sacha chua living an awesome life

I’ve been trying to figure out what intimidates me about this new idea every month challenge. I guess it’s because each business idea feels like a fresh opportunity for the impostor syndrome. I deal with the impostor syndrome by being up front about what I can do, assuming people are responsible for their decisions, by offering a satisfaction guarantee.

Fortunately, other people are exploring that path, and I can learn from their experiences. I’m a little envious of the folks over at Ridiculo.us, who’ve not only set a goal of 12 projects in 12 months but have also figured out how to quickly whip up prototypes. David Seah is another person I look up to, and he’s been working on designing a new product every day. It’s clearly something you can still do solo if you’ve got the skills to back it up.

I’d be more comfortable with committing to make something new every month if:

• I had more practice in creating and supporting stuff, which is a catch-22 because you don’t get practice in creating stuff until you create stuff, so I should just go ahead and do it.
• I knew more people with well-defined needs that happened to match up pretty well with what I want to create, which is easier if I talk about the things I want to build.
• I set aside a monthly business budget in terms of money and time, which is entirely under my control and therefore something I should just go ahead and do.
• I clearly define the parameters of the experiment so that I have multiple ways to succeed or I get more comfortable with the idea of failure.
• I brainstorm a bunch of ideas that I can work on even when I’m not feeling particularly creative, and I break them down into smaller steps so that I can reduce the time between coming up with an idea and testing it out.
• I remind myself that this is about practice and experimentation. It’s low risk, and this is as good a time as any to try things out.

Sketchnoting the first day of the FITC conference was a fascinating experience because the speakers were clearly passionate about design and art, and they were doing things that were way geekier than anything I’ve ever done. (For example, programmed electrical stimulation of muscles.) Crossing over into world-crossers’ worlds.

It’s fun stepping into other people’s worlds. People talked about installations, exhibitions, and residencies – these structures that just aren’t part of the programming, consulting, or sketchnoting that I do. And yet I’m part of this world too. There are overlaps through visual thinking, data visualization, Quantified Self, and interesting ideas like Stefan Sagmeister’s seven-year sabbatical cycle. (I’m doing a more extreme version of this, I guess. I’m starting off with a five-year experiment in semi-retirement.)

This crossing-over thing reminded me of Mel Chua’s reflection on reaching across worlds:

But I was made for bridging; it’s my gift. When I pull across worlds and stand between them, I feel both the pain of loneliness and exclusion and not having a home to belong to, and the joy of being fully used — because in any one world, only part of me is awake. I need to reach across worlds to be all me, be all there.

A different perspective makes it easier for me, I guess. I’m at home in many different spheres: development, consulting, sketchnoting, self-tracking, writing, cooking, gardening, reading… Home enough, at least, to often feel assured, and I know enough about the impostor syndrome to recognize it when it tries to creep in. I cross over because it’s fun to see if I can translate what I know, and what new things these new worlds will teach me. If I had to give up all those other worlds and concentrate on one, though, I would still have infinities to explore. Interests are often fractal and endlessly deep. On this adventure, I bump into other category-defiers and boundary-crossers. The lines blur, and that’s awesome.

修正した：もっと丁寧です！

いろいろな事を準備しました。来週は忙しくなりそうんです。日曜日から火曜日まで会議で図をかきます。木曜日も働きます。でも、土曜日にマッサージがあります。楽しみにしています。

私と主人は日本語を勉強します。主人は平仮名を覚えています。私は漢字を復習しています。私達は今年日本へ行きたいです。日本語は難しいですが、がんばります！

私の下手な日本語ですみません。改善するために、練習しなければなりません。誤りがあれば訂正お願いします。＾＿＾

We prepared various things because next week is going to be busy. I’ll be drawing at a conference from Sunday to MondayTuesday. On Thursday, I’m working too. But I’ll be having a massage on Saturday, so I’m looking forward to that.

W- and I are studying Japanese. He’s memorizing hiragana. I’m reviewing kanji. We’d like to go to Japan this year. Japanese is difficult, but we’ll try our best!

