Scott Porad

A young man introduced himself to me after my presentation at BlogWorld Expo. We sat down to talk and he explained that he was an engineer at an aerospace firm, but wants to get into blogging…

…he was at BlogWorld to learn and explore options…a blog, a podcast, a video podcast…he was trying to figure out what the best thing to do…to figure out something that had the greatest chance of success given the amount of time he could put forth as a side-project…

…after learning about Cheezburger from my presentation, he considered user-generated content…perhaps it would be easier to identify quality content as opposed to generate it. “Maybe that would work,” he wondered aloud.

Until this point, I listened. New to the world of blogging and social media, his mind was brimming with new ideas. I could see the gears turning as he worked out this thoughts aloud. But, when he said the phrase, “that would work” I jumped in.

“There is only one thing that works,” I said, being really forward. “Do you want to know what it is?”  Dramatic pause.

The only thing that works is doing the something you love.

Whatever you choose to do, it’s going to be hard. At first, there will be very few people paying attention, if any, and it’s unlikely that you’re going to make any money.

You have to do something that makes you happy all by itself; something that you enjoy enough that you’ll done it for free.  Inevitably there are going to be tough times, and as I’ve written before, if you’re not passionate about your project then you won’t persevere because your heart won’t be in it.

It’s my birthday today, and yesterday my family came over to celebrate.  As I was waiting for them to arrive, I sat on my front deck for a bit thinking about the past year, and the one coming.

Where my thinking let me is to the phrase I find myself saying nearly every day: the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.  Typically, that phrase is the motivation I use to jump in and get something started, but this time it was different.

On a journey of a thousand miles, there are many steps in between the first and last.  What occurred to me is that sticking with the journey and persevering is just as hard as starting it, if not harder.

Often I’m discouraged because I haven’t arrived at my destination, haven’t achieved my goals.  But, many of the goals we have in life don’t have an actual destination.  I suppose really the discouragement is because I fail to see how the current step is helping me along my way to my destination.  Perhaps the phrase should be the journey of a thousand miles takes a million steps.

My goal for the coming year is look at the glass half-full in this regard: to become better at appreciating how what I’m doing is moving me toward my destination, as opposed to the half-empty view of only looking at how I have not achieved my goals yet.

The post I wrote about quitting your job is one of the most popular I’ve ever written in this space.

I’ve received e-mails from a few people about the post, and some of the things they wrote scared me.  My goodness, I’m telling all these people to quit…I feel sort of responsible for that.

Of course, I’m not responsible: they’re adults and make their own decisions.  But, what if they quit based on my advice, and can’t find a job, and go broke and homeless.  That’s a lot of weight to carry around, so I feel compelled to write this follow up.

The very most important thing to note about my friend Mark was that he had a financial backstop: it was his wife.   Because she was employed and could support them completely, his family was not going to go broke and homeless.

Take that lesson to heart: only quit your job if you have a financial backstop that is very deep.  If you have only 3 months of cash in savings, I’d say you probably shouldn’t just go quit your job.  If you have 12 months…well, maybe, that’s up to you, but I’d say it’s borderline.

Now, let’s say you don’t have the financial backstop: that doesn’t mean you can’t start looking for a new job.  As I’ve written before, change doesn’t happen by itself.

So, take that first step: update your resume and apply for a new job.  That doesn’t mean you have to take the job if offered, or even go to the interview if invited.  It’s just the first step on a long journey, nothing more, nothing less.

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Yesterday, I was trying to talk my friend Mark into quitting his job, and was reminded of a Chris Brogan a post about how You are the Captain of your life:

…no one is actively trying to move you up from where you are to where you want to go, until after you take command of your own ship

Yes, in this economy, I want him to quit.  Why?  Because he can and it’s ruining his life.  Let me break those down:

Because He Can

Mark’s wife is a well respected doctor working at a hospital where she is a nationally known expert in her field.  So, I asked him, “Mark, how long could you live on her salary before you ran out of money?”  “Forever”.  Okay, so problem solved: quitting his job, and spending time, perhaps months, looking for a new one is not a financial issue.

