sacha chua living an awesome life

Because people like my sketchnotes so much, I’ve signed up for the Rockstar Scribe course to see if I can learn how to sketchnote even better. I’m curious about layout and figure and colour, and I’m sure this will be a good skill to develop over the next twenty years. I could probably learn a lot practising on my own, but I promised myself that I’d invest more in tools and education, so here I am!

Our first assignment was to draw a visual introduction. Among the guide questions was this one: What is your life philosophy in three words?

So this is me, at least right now. =) Learn, share, scale.

Rockstar Scribe (from Alphachimp University) – affiliate link, non-affiliate link

One of the people I met through the MaRS Entrepreneurship 101 course asked me what brought me to the sessions, since it looked like I was doing well already.

I like going to tech and business meetups that have talks. I get so much more than most people do out of them, I think. For many people, presentations are like lottery tickets. Sometimes the talks are directly relevant to their work, and sometimes they aren’t. Sometimes they’re at the right level of experience, and other times, talks are too basic or too advanced for them. Sometimes an hour’s talk more than pays for itself. Many times, though, it’s an hour that they won’t get back. Their return on investment is highly variable.

I like getting multipliers of value out of my time. I spend the same hour that everyone spends listening. By taking notes, though, I make myself listen more actively, create something that I can use to trigger my memories, share with other people, and add more to my blog archive. I used to take a lot of text notes. Over the past two years, I’ve switched to taking more sketchnotes because:

• drawing is quieter than typing (no distracting clackety-clack noises!), and it’s obvious I’m not doing e-mail
• drawings are easier to quickly review than text notes – you can get an almost visceral reminder of things in a glance
• drawings are easier to share with other people who might not take the time to read a liveblogged post, but who’ll find drawings interesting

So that gives me even more ways to get value from the time I have. Here’s the Evil Plan I shared in my e-mail response about why I go to the entrepreneurship course:

…I mainly attend for sketchnoting practice and long-term network building. Every session gives me exactly what I want: better real-time drawing skills, an excuse to delight and follow up with experts, stronger connections with event organizers and business resources, serendipitous encounters with potential entrepreneurs in person and online, the ability to give something to a pretty large audience, and material for blog posts and compilations. :) All for maybe two hours’ total investment of attention and a few subway tokens… As far as Evil Plans go, I suspect it’s a good one. ;) Five, ten, twenty years down the line, it will probably lead to something wonderful.

Some people are more productive because they require less sleep – my dad belongs to this category. Me, I like getting between 8-9 hours of sleep each night, averaging 8.3 hours over the past 321 days (standard deviation of 1.6 hours/day). That means I just have to get more value out of the time I have – not so much multi-tasking, but getting multiple kinds of value.

Right now, it’s easy to squeeze out more value from the dish sponge of life. I’m in the awesome part of the learning curve, where I’m getting tons of value out of going to things because I learn so much. When I hit the plateau of mediocrity, things might be different – or maybe I’ll get better and better at structuring things so I’m always getting lots of different kinds of value from the same hour: learning, skill-building, relationship-building, knowledge-sharing… In 2009 I wrote about how my interests complement each other, and the new ones I’m picking up – drawing, publishing, learning how to build a business – snap right into that framework. But there’s so much more to learn about learning and living. What can I possibly know even now, at 29, with so much more of life ahead? This is nothing, a tiny fraction of what’s possible. It’ll be wonderful to keep learning, to find out what it’s like to get even better at making the most of time. I’m looking forward to it. Any tips? Anything I can help other people learn?

I’d like to learn more about mobile development because there’s so much untapped potential when it comes to these portable devices that invite personalized, playful, touchable use. I think the next few years will be tremendously exciting, and I want to learn how to contribute to this future.

Mobile development is intimidatingly complex. Even if I focus only on Android development – and maybe even only on tablets that run Ice Cream Sandwich or later, for example – there’s so much to learn. There are so many possibilities to explore. It’s easy to get overwhelmed.

