sacha chua living an awesome life

I don’t trust my memory. One way to deal with this is to force myself to use it more, like the way some people wipe their cellphone address books and make themselves commit phone numbers to memory. Another way is to learn mnemonic devices and use vivid imagery, such as those suggested in Moonwalking with Einstein. A third way is to arrange my life so that I don’t have to remember as much. I trust this way much more.

So I build these memory scaffolds around me. Appointments go on a Google Calendar that’s synchronized on all the devices I use. I hired an assistant who sets up meetings and doublechecks that all the information is there. I use Evernote to capture more and more of what I come across: websites, snippets, e-mails, pictures, scans. Blogging gives me an external public memory, which is great because people and Google have reminded me of things I’ve completely forgotten about. I have checklists for extraordinary things like packing, and I have them for mundane life as well: morning routines, evening routines, which sites to update when WordPress comes out with a new version, what to do every month… I practise confessing that I don’t remember someone’s name, and I winnow out from my life the people who take offense or who put people on the spot. I carry a belt-bag because I was always setting my purse down somewhere that I could not remember. I give things away, label cupboards, take inventory of drawers.

I’m learning not to fight the fuzziness of memory. I could be stressed out by forgetfulness, but that just makes things worse (Wikipedia). This is normal. I can work around it. Every lapse becomes an opportunity to make something better.

How do you deal with the fuzziness of memory?

Failures can be caused by all sorts of factors, but an embarrassing failure exposes the unfortunate decisions along the way. This is a wonderful thing. While it’s easy to shrug off other kinds of failures as bad luck or bad timing, embarrassment is a clue that there are many things you can improve. It is that ever so human emotion when you know you haven’t been your best – and it points to what better looks like.

For example, last Thursday, I’d scheduled a 3pm call to talk about sketchnotes. I had noticed some power problems with my phone and had drained my battery several days in a row. I usually managed to squeak by with my backup battery, but I had misplaced it on Wednesday night, so I didn’t get to charge it. I tucked a USB cable into my backpack so that I could charge my phone off my computer – or at least I thought I did, as I couldn’t find that when I searched my bag right after settling in. I switched to low-power mode and that seemed to slow things down, so I figured that 70% charge would probably be enough to get me to the afternoon. After a meeting, I checked on my phone… and found it practically dead. I bought an overpriced USB cable from a nearby electronics store and plugged it into the computer. The cellphone was discharging faster than it could charge, though, even though I wasn’t using it. And then it was time for the call.

After a few attempts, I had to admit defeat and reschedule. Fortunately, the person I was going to talk to was very understanding, and we managed to sort things out over Twitter. Even with that resolution and my subsequent return to regular work, I was stressed. I could still feel that rush of adrenalin after trying to scramble some kind of a solution. Although I knew I could still do well, I also knew that stress messed with my brain and made me more likely to overlook other important things.

I also knew that this lingering stress was unnecessary. We’d rescheduled. The worst-case scenario would probably have been being perceived as a flaky unprofessional person, but that was temporary, bounded, and not part of who I was. I could do something to make it better. (Locus of control – useful thing to know about!)

So I made a list of many things I could have done to make it better, and that helped me clear my mind a little. I got back to work, focusing on some analytics that I knew would give me the pleasure of a few small wins. I was tired enough to leave my scarf behind and then to not be sure about whether I locked my cabinet (needing two extra trips up the elevator to retrieve one and confirm the other) – but at least I remembered before going on the subway. Glass half full.

I still went to fitness class, where W- met me with a bag of clothes and my shoes. It was a struggle to get through that class as well – oh no, more moments of suckiness! – but I got through it anyway. It’s important to learn how to do things even though you don’t feel like it.

Anyway, back to the good things about embarrassing failures: there are lots of things that I can fix, and I can prioritize them based on effort and benefit. Phone-wise, I found out how to use Titanium Backup to uninstall a large number of applications at once. My battery life has improved. I’ve ordered an extended battery, which should allow my backup battery to be a backup again. Routine-wise, I’ve created checklists in Evernote. Checklists are wonderful. Life-wise, I think it’s time to make myself a little more space – sometimes these are symptoms of trying to pack in a little too much.

This is good. I’m learning to not beat myself up, and to celebrate the ways I can improve things and move forward.

Another step forward, perhaps, would be to be able to do this before embarrassing failure highlights the need – like the way defensive drivers (and cyclists, and walkers…) constantly scan for opportunities to go wrong and plan what to do. To balance that building of a strong safety net (several safety nets, in fact) with the ability to let go and fly – that will be a wonderful thing to learn.

