sacha chua living an awesome life

I was thinking about my experiments with entrepreneurship the other day, and I realized that I have a lot of room to learn things. Books tell me it takes about five years for many businesses to shake out the bugs and settle down; even then, only about half of new ventures survive the first five years (according to US statistics). As a relentlessly optimistic person, I immediately read that as, “Cool! Half of new ventures succeed in surviving their first five years!”

Anyway. Five years is a long time. This is what five years looks like:

Five years is longer than my university degree. It’s longer than the time I worked at IBM. If I work hard and I work smart, I should be able to learn lots of things in five years.

Things I am curious about:

• How to help people, groups, and organizations adopt different ways of working: This is a challenge! It’s difficult to help one person change, much less a team, much less a community. But it’s essential because otherwise people will miss out on all these productivity improvements from technologies or processes. They’ll waste time. They’ll get frustrated. They won’t make the best decisions they can make. I want to help people work better so that they can focus on things that make the most of their skills and passions.
• How to document and improve processes: Many organizations struggle to grow beyond one person or a small team. So many things aren’t written down. There are few processes in the beginning. Then there’s no time to document operations because there are too many things to do. Besides, people don’t feel like they can write down what they’re doing, or they’re too close and they forget what else other people would need to know in order to do their job. I can interview people and watch how they work, write those steps down, and make it easier for people to scale up by delegating, automating, or eliminating the things that they do.
• How to communicate effectively and engagingly: People want to learn, but they don’t have the time to read lots of books or listen to lots of talks. I want to help people learn more effectively. People like the things I sketch or write about, and they like my presentations too. I want to learn more about things that help other people, and I want to get better at organizing and sharing what I learn.
• How to build a scalable, sustainable business: I want to build a business that goes beyond the time = money equation. More than that, I want to learn how to systematically build these businesses, so that I can help other people do so too. That’s because there are a lot of people whose talents and skills aren’t sufficiently used because of their time requirements, their location, or other factors. I want to help more people have these options and create the kind of value they can create.

Five years should be a decent length for a self-made program. Maybe a Master of Business Awesomeness? Here we go. =)

“Congratulations! What’s your new business about?” “What will you be working on?” “So, what do you do?”

I don’t know yet.

One of the most challenging aspects of starting something on your own is this uncertainty. We expect people to have clear, compact descriptions for what they do, even if we don’t understand it ourselves. For example, I got away with describing my work as, “Oh, I’m a web developer,” or “I’m a consultant on emerging technologies and collaboration,” or sometimes even the catch-all, “I work with IBM”. This last introduction often needed little explanation, eliciting an “Ahhh, I see,” from glazed-over networking contacts who probably filed me in their mental category for “people who do stuff with computers.”

What do I do? What do I want to do? What challenge do I want to address? What problem do I want to solve? What vision do I want to realize?

I’m not sure.

I’m tempted to be prematurely certain. I’ve listened to my fair share of “Oh, I’m working on a startup” people who confidently declare that their audience is “Well, everyone, I guess…” and who deflect further questions with, “We’re keeping our plans secret for now.”

I’m tempted to flee into the familiar. Consulting, web development with Drupal or Ruby on Rails… People ask me for these services, and it would be easy to focus on that: well-defined, well-understood. I know I can deliver when it comes to that. I also know that those services won’t take me all the way to where I want to go.

It’s okay to be uncertain. It’s better to admit that I’m figuring things out than to fake this. It’s better to draw people into the experiment than to present a façade. It’s all right to say the words that terrify most people when they try to use those words themselves: I don’t know.

Besides, it’ll be fun to find out.

I might not see the light at the end of the tunnel, but I can figure out some of the steps along the way. Writing is my favourite tool for figuring out complex branches. I want to write about what I’m learning: entrepreneurship, the steps to setting up shop, ways to figure out what you want to do with your life (or at least the next year).

This is a good time, a useful time. I shouldn’t rush out of it. I deal with this scale of uncertainty rarely. I never agonized over what course to take in university. I’ve been into computers since childhood. I remember the ups and downs of searching for a research topic for my master’s thesis, but I had a supervisor’s help. Even marriage was the logical (and emotional =) ) follow-through on a relationship that was already clearly a good thing. IBM was the same. This entrepreneurship, this uncertainty – this is me stepping up to bigger risks and bigger opportunities for discovery, having done well with the training wheels of past circumstances.

It’s not actually that scary when I can call the uncertainty out of the fog and name it. I know it’s there. I know it’s normal. I know it will pass, too. Each step I take throws light on something, even though some steps add more questions. If I do this right, each step won’t be about getting closer to a definitive “I know this to be forever true”, but rather towards springboards for more experimentation.