Please pardon my bad Japanese. If I want to improve, I have to practice. If you see any mistakes, please correct me! =)

Blog posts

• Weekly review: Week ending April 12, 2013
• Time enough for friends
• How to present using Org-mode in Emacs
• Building bridges to geekiness
• Towards wonderful new normals
• Practice Perfect: Calling your shots
• Impatient for spring

Accomplished this week

• Business
  • Build
    • Set up Heroku tools on virtual box
    • Contact kaizenaccounting to see if they can help me
    • Clear up disk space on my server
    • Despam quantifiedself.ca/directory
    • Clear up disk space on my laptop
  • Earn
    • Earn: Consulting – E1 – Thursday
    • Earn: Consulting – E1 – Tuesday
  • Connect
    • Process March 27 2013 video
• Relationships
  • Renew my passport
  • Reply to Clair Ching by mail
  • Help W-’s mom with computer stuff
• Life
  • Work on project P

Plans for next week

• Business
  • Earn
    • [ ] Earn: Consulting – E1 – Thursday
    • [ ] Sketchnote FITC – Sunday
    • [ ] Sketchnote FITC – Monday
    • [ ] Sketchnote FITC – Tuesday
  • Connect
    • [ ] Transcribe John Wiegley’s session
    • [ ] Transcribe chat with Matt Tanguay
    • [ ] Process audio podcast – Matt Tanguay
    • [ ] Co-host Visual Thinkers Toronto meetup
  • Build
    • [ ] Sketchnote a book
    • [ ] Set up virtual box
    • [ ] Write about edebug
• Relationships
  • [ ] Drop by HackLab.to on Wednesday
  • [ ] Drop by HackLab.to on Friday
  • [ ] Measure cushions
  • [ ] Send letter to Clair
  • [ ] Attend conversationalists meetup
• Life
  • [ ] [#C] Study for the Canadian citizenship test
  • [ ] Draw emotions
  • [ ] Declutter
  • [ ] Buy seeds
  • [ ] Write a simple Japanese blog post
  • [ ] Read a volume of Doraemon

Time review

• Business: 30.0 hours (Earn: 18.4, Build: 11.3, Connect: 0.2)
• Discretionary: 33.7 hours (Social: 3.3, Family: 9.4, Productive: 10.2, Play: 2.4)
• Personal: 21.2 hours (Routines: 11.6)
• Sleep: 63.9 hours – average of 9.1 hours per day
• Unpaid work: 19.3 hours (Commuting: 1.8, Cook: 11.9, Tidy: 2.6)

If you leave a little bit left when chopping green onions, you can grow new ones. The ones on the right are remnants from last week’s cooking session. Look at how quickly they’ve grown! It’s fascinating to see the difference day by day.

We don’t grow many plants indoors because the cats like chewing on things. I wish I could grow herbs like parsley and rosemary throughout winter, or start seeds for tomatoes and basil, but we don’t have the sun or space for it. We have a spare room upstairs, but it’s dark and carpeted, so working with soil is less fun. Oh well! When the weather warms up enough, I’ll jumpstart the garden with seedlings and set up the greenhouse for more seeds.

I bike through High Park and along the lakeside trail on my way downtown. There are many trees along the trail, and they’re starting to fuzz up with brown leaf buds. I’m sure we’ll see more green soon!

What will we plant this year? The garlic we planted last fall has survived the confusing weather. It now pokes out through the chicken-wire that we stapled over the box to thwart squirrels. We’ve been cooking with a lot of cilantro, parsley, bok choy, and green onions, so I’d like to grow those. Snow peas and sugar snap peas, mmm – I hope it’s not too late. Lettuce might be nice, too. And I’d love to give bitter melon another try, and maybe zucchini.

I want to spend more time gardening this year, so let’s see how that works out!

Practice Perfect is a book packed with tips for deliberate practice. One of the ideas I’ve been trying from the book is the practice of calling your shots by telling people what you are trying to do. For example, I recently helped some colleagues revise their presentation proposals for an upcoming conference. In addition to posting my versions of their abstracts, I also wrote about the specific things I was trying to do, such as highlighting contrasting ideas and writing with potential attendees in mind. By telling people what I wanted to do, I made it easier for people to understand the differences, and they could come up with even more effective ways to say things.

Calling your shots is an excellent way to help other people learn. It builds your understanding of your own skills as well. It can also lead to interesting discussions, and you might learn a few things along the way.