It’s my dad’s 65th birthday today. He’s having a party with sixty-five guests, and from the pictures that people were posting on Facebook, they were having a lot of fun. =)

I wish I could’ve been there. My dad is the sort of person who’s best in person. He has all these wild stories and projects. Besides, I think Skype makes him sad. I think Skype makes my mom sad too, but she puts up with it better, and so she tells me stories about what she and my dad have been up to.

Fortunately, my dad loves taking pictures, so I can catch glimpses of his life through Facebook. He writes well, too. You can hear his voice when he writes. And other people like telling stories about him and taking pictures with him, so it’s very easy to keep up with his adventures.

W- is at work and J- is at school. It’s a good thing I blocked off my calendar and left myself some space to breathe. I cuddled up with the cats and got through another bout of homesickness. Well, mostly. It’s hard to deal with this. I’m getting better at reminding myself why I’m here. We’re saving up for flights and some other major expenses that are coming up this year, so we can’t visit nearly as often as I’d want to. Even if money were no object, J- has to be in school, so W- needs to be here, so I want to be with him. It would be nice if our extended family were all in one city, but it is what it is. I could no sooner turn my back on this than turn my back on myself. The double-digits-below-zero weather isn’t helping my mood any, but the cold air turns out to be bracing and refreshing, so I might go out for a walk later.

My dad is awesome and I can’t wait to see what he’ll do next. I’m also looking forward to hearing about another year of grandfatherhood. Wonderful stories are ahead.

It’s traditional to make a wish around birthdays. Even if it’s not my birthday, I’m going to make a wish anyway. I have to figure out what I want to wish for, because otherwise this sort of distance is only going to get harder, not easier. I wish we can get better at celebrating life while being less distracted by the distance. That’s all the distance is – something that gets in the way while there are so many other good things to focus on. I have to work on that.

In the original version of the Little Mermaid, the potion that gave the mermaid legs also made her feel like she was walking on sharp swords. I’m lucky in that it doesn’t feel that way all the time. The trick is to keep dancing even when it does.

Anyway, it’s my dad’s 65th birthday. He and my mom show me that it’s possible to live an awesome life, and so I will too.

Wake up early? I feel smug. Survive an exercise class? Smug. Bike in winter? Smug. Try a new recipe (particularly a vegetable-focused one)? Smug. W- and I joke about smugness – a playful take on (self-)satisfaction, for me – as one of my key motivators.

This smugness is deliberate. I like celebrating the little wins. Habit changes are easier when they become part of your identity. The more I take these new habits into myself, the more I reframe myself as the kind of person who does these things habitually, the easier it becomes to maintain that behaviour. Smugness is part of that. It’s about telling yourself, “Aha! I am the sort of person who can make this change.”

Pat yourself on the back every so often. Cheer your own self on. That might make it easier. As long as you’re light-hearted about it and don’t actually become convinced of your own superiority, you should be all right. Then you can keep stretching yourself by inching your smugness threshold higher.

a snippet from my 2006 annual letter

I’m tremendously lucky to have family and friends who humour me by writing letters. On several occasions, I’ve asked for letters as presents, and they’ve obliged: before my trip to Japan, before my trip to Canada, on various birthdays. Letters from my mom and dad sustained me through my bouts of homesickness, and letters from friends in far-off places have given me glimpses of other people’s lives.

I’ve kept almost all those letters in binders. I lugged that first small collection through Yokohama and Tokyo during my six-month internship there. Then back to the Philippines, then (bolstered with more letters and wishes from friends) tucked in one of the three suitcases that I brought to Canada, anxious and hopeful and ready to start my master’s degree. The long-distance relationship I was in grew, then dissipated. I kept the letters, although I didn’t look at them for a while. Through other relationships and friendships, more letters arrived.

I have many letters, but not all. I don’t have the ones from high school. I remember prolifically writing letters then, with a boyfriend who was also epistolarily-minded and who often slipped letters into my locker in addition to writing me e-mail. (We ran into Eudora’s per-message size limit, that’s how much we wrote.) I don’t have all the quickly-dashed-off greeting cards. I don’t have the letters I’ve sent. If I had thought about keeping a copy of my correspondence, it’s lost on forgotten hard disks, the way my private notes often become fragmented while my public blog survives.

