Aspiring To Adventure

If you asked me what is the most important thing to accomplish in a day, what makes me feel like a human, nay, like a superhuman, what one thing that, if checked off my list, makes me feel like countless other things are possible–I’d say, getting a shower in the morning.  And yet.  Most days I don’t manage to fit a shower into my morning, and I go through the day busy and grumpy and probably a little stinky, moving from one thing to the next to the next, because somehow, I made all the other priorities for the day come first.  Let’s unpack that.  

My priority= morning shower

Things that I give precedence over my priority=pretty much everything else that I need to do in a day.  I tried making a list, but it was a long and interminable list, and consisted of pretty much every other action that I engage in.  Including things like folding laundry and doing dishes.

So is it really my priority?  Why don’t we do the things that we say are important to us?  Why am I dragging myself through the day, feeling like 50%, and telling myself (and my husband) that it’s inescapable, and that I just had too many important things to do (for other people) to fit in the one thing that would make me feel like 200%?  

What could I accomplish if I felt like 200% all the time?  That’s kind of intimidating.  Maybe I can get into this more tomorrow-it’s bedtime.

This evening, I had some friends over, to sit around the fire and talk.  While in some sense, I don’t have this time if I’m going to be hustling and accomplishing all these huge goals, it was one of the major constraints of my vision.  To not neglect my friendships, or my wife, or my kids.

I am keeping these priorities, and see them as essential.  What good is it if we build a business but have no one to share life with?

One of the themes of our discussion was giving all your desires to God.  Pointing everything back to what’s primary.  Pointing everything to the one who calls us out of our complacency, out into the wild, out into adventure.  Allowing our striving to be directed, ultimately, to what is good, and to ordering our lives and our striving ultimately to Him.

If I were to make my goals all about me, and to simply go after material success, it would be a fruitless and vain endeavor, ultimately about self-gratification, which would accomplish nothing.

What I want is for this striving to be a source of transformation and grace, to show myself, and others, what we are capable of when we do not sit complacently but reach for something.  

So far, the fruits of this striving has been to find the cracks in myself, and where the struggles are, and what kinds of beliefs I have that are keeping me from using my talents fully.

I hope that these friendships are strengthened and deepened by what I gain, and that these fruits also help those I love to grow in their own lives and in their own goals, which ultimately will help us all to become who God wants us to be.

Since we committed to working on this goal, we’ve had to stop making excuses, and just face up to doing some very hard things.  And as we’ve done that, a lot of sludge has been coming out.  Insecurities, weaknesses, old wounds, lies we’ve told ourselves for so long that they have taken on the appearance of truths, just tons of really yucky sludgey stuff.  I keep wondering, where is all this stuff coming from?  I thought I was over this, I didn’t even realize that was a problem, and so on.

I’ve been taking traffic school online for the last couple of weeks.  I’m about….2/7 of the way through the course.  Another one of those things that I’m trying to fit into a schedule that feels like it’s bursting at the seams.  A couple of lessons ago I came across a description of what’s called “self regulating.”  It’s essentially avoiding driving situations that you find difficult or potentially dangerous.  It could mean keeping to the slow lane, or choosing not to make right turns at red lights.  Parking in the back of a parking lot to avoid having to deal with other drivers, or never driving during inclement weather.  Traffic school posits that more self regulation leads to safer roads.  I’m not so sure.

When I first read about self regulation, my initial thought was that it would lead to timid drivers who don’t really know how to drive, and who can’t handle themselves on the road when things get real.  Who can’t handle LA traffic, or parallel parking on a busy street, or making that really scary left turn with a whole line of cars lined up behind you.  When you have to safely change 4 lanes of traffic in the space of half of a mile to reach the freeway offramp…do you really want to be the guy who never practiced changing lanes because it seemed a little dangerous?

It suddenly occurred to me why it is that all that sludge is coming up and out now.  We’ve been self regulating our lives.  We’ve been avoiding anything that forces us to even approach the difficult, the uncomfortable, the awkward, the icky.  We’ve made anything and everything our excuses, and now that we’ve started calling BS on all the excuses and just facing up to things…it’s getting a little yucky.  It doesn’t feel good.

I was discussing this with husband earlier.  He made the point that maybe instead of avoiding those bad feelings as we have for years, we should sit with them.  Listen to them, and learn something.  Learn about the parts of ourselves that are broken, rotted, and in disrepair.  And then fix them.