“So, what are you going to do?” That’s always what people ask after I tell them that I’m leaving IBM in order to experiment with entrepreneurship.

“I don’t know yet,” I say. I explain that I haven’t yet experimented with anything that could be seen as competing with IBM, following our Business Conduct Guidelines – and that covers so much ground. I’m leaving without a solid business plan or a proven opportunity, just itch and curiosity and the sneaky suspicion that there’s probably at least one business that I can build considering how others have succeeded.

The first thing I’m going to do after I leave is to create a structure for experimenting. Despite the associated costs and paperwork, incorporation makes sense to me. Limiting the downside – building that part of the safety net – makes it easier to experiment.

How can I go about testing possible business ideas? There are some conventional things I’d like to try.

Writing: I love reading and writing. If I can combine that with drawing and design, maybe I can create engaging e-books that will help people save time and be inspired. People have earned money from information products, so this has worked for other people before. Some have even succeeded without sleazy marketing tactics and without preying on people’s greed, which is encouraging! =)

I can test this by researching topics I’m interested in, writing blog posts and chapters, and eventually building up to e-books for things that people might buy. I’ll be writing notes anyway, so I may as well invest time into making them more usable for others.

Coaching: I’ve gotten so much value from writing, presenting, and experimenting with life. People find these things intimidating. Maybe I can help build scaffolds so that people can gradually try things out, succeed, and then gain enough confidence to do things on their own. (And I can write about what we learn along the way!)

Self-tracking: I like the results I’ve been getting from tracking my life, and I’m curious about building and tailoring tools for other people’s lives. Can I turn that into a recurring source of income? We’ll see.

Sales and customer relationship management for development: Quite a few developers have told me that they don’t particularly enjoy this part of freelancing, and it’s one of the parts I’m actually the most curious about. Maybe I can get started by helping my friends take better care of their clients and leads, and then see if the arrangement works out well.

Community analysis tools: Considering the success of the Lotus Connections toolkit within IBM, it might be interesting to make it more available to other companies. Right now, some of the functionality is available externally in a plugin for Lotus Notes, but things are still difficult to adopt. If I write a new implementation from scratch and I build the tool based only on externally-accessible information, that might be okay. It’s been quite a useful service within IBM, and it would be great to share it with more companies.

Testing ideas: How meta is that? If I’m going to be testing lots of business ideas and possibly working with other people to help them test their business ideas, then it would be great to gradually build processes and infrastructure for doing so.

Freelance consulting and development: I want to focus on the other initiatives first before I get into freelancing. I’m reasonably confident that I can figure out freelancing (especially with a little help from my friends). The kinds of work I’m considering (consulting, web development, technical writing, data migration) are similar to my work at IBM, so there’s less uncertainty to resolve. Custom work often means fewer opportunities to build compounding value, and I’d like to see if I can build a business that can scale up beyond my time.

I’m looking for things in the sweet spot: the intersection between what people need, what I’m good at, and what I love to do. If you’ve been reading my blog for a while, you’ve probably picked up a good sense of what I’m interested in and how I might help you (and lots of people like you!). Is this list missing something that would help you even rock more?

So I’ve taken to calling my personal dashboard Quantified Awesome, and I even have the domain name for it. The name is fun, and it reminds me that this is data tracking for a reason: to live an even more awesome life. Right now, I use it for time, clothes, library books, fruits and vegetables, stuff, and measurements. I’ll add more as ideas come to me, and as I use the tools, I’ll flesh out the interface.

Quantified Self Toronto meetups have been fantastic for getting more ideas and for sharing what I’m working on with other people. I think this kind of tracking would be the kind of geeky thing that might be interesting for the DemoCamp Toronto crowd, too.

DemoCamp demos tend to be mostly startups, and I’m not at the point of turning this into a business yet. I remember they had lots of fun with my Livin’ la Vida Emacs talk, though, and I’d like to inspire people to apply their skills – programming, designing, whatever – to their own lives. I’d also love to connect with other people so that I can be inspired by their examples. People who are into this sort of thing in Toronto are probably already part of Quantified Self Toronto, though, so there may not be that much extra value in presenting something mainly for connection purposes. If I’m going to focus on either inspiring or collecting feedback, then, I want to make sure that people’s activation costs are low.

So, what would it take to get this to the point where I can create a lot of value in 10 minutes of demo and five minutes of Q&A? (Or if this is anything like my other talk, a short demo derailed by people anticipating jokes, turned into a general truth-is-funnier-than-fiction thing. =) )

I’d probably want to have lots of data driving lots of visualizations, because they’re easier to see on a big projected screen. If I build this up over a few months, I’ll have the data to let me ask interesting questions and report on behavioural changes, which will be really useful. I may want to shift from using RaphaelJS to using Protovis or a similar library for visualizations so that I can take advantage of the source code examples for a wide range of charts.

