I can write about a lot of things again and again, and I’ll keep learning something about them. I can write about time, I can write about personal finance, I can write about cats… There’s just so much to untangle, to discover about these things. It’s okay to write about something again and again because there’s something more you can learn from it, and there’s something more you can share with other people.

Most of this will be boring, especially if you haven’t had a lot of practice writing. The first few times around, you’ll be thinking, oh, my grammar is kinda funny and I’ve got typos here and there, and it’s boring. No one is ever going to read this. I’ve looked at my blog archives. I sat down and read through everything–not in one sitting–but I read through every single post that I’d written. From 2002 to 2007, I was writing about technical things that were probably interesting to just me and maybe five other people. Anyway, it was there. It was only later, after I’d figured out more in this process that I realized that okay, here’s where I don’t agree with other people. Here’s where I want to explore something different. It’s only when you can write past that, when you can tell the difference between what you’re supposed to think and what you actually think, or where you are and where you want to be… And you don’t get there without thinking a lot about it, without writing it down.

Writing down is important. If you’re just thinking about it, you can fool yourself into thinking: this is what I’m really interested in, this is where I’ve got a clear opinion. When you write it down, you’ve got to be honest with yourself, and then you find out whether you’re making sense or not. Most of the time–especially in the beginning–you’re not going to make sense. That’s okay.

Tune in next Thursday for the next part in this series! I’ll add new entries to the Discovering Yourself through Blogging page to make it easier for you to find them.