sacha chua living an awesome life

I’m taking all of September off from consulting so that I can present at a conference, spend time with family, and work on other skills. This five-month consulting engagement has been absolutely wonderful. It turns out that you can create tremendous value as a generalist with technical, business, and design skills, and that good engagements help you refine and pick up even more skills. :) I look forward to returning for two days a week throughout October and November, but I also want to make sure I keep pushing myself to learn about business models. It’ll be a good adventure.

Six months into my business experiment, I’m delighted with what I’m learning and how I’m learning it. It was the right time to start. Earlier, I wouldn’t have had such a good foundation to build on. Later, inertia and comfort might have kept me where I was until I absolutely needed to shift.

I haven’t been able to focus my evening time and my personal days as much as I thought I might. I think it’s because my consulting work involves a lot of novelty and creativity – a good thing – and that means I focus on other things during the evenings. I should crunch the data to see what it has actually been like instead of just how I perceive the last few weeks.

I’m looking forward to doing a more thoughtful review over the Labour Day long weekend. Much to reflect on! :)

I’m curious about this because I’ll need it in order to scale, and because it’s one of those universal things. How do people learn how to manage? How can I learn? I’ve read tons of books and blog posts. I’ve heard lots of advice and stories. We have a sense of what good management looks and feels like, and we’re all too familiar with examples of bad management. How do you bridge the gap from theory to practice?

How do you grow into becoming a good manager or a great one? Do we leave it to people who figured out the rules in grade school – “natural leaders”? We don’t get lots of practice or lessons in managing, probably because it’s so easy to step back and let other people make decisions. But the lack of management skills can get in the way of making good things happen, so it’s good to learn how to manage.

What does it look like to consciously develop this skill of orchestrating people’s work and energy? How can you gradually learn it in low-risk situations instead of waiting for workloads to force your hand?

I want to learn more about how to align people and help them grow while creating more value than one could create alone. The world is this candy store of people with awesome skills and possibilities. There’s just so much out there that I’d like to be able to draw on.

On one of my consulting engagements, we have a high school intern who’s doing wonderfully. I’m delighted to have the opportunity to help pick some of his tasks and delegate some things I’ve been working on. I learn from the way he does things, and I enjoy looking for ways for him to make the most of his internship. I haven’t been paying much attention to my outsourcing experiments over the last few months, but I bet that I could learn a lot if I paid close attention to it, going beyond transactions to help people grow. I’ve done that in the past with other assistants, and I really liked the results.

Here’s what wild success might look like: I find good people and help them grow their skills, either working on things I’d like to see happen or good things that people are willing to pay for. Success would be a great fit between the person and the work that needs to be done. They might grow enough to be able to handle these things on their own, in which case I can grow a network of freelancers, or they might prefer the benefits of working with a team. I find clients who have flexible timelines (so that I have time to coach or even do the work if necessary) and are okay with me delegating the work so that people grow, or I find a project I believe in strongly enough to fund and bootstrap until it’s been fleshed out enough to be worth investing in.

Step 1 might be to map people’s interests, skills, and growth plans. Step 2 is trickier. How can I put on training wheels so that I can try things with friendly clients on non-risky projects without taking on too much risk myself? I’m scaling down my consulting work, but I can postpone part of my next experiment if contracting is a better way to learn this. What if I focus on, say, Rails or WordPress stuff, with the understanding that I’ll pair-program with someone, maybe like the apprenticeship systems of the past? I’m fine with Rails, Drupal, and WordPress development, but new to independent contracting, so maybe I should approach it as a learner first – partnering up with someone for a few projects?

What about non-web development ways to learn this? I can delegate more of my processes, and see if other people would be interested in delegating or expanding theirs. That’s something I’m curious about, actually. People need help learning how to give good instructions and build working relationships. It’ll be interesting to see if I can do that in a way that adds value. I think that might actually be more promising than development because I won’t be distracted by the technical side of things. I’ll need to find out if people are looking for help in getting started with delegation. In terms of alternate business models, it might be an agency structure, process libraries, and e-books. Hmm… That would look like phone or Skype conversations about what people want to do, then coordinating with service providers. There are quite a few companies that do this already, but process libraries, automation, and growth might make a difference.