Another key thing would be to either allow other users or share the source code (maybe both! less hassle for helping people get started). That way, it’s not just about “Hey, this is cool! But you can’t use it unless you build your own.”

Opening this up to people will probably mean splitting my project time into development and support. It’s a trade-off: would the increased feedback be worth the support load? Depending on people and expectations (here there be bugs!), it might be okay. It might be a good idea to slow down and apply the same discipline we’re adopting on our work projects, too: test, test, test. I think it might be worth gradually opening this up over the next few months, with an eye towards demonstrating it at DemoCamp when I think it’ll help lots of people get started. It’s also highly likely that there’ll be a second Quantified Self conference, so that might be something good to plan for as well.

There are plenty of companies focused on making money by helping people track their life (health, mostly). Me, I want to be able to ask questions about life and figure out how to answer them, I want to inspire other people to try doing that too, and I eventually want to help build tools to make it easier for people to do so. Besides, it’s a great way to practice my development skills without giving in to the temptation to spend all that time on work instead. =)

Testing business assumptions: I like this definition from Eric Ries’ book, “The Lean Startup”:

A startup is a human institution designed to create a new product or service under conditions of extreme uncertainty.

I’ve come to realize that the most important part of this definition is what it omits. It says nothing about the size of the company, industry, or the sector of the economy. Anyone who is creating a new product or business under conditions of extreme uncertainty is an entrepreneur whether he or she knows it or not and whether working in a government agency, a venture-backed company, nonprofit, or decidedly for-profit company with financial investors.

I like the idea of treating work as an experiment that reduces uncertainty and helps us do something better. I want to get better at bringing out those uncertainties and planning how to resolve them.

Visualizing data and making better decisions: I like collecting data, bringing them together in dashboards, and figuring out visualizations that can help people make better decisions. Last year, I implemented a visualization for a Drupal project so that investors could see where the gaps in funding were. I’m working on some visualizations for my personal dashboard. I think it’s useful to be able to help people find patterns while avoiding false positives or visual noise.

Building systems that fit the way people need to work: I like the way we tailored the last project based on constant client feedback. I like saving people time by building systems that help them work more effectively instead of requiring a lot of repetitive work.

Hmmm…

I’ve been fiddling with Quantified Awesome, this personal dashboard that I’m building so that I can keep track of what’s going on in my life and use that data to make it even more awesome. For example:

• Tracking my time helps me make sure work doesn’t tempt me too much, and that I make time for both personal projects as well as connecting with other people. It also helps me improve my time estimates: How much time does it really take to walk to the subway station? How instant are instant noodles?
• Tracking library books reminds me before they’re overdue, helps me collect my reading history, and gives me a greater appreciation for where my tax dollars go.
• Tracking my clothes helps me remember to wear different types of clothes more often, makes it easier to donate items I don’t typically wear, and encourages me to try new combinations.
• Tracking the produce we get from community-supported agriculture helps us avoid waste.
• Tracking stuff helps me remember where infrequently-accessed items are.

It turns out that other people are interested in this too. 21 people have signed up through my “I’ll e-mail you when I figure out how to get this ready for other people” page, and my mom wants to use it too. That’s awesome!

Now I have to go ahead and actually build it so that other people can use it. That’s scary.

And like the way I deal with other scary, intimidating, procrastination-inducing things, I’m going to list my excuses here, so that I can shine a light on those assumptions and watch them scurry away like the cockroaches they are and, if necessary, squishing them with a well-applied flipflop.