So I don’t have any coaching for almost 3 weeks due to the holiday season.  What am I supposed to do with that?

I’ll tell you what I’m doing.  I’m going through the same pre-coaching questions, looking at what seems good, making some commitments, and putting dates on them.

I am recommitting to my vision, and putting it back into my head, and accepting the fact that the gaps between here and there are bigger than I originally thought they were.

I’m paying a lot of money for someone else to be the helpful person who advocates for my interests when you feel like maybe you should let all your dreams die, because maybe it’s hard or maybe you’re busy or maybe maybe maybe there’s a good excuse or reason to stop trying or having desires.

Could I do this for myself?  Probably, with practice.   That’s the goal.  Find my limits, push harder, learn how to do it on my own, then maybe I can help others blow open their lives and see what they can do too.

The amount of freedom God gives us is staggering, and the power we have is unbelievable.  All of these also exist in these fragile fleshy bodies with broken minds.  Can I open myself up to God’s healing when I find all these cracks in myself?  Can I find the lies and reject them?  Can I learn how to exert myself AND stay peaceful?

That’s the real challenge, and maybe what I’m really after.  But I also don’t want a mortgage, and I want to make a real impact in the world, just to find out if I can.

Husband wants me to commit to blogging every day.  How do I feel about that?  I want to be good at writing.  I want to be really good at writing.  I so much want to be good at writing…that I don’t write.  Pretty much ever.  I never feel like I have the time, focus, energy, and quiet necessary to produce something great. Writing is a someday goal for me- the thing that I think I want to do and even sometimes say I want to do, but somehow…never actually get around to doing.

I think a lot of people have these someday goals.  Husband and I were recently talking about why people don’t actually do the things they say they want to do.  Why they use words like “eventually” and “ideally,” but don’t seem to be taking any steps toward that eventual and ideal future.  What good are they hoping to capture by not pursuing their dreams?

It’s a lot less scary to be an aspiring writer than a bad writer.  

By keeping our dearest aspirations on the back burner, by telling ourselves that we would do it, if we could do it, but now is just not the time…we preserve something.  I’m not sure exactly what it is, and I’m not sure I’m going to figure it out with a 1 year old literally climbing all over me and the computer and punching random keys on the keyboard as I try to write.  But at least I’m trying.  I can say I wrote something today.  I can’t say it’s great.  But it exists.  And it’s good to exist!

I’ll write more tomorrow.

Sometimes I feel a bit hungover after I discuss my goals.  Like sharing them, casually, dissipates them.  Like some of the power of action goes out of you, as though you’ve actually done them.

And then, answering people’s questions can feel tiresome, since you don’t know all the answers yet.

What good is all this talking?  At this point, it is more distraction, more inaction.

Next step – start writing about the subjects that interest me.  Build up a framework of what a healthy software company looks like.  Make it specific.  Perhaps re-read some of my favorite books on these subjects, and start painting a picture.  Start telling stories.  Start getting specific on how we can measure success, both the what and how.

It’s all very doable, I just need to stop looking for success to jump up and get me like an over-excited dog when its master walks in the door.  I have to strengthen my desire, and keep what I’m doing in my mind so that it starts to feel more real.

Ok, husband.  I have been cleaning my stove every day since…

Solving your problems, even little ones.  Just replaced the screens in our sun porch with pet proof screens so that our kitten stops tearing out of it.

I sent the emails yesterday.  Today, I feel a bit discouraged, as though this is just more or less impossible, and that I will have to do a ton more work to gain credibility.  I haven’t even waited for Monday to come so I can actually say everyone ignored my emails.  I sent them on Friday afternoon, after all.

This is just silly.  The right path is likely to just do as much as I can to create a credible presence.  Writing about what works, what doesn’t work, and establishing myself as an expert on the subjects.  

There is a lot that you can do before you start doing data-driven experimentation.  And I can probably find a job with someone with whom my opinions resonate before I am able to get proof that what I propose actually works better.

Discouragement -> inaction -> guaranteed failure.

Recommit -> take action -> possibility.

Normally, I would not have sent those emails.  I cold-emailed 20 executives trying to set up an exploratory meeting so I could learn more about what they’re doing at their companies.

I’m not yet committed to starting at a particular date, or moving on from my  job, so the most I can actually do is explore and do research, at this point.  If I want to make this a business, I need to have some hard conversations with my current employer, or simply move on (which I also don’t want to do… at least not that soon.)

