sacha chua living an awesome life

In my dreams of wild success, I am not an executive, not a manager, not a consultant, not a seller. I am a maker.

I don’t architect complex systems. I build on the human scale: small, simple tools that make individual people’s lives better.

The mechanical translation of designs and diagrams to code has moved to other countries. Development is seen as less valuable, less interesting, less glamorous. There must still be opportunities for invention, for finding a need and solving it.

I love the concrete progress of checking requests off my list, delighting people, and building something that saves people time and effort.

This is interesting for me, because I’m learning that my happiness map can change, and there’s always more to learn. It turns out that I’m more passionate about coding than about coaching people on collaboration or helping executives learn about emerging business trends.

Maybe work is like happiness. It’s not about the goal, it’s about the journey. I enjoy what I’m doing. I enjoy what I used to do, too. There are multiple ways forward.

Like the way I learned to not stress out about “potential” in life, I need to learn how to not stress out about “potential” at work.

I don’t have a clear path for myself yet. I haven’t picked a life out of a catalogue and said, “That’s who I want to be.” I haven’t picked a job description and made that my goal.

I don’t know. There, I admitted it. This might discourage people from investing in my career. Who wants to groom someone for a particular field and then have them cross over into a different one? But I’d rather be clear about figuring things out than pretend that I’m certain.

I love what I’m doing. I’m passionate about what we can do at IBM as we learn how to work smarter. I enjoy helping people brainstorm and innovate. I’m exploring this with IBM because I’m in the right place at the right time, and I can help make bigger things happen.

But I want my life to also include rolling up my sleeves and making things myself. At some point in my life, I want to build systems that people will enjoy using.

Maybe I’ll take a sabbatical in a number of years. Maybe I’ll free up time to do this as a hobby.

Who knows? Maybe I’ll find more role models for this other path, and my dreams will expand to include what I’ve learned from them too.

What do you see in your dreams of wild success? Does it match how you’re living?

It’s almost time to make my personal business commitments. It’s a great time to think about what I want to do with IBM.

There are the existing goals and commitments that come down through the management chain. I want to work with IBM on making those happen because I believe in what we’re doing, and I believe that the work will help me grow. Saying yes to those is easy.

And then there’s the really important question of what I want to do with IBM, if IBM can be this platform that lets me make a bigger difference. What I want to do with IBM is to build a world where work really does flow like water, where people can do and be their best wherever they are.

If we can figure out how to work with the system—if we can figure out how to align and support even a fraction of the energy and talent in this 400,000-strong organization and our extended ecosystem—imagine how much we can help change the world and how much better we’ll work. Look at how much the world has already changed in the past few decades. Wouldn’t it be amazing to find out what we could do if we could help people fully use their talents?

So what does that look like, long-term?

• People can easily and effectively collaborate with people around the world. This means knowing how to reach out and find resources, work together, and deliver results. Challenge: Lots of growing pains right now, especially as work moves around the world and companies shift towards more diverse workforces. People don’t know which tools to use when, and we’re still figuring out how to work together.
• People can work on what they’re good at and passionate about. We can get better at connecting people with opportunities and adapting to changing needs.
• People learn and share as much as they can. Learning from other people and sharing what we’re learning becomes a natural part of the way we work.
• People work well. We communicate clearly, without too much jargon. We communicate as people, not hiding behind passive words or inhuman abstractions. We connect with each other.

How can I help make this real?