Because It’s Ruining His Life

The nature of Mark’s job is that he spends about 4 hours of every work day dealing with irate customers who as often as not treat him rudely.  After 10 years of this, Mark’s job has made him dislike people.  In general, he’s come to conclude that people are, on average, not very nice, so short of his few friends he doesn’t want anything to do with ‘em.

To me, this is heart breaking.  As I’ve written previously, people are all we have in this life, so you do the math: if people equal life, then a job that ruins people are ruining his life.

Then Why Won’t He Quit?

That’s a great question, and I don’t know the answer.  If he’s not doing the job for happiness, and he’s not doing it for money, and he’s not doing it altruistically, then I don’t know why he’s doing it.  I can speculate on a number of reasons, but the bottom line is that he’s scared.

He’s scared that he won’t find another job. (Wrong!  He’s in sales and account management!  If you can sell, you can work!)  He’s scared that his wife will think him less of a man for quitting.  (Wrong!  Your wife, more than anyone, wants you to be happy!)  He’s scared of change.  (Wrong!  Change is like Death and Taxes…it can’t be avoided, so use it as a tool to your advantage.)

You know the real thing to be scared of: when you there is no excuse to stop you–not the money, not the spouse, not nothing…spending your natural gifts, talents and potential–your life, for goodness sake!!–on a job that neither makes you rich or happy or makes the world a better place.  Seriously, what is there to lose?  Nothing.  There’s only happiness to be gained.  Life is too damn short otherwise.

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This week, I sat down for an hour to talk with Erica O’Grady of ReinventingErica.com about how to use change as a tool for achieving greater happiness.  Here’s a summary of what we talked about.

• Nobody is going to change for you. Claiming personal responsibility is possibly the most important ingredient of change.  Say to yourself: I am the only person who is going to change this thing; there is nobody who will make me happy but me.
• Change is incremental. The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.  For example, losing weight doesn’t happen all at once–it happens one pound at a time.  Change can seem overwhelming, so break it into small, achievable tasks.
• An object in motion tends to stay in motion. Focus on making small changes because each small change results in positive feedback creating momentum that leads to the next.  The key is to take action to begin the momentum. After taking the first step, the second step will be easier.

It was a wonderful conversation, and when Erica makes the video of the conversation available, I’ll post it here.

In response to my Stop Seeking Happiness post, Joel Bush posted an excellent comment that referenced an article about the positive influence Marines’ boot camp has on its recruits.  (The article is absolutely worth reading, click here).

I really appreciate the excellent contribution to the post from Joel…the money line was this quote from the article:

Don’t pursue happiness; pursue excellence.

which is really just awesome.  Take a moment to meditate on that line and realize it’s power.

I saw Joel at Cheezburger Night at the Mariners last week, and since then I’ve been thinking about his comment.  As I’ve been considering this, what comes to my mind is substituting the word “excellence” for “creativity”.  I don’t mean creativity only like an art project, but rather creativity as the act of creating something.

I’m not saying the original quote is wrong or off-base.  In fact, they are not mutually exclusive.  I just realized that, for me, it is creativity that causes meaning and happiness.

Over the weekend I made a comment to Lisa that, given these economic times, I would feel safer if we had more money.  Don’t get me wrong, we’re not going to the poor house any time soon, but we still have to work for a living.  I would feel more safe if we had enough money so that we didn’t have to work, I said.

Regardless, even if I didn’t have to work, I would still probably keep doing what I’m doing.  It’s just too exciting to do otherwise.  But that wasn’t my point; I was just trying to express that I would feel more safe than I feel now.

“It’s interesting to me that you think money, and not people and relationships, will make you safe,” Lisa replied.

KAPOW!  Lisa’s response stunned me and she was absolutely right.  Given the worst-case scenario, we’d end up having to rely on friends and family for necessities.  In the event of that unlikely scenario, it will be the people and relationships that keep us safe.

After getting my head screwed on straight, I was reminded of Tara Hunt’s recent post about chicken soup:

…the soup metric is the number of people in your social network that you know would bring you soup if they knew you were sick and/or get your back in any other real friend way – to help you feel better OR help your career.

which after thinking about it, I realized was just another flavor of the Kevin Kelly’s 1000 True Fans theory:

A creator, such as an artist, musician, photographer, craftsperson, performer, animator, designer, videomaker, or author – in other words, anyone producing works of art – needs to acquire only 1,000 True Fans to make a living.