If you’re the one asking for help, it can be difficult to see what people have changed and why. It’s much easier to learn when people point out what’s different and share the reasons. Next time you ask for help and get a simple answer, try digging into the differences to help you understand things better. You can also call your own shots while learning something. When you write down or talk about what you plan to do, you’ll be more prepared to correct things if the results aren’t what you expected, and other people may be able to offer suggestions as well.

Give it a try!

Practice Perfect: 42 Rules for Getting Better at Getting Better (Amazon affiliate link)

I’ll be doing consulting for around two days a week for the rest of the year. Before I started this experiment, I hadn’t even considered this kind of work arrangement. Development tends to need larger chunks of time because you need to hold the codebase in your head, especially if other people are also changing it. Sketchnoting involves intense effort over one or two days. Illustrations are usually be short engagements with rapid turnaround. This social business consulting that I do with E1 works out really well. I can make a big difference on the days that I’m there, and I can also think about other things when I’m not in the office.

I like the work that I do when I’m consulting. It’s a mix of such different skills: writing, front-end development, database queries, Excel wizardry, statistics, automation, even drawing. I make good things happen.

What do I want for the second year of my experiment? This, I think – a wonderful new normal. Strengthen the foundation of fitness, remove more stressors and unnecessary obligations. It helps to remember that I don’t need to chase after every opportunity, that it’s okay to slow down and breathe.

Sometimes I think that I’m not using my other days well enough, that I’m too scattered across a number of potential projects. That I should be Doing Something Amazing. But worrying about it is even less productive, and I should expect that like all skills, learning how to make the most of discretionary time also takes time.

Hmm. There’s something interesting there. I don’t want to use these five years to have wildly awesome experiences and then go back to “regular life” afterwards. I want to use these five years to move towards new normals, new habits. It’s like the way I like keeping our lifestyle smooth and simple instead of varying it with incomes’ ups or downs. Slow and steady progress, sustainable growth, instead of fleeting impulses and momentary enjoyment.

On the #emacs channel, aidalgol asked me if people ever looked at me as if I were crazy because of my interest in Emacs. =)

I used to worry about being too different, being someone people couldn’t easily relate to. There were practical reasons for thinking about this. At IBM, I wanted to help people and teams make use of new tools and ways of working. Early adopters are terrible at helping mainstream people try out new technologies or approaches. You need someone in between, someone who can relate to early adopters and with whom mainstream adopters can identify.

If people thought I was too different from them, they would stop really listening. You know the excuses people give: “Oh, you’re young, that’s why it’s easy for you. I’m too old to learn this.” “You’re a techie, of course this is easy for you. I’m not very good at this computer thing.” There’s this gap, and that gap becomes a reason for people to not even try. This is also why I don’t like being called a rock star. It creates too much of that separation.

So it was natural to respond to compliments by downplaying what I do. “Oh, they’re just stick figures. You can do this too!” “It’s just that I’ve been doing this for a while. Everyone starts somewhere!” I toned down some of my excitement, tried to giggle less. Worked on minimizing the gap.

It’s becoming more and more fun to revel in the geekiness, though—to follow my curiosity into the winding rabbit-holes and share that sometimes incomprehensible joy. Emacs, Quantified Self, visual thinking and sketchnoting, cooking, reading… I am deeply into things. I play.

People often come up to me after presentations and tell me that I blew their mind. I used to think that was… hmm… Not bad, but not particularly good either. I wanted to show the possibilities, sure, but I also wanted people to walk away with practical things that they could do right now, those first few steps that could take them on even more interesting journeys.

But then there’s this quote, still one of my favourites over the years:

If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people together to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Here is what I’ve come to realize: it’s okay to be weird, to be geeky, to be different, to explore things that many people don’t get a chance to do so. It can inspire people to know what’s out there and what’s possible.

And then periodically come back and balance that with building bridges and on-ramps and ladders. When people are stymied by a seemingly insurmountable gap between where they are and where you are, help them figure out the next small thing that can help them move forward in the direction they want to go. Find it or make it. Then do that again, and again, and again. People come from different perspectives and start at different levels, so your answers may feel scattered in the beginning. Keep doing it. Then the patchwork of resources will grow, and you’ll be able to see how different things can come together and what’s missing. Build, organize, build, organize, step by step, and you’ll learn tons of things along the way.

This seems to work a lot better than trying to convince someone that you’re just like they were and that they can do what you do. No one believes that anyway.