Worth thinking about some more…

After allowing a few months just in case there was any doubt about the residency calculations, I’ve finally sent in my application for Canadian citizenship. This is important to me because I don’t want to ever get stuck on the wrong side of an immigration counter, or to sweat over renewals and paperwork like I did before. Both Canada and the Philippines permit dual citizenship, so I don’t have to give up being Filipino (as if that were possible! ) in order to have that certainty. It’ll be nice to be able to vote for bike lanes and libraries. :)

The government website says 80% of applications are processed within 19 months. Time enough to learn history and geography and politics.

I’ve lived in Toronto for a little over seven years now. I’m getting the hang of where things are, and have gotten to the point of also having old friends here. I know! Boggle. The multicultural diversity of Toronto means I don’t feel out of place, although I’m conscious that I don’t hear or speak as much Tagalog as I probably should. Always a little awkward with it even back home, except in the relaxed and freeflowing company of friends, and here, just unexpected conversations at banks and on the street. Facebook and blogs and Skype chats with family, news articles and charity and trips home… If I don’t have those spontaneous connections, I just have to make my own.

All people who move find their own balance.

Blogging will be a little slower for me over the next few… days? weeks? I’ve been making myself use the Asus TF700 tablet as my primary personal computing device, and there’s a lot I need to figure out.

It’s nowhere near a substitute for my totally awesome Lenovo X220 tablet PC for writing, drawing, replying to e-mail, or even browsing the web. The TF700 is much lighter than the X220, though, so like the way that the best camera is the one that you take with you, I’m seeing if the increased portability will be enough to make up for the limitations. Besides, I’m sure there are all sorts of cool things I’ll be able to do because the tablet runs Android, and I’ll only figure those things out if I use the tablet enough to get past the awkward stage.

It’s a little odd intentionally being less efficient, but I think it will be worthwhile. A new platform, a new type of device… I have to try all sorts of things before I can really understand what’s awkward because I’m new and what’s awkward because the design is just not there. Eventually I’ll figure out how this compares with paper, phone, laptop, and other alternatives, and how I want to improve the mix.

In the meantime, more exploration!

On a whim, W- and I are learning Latin. We figure that schoolkids used to learn Latin and Greek, so we should be able to hack it too. So we’ve signed up for an Internet study group, borrowed books from the library, and looked for other Latin resources.

We were delighted to find Cattus Petasatus, a Latin translation of Dr. Seuss’ The Cat in the Hat. There are even translations for some of the other books, like Green Eggs and Ham. I like reading them in addition to our textbooks. They make Latin feel more contemporary.

Learning Latin with W- is a lot of fun. He shares the ways Latin reminds him of French. He thinks I find it easier to say Latin than he does because of my background in Filipino, which also has a lot of short syllables. We review our study group homework together, laugh at the contrived examples, and look around for other resources. I’m so lucky my husband is a geek. =)

We’ll gradually work our way up to Winnie ille Pu. Maybe we’ll even put together our own Latin projects!

Latīnum studémus. Monē mē!

The Latin textbooks that W- ordered from the library have arrived, and we’re slowly making our way through both Wheelock’s Latin and an online copy of a Latin textbook from the 1880s. Writing is probably going to be painfully slow and ungrammatic for a while, but hey, it’s worth a try. =)

Why Latin? Geek quirkiness. Secret languages for greater connection. Potential classical education.

It will be interesting. Let’s see if my blog can handle the characters…

We watched Wicked last night from some of the best seats in the house. It was amazing. J- had never seen it. For her, it was an entirely new experience. For me, seeing people’s facial expressions made the performance just so much richer – something I couldn’t do from the discounted rear seats we’d had the last time W- and I watched the musical.

What did we like about the experience? It added a richer sense of enjoyment to something we already loved. We often listen to the music from Wicked, and it was fantastic to be able to see it. There were new memories too, like the “Bring out the battering ramekin” quip that made W- and I laugh in an otherwise quiet theatre. (What, did they miss the pun?) It was a perfect fit for our dream fund.

What did it teach me about experiences to seek out? I really like watching performances, not just listening to music. It makes it much easier to remember and enjoy the music afterwards. I like musicals and operas more than concerts, so I’ll check out the Canadian Opera Company’s season and take advantage of their under-30 discount. W- and I love clever wordplay, too, so anything like that is fair game.

Looking forward to more awesomeness!