Writers Block? Me?

I've never really had a problem sitting down and spewing out a bunch of words. My process is pretty simple:

• Start somewhere, see where it goes, then try to make some sense of it in a closing paragraph or statement.
• If I have the energy, proof read and tweak the text. Otherwise, let 'er loose!
• Hope no one notices that I'm a hack ;-)

I think think the process works for me because I tend to present in terms of conversational narrative. I write as if I'm talking to my friends, and I am constantly thinking of the best way to sequence a bit of information so it can be comprehended correctly. This actually doesn't play as well in real-life; in the process of establishing the context, iterating the supporting facts, and drawing my brilliant conclusion, attention spans tend to wander. This is good, because it forces me to try to be more visceral and succinct.

But I digress.

CONTINUE READING ...

Alex Shalman’s Happiness Project (and interview with me)

I'm still holed up with work, but here's a quick link: Practical Personal Development blogger Alex Shalman interviewed me via email a while ago for his Happiness Project, in which he lined up an impressive list of other bloggers to ask them a few questions about what made them happy. This was an interesting question to me, because I hadn't been thinking if I was happy or not; you can find my interview here.

Print Your Own “Re-Gift Receipts”

I don't know if this is common around the world, but after Christmas Day there is a frenzy of returns at retail outlets across the United States, as people trade-in/trade-up their gifts to something they like better. To make exchanges easier, stores issue gift receipts to gift purchasers with the price omitted to maintain some semblance of propriety. Call me sentimental, but when someone gives me a present, I find it difficult to treat it as just another material asset to be cashed in. It just doesn't jibe with what I think of as The Spirit of Giving. Why not leave warm cups of "Drano" out for Santa instead of milk while we're at it, or have a nice reindeer venison stew for Christmas Dinner as we throw rocks at elves? But that's just my moral outrage masking the true issue at hand: sometimes I get terrible presents and I'm not sure what to do with them. The barbarian materialists exchange their presents and are materially happier afterwards. Traditionalists like me get principles stuck in their craw, muttering bitterly as their houses fill with junk they can't just throw away because "they were gifts."

There is another gift-related practice here in the States called the Yankee Swap, associated with office Christmas parties, where you can potentially bring all your unwanted junk and gift it away to some poor sucker. Each person brings a present, and gets one in return. The trick is that each person draws their present based on a number, and they have the option of exchanging whatever they got with whatever someone before them got. It's deliciously balances the Spirit of Giving with the Spirit of Taking Away, just the sort of spirit one needs to survive the modern corporate environment. We are what we are.

While this year I received no bad presents (in fact, they were all awesome), there was an interesting moment at one of these events when someone recognized a "real" gift from a Christmas many years in the past re-gifted to someone else. This created some awkwardness on the part of the re-gifter, though the original gift giver didn't mind at all. This got me to thinking: we already have gift receipts. Why not take it a step further and include a re-gift receipt that establishes once and for all that once you are given a present, it's yours to do with what you want?

Design of the Re-Gift Receipt

To create the Re-Gift Receipt, I used my Stockwell Rubber Stamp Kit (I'll have to write about this sometime later) to create the RE-GIFT RECEIPT: YOUR GUILT-FREE PASS lettering at top. I scanned this in, colored it to resemble the purplish ink on old-style receipts, and laid out some text using an 8-point monospaced font (Bitstream Vera Sans Mono if you are curious...it's one of my favorite console fonts).