I had some (maybe valid) reasons why I should not have sent the emails out yet.  But I decided to just do it, because the real reason I didn’t want to do it was because I was afraid.  Afraid of looking stupid, or failing.  

And why do I care about that?  Why?

Now that the emails are sent, I don’t really care if they work or not.  What was I so afraid of?

It just felt uncomfortable.  Like I would look dumb. But I’m going to have to be comfortable looking dumb if I am going to do things for the first time.

The biggest barrier to starting something new is how comfortable it is being old and wizened in the current field you’re in. 

If you ever want to switch careers, you will eventually have a first time doing something, and it will be uncomfortable, and you may have to look stupid in public to learn how to do it.

Regardless of results (and I’m not particularly optimistic about that at the moment) I am glad I kept my commitment and did the thing I was afraid of.

In my coaching session yesterday (Is there an emoji that encapsulates the feeling of being excited to do something while simultaneously mourning your bank account?) my coach said something very interesting.

Me: “I have been having trouble engaging fully at work because I’m not sure if I will be there in a couple months, due to the unethical thing they might be doing soon.  I don’t know if I’ll have to leave”

Coach: “So you’re paying uncertainty, and what you get is poor performance.  Sounds like a bad deal.”

I can’t remember exactly what he said after that, or what I said, but even now I am somewhat confused by this.

I know that I’m paying uncertainty, but how exactly is the uncertainty something that I’m creating?  

I suppose I could say “I will work here no matter what they decide to do” or “I will quit no matter what they decide to do”, but if I say “I want to work here so long as they don’t go in the direction I think is not okay”, I have uncertainty about what will be next.

To what extent is this experience of uncertainty my choice?

Please excuse me if you already see the answer.  It is much easier to see through someone else’s self-inflicted suffering than your own.  Because you see… “I see facts and reality, and all these other people are laboring under their delusions”.

And no matter how many times we intellectually acknowledge that we do not in fact see facts (heh) but rather we experience situations through a lens and from a vantage point, we still will think that we have somehow eliminated moooost of our biases and more or less are much more objective than anyone else.

I’m not saying we logically think this.  Iin your bones you think you know what’s happening and have a grip on things.

So here I am wondering… how is it true that I am the author of my uncertainty?

Could I, keeping the same basic moral posture and position, experience something else?

What would that be like?  What do I _want_ it to be like?  What am I committed to creating here, while I am here, no matter how long I am here?

What I want is to go into work with a clear idea of what we want to accomplish in the next 6 months, and what that future will look like when we manage to accomplish it.  I want a compelling future result.

What I would really love is to deliver at my current job what I want to deliver in my consulting.  Massively productive software teams that deliver the right thing, on time, and love going to work.

The problem I have is that the only thing that makes me feel “productive” currently is writing code.  When I’m building documents, or helping users on the forums, or developing processes and ideas, it feels like “wasting time”.  It feels like a chore I have to do so I can get to the real work.

What is the “real work”?  Why do I consider the tangible results the only thing that actually counts?  And even if it is that, could I deliver more value by catalyzing and accelerating those results?  

“You’re not worth anything if you’re not contributing”  “You have to have something you can point to” “How can you measure the effect you have on someone else’s work?  Best to make sure you’re moving tickets around” “If you’re not valuable you’ll be fired” “Value needs to be created directly by you to keep you safe”

I know these things aren’t really true.  But they pop up in the back of my head when I’m considering doing something else, and they distract me from doing the work I would be interested in doing that might actually make a big impact. 

“What do I have to say about this anyway?  I can’t back this up.  It’s too much work to research it all to the point they’d believe me.  It’s not going to make a difference.”

Again, all self-defeating.  These lies are meant to keep us from moving forward.  And we get something out of them too.

What I am getting out of all this: I can self-righteously complain that nobody else understands the right way to do things, and if only I had some time or permission to change things I could do it right.

I don’t have to confront my fears of confronting people or asking for what I want.

And ultimately, these silly thoughts are keeping me from actually doing what it takes to make the future what I want it to be.

So I settle for mediocre experience and mediocre performance.

And I don’t bother putting together a vision that would be interesting to me, because what difference does it make anyway?

A Better Vision of Work

What could I do at work, if I was committed to being there for 6 more months at least?

