I don’t agree with every single nuance in this great talk by Srikumar Rao, but there is definitely gold to be mined here:
(Especially the Coach John Wooden quote!)
I’ve just started following Chris Guillebeau’s Art of Noncomfority blog, about his non-traditional work/jobs/career, and his travel around the world.
One thing that stuck out for me in today’s post is this quote on The Heart of the Matter:
The way you stand out in a non-profit organization isn’t that different from what you do in any group or company. You show up, give more than expected, and try to make other people look good.
Unbelievably true.
90% of success might be showing up, according to some, but it makes a big difference how you how up. Are you just there, or are you really all there? Do you do the minimum, or the maximum that you can contribute? Do you make others look good, or are you just focused on your own goals.
Love the quote, love the reality.
Now: to focus on making it come true for me.
It’s now 8:26 PM. Most of the work of the day is finished … except, of course, the work for my current course.
I’m currently taking the seventh of ten courses that will bestow upon my bedazzled ego the title of Master (hah!) of Educational (double hah!) Technology. The challenge is finishing all ten before they finish me.
So, naturally, I’m lying down on the job.
More specifically, I’m lying on our wonderful 3-seater leather sofa, propping my MacBook against my knees, and typing with all the grace of a drunken penguin climbing Mt. Everest. My arms are curled like pretzels, and my wrists burn from keybordian curvitis.
But at least my back feels good.
What I really need is a keyboard for lying down on the sofa. I think it would look like a USB cable that plugs into your right temple. Direct brain-to-computer interface … no other interrupting medium needed, and no clack, clack, clack of keys either. The best keyboard ever invented – no keyboard at all.
Steve, Bill, anyone? I’ll pay up to 10 bucks. 15, tops.
There’s been a very interesting little “discussion” going around what we used to call the blogosphere.
TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington spent the previous week at LeWeb, in Paris, where in response to some questions, he said that Europeans love life too much to generate the biggest technology success stories. They have too many 2-hour lunches and too few late-night coding sessions. LeWeb’s organizer Loic Le Meur responded by asking – on his blog – whether Arrington should be invited back.
Meanwhile, Zoho Office blogger Sridhar reflects that Japanese work even harder … often 12 or more hours daily.
This issue is bulls-eye topical for me, as I’ve been working 12 to 14 hour days lately in my new job.
But … let’s be honest.
There can be times when you go way overboard and work mega-hours to pass critical checkpoints. But 99% of people will not be long-term successful (or happy) being out of balance all the time. The old saw about no-one wishing on their deathbed that they’d spent more time at the office is true. And realistically, almost no-one is actually effective spending that many hours for very many days.
As I mentioned on the Zoho Office blog …
I’ve also read first-hand accounts from ex-pat workers in Japan who said that a LOT of the office time was actually just face time … there was not a lot more work actually getting done. But people couldn’t leave, because that would have been see as slacking. So they stayed at their desks, doing a little online shopping, doing a little of this and a little of that.
Here’s the deal: I’d much rather work smart than work hard. That is where you’re actually going to make the major difference – where you’re going to leap-frog the competition.
But to succeed, often you have to do both.
Today is the day.
While I’m on-call for another week, and will return to the office next Friday for a cake&coffee with the team, I’m leaving the company that I’ve been with for 15 years (give or take a month).
That’s 15 years through 7 different jobs:
And 15 years through 3 different ownership stages:
And 15 years through 8 different bosses:
What a wild ride it’s been, from a company that did about $40 million in annual business to a company that does over $130 million yearly. From a small family-run operation to a cog in a billion-dollar public corporation. From a small, cramped office in a leaky Abbotsford building to the former President’s (Henk Berends) corner office in Langley, and then to Bellingham, WA.
The opportunities I’ve had have been incredible. Just one of them is the travel, which has enabled me to go to San Francisco multiple times, Silicon Valley, Salt Lake City multiple times, Seatle, Portland, Wisconsin, Asheville North Carolina, San Diego multiple times, New Orleans, Virginia Beach, Texas multiple times, Florida multiple times, Quebec, Phoenix, Whistler, Winnipeg multiple (multiple multiple) times, Chicago, Philadelphia, Atlantic City, Moose Jaw (!?!), and many more places. Business travel is not always all it’s cracked up to be, but I always made a point of seeing or doing something at each place that I could not have seen or done at home … and so it has enriched my life.