• Excuse #1: Idiosyncrasy. The way I work might be really weird, and other people may not be able to figure out what to do.
  • What’s the worst-case scenario? “I have no idea how this works!” I end up with lots of crufty special cases because I can’t figure out how to reconcile different ways of working.
  • What’s the best case? I adapt the system to the way other people work, and I get inspired by what they do. I build a lovely, flexible web app and API.
• Excuse #2: Risk. I’m fine with loading my own data into an experimental system, but if I mess up and delete other people’s data, I’ll feel terrible. Also, they might trigger bugs.
  • What’s the worst-case scenario? Catastrophic data failure, nothing saved.
  • What’s the best case? Regular backups help me recover from any major mishaps, and careful coding avoids more common mistakes.
• Excuse #3: Support. I’m going to spend more time handling bug reports and feature requests, and less time building little things that might be useful only for me.
  • What’s the worst-case scenario? People get annoyed and frustrated because I’m currently focused on other things, like my work.
  • What’s the best case? I get the system to become mostly usable for people, and I use my discretionary time to build more features. People’s requests inspire me to build more stuff and create more value.
• Excuse #4: Documentation. I’ll need to write documentation, or at the very least online help. This means confronting the less-than-intuitive parts of the system. ;)
  • What’s the worst-case scenario? I describe what currently exists, get frustrated because I want to improve it, and end up cycling between updating documentation and improving the system.
  • What’s the best case? I describe what currently exists, and end up improving it along the way. I build online help into the system so that it’s easy to change. There’s a blog that helps people learn about updates, too.
• Excuse #5: Offline access. A web-based time tracker might be of limited use if you don’t have web access often. I’ve been working on an offline HTML5 interface, but it’s still buggy.
  • What’s the worst-case scenario? Early testers try it out, but get frustrated because of the lack of offline access.
  • What’s the best case? I figure out the HTML5 offline thing. Someone else might be interested in building a native app, and we work together on fleshing out an API.
• Excuse #6: Impatience. If I bring people on too early, they might get annoyed with a buggy system, and lose interest.
  • What’s the worst-case scenario? People give it a cursory try, and give up in annoyance.
  • What’s the best case? Early users are extraordinarily patient. We figure out a minimal viable product for each of them – the simplest thing that could possibly support what they want to do. Over time, things keep getting better and better. Also, I build a decent export interface, so even if people move on to a different system, they’ll still have their data.
• Excuse #7: Privacy and control. A bug might accidentally expose people’s information, which is not fun. I also don’t want to have to police the system for objectionable content, considering the thumbnail uploads.
  • What’s the worst-case scenario? Someone’s private notes get accidentally published.
  • What’s the best case? People sign on knowing that I might have bugs, and don’t save any super-secret or inappropriate information on the system.

Okay. I think I can deal with that. So, what are the smallest, least-intimidating steps I need to take in order to get closer to opening up?

• Write a quick test to make sure that people’s data will stay private. We’ll make people’s accounts private by default, although mine will stay mostly-public.
• Make a list of things that people should be able to do right now. (Not including new functionality!) Gradually write tests to nail down that behaviour.
• Make a list of things that people may want to do some day. Eventually set up an issue tracker.
• Enable Devise’s invitable feature so that I can set up accounts for people easily.
• Doublecheck backups.
• Bring one person on. Then the next, then the next…

It will still be better than nothing, it will be a good learning experience, and participation is purely voluntary anyway.

One step at a time.

Nudged by @catehstn‘s recommendation of my blog to @Tending2Entropy as an example of goal planning in personal life, I updated my learning plan with the things I’m planning to learn next year.

It was easy to come up with a quick outline. There are so many interesting things I want to learn. The tough part, however, was thinking about what I might actually get to do.

What does my cognitive surplus look like? I wanted to get a sense of how much discretionary time I actually had on a regular basis. I have about 20 weeks of data since I resumed time-tracking near the end of July. So that my numbers wouldn’t be thrown off by the vacation we took, I focused on the last eight weeks (graph: 2011-10-16 to 2011-12-11).

Over the eight-week period, I got an average of 3.5 hours of discretionary time per weekday and 7 hours of discretionary time per weekend day. I can simplify that to an average of 4.5 hours per day, which comes out to 1642 hours for 2012 (not including vacations, which include more discretionary time).

Around 40% of discretionary time was used for social activities. Let’s say that another 30% is a buffer for breaks and other things that come up, leaving 30% for focused learning. That gives me a time budget of around 500 hours. I want to do more than 1,000. Hmm.

Prioritization is important. I can focus on the things I want the most, then see how the rest of the year shakes out. Plans will change anyway, and estimates are flexible. My first few priorities for personal learning:

• Android development, so that I can save time syncing and get more of the data I want
• Goal tracking (handy for keeping the rest of my time in line)
• Behavioural change (trying small experiments)

Another way to deal with the gap is to shift more time. Over those eight weeks, tidying took about 0.7 hours / day, and cooking took about that much time too. Let’s say half of future tidying and all of future cooking is outsourceable at $20/hour. That’s an additional 384 hours for a trade-off of $7,680 after tax, which is a large chunk of money. I’d rather save the money and let it compound for later use, especially if I time chores so that they take advantage of low energy. Besides, cooking and other chores are partly social time too.

I can shift time in other ways. For example, I can use commuting time to learn more about Emacs, Org, and Rails, so that will help too. I can also use walking time to record life stories if I can figure out a workflow for dealing with audio or short notes.

Good to know what the size of the box is, and how much I want to pack into it! Let’s see how it all works out…