Today I was deep into working on blank state views for Obsorb. Sam Hutchings made an insightful comment.
Two rules:
- Use as few words as needed to get the message across
- Use plain english, assume your user is a novice.
Hire Sam for your copywriting needs, he’s excellent.
I’m a big fan of Klout and their attempt to measure people’s individual influence on the internet. I think marketers can begin to do interesting things when they have access to this information. However when the scores are unpredictable, it isn’t going to work. The above chart shows my Klout score jumping 12+ points to just over 52 within 24 hours. Klout also says Robert Scoble — a tech journalist — is more influential than Obama. I highly doubt that.
Several weeks ago, I finished an adventure I’ll always remember. It was me, my motorcycle, and 1 month on the road to California. The above image is the exact route I traveled. First, some stats…
It all started with a movie. Back in February I began getting the itch for a little adventure. One night I put in one of my favorites, Into The Wild. I’ll let my good friend IMDB give you a quick synopsis of what its about.
After graduating from Emory University, top student and athlete Christopher McCandless abandons his possessions, gives his entire $24,000 savings account to charity and hitchhikes to Alaska to live in the wilderness. Along the way, Christopher encounters a series of characters that shape his life.
I should add the movie is a true story. Now, I had no intention of hitchhiking or giving up all my possessions. However, it did inspire me to start looking into riding my motorcycle from Dallas to California for a couple of weeks. The idea started as a two week trip to San Francisco and blossomed into 4 weeks with main stops in Austin, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Sacramento.
The trip was to serve three main purposes:
The plan was to leave Friday March 11th and ride to Austin, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Sacramento, back to San Francisco, and then head back home to Dallas. I would use a mixture of friends couches, Airbnb, and hotels for places to stay. The length of time spent at each location would be mostly up to me.
Why these locations
The original plan was to just ride to San Francisco and stay and ride around there for a week. The extra week would come from travel time going and coming from my home in Dallas. After hearing about the trip, my friend Jillian offered to let me crash on her couch at LMU in Los Angeles for a week. Extra stop, numero uno.
I had become friends with Lance Walley, the CEO of Chargify through our common interest in startups and motorcycles (he rides as well) so he suggested I come hang with him for a day in Sacramento when I would be in San Francisco.
I then realized that the time I planned to leave fell right around Austin’s SXSW. I had planned to attend the last 2 years but for various reasons couldn’t make it. I didn’t want to miss it a third year so I planned to hit Austin first, and then leave from there.
When my dad heard about my plans for the trip, he wanted to join. We hadn’t taken a long moto trip together yet, so I agreed. Unfortunately in order for him to be able to go, I would have to do Austin first, then come home for a few days, and then leave with him. He could only take a week off so we planned to ride the first 5 days together and then he would head back to Dallas. I would then go on to LMU, San Francisco, and Sacramento on my own.
About 3 weeks before I would leave, I began prepping my bike and buying a little bit of gear. Since I would be traveling on a bike specifically designed for racing and not comfort, I needed to make some adjustments. I bought some moto luggage for my clothes, a ‘no drag’ Ogio backpack for my computer stuff, and a large tank bag for miscellaneous items like a rain suite. On the afternoon of March 11th, bags were packed and I left for SXSW.
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The ride to L.A., randomly meeting Matt Leblanc (Joey from Friends), LMU Shenanigans, first advice on dropping out, and more in part 2 soon.
Over the last few months I’ve slowly developed a few habits that have allowed me to quantify the progress on goals I’ve set for myself. It’s been working really well for me so far, so I thought I would share as it may be helpful to others. Consider this a ‘how I work’ post.
Personal productivity is inherently personal
Tim Ferriss during an interview in You 2.0, a documentary on life hacking
First and foremost, have some goals. I recommend coming up with a mix of personal and professional goals for yourself, it will keep you balanced and happy. Here are some of my goals for the year. I tweaked a couple since writing that but you get the idea. I’ve also accomplished several of them already (more on that later).
Keep them infront of you. I use a to-do app for Mac called Things and the corresponding iPhone and iPad apps that all sync together. In Things I add goals as projects. I keep most projects as ‘Inactive’ until I’m ready to focus on them. Projects go into ‘Areas of Focus’. In my case they are Personal, Obsorb, and AllRendered (my 2 companies). Each task relating to the goal goes inside that corresponding project.
Identify what is moving the ball forward. This is the most important part. When I add any task I tag it with either ‘proactive’ or ‘reactive’. If you write things on paper, just put proactive or reactive next to the task, its as simple as that.
Reactive tasks = a task that you need to deal with that doesn’t pertain to a goal you set. It’s incoming work.
Proactive tasks = a task that, once completed makes you one step closer to accomplishing a goal that you set.
One important thing to note is not all tasks inside of a project are tagged ‘proactive’, even if they’re for a goal. For example, I have a monetary goal for AllRendered. Landing a very large animation contract and getting it going was all proactive. Responding to incoming questions about progress on it was not. That was reactive work. Tagging each task requires a second of thought.