Other opportunities have been career development. I started with Premier almost right out of Simon Fraser University. I had some previous experience managing a retail sports store … but Research Assistant was my first real career job. From that beginning people and experiences at Premier taught me product development, marketing, and basic business realities. My interest in technology grew significantly while at Premier, and the company had an opportunity for me to start and lead a web development department. From that, I moved on to other interesting and challenging jobs, including the one I’m currently leaving from: Director of Product Development. What a blessing! I feel truly fortunate and blessed to have had the career opportunities that I’ve already had.
But probably the best opportunity at Premier has been the people. Meeting and working with the amazing people at Premier … the David Leoppky’s, the Henk Berends, the Joel Zuckers … and so many more. I can’t – really can’t – name them all, but ones that really stand out are Pat Graham, Brandon Bird, Foeke van de Poel, Kelly DeVries, Bruce Morris, Sibrand Stulp, Andrew Westrink, Raymond Kenny, Teresa Alexander, Brad Kuik, Kevin Moore, Jane Hix, John Flokstra, Jonathan Catherman, Harold Ludwig, Wim Kanis, Natalie Critchley, Ronnie Zindorf, Larry Huinker, John Wesselius, Steve Misenhimer, Rastin Mehr, Arie Veenendaal, Ray Kuik, Dave Shoots, Bob Goodman, Diego Rodriguez, Sheldon Atkinson, Dominique Fugere, Francois Lupien, David Boone, Larry Renooy, Tom Osborn, Mike Skovgaard, Bernie Van Spronsen, Lisa Peumsang, Brian Koning, Steven Leyenhorst, Anita Lofgren, Phil Minderhoud, Tyler VanVliet, Bram Vegter, and Cheryl Vandeburgt. There’s more … I know there’s more, and I apologize if your name isn’t there. But those are the ones that came to mind. We had a great run together, and I wish you all the very best of everything.
Some of my favorite memories of these 15 years are:
I have been very blessed, and very happy to have been a part of Premier from December of 1994 to November of 2008. And while I’m eagerly looking forward to new challenges, I’ll remember these times and people with fondness and some nostalgia.
So long, farewell, auf wiedersehen, adieu!
I feel good. Really good.
Reason? I worked out last night … even though it was a crazy, crazy day with a full 9 or so hours at work, an hour coaching baseball for my son’s team, and a coffee with friends.
I think it was Penelope Trunk who said it a few months ago … something along the lines of: you should work out if you want to be successful in your profession? Why? Most successful people work out.
That’s a correlational as opposed to a causal relationship. But it’s still significant.
Feeling better, feeling stronger, feeling more alert, just generally feeling physically better is going to translate, most of the time, to acting better, performing better, and simply being better.
I haven’t been able to work out regularly lately due to a crazy sports schedule (I signed up for two ice hockey teams – big mistake) and a neck injury (probably unrelated but its hard to tell). But in the past 5 days I’ve worked out twice, and I feel incredible already.
Here’s to the gym!
I’m in New Orleans for the week for a conference.
The big easy is an amazing place, to say the least. It’s my first time, and I’m enjoying it immensely.
Any city that prioritizes walkers over drivers can’t be all bad, and New Orleans is a great walking city. The art galleries are many, varied, and wonderful, as are the antiques stores.
New Orleans has distinctive smells, too. The ripe musk of the bayou nearby, the cooking spilling out from multiple restaurants in the French Quarter, the alcohol in a thousand hands on Bourbon street … and yes, the vomit on the sidewalk outside on of the thousand bars.
I’ve only started exploring the city in some of the hours not allocated to the conference, and I look forward to more over the next couple of days.
Just found out today that the November 2007 Today’s Parent had a story by Helaine Becker on one of my company’s products.
I’m the director of product development at Premier, and we make student agendas – planners for kids in K-12 and higher education.
It’s always cool when people are talking about you, and the article was a lot of fun to read … I can totally relate to the challenges of being organized enough to model great behavior for your kids.
I just wish I had seen it earlier!
Tomorrow is my last day of work before the holidays – we’ve got a two-week company shut-down period, which is VERY welcome.
It’s been an intense last third of the year … two courses for my master’s program, a promotion (and subsequently doing both my new job and old job for some time), and all the typical family and home things.
Two weeks off is just what I need – if I can only get all my Christmas shopping done!