Since I wanted to reproduce the length of the typical gift receipt---they are often filled with legal mumbo jumbo---I had to write some filler. I figured it wouldn't hurt to cover some of the basic scenarios that lead to "poor gifting". Here's what it says:

RE-GIFT RECEIPT POLICY

This present has been given to you by your (CIRCLE ONE):

CO-WORKER(S)

CASUAL BUDDY

REALLY BUSY BEST FRIEND

SIGNIFICANT OTHER

OTHER ACQUAINTANCE

If you like it, great! However, in the event that dismay and polite confusion ensued rather than joy, please allow that (CIRCLE ALL THAT APPLY):

I DON'T REALLY KNOW YOU THAT WELL SO I JUST WINGED IT

IT LOOKED MUCH BETTER ONLINE / IN THE STORE

I'M A CLUELESS GUY/GAL WHAT DO I KNOW ABOUT PRESENTS

I GENUINELY THOUGHT YOU LIKED THIS KIND OF STUPID CRAP

I DID ALL MY SHOPPING AT THE SAME STORE THIS IS WHAT THEY HAD

I THOUGHT YOU COULD USE IT FOR HOBBY/WORK BUT WHAT DO I REALLY KNOW ABOUT IT

MOM SAID "IT IS THE THOUGHT THAT COUNTS" AND I BELIEVED HERE

In the True Spirit of American Giving, this RE-GIFT RECEIPT entitles you to pass this item guilt-free to a third party, no questions asked.

AUTHORIZING GIFT GIVER:

RECIPIENT:

by re-gifting this present, you agree that there is no reason to ever mention this again

I think this covers about 80% of all bad-gifting scenarios, and having it in an easy "circle your excuse" format really captures the Spirit of Exchanging Gifts For Better Ones: convenient, cheerfully impersonal, with no hard feelings at all.

After I got this text laid out in Illustrator, I noticed that the overly-crisp quality of the text was at-odds with my scanned rubber-stamp letterings. I applied a 1-pixel gaussian blur over all the text using a raster-based effect. It's cool that you can do this stuff now; back in the old days, I'd have had to convert the whole file to a high-resolution TIFF file and that would have been a pain in the butt. Blurring the text slightly made everything fit together visually. I was pleased that the file size didn't get too large either. At about 250KB for the PDF it's about 100K larger than the non-blurred version, but that's acceptable I think for the visual result. On the minus side, there's a good chance that non-Adobe PDF readers will render the file incorrectly; let me know in the comments if you come across this problem. I'm curious.

Download the Re-Gift Receipt Forms

There's three Re-Gift Receipts per 8.5"x11" sheet. Just trim along the print marks and you'll be ready to start disavowing any intended thoughtfulness to your gift giving. You could also use these forms to legitimately (sigh) let your friends know that you did your best, but there is no obligation to hold on to it...just don't give it BACK. :-)

• Download Re-Gift Receipt Printable Form (PDF, 316K)

If you appreciated the dubious value of this download, you might also like my Chain Letter Nullification Certificate, Arm-Mounted Task Nagger, Procrastinator's Clock, and Social Yardstick designs. Enjoy! :-)

Ground Hog Day Resolutions Review Day 7

Yes, it's that time again: Groundhog Day Resolutions Review Day. I almost forgot about it, but fortunately I had entered all the days into Google Calendar and I got the reminder last night.

The quick recap for those unfamiliar with the Groundhog Day Resolutions Concept: Forget January 1st, and set your resolutions on February 2nd. Then follow through and check every month and a day until December 12. This is the first year I've tried this, and it's kind of gratifying to look back and see what progress has been made.

Rather than go into a long-winded explanation of what's been going on, I'll just recap each statement; you can read about the original ideas in the original post and various followups (there is an index of posts at the bottom of this article).

1. Make Money from Writing and Making Stuff

The general idea is to shift from pure services and become an original content creator, deriving the bulk of my income from my own work. This ties into a new goal I established this month: to be completely mobile by 2010, so I can go to where the interesting projects and people are in the world. There's so much world to experience, it drives me nuts. I've also been inspired again by Tim Ferriss' continuing adventures, which you can follow on his mind-bogglingly excellent tip blog.

The "whiffed" (missed) goals I have decided probably weren't as important as I thought. I still do need to transition to Expression Engine, because my current blog structure feels very constraining, and I think EE's system will be a welcome improvement.

I actually have been booked for the remainder of the year, and probably a good chunk of next year, so my big challenge will be actually time management. The nature of the projects are steeped in writing (essentially, analysis) and making stuff (software, basically). It's kind of what I was doing before, but more challenging and therefore interesting. I will be learning a lot that I can proceduralize and redevelop into new things.