I could build a system of measurements for our team’s productivity.  I could combine subjective and objective measures, both internal and external.  I could track these things week over week, and see how they are all correlating with the team’s sense of both project health and productivity.  Are our bugs actually going away?  Are we solving problems?  Are we making big strides in our vision?

I could inspire my whole team to take these questions seriously, to see that if we were to measure our output and impact, we could radically make our lives better.  We could actually make a case to attack the things we want to attack, because they’re all experiments to find out how to ship code faster, to improve the state of the art on our platform for other developers.  To develop best practices.

What if, at the end of that time, I could tell a compelling story about the changes we made on our team, how we measured our success, and what the outcomes were, and make recommendations for other teams, and work towards pushing those changes out into the broader world through my consulting?

What if I could also become an expert at Rust through all the experimentation I would be doing with our architecture to reduce cycle times and make features easier to deliver?

There’s more work to do but this is maybe a start.

I had a couple conversations today about my consulting idea, and the people I was talking to kept bringing up problem after problem that would be hard to solve.

And for a lot of them, I kept getting really excited.  Because I liked those problems.  I know they’re hard, but I want to solve them.

I have a vision of a software developer telling me, after I spend a few months working in their organization “I didn’t know that work could feel this good while also being this productive.  I didn’t think this would all work out so well, but I am surprised to say that I am getting a lot more done, I like working in this codebase more, and our team is so well aligned with the organization that there’s almost no thrashing.  There’s not so much negative pressure pushing us, and instead we are finding out what we can do, and driving improvements for our team and our customers constantly.  I didn’t know I could like work so much!”

I know that this is possible, because I have been in organizations that worked well and were sane.

Sadly, most software development organizations seem completely insane to me.

I want to find out if I’m right about that and figure out how to make my thesis about what would work better into a falsifiable and testable experiment that I can run, and then when I have shown it at a couple companies, I think it could be huge.

I had a hard conversation about lots of things with the VP of engineering, and even briefly pitched the idea of using my current team as a case study for the improvements I’d like to make with my prospective business partner in such a way that we could use it as a platform for what comes next.  And he also validated the value that it would have if we were able to double the throughput, or more, of a software team.

And it all went pretty well.  There was some openness, and some real possibility, and I think there is maybe a path forward there, where I can keep my current job for a while and also keep developing this other business idea.  Whether or not that is how things will go, only God knows at this point.  I’m trying to be open and honest.

Today was long, and neither of us slept, so I’m barely squeaking this post in right before bed.  But I wanted to capture that doing the big scary thing turned out well.

And maybe tomorrow I will be able to do another big scary thing, and figure out what I would write to some SaaS companies to see if I can further validate some concepts and ideas.  Can I write an email that is compelling enough to get a response, and not be deleted (like almost every email I get from rando’s in my work email is)?

It’s embarrassing how infrequently I clean my stove.  It gets dirty basically as soon as I clean it, and then for the next week or so I get a pang of anxiety every time I walk into the kitchen.  I tell myself I don’t have the time, and it feels like that is true.  I’m always working on something, aren’t I?  I’m always rushing through some task, trying to finish some urgent thing before I run out of what I call “happy baby time” (the time when the baby is content and occupied and not fussing and demanding to be held).   The dirty stove is an external symbol of internal haven’t got it togetherness.  The sight of it drags me down and makes me feel as if nothing is possible.  I can’t even manage to clean my stove, how can I fix any of my problems or approach any of my aspirations?

So today I thought, I should clean the stove.  So I cleaned it.  And it took 5 minutes.  It’s a 5 minute job.  I don’t have time to do a 5 minute job?  I find time to make dinner for my family every day- that takes a lot more than 5 minutes.  I find time to nurse the baby, to get the 9 year old to her appointments, to brush the 3 year old’s teeth, to pick up the 6 year old from school, to change poopy diapers etc.  

After I cleaned the stove, it was like the rest of my home opened up with possibility.  Instead of walking into a room and feeling heavy with the weight of the clutter, mess, and undone tasks, I zipped around clearing, cleaning, and getting stuff done.  That little oasis of order and peace in the corner of my kitchen inspired and energized me. 

I think I have a lot of ideas about what is possible, and more about what is impossible.  I think maybe I need to commit to cleaning my stove every day.  Just to expand my experience of what is possible.  

And here we come to the biggest blocker in all of my previous attempts to start an online business.