• Consulting: I can help organizations, communities, teams, and individuals change the way they work by helping them learn about tools, practices, and success stories. I can coach people on how to develop new practices. I can look for what people are doing well, document those practices, and explore how they can work even better. If I can get really good at consulting, I can help people identify the strengths that they can build on, recognize and share what works, and plan how to address the challenges that get in the way of collaboration.
• Practising relentless improvement: I’m good at looking for small ways to improve processes and building tools to help people work more effectively. If I can get really good at relentless improvement, I’ll be able to identify key changes that help people work much more effectively, shape a culture where people love practising relentless improvement themselves, and formalize and share improvements through processes and tools.
• Learning and sharing: I’m good at learning tons from people around me and sharing what I’m learning through presentations, blog posts, and other ways to scale up the knowledge. If I can get really good at learning and sharing, I’ll be able to inspire people to learn and share, map out what people need to know, share lots of insights, and organize it so that people can find what they need.
• Connecting: I’m good at connecting people with other people, resources, and tools. This is partly because of a wide network and broad exposure, partly because I deliberately look for ways I can connect people, and partly because I work on taking notes and thinking of associations. If I can get really good at connecting, I’ll be able to not only help people build on others’ work instead of duplicating effort, but also push the network knowledge into the organization so that people can find relevant people and resources without being bottle-necked by connectors. I could also get really good at connecting and then use this to help clients understand complex technical systems.
• Showing the big picture: I’m good at showing people how they fit into the big picture, why their work matters, what else is going on, and what they can do next to grow. If I can get really good at helping people see that, I’ll be able to shape people’s motivation to work, help people stay passionate and engaged, and show what the next steps are.

It’s interesting to look at this list. Although I enjoy building systems and developing my technical skills, I think I’ll get closer to what I want to do by focusing on the business side. My technical aspect helps me because I can automate tasks, crunch numbers, analyze information, and build tools for remembering things. For the kinds of challenges I’m really curious in exploring, though, technology isn’t the limiting factor. Technology-wise, things change really quickly, and I’m confident that people can build what we need. What we’re limited by is our ability to change and learn.

What does that look like in the short- and medium-term? What can I work towards for my career?

One of the quirks about planning my career is that I don’t need to work towards a specific position in order to make the kind of difference I want to make. I can already work on this from where I am. My current role already involves all of those capabilities to some extent, and I also contribute outside my official job role. My work with Innovation Discovery helps me learn about all sorts of interesting people and interesting projects. My mentors teach me about consulting skills and facilitation techniques. My tasks provide me with plenty of opportunities for relentless improvement. Learning and sharing, connecting people across the organization, helping people see the big picture and the next steps—these are things I do for work and fun.

So, how can I make the future even better than today?

• Better alignment: The more closely my goals and my team’s goals are aligned, the more resources I can tap to make things happen, and the better IBM and our clients can take advantage of what I’m good at.
• Immersion: If I focus on developing one capability (or a set of related ones), I can create and share more value faster than if I spread myself out. For example, if I focused on doing lots of technology adoption coaching, I can build lots of resources around that instead of making gradual progress in lots of areas. (Although touching so many different areas of work also helps me with connecting…)
• Better inspiration: If I work with other high-performing teams that do connection and collaboration really well, I can learn tons, share insights with other teams, and bring my own talents to the mix. If I work with different kinds of high-performing teams, I’ll learn different things. For example, I’m currently learning a ton about working with decision-makers and spanning boundaries within IBM, because those are the things my Innovation Discovery team excels at. I wonder what other teams can teach me, and how they might benefit from cross-pollination.
• More leverage: I can learn about contributing through a team in addition to contributing as an individual. People-management sounds like it’ll take a lot more work than individual contribution (and management seems less secure, too!), but it seems to be a good way to break past the limits on how much value I can individually create. I have 24 hours in the day, like anyone else, but if I can figure out how to be a great manager and enable lots of other people to work at their peak, we can create more collective value. I love learning about management and leadership, and I’m curious about what’s possible. I don’t know enough about this because most of my mentors are individual contributors, so I don’t have a good sense yet of whether management would be a good fit or how I can go about exploring it.

There are many paths that I can take. Here are a few paths that people have recommended I think about:

• Working towards becoming a client IT architect: David Ing recommended this because it involves low travel, takes advantage of my strengths in connecting the dots and keeping complex systems in my head, and helps me build a deep understanding of a particular industry (probably public sector?). It’s a revenue position, so it should keep me relatively safe from resource actions, and it will allow me to continue contributing to IBM.
• Focus on collaboration, maybe figure out some kind of rotational program between client-facing and staff positions: I would love to alternate between focusing on helping our clients adapt and helping IBM adapt. If I have the capacity to do this simultaneously, even better. Working with IBM will help me deepen my understanding and empathize with client challenges, while working with clients will help me share what we’re learning and broaden our perspectives. David Singer suggested this because being client-facing means not having to worry too much about other people cutting budgets, while the rotational aspect will help me learn more.
• Working towards becoming a master inventor. Boz suggested this one because I love helping people come up with and improve ideas, I love learning, and I love connecting the dots.