2. Build a Sustainable Social Network

It feels like I've finally stabilzed a few social structures over the past month, though I am uncertain about my level of commitment to them. This uncertainty arises from the amount of energy that I receive back. I actually feel a little "overdrawn" in terms of my social energy and time, so I need to hole up and regenerate. Also on my mind is the continuing search for suitable partners, in terms both of romance and in working mission. In an ideal world, it would be the same person, but I am not sure how to go about finding this. I may write about some of the challenges I'm facing in the coming months, as I haven't yet come across a really good explanation of the process.

I do need to get off my ass and resurrect the May goal of creating the co-schemer / freelancer list...this is pretty important to me, and is related to my overall search strategy of being able to connect people. I'd like to be connected too, of course, and I've come to believe that all it will take is someone standing up and taking names. I guess that will be me. Watch for a post in the near future.

3. Sell a Product This Year

It's taken a while, but the Emergent Task Planner Pads have finally gone to press. Related tasks: forming an LLC, figuring out the design-to-fulfillment chain, and starting to think like an actual business entity instead of some guy working out of his basement office in New Hampshire.

This goal relates closely to #1, and there are actually some new deadlines in place. If last year was any indication, the last months of the year are when people start thinking about planning for next year, so having pre-printed versions of the Compact Calendar, perhaps a full-year planner product, and goodness knows what else could be nice product to have. Now that some of the design-to-fulfillment workflow is in place, I can start to automate the process and shorten the cycle. While I was at the printer, it struck me that there's quite a lot of custom print work I can do beyond pads, and working with a local printer could be a lot of fun. Apparently there is a thing that paper manufacturers create called a paper library, which is a sampler of all the paper stock with printing examples. I was so excited I thought I would faint. This might sound crazy, but I have the ability to touch any material and instantly envision something I could make from it that "respects" it. Putting that into practice would kick ass.

For Next Month

We're in the home stretch, with only 3 more review periods before the GHD year comes to an end.

• The biggest goal on my mind is shipping those ETP pads and getting feedback from the brave souls who have taken a chance on the product. The second goal is to establish the LLC (I'm thinking of calling it "The David Seah Group", which scares the crap out of me because I would have to grow into that) and getting the online ordering and fulfillment automated.

• I'm not so concerned about #1, as the printing goal sort of takes care of that.

• Regarding #2, I do need to gather a group of like-minded people with skills, just so we know who we are. I've done some of this already privately, but there are so many cool people I've been contacted by that I feel the need to organize them into some kind of directory of awesomeness. Everyone has a skill and a story that they can contribute to the pool.

• A bonus goal that wasn't even on my list was going to the gym...I've been going for two months now, and am likely to continue doing so because I have been feeling stronger and---I admit this doesn't make much sense, but it's true---breathing more enthusiastically...maybe it's a result of the improved cardiovascular endurance. The next challenge that isn't part of my GHDRs is to systematically lose weight.

So that's it for this month...now, back to work! Time for dreaming will have to come later.

PAST POSTS ON GROUNDHOG DAY RESOLUTIONS AND REVIEW

• Original Post and Rationalization - February 2nd
• GHDRRD #1 - March 3
• GHDRRD #2 - April 4
• GHDRRD #3 - May 5
• GHDRRD #4 - June 6
• GHDRRD #5 - July 7
• GHDRRD #6 - August 8

Circumnavigation of My Arrogance

I have noticed a disturbing trend in myself in the past few weeks: I've been losing patience and I've been kind of a jerk to my friends and coworkers.

What's new is that I've been under a bit more project load than usual. This is fantastic because I have been wanting to sink my teeth into something nice and meaty for some time. However, I've found some bad old habits resurfacing from the white-hotness of the old 2001 Internet Bubble. I have been arrogant and self-serving under the mistaken belief that I was just being proactive and responsible. I'm lucky that the people that I work with are understanding and strong enough to stand up to me, so I can see what I've been doing wrong. I just feel awful about it, though.