It’s okay to have gaps in the record; I’m amazed that I have this history at all. My mom has a point when she urges me to print photos. The physical presence of an item nudges memory. A binder of letters can be rediscovered. A folder on a hard disk is easier to overlook. E-mail is not designed for printing, while a letter is written to stand by itself.

But a physical copy is limited to one place at a time. Whether the letters are in a binder in a basement cabinet or a box on a shelf above my desk, they’re still inaccessible unless I am there, unsearchable unless I flip through them. So I scanned in my collection over several hours during the New Year holidays – ringing in the new by celebrating the old, planning the way forward by remembering the path before.

Filed in Evernote, tagged by sender and by subject, these letters are reminders that people have taken time out of their day to share something. I’ve come a long way from home. I’ve gained much, but I’ve also lost some things along the way, and this might be one of those things I want to relearn. The rhythm of correspondence was broken for a while, and I’m curious: is it the shift towards Facebook, Twitter, and blogs? the cocooning effects of marriage? links made too tenuous by the dwindling of shared experiences? Or are these conversations that I can return to?

And other questions: Who was I that my friends took the time to write to me? What can I write to other people? What kind of a good friend was I then, and how do I build that again with those friends and with new ones?

I’m not precisely certain. I do know this: I remember in public because that’s the most reliable way that I can remember, but other people hold their stories closer to their heart. I have friends who are decidedly not on Facebook and who hardly have an online footprint. If I want to know what’s going on in other people’s lives, I need to ask. That could be why I’ve been having a hard time writing, the same way I prefer the indirection of blogging compared to the directness of e-mail. It seems presumptuous: “Please take the time to tell me about your life.” But the world is full of interesting people and I want to get to know them, so I can try.

I refilled my fountain pen and dusted off the prettiest stationery I could find, this Carta di Firenze set with a beautiful peacock-and-flowers pattern with powder-gold spots – another gift from my mom, to whom I wrote the first note. Then I wrote another note to a friend, and another, and another, and another, and another, until the creamy notepaper was used up. To make it easy to enjoy the pattern on the inside flap of the envelopes, I used stickers to seal the letters closed instead of sealing the flap all the way. Well, the letters may be mundane – I’m still re-learning how to write a letter – but at least the paper is pretty. I looked up the postage (it’s gone up quite a bit!), stuck on an assortment of stamps (another dusty collection I should get through), and put the letters in my bag. I tucked the surplus of envelopes into my newly-labeled “Envelopes” drawer, also quite full of the odds and ends of collections. (Why is it that there’s always this mismatch?) No more buying stationery until these cabinets are empty, and emptied in the best way possible.

Time to revisit books like A Woman of Independent Means (Elizabeth Forsythe Hailey, not the no-nonsense financial guide by Gail Vaz-Oxlade), Daddy Long Legs, and Yours, Isaac Asimov. Can you recommend any good epistolary novels?

Do you write letters? E-mail me at sacha@sachachua.com and let’s swap mailing addresses. I can’t promise that I’ll write regularly, but I think it would be great to learn this again: the art of letter-writing, and the art of being the kind of friend who writes.

“Eat more healthily” is a popular New Year’s resolution. It’s on our list too – a push towards eating more vegetables and less meat, exploring more variety, and developing kitchen skills.

Last Monday’s new recipe: warm lentil salad with sausages, which I found while looking for warm salads to enjoy this winter. Lentils have become one of our kitchen staples. W- makes rice and lentils in the rice cooker for a simple, filling weekday or post-gym meal. I wanted to find other ways we could prepare lentils so that we could play around with different tastes. I looked for a non-dairy salad that I could put together mostly with ingredients we usually have around, and the warm lentil salad with sausages on Epicurious fit the bill.

Ingredients:

• 2 cups French green lentils (13 oz), picked over and rinsed – replaced with 1 cup brown lentils and 1 cup green lentils, since that’s what we had
• 6 cups water
• 1 California bay leaf or 2 Turkish – 2 bay leaves of unknown provenance
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1 medium onion, finely chopped (1 cup)
• 2 carrots, cut into 1/4-inch dice (1 cup) – turned out to be more than a cup of carrots, but no big deal
• 2 celery ribs, cut into 1/4-inch dice (1 cup)
• 1 tablespoon finely chopped garlic – Yeah, right. I put in five cloves of garlic.
• 1/2 teaspoon dried thyme, crumbled – Didn’t want to get fresh thyme (it’s buried under snow), so I sprinkled some of the Italian seasoning we’re trying to use up
  1/4 teaspoon black pepper
• 1/2 cup plus 2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil – didn’t measure, just drizzled into the dressing
• 1/4 cup red-wine vinegar – substituted apple cider vinegar, because that’s what we had
• 1 tablespoon Dijon mustard – substituted regular mustard
• 3/4 lb smoked kielbasa or other smoked sausage (not low-fat), cut crosswise into 1/4-inch-thick slices – substituted mild Italian sausages roasted at 400F, not sliced
• 1/4 cup finely chopped fresh flat-leaf parsley