Staff positions are interesting and I know a lot of people who do incredible work. I love the variety of my internal and external network and the things I learn from constant interaction with clients, though. So it looks like I’ll focus on growing as a consultant and figuring out how to be the bridge. Following an individual contribution path will give me more flexibility, I think, than growing into people management.

I’m fascinated by small businesses and entrepreneurship, but an organization of IBM’s scale and influence can do so many amazing things. I want to figure out how to work with an enterprise like this to make things happen. So I’m going to figure out what I can do with IBM, because I want to make a bigger difference than I can make alone. =)

What does that mean for the next year and the next few years?

• I can deepen the work that I do with Innovation Discovery by volunteering to take on more responsibility for engagements, or by applying relentless improvement to the social networking and collaboration topics that clients are interested in. Scaling the program up is interesting and creates value, but if I’m going to focus on that, I need to figure out how to focus more on the consulting or sales aspect instead of taking the training/staff approach so that it’s in line with my long-term goals.
• If I want to focus on the client IT architect path, I can find a mentor and look for engagements that will let me immerse myself in other kinds of systems and how to work with them. Yes, even if that means stepping outside my wonderful open source / web application world. After all, our team is good at application services, so I should take advantage of those competencies.
• If I want to grow towards the strategy and transformation practice, I can find mentors, shadow or support engagements focused on Web 2.0, and build more thought leadership inside and outside IBM around collaboration and technology adoption.
• I can deepen my technical leadership capabilities by sharing what I’m learning, exploring more virtual leadership skills, and helping people become better technical leaders and individual contributors.

What are some next actions that I can take?

• Find role models in strategy and transformation, learning and knowledge, and other areas that I’m considering. Find out what their work is like and look for resonance.
• Negotiate my job role with the Innovation Discovery team so that we can deliberately develop certain capabilities.
• Invest into learning and sharing as much as possible around collaboration and change, learning about different industries along the way.

If I can build lots of understanding and insight around collaboration both within and outside IBM, then I can help people learn and experiment within the company, and I can inspire clients to learn and experiment as well, and I can (I hope!) convince clients to invest in partnering with IBM so that we can help them create value much faster.

So that’s what I’m thinking, and now that it’s outside my head and in a form I can share, I can work with other people on making it clearer.

Now the hard work begins: clarifying, creating, collaboratig, learning, sharing… =)

How much of a role does luck play in success? A lot. Malcolm Gladwell goes into this in great detail in his book Outliers, which explored the systemic, situational factors that contribute to people becoming wildly successful.

To call it just luck is to ignore the hard work that people put into recognizing and taking those opportunities. To shrug it off as a life lottery shuts one to the possibilities that stretch before them. We have many, many stories of people who have changed the world from unconventional starting points.

Stop worrying about luck. You’re always luckier than someone and not as lucky as someone else.

When I was growing up, I used to feel pretty darn lucky. I stumbled across computer programming at an early age. I had an aptitude for it, which developed into a passion.

Then I heard about people my age—or younger!—in other countries doing even incredible things, and I felt insecure. Maybe I’d missed out. Maybe I’d never be able to catch up.

It wasn’t even the bright stars like Marcelo Tosatti, who became the Linux 2.4 stable kernel maintainer in 2001. We were both 18 then, and he had attained my then-pinnacle of geek coolness. It was the fact that in other places, ordinary students were hacking on incredible things. I remember feeling despondent about the fact that our operating systems course in computer science had a reputation for being more theoretical than deep-in-the-guts-of-an-operating-system practical, and I felt envious of universities like Georgia Tech, where undergraduates experimented with Linux on the Compaq iPAQ PDA. The Internet could get me curricula and whatever resources people shared, and it could let me participate in open source development, but it couldn’t give me those hallway conversations and interesting project experiences people no doubt enjoyed there. There were the coop opportunities that I would never get to explore, because I wasn’t in Silicon Valley or Waterloo. People I wouldn’t bump into. Mentors who might never find me.