ARROGANCE

First, the positive: my default mental stance is to believe that everyone has a knack. That is, everyone has some kind of incredible potential that, if we can but unlock it, will result in an explosion of empowering happiness.

When I am in the position that I can help someone come into that potential, that makes me feel incredibly happy. This is a mission that I've recently accepted as being one of my primary life goals. Because of this, I am a patient and nurturing teacher, free with my knowledge and my time. I can trace this tendency back to when I was trying to learn the BASIC programming language in the 7th grade, and this older kid named Donald Dimitrios took the time to show me the ropes. He put up with my blank-eyed questions and endless confusion when it came to understanding PEEKS, POKES, and the mysterious FOR-NEXT loop. This generosity of knowledge was particularly notable because in junior high school, there is such stratification between grade levels that even TALKING to a 7th grader was grounds for ruthless taunting. He didn't give a crap though, and as a result I had a positive introduction to computing that not only helped set the course of my career, but imprinted me with the values that lay the foundation for a strong community of practitioners. I am forever grateful.

That said, you might find it surprising that this patient gratefulness dries right up when I am working with someone who is already an equal. The reserve of patience and understanding gets put away for the next student, because I'm excited to gird on the armor and the sword. I'm not exactly Leeroy Jenkins when it comes to group projects, but I must admit there is a certain LET'S GO OUT AND KICK ASS! YEAH!!!!! vibe. I want to drink the blood from conquered skulls of bad interactive media, reveling in the lamentations of the corporate tools who inflicted such point-and-click monkeyware upon the world in the first place! Ok, I am exaggerating a little here, but I really do feel that it's a moral imperative that must be followed through.

I believe that this is arrogance masquerading as the belief that quality and skill are most important for a professional project. That's not to say that quality and skill are not the point; it is the basis of business trust after all. What is arrogant is my belief that valuing quality and skill entitles me to say and do whatever I think. I never fully calculated the human cost in terms of lingering hurt feelings, lowered morale, and confusion. I think for the first time, I am ready to concede that this cost is unacceptable when it is exacted for my own standards. It is only worthwhile when everyone benefits for their own reasons, and they want to be in the room.

WHAT'S OLD IS NEW AGAIN

The last time I experienced this form of personal hubris was in 2001. I believed I knew exactly what should be done, how it could be done, and was incredibly blunt about it. The net result was that I drove away a lot of good people, and it took four years to rebuild both myself and real relationships with people. I learned that I did have this dichotomy of expectation between my mentoring and collaboration modes. My solution? Go freelance...obviously, I had trouble working with others in a company context, so maybe the freedom to put up or shut up on process was my destiny. Problem solved! This path resulted in the start of this blog and the freedom to build many new relationships with people. I have never been happier or more excited in my life by the possibilities before me.

There's just one problem: I really do want to work with people. So for the past year, I've been slowly building up to the point where I can start working with people more closely.

What's different now is that I'm aware that it's much easier to attract similar people than it is to find them, if you are brave enough to put the vibe out there. One reason that I write so broadly on my blog is that I like eclectic people; I figure that if someone is intrigued by the types of topics I write about, they are probably more likely to be someone I'd like to work with. If they like the way I write, that is an even closer potential match! I think this is a good example of finding your niche; it's more important, particularly at first, to find a few people who deeply connect and enrich you than thousands who you superficially encounter but form no bond whatsoever. The reason I think this is important is that when we're getting started, we all need additional sources of energy to push through our fears, uncertainties, and doubts. Having even one person who really believes in you can make all the difference.

I've also thought that maybe it was the style of collaboration or scheming that was the crucial relationship element, which is just a special case of attracting similar people. People that have similar values and interests are more likely to have a harmonious relationship. In general I've found it to be true...for establishing friendships. Extending this principle to a working relationship has so far eluded me. My weird arrogance regarding competency and process rears its ugly head, and drives away the people I want to work with.