How do I find out if people are willing to pay me what I would like to get paid for the thing that I am thinking about making?

All the steps to get there seem onerous, and far off, and I am inundated with a constant sense of pointlessness.  I’m going to spend hours or days making this website or landing page or whatever, and I won’t even get enough traffic to it to find out that people don’t want to buy what I’m selling.

And in this case, as I am working on two separate things at the same time, I find that I am getting stuck twice as much.

Figuring out our process for how to validate an online product is hard.  But just compiling a list of prospective clients for my new consulting venture seems like absolute torture.

Who am I that anybody is going to listen to me?

I don’t have enough public notoriety.  I’m not a public figure.  How do I get my foot in the door?

How do I get them to take me seriously?

I guess the only way is to demonstrate a very high level of competence and confidence…

But at this stage, I do not yet have a full plan of attack.  I first want to validate that the market could actually pay what I want to make if I was able to get the results I think we can eventually drive (and that I am committed to driving) after the first client engagement.

Making it specific

Why don’t we make our plans specific?

That would make it something you can actually do.  I am hiding my fear of going into a meeting with an executive at a large company behind a whole lot of tasks I have to get done first, before I do that.  

My experience of this situation is a kid who got called to the front of the class on the day he hadn’t done the reading, and has no idea how to answer the questions the teacher is throwing at him.

Is that actually what it will be like?  Will it actually be quite such a harrowing experience?

All I really want to do is validate that people are willing to pay a lot of money for a phenomenal amount of value generated, which is 90% me asking them questions.

What we have to offer

Hiding in all these delays and deferrals and excuses is simply the fear that I don’t really have anything particularly unique or interesting or valuable to offer the world.  

And even if I did, nobody would recognize it.

So again – why should you try?

What’s a better way of looking at this situation…?

Maybe I don’t.  But maybe I do.  Maybe if I went and actually did the things, I would find out that I had something to offer that people found both valuable _and_ surprising.  That they genuinely hadn’t thought of something in just that way before.

And if I do have something to offer, maybe they’d find it very valuable and would be able to get enough out of it that I could in turn achieve my own goals.

Maybe.  Maybe…. Maybe.

There are few definites in life, and courage is living in a maybe, because that maybe is terrifying.  It’s where you have indeterminate path complexity.  Things can blow up and your life can change in a maybe.  That’s scary.

I suppose that is what we are aspiring to – adventure.

I would be so creatively productive if I could just shower for like 3 hours a day.  The shower is my thinking place, where I come up with my best ideas, where I get my thoughts in order, and where I compose my final drafts.

Yesterday in the shower, the image of bread came to mind.  Husband and I recently took up baking sourdough.  Or rather, I took it up, and then husband picked up my copy of Tartine and got really into the whole sourdough process as well.  At first I was mildly annoyed that he was stealing my hobby, but once I got over that, I realized that it was actually a great boon to the whole endeavor.  Having not one, but two, enthusiastic fledgling sourdough bakers in the family has come in very handy-if I’m out at an appointment with our 9 year old, husband can pop into the kitchen for 30 seconds and stretch dough or shape a loaf.  If he mixes some dough, but then gets held up in meetings for 3hrs, I can take custody of his dough without missing a beat.  

The thing about sourdough is that it takes stunningly little work to produce a lovely loaf of bread, but a whole lot of tiny little moments, little nudges in the right direction.  And occasionally some redirection if you over nudged or under nudged earlier in the process.  

1.  Make the leaven-literally mix some flour and water into your starter, then

LEAVE IT ALONE…until it’s mature and ready for the next step

2. Mix some flour and water into your leaven, then

LEAVE IT ALONE…for about half an hour

3.  Mix some salt and water into your dough, then

LEAVE IT ALONE…for about half an hour

4.  Every half hour for a few hours, stretch the sides of the dough up and over onto itself.

In the interims, you guessed it…

LEAVE IT ALONE

5.  Do some simple shaping of the loaf (takes about 30 seconds)

LEAVE IT ALONE for about half an hour

6.  Final shaping of the loaf, and into the pans, after which you 

LEAVE IT ALONE…either at room temperature for an hour or two, or overnight in the fridge, until it’s time to bake

7.  Flip it into a hot dutch oven, slice a gorgeous pattern into it with a bread lame, and bake it for about 20 minutes with the lid on.  So while it’s baking you…