Then I decided I wasn’t going to let being in a third-world country stop me. And I learned, and I hacked, and I ended up committing code to the Compaq iPAQ bootloader, which was actually my first public commit with my name on it and which made me feel that hey, I could stand up there with everyone else. (Story: I had sent in patches almost every day for a week. This was either final exam week or the week before that, so coding was a great way to procrastinate studying. ;) It got people’s attention, and Jamey Hicks of the Compaq Research Labs actually called me up, long-distance, to find out who I was and how they could help me keep hacking. That felt awesome.)

And then I decided to stop stressing out about prodigies and possibilities and uneven distributions, and instead work on helping people surpass me by sharing as much of what I learned as I could.

After I finished my degree, I taught computer science in university to students who grew up with even better tools and better resources than I did. The things I helped them learn how to build in first year were better than what I built in first year. Awesome!

Do I feel a twinge of envy when I see a 12-year-old girl publishing books and speaking at TED? Yes, a little bit. But it’s drowned out by a feeling of inspiration for doing it, pride that the world makes it possible, and excitement about what can come next.

You know what’s even more inspiring? The people who discover their passions late in life, and make a difference anyway. The people who develop and deepen their understanding into something that changes the world. Life is not a sprint. It’s a marathon, and we’re all in it together.

There will always be someone luckier than you are, and someone less lucky. There will always be someone who knows more and someone who knows less. It’s what you do with what you have that makes you who you are. It’s okay if you didn’t start ten years ago. Start now. Find and develop your passion.

Thanks to Mylene Sereno for the nudge to write about this. Hang in there! Everyone starts somewhere.

It was sunny and almost spring-like on Sunday. I rode my bicycle 5km to the Artscape Wychwood Barns, shedding my winter jacket and fleece along the way, enjoying the ride in a light turtleneck and thermals. That 5’C is warm must speak to the reality-distorting powers of winter, which will make a return in the next few days. But today was like spring.

I wanted to check out the Seedy Sunday event I’d learned about on one of my favourite Toronto gardening blogs. The converted barn bustled, hundreds of visitors flipping through seed packets and comparing cultivars. I slipped into the attached greenhouse for a seminar on seed starting, marveling at the rows of young plants sheltered from the cold. After wandering around to see what was available, I bought almost twenty seed packets: cherry tomatoes, assorted carrots, bok choi, bitter melon (W- loves it), and various herbs.

With the exception of bitter melons, equivalents for the herbs, fruits, and vegetables I plan to grow are readily available at a supermarket that’s within walking distance. I can buy bitter melons in Chinatown or ask W- to pick up some from Lawrence Market on his way home from work.

But there’s a certain thrill in turning over the soil and watching earthworms squirm back into the ground in search of more nutrients. Seeing something grow and remembering that just last week that patch of soil was brown and bare. Tasting something fresh and knowing that it doesn’t get much better than that.

Also, the supermarket doesn’t stock purple carrots or yellow cherry tomatoes. =) And I hate throwing away herbs if all I need is a small bit of it (I’m talking to you, parsley). Much nicer to just snip a few from a plant that can keep on growing.

This year, I’m learning how to plan ahead. I’d like to start as many plants from seed as possible instead of buying plants from the nurseries of nearby hardware stores. It promises to both be cheaper and more wide-ranging. It’ll be fun. And if it doesn’t work out, I know where to get plants that are ready for transplanting, and I know those will work in our garden. =)

I suspect gardening’s one of those hobbies I’ll grow into. I want to be like that older lady down the street, the one who grew rows and rows of bok choi, tomatoes, lettuce, and other assorted goodies in the front yard of an apartment building. I always peeked at her garden whenever we walked by.

I enjoy gardening a little bit now, and I can imagine how much more fun it will be when I can appreciate the difference between cultivars and know what kind of environment I should provide to help the plants flourish. It all begins from a seed of interest.