DIAGNOSIS

I hurt a few people today who are important to me, which is why I'm trying to work through this and fix it because I apparently did not achieve closure before. I think there are probably others out there who have gone through---or ARE going through---a similar cycle. Here's a few warning signs, based on feelings that I've had before:

• You believe that people around you just aren't willing to understand the value of what you're doing.

• You believe that you are doing more than you are supposed to with regard to your job or role.

• You believe that there is a lack of definition and direction in the workplace, with no apparent end in sight.

• You believe that if you take responsibility for conveying the importance of these issues, matters will improve if people are willing to listen. Through education and persistence, you can effect a change.

There are two responses to this that I've tried in the past:

1. Step up and lead until someone makes you stop: When you don't have authority to make changes directly granted to you, you can apply personal leadership to the situation. Though it's not strictly part of your job description, bringing clarity and vision to the people around you is often appreciated if it's not perceived as a power trip. Being willing to take punches, go the extra mile for your peers, and create recognized excellence within the organization can be the beginning of a new era of solidarity. However, this approach requires a lot of energy with no guarantee of recognition or reward. It can pay off big, or you will burn out in about a year.

2. Withdraw and cut your losses: Situations in which you do not have the authority to change culture and process are difficult to win overnight. After you assess the amount of effort and luck required to remedy matters, you determine it is too much work. You can stop caring and restrict your role to the smallest unit of responsibility that won't get you fired. Or, you can leave.

I've practiced both responses half a dozen times with various companies. The typical patterns is to lead with "stepping up" and try to last long enough to achieve whatever goal was set before me. Very draining, but rewarding when we pulled off something kick ass. Eventually, though, my energy stores are drained so thoroughly that I become very moody and depressed. I ask myself am I really going to be happy doing this forever and come to the conclusion that it's time to move on. So I close off things as cleanly as I can, and enter a new phase of my life.

The current phase of my life, which is this blogging/design thing, has been sustainable because I'm generally working on shorter projects. With shorter projects, I can work hard to get the thing out, and then count on some downtime to replenish my store of energy. Shorter projects also tend to be very well-defined or limited in some way that makes them much easier to tackle comprehensively.

It's the longer-term projects that require more of a marathoner's approach to energy management: the pace is necessarily slower, because you need to maintain energy for the entire project track. And it's these projects that are the ones with the most need for collaboration between peers. I also think it's these projects that are the most rewarding due to the larger scale of the accomplishment. I need to develop a third option that doesn't involve total withdrawal or total sacrifice.

IDENTIFYING THAT THIRD OPTION

What I need to confront is my ego and sense of entitlement. I thought I'd dealt with this years ago, but they both live on. I also need to resolve that sense of responsibility that tends to exert itself when I think I can help clarify things. Here are my thoughts on the matter:

1. I should acknowledge that I'm really good at some things. And that's as noteworthy as someone having hair because everyone is really good at something. Even exceptional skill, I think, is just a tiny aspect of a person's place in the universe, no sense in kicking up a fuss about it. Also, embracing one's talents without feeling embarrassed is a necessary step to performing on the broader world stage; if I really want to do cool stuff on a bigger scale, I need to get comfortable with offering what I can offer.

2. There's no need to "awaken" or "educate" people all the time. What's funny is that I believe that I already believe that expressing ideas in tangible form is most effective in creating positive change; so me merely telling people things and expecting them to follow without some kind of concrete example is just foolish. I'm amazed that I did not see this before.

3. Forgot job boundaries, assigned responsibilities, and appropriateness of action. Just pitch in and help. It's the right thing to do. And this is the path through which quality may be attained with much less friction. I've just realized that assigning distinct responsibilities to people is a form of zero sum thinking; the implication is that if people don't do what they are "supposed to do", the project will go horribly awry. Well...maybe not!

So that's my amended course of action, and I am hopeful that this means that I'll finally get the hang of collaborating with people more closely. I don't think clients will necessarily notice a difference (it's quality and skill that they're paying for). However, I think these new guidelines will help me come to a more comfortable work-life balance that includes everyone, not just me. It's a moral imperative!