You’re going to have to deal with reactive tasks, its just not possible to eliminate all reactive work. What you can do however is measure the proactive to reactive task ratio you accomplish. Successful people live purposeful lives by doing work that moves them closer to what they want. The ones that just get by are stuck on reacting to the incoming stuff.
Give yourself some feedback from data.
Every Monday, I look at the log of all of the completed tasks from the previous week and add up the proactive and reactive tasks. I input this data into a google doc’s spreadsheet. Each day has a column for the # of proactive and reactive tasks completed. There is then a percentage breakdown of proactive and reactive tasks completed for that day. (ie, on 2/25/11 75% of my tasks completed that day were proactive, 25% was reactive.) That daily and weekly percentage is your crucial feedback, monitor it.
None of this is really new. I’ve simply pulled from many different things that I’ve read and tried over the years. This works for me. If you do one thing from this post, monitor your breakdown.
The goal is to keep the proactive totals and percentages high. I shoot for 70% or more of tasks completed to be proactive.
Somewhere during 2010 I decided I wanted to take some time off from school. I either wanted to travel or raise capital and start a new company. After the Fall 2010 semester, I would be finished with 60 hours of ‘basics’ and would be ready to transfer to a new school. So before I landed at a new school, I decided to take off 1 semester plus the summer. The plan was to transfer to a school in California after the break.
Around this time I heard about a program by the Chilean government called Start-Up Chile. They were bringing in 24 new companies from around the world as part of a beta group. The participants receive $40,000 and a 1 year visa to come and build their companies. What was interesting is they weren’t taking any equity for the money. Instead, the program was an incentive to attract outside entrepreneurs working on innovative companies to come and build their businesses in Chile. The way I understand it is Chilean entrepreneurs do not take very many risks. Most of their companies aren’t very innovative either. They mainly focus on imports and exports. By attracting outside entrepreneurs working on innovative projects, their hope is to make Chile the ‘Silicon Valley of South America’.
With the success of the beta group, Start-Up Chile would open applications in February of this year to bring in an additional 100 companies. By this time I had already formed the new company (Obsorb, Inc… more on that in a future post) and raised some cash for it from an angel investor. One of my mentors, Shonika Proctor, had moved to Chile a few months back to work with some of the university entrepreneurship programs over there. I kept hearing all sorts of awesome things about the country from her and others.
On February 15th, they opened up the applications and I applied with my new company, Obsorb. After a long wait, yesterday I got an email with an acceptance letter. I’m beyond excited. Things are going to start moving incredibly fast. I haven’t picked an exact date yet, but I will be moving there around the end of May or the beginning of June (About a month out). I have to be there for a minimum of 6 months so I won’t be back until at least December, although I can come and go as I please.
Now its time to get everything ready. Unfortunately for me, I thought taking French in high school was a better idea than taking spanish. Luckily a lot of the college graduates there all speak english, so we’ll still be able to hire and communicate with a team.
PS: Consider this an open invite to any friends that want to come down and visit. I plan to rent an apartment with at least 2 bedrooms.
Chile is 2,700 miles long and an average of 109 miles wide. It has the Andes Mountains on the east and Pacific Ocean on the west. Needless to say its a beautiful country.
Entrepreneurs, by means of nature or nurture (another argument) you’ve been gifted with the ability to bring together resources for profit. Just as much as our world needs you for economic stability, jobs, and innovation, we need you for your ability to bring resources to those in need.
This year I’ve been heavily influenced by an organization called Charity: Water. Their founder, Scott Harrison made his living as a New York City nightclub promoter. He led a life of selfishness and arrogance. Desperately feeling unfulfilled, he asked a simple question:
What would the opposite of my life look like?
Scott proceeded to take a position with a humanitarian organization traveling to Africa. It is there he found his calling. Scott saw first hand the affects drinking dirty water had on people. He went on to use his gift as a promoter and founded Charity: Water. The organization now raises money to drill and build wells for the billion people living without clean drinking water.
Scott Harrison used his influence and entrepreneurial abilities to help those in need. As an entrepreneur, it is my belief you have the obligation to do the same.
I’m starting small. On January 1st, I turned 21. Instead of asking for gifts which I certainly don’t need, this year I decided to give up my birthday and ask for donations for Charity: Water. Each $20 raised is another person that never has to go without clean drinking water.
I’d like to encourage you to find an occasion or reason of your own to “give up” an event for a charity. Entrepreneur favorites include:
Kiva.org which supplies micro loans to entrepreneurs in third world countries and the aforementioned charitywater.org. They also have a nice platform for you to host your own event page at mycharitywater.org.
Some of the most rewarding experiences you will have in life will come from helping those in need. Do something besides blowing your money on shots at the bar on your birthday and decide to do something that matters. It’s your duty.
I originally published this on Under30CEO.com
Here are my predictions for the tech industry in 2011… Can’t wait to see how it all pans out. I think #6 would be awesome and in my opinion, quite possible.