Looking back on her years, my mom wondered what she did with her free time and why she can’t identify any particularly physical hobbies. She ran a business and raised us—that must count for a lot of time and quite a lot of exercise. But of the different hobbies she explored, she wrote:

Embroidery, sewing, pottery, carpentry, cooking, baking – I’ve tried them all but could not go beyond introductory levels – there was not one that I was passionate about to pursue through the years.

What I’m learning about passion is this: most of the time, it doesn’t spring full-formed from the ground. Passion comes from skill and appreciation. The more you know about something, the more you can appreciate it. It’s okay to be interested but not passionate about something as you explore it.

I’m interested in gardening and sewing. I enjoy baking, and I’m getting better at it. They’re not my passions yet, but perhaps someday, they will be. I’m passionate about helping people connect and collaborate, and about sharing ideas through writing and presenting. It took me a while to be able to really enjoy it, but now it totally rocks.

Passions develop from seeds of interest. They benefit from a little care, thought, and time. Maybe some potential passions have longer “times to harvest” than others. Some seeds don’t germinate at all, or they grow and they don’t flourish. Others are like zucchini and can take over the rest of your garden if you don’t pay attention. Some passions go well with other passions, like companion plants. Other passions don’t go well together at all. So you do a little planning, but you can’t plan too much, because life happens and you just need to figure out how things work out.

Sometimes you need to put in the right support structure. Sometimes you need to build a protected environment – a greenhouse of time and motivation – so that new interests can survive until they’re self-sustaining.

Cultivate the ground, plant seeds, and see how things grow. Keep what you like and think about replacing what doesn’t work out. And enjoy the process, always. It’s not about the fruits of your labour (although that’s yummy!), but also all the experiences along the way.

(Tangent: My dad is an awesome gardener of opportunities. ;) )

There are three stories I refer to again and again: taking the first circus, making more pots, and building a cathedral. They form part of my approach to life.

Taking the first circus

My parents told the story of the first circus to us when we were growing up. On her blog, she wrote:

It came from an anecdote that my husband and I read in the Readers’ Digest about a little girl in a town soon to be visited by three circuses. Her father explained to her that the family was not financially able to take her to all three circuses and could take her only to one. The first circus would be just a small one, while the third would be the best and biggest, and presumably the most expensive. “I’ll take the first circus,” she said, and so her parents took her to the first. A few months later, when the second circus came, the family’s finances had improved and they were able to take her to the second. And finally, they found that they could afford to get tickets to the third and most expensive circus.

Harvey Chua, I’ll take the first circus

The story of taking the first circus reminds me to take opportunities when they come up. I tend to be conservative and frugal, but I’m also good at figuring out when it’s time to take that leap.

Making more pots

In a previous blog post, I wrote:

There’s a story about a pottery teacher who divided the class into two groups. A student in one group would be graded based on the quality of one pot that they turned in at the end of the semester, while a student in the other group would be graded based on the sheer number of all the pots submitted throughout the semester. At the end of the semester, students in the second group–those measured only on quantity–had produced better pots than those who had focused on quality. In the process of creating a large number of pots, the second group had learned from their mistakes, while the first group had been paralyzed by endless theorizing about what a perfect pot would be.

Me, Of sewing more dresses and making more pots

I use the pot-making story a lot. For example, when I struggled with writing, the pot-making story reminded me to just get something out there. The pot-story reminds me that even mistakes help you move towards mastery.

Building a cathedral

Several builders were on a construction site. A visitor asked the first worker what he was doing. The first builder replied, “I’m laying bricks.” The visitor asked the second, who replied, “I’m building a wall.” The visitor asked the third, who proudly answered, “I’m building a cathedral.”

The cathedral story reminds me of the power of vision. Good vision can turn any work into a joy. The lack of vision can make even the most talented lost.

The story also tells me that vision can be created by anyone. Even though I’m a recent hire, I have a strong vision for what I want to help the company and the world become, and I have a strong vision for myself and who I want to grow into.