LEAVE IT ALONE…and then after the 20 minutes you

8.  Take the lid off to finish baking for about 20 more minutes, then after you

LEAVE IT ALONE for those 20 minutes

9. Flip it out of the pan and admire the beautiful product of all those little moments of activity, spread out over a whole day of doing mostly nothing (bread related…if you’re like me, you spent all that down time frantically running from one thing to another)

It’s as if those tiny moments of care, attention, and effort are multiplied by the power of time.  Could businessing be like that?  Is it a workable model to work on things in fits and starts and found moments, and can we leverage the time in between those moments?  If we set the right things in order one day, then come back a couple days later to take the next important step, could the time in between actually work to our advantage?  I guess I’m wondering, can we keep up with all of our commitments- to work, to each other, to our children, to our community, and still fit in making a million dollars?

I have a problem where whenever I do anything fun, and come back to my normal life, I find myself being a big hungover.

Not the alcohol hangover.  Fun hangover.  In fact, I’m not planning to drink anything until we’ve made our first sale (of whatever it is we end up doing).  Until this business has an ounce of success, I’m making things a bit more uncomfortable by removing something that takes the edge off of a long day… so that I can use my evenings and other scraps of time to keep making progress.  Embracing some discomfort for the sake of moving the ball down the field (I don’t play sports but for some reason love sports analogies and sports psychology, I’m not unpacking that right now).

But backing away from that tangent – fun hangovers…

Fun hangover is when you had such a great time that you can’t imagine needing to go back to real life.  Like you basically just got a tiny glimpse of heaven, with good friends, great conversation, fulfilling activity, and much merriment, and now you’re cast back into the humdrum of daily living.

And I was camping and the literal pain in the neck kept me up.

So I’m a bit discouraged and unfocused.

But I am keeping this commitment to blogging every day, through the good and the bad, the ugly and the not as ugly.

On Friday evening, we came up with some basic cost analysis for online business ideas.  We came up with 20 bad ideas.  (Maybe not all bad, but hey).  So what’s the next step?  What’s the next thing we have to do that turns something into a real business?

I guess we have to figure out if there’s a market for any of these ideas. 

But what about consulting again?

What I’m dreading and the nonsense I tell myself

And of course, I still have to compile that list of clients to contact, which I’m dreading, because I can’t imagine actually contacting 10 people (how annoying is it when you get unsolicited emails?).

I have stories in my head about a lot of things that are likely just excuses for why I’m not where I want to be in my life.  “Well of course _they_ could succeed.  Look at the ____ (dumb, silly, classless, irritating, etc etc) things that they’re willing to do to get there.  I almost wish I was so ____ (ignorant, tasteless, idiotic, etc etc) so I wasn’t getting in my way.  What a curse to be so ___ (smart, sophisticated, developed, etc etc)”

I’m not saying I walk around thinking this kind of thing all day, but only in my more resentful or jealous moments.  I don’t know that it even quite rises to the level of a conscious thought.  But don’t we all, from time to time, try to pretend that we have some moral virtue to explain our very real material failure or lack of some other moral virtue?

And of course, this is bullshit.  I get to feel superior AND keep sitting around on the couch, letting time drift by without doing anything.  

My real fear is probably that I do manage to find some clients, get them to pay me handsomely, and fail spectacularly, so badly that they curse me and spit at me as they drive me out of the building, and are so enraged by my incompetence that they take out billboards in every area of the country where anyone I’ve ever desired the respect of lives, just to say “That guy is literally the worst, and here’s the website with the details”.

But in all seriousness, can I deliver what I want to deliver?  

Do I just play small with clients where I can’t make it worse?  Where it’s easy to look great because their things are terrible?

And am I writing an extra long blog post today as a form of sophisticated procrastination?  Time to stop that.

The 6 year old just came up to me and asked me to smell his teeth.  It’s a Saturday.

So there’s no time.  And no energy.  The 3 and 9 year olds fight, and the baby climbs on you, and the 6 year old sends an endless stream of monologue into your ear as you try to snatch a moment to reflect and transform swirling intellection into words on a page.

There will never be time for the important things.  There will never be energy for the important things.  Because we’re under water.  And that frantic frenetic flailing attempt to push to the surface of an infinite ocean of chores- that’s akin to drowning.  The 6 year old is waving a tiny toy fox six inches in front of my face and making little squeaky foxy sounds that demand my attention as I try to type.  I hear the 3 year old in the kitchen, possibly eating the butter.  It’s a great time to make a million dollars.