How I did it (although you should probably check out the real instructions if you want to try this):

1. In a medium saucepan (after having gone through several options from the cabinet), combine the water, lentils, and bay leaves, bring the water to a boil, and lower the heat to a simmer. Chop the other ingredients, checking the saucepan occasionally.
2. In a 12” skillet, drizzle some oil and sauté the onions and garlic for about a minute. Add the carrots and celery. Cook until slightly softened. Realize you’ve forgotten to add Italian seasoning / thyme, salt, and pepper; season the vegetables, mix them up, and cook them until softer.
3. Check on the lentils and salt them too.
4. After a few more minutes, the lentils should be tender. Worry about overcooking the lentils. Drain them and pick out the bay leaves as you see them. Mix the lentils and vegetables in the saucepan.
5. Contemplate whether to make this a vegetarian dish or to put in the sausages as well. Decide to go with the sausages. Look up how to roast sausages; put them in a 400F oven, turning them when you remember.
6. In a small bowl, whisk apple cider vinegar (or red wine vinegar, if you have it), mustard (or Dijon mustard, if you have it), and salt and pepper. Add olive oil, whisking constantly, until it looks about right.
7. Pour the dressing into the saucepan. Mix it in and taste it. Realize that it doesn’t quite taste sharp enough, so make up another batch of dressing and put that in too.
8. Keep the lentils on low heat while waiting for the sausages to finish. Try it out before announcing the availability of dinner to others in the household.

I’m getting better at trying new recipes out. I can decide: I don’t have that, so let’s use this instead; hmm, this needs a little more bite; okay, this needs to be put on hold while I finish this. (Hooray for the Internet, though!)

My next steps in lentil awesomeness: buy lentils in bulk from Kensington Market or a good bulk food store, and experiment with growing them in our backyard. (Did you know that Canada is the world’s largest export producer of lentils, according to Wikipedia?) Buying lentils in bulk should work out cheaper than the fancy 500g organic lentil packages we get from The Sweet Potato. We’ve had fun growing peas and beans, so lentils might work out well in our garden too. Exciting!

Epicurious: Warm lentil salad with sausage

It’s odd to notice the shifts in the value I create for people. For example, tonight, Girl Geeks Toronto is hosting a discussion on women in technology. Initially invited to be one of the panelists, I suggested that I might create more value by sketchnoting the discussion so that the conversation can continue beyond the evening. A friend suggested that I submit a talk for TEDxOCADU in January. Talking to the organizers led to the possibility of my sketchnoting the event instead of speaking at it.

Of course, sketchnoting doesn’t preclude participation. I prepared sketchnotes for my “Shy Entrepreneur” talk at the Toronto Reference Library before I gave it, and I could put in the extra time to prepare a presentation for an event I’m already sketchnoting. But a prospective speech tugs at my attention at random times, fills my brain with odd audio snippets and visual concepts, and generally makes life a little crazy before the event. I like the fact that sketchnoting lets me connect with lots of people without the stress of having presentations rattle around my brain for weeks.

Speaking and sketchnoting meet different goals. Speaking positions you as an expert, while sketchnoting allows you to reach more people in the course of continuing the conversation. My primary goal for public speaking in the past had been to ease the process of meeting people – the introvert’s ultimate conference hack, because people start conversations with you instead of you starting the conversations yourself. Channelling other people’s ideas is a different sort of contribution from sharing your own experiences. It’s worth experimenting with, especially as I continue to build skills and collect stories for future talks.

And of course, there are all these other ways I can create value – building systems, writing, social business consulting, and so on – but my attention can be on only one thing at a time, so I can leave the other capabilities for people to discover through my blog or through interaction. I can build a network of people to refer opportunities to as well.

If life is a start-up, perhaps this is a pivot – recognizing that your value proposition is changing in response to what people want and need.