Circuses, pots, and cathedrals – shorthand for how I live. What are your key stories?

Thanks to Paul for the nudge to write about this!

I had a wonderful conversation with my manager’s manager the other day. She wanted to know more about what I was working on with Innovation Discovery, and the other things I was doing at IBM. I told her the story of how I joined IBM after getting to know so many incredible people throughout the organization. Two and a half years later, I’m even more in love with the amazing people, talents, and opportunities within reach, and I’m doing work that’s exactly in line with my skills and passions.

“You’re so lucky,” she said.

Yes, I am. But it doesn’t have to be luck. I think we can help many, many people have these kinds of experiences, particularly as we get better at bringing down the walls of geography and organizational division. I want to figure out how other people in IBM and in other organizations can have these kinds of wow moments.

It reminded me of the “career best” moments described in The Extraordinary Leader: Turning Good Managers into Great Leaders. “Career best” experiences are the highlights of people’s work—when they contribute something of significance and they feel successful. The concept was researched by Kurt Sandholtz and further developed by Gene Dalton and Paul Thompson. Dalton and Thompson wrote, “If individuals don’t understand their unique strengths or interests, they don’t have any basis for deciding whether a job or an assignment make sense for them.” Knowing what to say no to is as important as knowing what to pursue.

In The Extraordinary Leader, Zenger and Folkman share a model for leadership sweet spots: the intersection between competencies, organizational needs, and passion. If that sounds familiar, it’s because that Venn diagram is very useful in all sorts of life situations. I’ve used it to think about the sweet spots in life, too. It’s the intersection between what you do well, what the world needs, and what you love.

What would it take for more people to find those sweet spots for themselves?

I think self-awareness plays a huge role. I think a lot about what I like and don’t like, in what I excel and in what I’m merely mediocre.

Communication matters, too. My manager, my organization, and my clients know what I care about and what I’m good at. I can show people how what I do meets the organization’s needs and our clients’ needs.

My blog is my primary tool for both self-awareness and communication. Blogging solutions, tips, ideas, and reflections helps me think through things and share them with other people. Reading what I’ve written and what others have shared helps me understand even more.

So this is one of the reasons why I’m passionate about helping people connect and collaborate. The more we can encourage people to reflect and share, the closer they can move to their sweet spots.

There’s still a lot of fear and resistance when it comes to sharing. People are afraid of embarrassing themselves, or they tell themselves that they don’t have time, or they think they don’t have anything to share.

I used to say that maybe the reason why I share so much is that I’m new. I’m learning a lot. I don’t have the established networks or reputations that other people have. I don’t have a choice – I need to share as widely as I can, in order to catch up.

But not many new hires have embraced sharing, and they’re having a hard time finding their sweet spots. So maybe it’s not that. Besides, I’ll keep sharing even as I grow in responsibility and reach.

What is it, then? What can help people find those sweet spots?

How can we help people build those serendipitous relationships with unexpected mentors?

How can we help people reflect, share, and grow?

Or should I focus on finding people who already have that spark – who already know it’s possible, who know a little bit about their sweet spots, and who want to grow even more – and help them do amazing things?

What if more people could be fully engaged? How wonderful could this be?

The Extraordinary Leader: Turning Good Managers into Great Leaders John Zenger and Joseph R. Folkman, 2009 ISBN: 9780071628082 This is an affiliate link, but please feel Google Books: The Extraordinary Leader: Turning Good Managers into Great Leaders

“Do you have any good questions to encourage people to set goals?” my mom asked. She’s been having a hard time getting people in the office to set personal and business goals. She’s tried worksheets, acronyms like SMART, motivational speakers,

I suggested providing a menu of suggestions, if people had difficulty answering open-ended questions. Generic suggestions –> concrete personal goals –> actions they can take to achieve that goal. It can be hard to dream from scratch. Ideas, guide questions, and role models help a lot. They’re like training wheels for setting goals.

When I’m brainstorming what I want to do in life, I find that reading and listening helps. I look for what resonates with me, and then I choose elements to incorporate into my plans.

What helps you set goals? How do you help other people learn how to set goals?