But I’ve learned about other large areas of study before, and I can figure this one out too. I’m getting better at ignoring the fact tht there are so many places where I could start, and just starting.

My plan:

Go through the tutorials until I can build things with a few hints. This will help me learn the basics.
Contribute to open source projects, then create and release my own. I want to learn both design and development.
Build more small apps. Release them and learn from the feedback.
Share what I’m learning through blog posts and maybe short e-books.
Graduate to paid apps or content? We’ll see. 

If I take it step by step, then it’s a lot more manageable. The more I learn, the better I can get at learning.

Many new fields are intimidating when you’re a beginner. That’s okay. Don’t let that stop you from starting.

Last Saturday J- was running late, so W- offered to drive her to karate class. She asked if she could skip it and said that she wasn’t really learning anything. W- suggested that she might practise for her upcoming test. She said that she could do that in the backyard. W- pointed out that she could, but she hadn’t been doing so, which is why it was worth going to the class. Besides, there’s always more to learn.

This reminded me of another conversation I had with a friend of mine. She was frustrated because she considered the projects she got at work to be beneath her – simple testing work, when she’d already had experience managing teams. I said that there’s always more to learn, and besides, it’s a good opportunity to do something really, really well.

Life is full of situations where you’re doing something you think you know how to do well already. It’s easy to settle for being bored or frustrated. Digging deeper is harder but more rewarding. When you can find something to learn and improve each time around, you grow.

I do a lot of “basic” things as a consultant. I write HTML and CSS and Javascript. I write technical documentation and user documentation. I prepare and deliver training. I answer questions and walk people through how to use the system. Everything I do gives me an opportunity to learn how to do things better.

I go to a lot of meetups. Some talks focus on beginners. Instead of getting bored, I’m glad I have an opportunity to create and share good notes. There will always be more beginners than experts, so I’m glad to be able to help more people.

Here’s a quote from page 23 of the revised edition of Peter Drucker’s excellent book, The Effective Executive (2006; affiliate link):

To every practice applies what my old piano teacher said to me in exasperation when I was a small boy. “You will never play Mozart the way Arthur Schnabel does, but there is no reason in the world why you should not play your scales the way he does.” What the piano teacher forgot to add – probably because it was so obvious to her – is that even the great pianists could not play Mozart as they do unless they practiced their scales and kept on practising them.

Don’t waste those moments.

It’s hard to get better without knowing what better is.

I want to draw better. What does better mean? For me, “better” means having a wider visual vocabulary for both individual concepts (icons? shapes?) as well as layout (graphic organizers? metaphors?). “Better” means cleaner lettering and more font or design choices. “Better” means being able to draw more things more recognizably, and to design pages so that they’re visually appealing as well as informative. “Better” means becoming more comfortable with colour and shade, and using them to emphasize what’s important. Someday, “better” might even include working with animation.

How can I learn how to draw better? Practice is a big part of it, of course. I can revise my previous sketches, and I can make new ones. I can also look at sites like Sketchnote Army for inspiration. I can collect graphic organizers and visual metaphors. For deliberate practice, I can draw lines, circles, and other shapes, and I can work on lettering.

I want to write better. “Better” means adding more vividness to my writing: picking just the right verb, noticing little details and fleshing them out, adding more specifics and more data. “Better” means pushing beyond clichés. “Better” means writing so that other people can learn more effectively – digging deeper to find things people might be curious about, organizing my notes so that other people can learn more from them.

How can I learn how to write better? Again, practice and inspiration. I can revise my posts and organize them into a coherent e-book or blog series. I can challenge myself to research and share a topic I’m curious about. I can read other people’s work and play around with their styles.

I want to connect better. “Better” means knowing more about people’s lives – it’s easy to know about mine, but I think it would be interesting to know more about people too. It boggles my mind wonderfully that I now have old friends here in Canada (by golly!). I’d like to cultivate more friends and build deeper friendships both in person and online.

What does your “better” look like?

It turns out that when I have more control over my schedule, I don’t fill it with development. I haven’t been working on open source or personal projects, much less client websites or applications. This is a surprise to my 2010 self, who figured she would spend the whole day coding if she could.