What could you accomplish if you cared enough to make time for it?

Husband had his first fancy pants coaching call with his fancy pants coaching coach yesterday.  I wasn’t sure what post-call report to expect, but I sure didn’t expect the first thing he said- “We have to get bedtime under control” (more or less, as mentioned, we don’t sleep, don’t expect perfectly accurate quotage).

Getting bedtime for our rowdy and ridiculous 4 kids under 10 under control as the first step to paying off $1 million dollars in debt?  We’re paying this coach how much…? 

Here’s why it makes sense, and why we didn’t think of it before.  We don’t have enough time.  Bedtime feels interminable and eats up most of our evening and energy.  We need to reclaim that time.  Find a way to help our kids feel safe and warm and cozy and loved (and in their beds!) at a reasonable hour so we can have a bit of time to push forward on our project.

Why we didn’t think of it before- We’re drowning!  We’re tired, we’re discouraged and demoralized.  We have a bunch of underlying assumptions about what is possible and what is necessary.  

We have more time than we think we have and we have more energy than we think we have.

I think there’s something invigorating about a time sensitive goal.  We can’t wait until conditions are right (when would that be?  When the last kid goes off to college?) we have to get things rolling now.  This presents the tantalizing prospect of dramatic change right now.  But to get to that change, we’ve got to act.  Imperfectly and messily, embracing mistakes and missteps as opportunities for growth and learning.  No money-making endeavor is going to make one cent percolating in our anguished minds as we over think, over plan, and finally kick the can down the road to “eventually.”

I struggle with a kind of perfectionism that leads to never getting anything done.  If I am going to create and put something out into the world, I want it to be perfect.  I once took 9 months to reply to an email from an old friend I had been trying to reconnect with.  It wasn’t that I forgot about her- on the contrary, I was thinking about her the whole time, and I wanted to send her a perfect email, but I never could find time in my over the top busy schedule with 3 little kids and a newborn to craft that perfect email.  I finally got over myself and just sent out an okay email that actually existed (instead of the ideal email that probably never would).  She hasn’t written back…

I never actually try anything because my life is messy, my house is messy, there are endless chores to distract me, and my kids are cacophonously loud.

So back to this time sensitive goal.  Because we’ve time boxed this thing to a year, and because we’re doing it together, there’s suddenly this amazing freedom to just do B minus work.  I’m discovering that it’s a huge relief to step out of my usual role of overthinker, super judger, nay sayer, and instead pivot into a new willingness to do a thing worth doing badly, quickly, maybe a little sloppily.  

So that’s what we’ve been doing for the last week.  Snatching bits and scraps of time to sloppily and speedily work towards our goal.  Even before revamping bedtime, it turns out we have more time than we thought.  But I don’t think we would have found the time if not for the urgency.  And once we just jumped in and got started, I feel like I’ve discovered energy I shouldn’t have, given how little our sweet 1 year old baby has allowed me to sleep this week.  

But I think there’s something more.  We’re not just throwing up our hands and accepting our messy life.  We’re taking agency and working to change the foundation of how we live, while simultaneously ceasing to take that foundation as the reason why we can’t take action now.  There will never be enough time for the important things- is that true?  There will never be enough energy for the important things- what about that?  I think we might be able to find both time and energy when we care enough about something to make it happen.  

We’re going to get that bedtime under control.  We’re going to fix that shower that’s been broken for months.  We’re going to organize that garage.  We’re going to break the flat surface rule.  We’re going to make a million dollars.

If we can do that in a year, what else could we do in a year?

I think the really interesting question is, what will we do next year, once the debts are paid?

The baby has his hands down his diaper and I don’t have time to write.

I never have time to write, or to practice the banjo, or to mop my floor, or to read Dracula, or to put up art, start a business, shop for clothes that fit, organize the garage, or basically anything that is not treading water and desperately trying to catch up on tasks that keep rolling over and piling up.  

How to find the time to make progress?  Do things imperfectly.  Learn to get to work without having a perfect environment for creativity.  Learn to create amidst chaos, noise, and mess.  Sounds impossible.  But that’s kind of our thing this year….

I just signed the (expensive – $2000 / month for 3 calls) coaching agreement.  I remind myself that part of the value is that it hurts (how is paying to hurt yourself a good idea?  What’s wrong with you, masochist?) and that will help me get committed.  And that several people I know have highly recommended him.  And that I desperately need to make myself do something.