I recently received a promotion, and I’ve been thinking about what it means to be a manager versus a leader, what kind of leadership I want to provide, and what kind of a leader do I want to grow to be …This is tough stuff, and I’m pretty sure I have a long way to go. But I think the critical piece is summed up in this advice that I found on PositiveSharing (the chief happiness officer’s blog):
A leader is best when the people are hardly aware of his existence,not so good when people stand in fear,worse, when people are contemptuous.Fail to honour people, and they will fail to honour you.But a good leader who speaks little,when his task is accomplished, his work done,the people say “We did it ourselves.”
The person who said that lived 2500 years ago in China: Lao Tzu.[tags] leadership, office, work, lao tzu, john koetsier [/tags]
Getting 6 people together at the same time on the same date at the same place (even if it’s virtual) is like herding cats.
So when a meeting fits in this nicely, it’s like the parting of the Red Sea … especially when our corporate meeting software shows busy times in red:
You never have office politics at your work right? Riiighhht …
There’s a really good article about office politics at BNet. Here’s an excerpt from the intro:
Like it or not, every workplace is a political environment. But operating effectively within it doesn’t have to mean sucking up, lying, or slinging dirt. In its purest form, office politics is simply about getting from here to there: securing a promotion, seeing an idea come to fruition, or gaining support to make an organizational change. Playing the game well is about defending your position, earning respect, exchanging favors, and keeping your sanity amid the chaos. To get started, you need to know what you really want from work, then orient your political moves toward those goals. It all starts with strong relationships and helping others; those people in return make up the support system that helps you realize your goals.
Having endured years of chronic neck pain in my life, I know something about the need to intentionally relax your muscles.
I saw a good tip today intended to help prevent near-sightedness, but a major side-benefit (or perhaps the main benefit) is muscle relaxation. I find that I tend to get a little more stressed, hour by hour, at the office, and that results in tensing my muscles, locking up my joints, and making me more likely to have neck or other joint pain.
Here’s the tip:
Poor distance vision is rarely caused by genetics, says Anne Barber, O.D., an optometrist in Tacoma, Washington. “It’s usually caused by nearpoint stress.” In other words, staring at your computer screen for too long. So flex your way to 20/20 vision. Every few hours during the day, close your eyes, tense your body, take a deep breath, and, after a few seconds, release your breath and muscles at the same time. Tightening and releasing muscles such as the biceps and glutes can trick involuntary muscles like
the eyes into relaxing as well.
Just watched the excerpts of Scoble’s interview with Tim Ferris (the 4-hour-workweek guy), and one thing he said really resonated with me …
Control the environment, not the behavior
He said it in the context of finding a PDA for himself that had email but no wireless access, and not having a particular brand of dark chocolate in the house. Reasons: he knows himself, and he knows he’d be breaking his own rules about email access and healthy diet.
That’s a powerful insight: engineer your environment to make undesired behavior inconvenient. I’ll be finding some ways of implementing that in my own life and work.
I had lunch with a colleague today. He’s young, smart, and creative … and in a job where he cannot possibly exercise all his talents.
(Kind of the way I like to think of myself!)
But he has a good-paying job. And a mortgage. And 3 kids. And a wife.
So it’s hard. Hard to take the plunge. Hard to take the risk. Hard to not settle. After all, if he has a hard landing, it’s not just him at risk.
And yet, a good-paying job doing often-interesting work is not enough. It’s not enough for him, and it’s not enough for me. There are some people who won’t settle – can’t settle.
Settling means dying, even if just a little. To settle, you have to kill your dreams, or at least shut them off, wall them up.
The colleague I had lunch with is not willing to do that. I’m not willing to do that. Someone, I think Eleanor Roosevelt, said that the biggest risk is not taking any risks at all.
The challenge is risk management.
In other words, if you’re going to take a risk outside the cozy corporate womb, have your ducks in a row. Plan it for some time in advance. Have a fairly large sum of money (12 months worth of living expenses, I think) in reserve. Then go for it.
Why?
You might as well ask why we live. Life is risk. Doing the same thing over and over, always staying within the lines, always doing the safe thing, is not life.
Life is experimentation. Life is change – without change there is no life. Literally, when you stop changing, you’ll be dead.
I want to live.
[ update ]
I just saw this article on risk-taking. It gives the following three reasons why people take risks:
Welcome to Sparkplug 9, John Koetsier's blog on technology and social media.
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