I spend most of my discretionary time learning instead: drawing, writing, Latin, business, life. Maybe it’s because I’m in the fledgling stage of business and there’s so much to learn. Maybe it’s because 3-4 days of consulting a week takes up a large chunk of brainspace. Maybe it’s because development won’t get me where I want to go in this short-term search for a business that can survive unpredictable schedules and the primary care of young children.

Learning time. Yeah, that seems like the focus that fits me. If I imagine days and weeks stretching ahead of me – maybe in half a year, after this consulting engagement – I can easily see myself spending time exploring ideas and sharing my notes. I’d want to plumb this, deepen my understanding of this, before I focus on something like development.

Self-structured learning time is intimidating, but I want to see if I can get past the initial anxieties and figure out things that work. Writers have been able to do so for millennia. Things will be okay.

I’ll still build things, of course. Code is a powerful way to crystallize learning and make it easier for people to do better. It also helps me ask questions that would be hard to answer manually.

Okay. I give myself permission to focus on learning after this. I know I’ll probably feel that itch to do something that creates immediate or measurable value for people. That’s okay. I might feel insecure at some point. That’s normal. But there’s so much I want to learn, and I think I’ll be able to stay motivated even without outside drivers. Worth trying it out and sticking with it through at least the initial bumps.

This will be fun!

(Thanks to Mel Chua for the nudge!)

The most fascinating thing I’m learning about business these days is the art and discipline of saying no. Many people aren’t comfortable with saying no. I’m practising how to say no – how to set clear boundaries and negotiate within them. There are a few things I say yes to: time with family, doing good work on my enterprise social software consulting engagement, learning new skills and ideas. I’m experimenting with saying no by default to all these other requests which don’t strike a chord within me.

It’s a good time to learn how to say no well, and when to say it. I have a main engagement that I want to be 100% awesome on, the savings to avoid desperation, and the terrific Best Alternative To Negotiated Agreements (BATNAs) of learning and discovery. It’s okay to turn things down, because I know I’ll use the time well. This is as good a time as any to become comfortable with choosing.

This is something I didn’t get to practise much as an employee, because there was often someone to whom I could defer decisions. Scope? I knew the project manager would keep me honest. Requests from different departments? I ran things by my manager to find out how to prioritize, and sometimes asked him to play the bad cop.

Now I’m in charge of my time. When I say no, it’s me saying no, not some process or some externally-set priority.

I don’t often say no directly, of course. There are many ways to negotiate something without saying no and without setting up a win-lose situation. I like thinking of it as being firm and professional, without being confrontational. It’s not rejection for the sake of rejection; more like nudging people towards others for whom they would be a better fit, more like figuring out how I really want to spend my time and focusing on that.

I like this. The process of saying no is the process of clarifying understandings and helping people find better fits. When I’m super-good at saying no, I’ll have a collection of templates that I can easily customize (I regret that I will not be able to speak at your conference because I limit my travel, etc.), and somehow people will end up happier than when they asked. That might be a tough one, but I can work on saying no thoughtfully.

Yes-to-everything is another approach much encouraged by blogs, books, and the occasional movie, but looking at that plays out in other people’s lives… I think it would drive me crazy. I wouldn’t be happy saying yes for the sake of saying yes, particularly as many of the things I want in my life are different from what other people want. I’m happy doing a few things well, building new strengths on old ones, experimenting with small steps and new directions (but not too many). This feels right.

My dad is probably the yes-est person I know. He’s amazing at making things happen. People get caught up in his ideas. He inspires yeses, and he says yes to life with way more intensity than I do. (People who tell me I’m energetic have never met my dad. ;) ) Even then, I’m sure he says no to some things – or does so by suggesting even better versions of the request, things that are more in line with what gives him energy.

Something to think about. What really is my default? It’s not actually no either, is it? I think it’s more along the lines of “Let’s find out, let’s find something that works for both of us, even if that means other people taking advantage of the opportunity”. Hmm…