This is about accountability, and breaking myself out of my current set of beliefs.  Getting to a new place, a new level.

I have to supply the commitment, the energy, and the action for anything to happen.  

Couldn’t I have found a cheaper way to do this?  It’ just an experiment, for 6 months, that I am committed to doing…. What’s $12k between friends (A car that runs a bit better maybe?)

You can’t make me

A thought I had, when contemplating signing this agreement, was “You can’t make me” or “Show me something” or “Prove your worth” – all in relation to my coach.

I have some serious resistance to doing all the things I think I will have to do, and almost want to push that thought out to my coach, so that he is representing the person forcing me to do things I don’t want to do.

Already Feels like a Lot

I just had my first call (between writing the rest of this post and this part).  I committed to a lot of action, and already I feel the massive internal resistance.

“It’s a lot” “I’m tired” “How do I get myself organized?” “I want to take a nap” “Maybe this was a massive mistake” “Things are more or less fine, my goals are impossible, why am I doing this to myself?”

This is the kind of crap that has kept me living at 50% for a pretty long time.

I don’t want to be 50% living. I want to be 100%, and maybe 101% (i.e. living just a bit beyond what I think I can do).

I want this pain, I want this struggle.  I want the results, and I want to enjoy getting those results.

My commitments, in 4 areas, over the next week… (again, why am I doing this to myself, and hey stop being that way, let’s try)

E-Commerce (mostly by end of next week, some sooner)

1. 20 e-commerce ideas (by Friday)
2. Cost analysis of cost to validate idea (by Monday)
3. Landing page software (by Tuesday)
4. Agree on budget for marketing with wife (by Monday)

Consulting (by end of next week)

1. Find 10 companies with software teams (by Friday)
2. Reach out to them (by Friday)
3. Get at least 1 meeting to see if they think it would be worth what I think it would be worth 
4. Schedule meeting with my own company to pitch the idea (and see if I can work here on similar stuff)

Kid Bedtime (a source of time suck):

1. Document our bedtime process today and Sunday
2. Propose different bedtime process by Tuesday (with wife)
3. Implement starting next Wednesday

Personal Organization

1. Write down my complaints (today)
2. 3 ideas to improve (today)
3. Pick one to do (today)
4. Do it (1 week)

This is preposterous, I have a full time job, and why again am I doing this to myself?

How do I get myself organized?

This is a legitimate question, though also some FUD, but it’s something I actually have to do if I’m going to hit this ambitious list of things.

I notice that my todoist is super cluttered.  I feel like I’m living in a sea of noise all the time, because there are things I “should” do that are cluttering up my lists, which keeps me from taking that list seriously as those items sit on the list for days or weeks.

I need to stop pretending I am going to do things I don’t actually want to do.  

I need to live from a place of genuine desire.  I need to connect crap I don’t want to do with something that matters to me.

Yes, I will pay my taxes, because I value not being in jail.  Yes, I will replace this tail light on the car because I value not getting pulled over, and I want to be safe.

I want to live from a starting point of “yes” instead of dragging myself along.

And that needs to be reflected in my calendar, and my bank account.

And my todo list.

Out of Balance

I had a massive flurry of activity today getting my life in order.  Unfortunately, that did not quite jive with getting that much work done at work, which is also quite important.

How do I keep everything up and running (i.e. not dropping tasks and forgetting they exist), make progress on my bigger goals, and also keep killing it at work?

How can I show up 100% to all of those activities?

What’s the next step?  Work backwards.

We want to have a million dollars, roughly, at the end of one year.  What does that business look like?

It means we have to 1) create  a business and sell it at a multiple at the end of a year, or 2) create a business that averages 80k / month in profit over the course of one year.  

So one way or another, we need our business to get off the ground and start accelerating rather quickly.

What kinds of businesses have explosive potential?   Or massive cash flow potential?

We came up with a couple dozen (mostly vague) ideas for how to make money.

This ranges from a lot of different online businesses to building software to starting a brewery or coffee shop or restaurant to writing books, to creating subscription boxes to selling drugs (just kidding, but the money is there) to just hiring myself out at really high rates for something very valuable.

We do have some top contenders, which leverages my experience developing software, as well as improving the performance of the teams I had the privilege to lead.  

Let’s see where we land.