A True Fan is defined as someone who will purchase anything and everything you produce. They will drive 200 miles to see you sing. They will buy the super deluxe re-issued hi-res box set of your stuff even though they have the low-res version. They have a Google Alert set for your name. They bookmark the eBay page where your out-of-print editions show up. They come to your openings. They have you sign their copies. They buy the t-shirt, and the mug, and the hat. They can’t wait till you issue your next work. They are true fans.

And what’s common here is what Lisa so eloquently was able to make me see clearly: it is the people and relationships that will safeguard your your health, career, and life.

In my yard there are two beautiful, tall pine trees that drop what seem to be an infinite number of pine cones.  So, on Saturday I headed out with my 7-year-old son to rake them and, in the process, learned some things about web and software development.

The first thing to know is that we moved to this house last summer from a postage stamp sized yard in the city.  Until now my son didn’t have experience raking anything more than about 10 square feet of lawn.  As he got going with enthusiasm, he basically just was just moving the cones around, sloshing them to-and-fro.  It was clear that he needed a little coaching.

Lesson #1: The Master Pile

First, I explained to him that we needed to make one big pile…The Master Pile.  We would rake all the pine cones into this pile, then we’d pick up the pile and put it into the yard waste bin.  The point of this lesson was that we needed a plan as a foundation for our project.  The same thing goes for any web or software project—you need a plan, a roadmap, a guide.

This bit of guidance worked well because it directed his efforts in one direction, but there were still issues.  He was raking a little bit here, a little bit there, but it didn’t seem like anything was actually getting done.

Lesson #2: The Clean Area

After he mastered The Master Pile, I explained to pick one small section, no bigger than 3 or 4 feet square, and get that area completely raked until it was clean of pine cones.  That would be The Clean Area.

Once he did that, which only took a few moments, I asked if it felt good to see that there was one part of the yard complete.  “Yeah,” he said.  “Okay, well, now pick another few feet next to it and make it bigger.  Keep on trying to make your Clean Area bigger and bigger.”

The lesson here was that when working on a project, you need to feel progress through small successes.  Success feels good, so set yourself up to have lots of it, even if they’re small.  When you’re having success, you’ll be having fun and want to keep on going.  Success is a drug, it’s addictive, so organize your project to get the biggest high possible.

But, it was still a big job.  Just because we had a plan, and we were having little successes along the way, doesn’t mean that it didn’t feel overwhelming still.  There were easily over a thousand pine cones.  How would we ever get this job done?!

Lesson #3: Focus on Progress

Building on the notion that success begets success, I had to relieve the overwhelming burden of what seemed like endless raking.  To do this, I worked at framing the project in positive a positive way.

“Dad, we’re never going to finish this.  Look at how many are left!”

“Oh, sure we are.  Look at how big our Clean Area is.  Instead of thinking about how much raking we have left, focus instead on how big our Clean Area has become.  Don’t think about what’s left.  Think about making the Clean Area as big as possible and we’ll be done in no time.”

The lesson here is obvious: focus on your success and progress, instead of the mountain ahead.  In the software or web development world, this means actually keeping a list somewhere of all the things that have been accomplished.

This is, in fact, how we do it on my team: we have an entire wall devoted to listing out all the things we’ve achieved and it just keeps on getting bigger and bigger and bigger to the point where it now dwarfs the list of stuff that we need to do.

All that said, I had never planned on having our yard raking job turn into a learning experience this weekend, but it did which made the job even more fun.  As they say, “once in a while you get shown the light in the strangest of places if you look at it right”.

In a recent blog post, Erica O’Grady writes:

Anyone who has talked to me lately, knows that I’m OBSESSED with Happiness. What is it? What does it look like, taste like, feel like? How do we get it? How do we know when we have it? Is Happiness even possible?

and what came to mind when I read that I’m not sure Happiness is something we can obtain directly.  In other words, my sense (based on my experience) is that Happiness is a byproduct of other types of well-being.

To put in another way, there is a thing called Happiness out there in the world that exists.  I believe this.  However, I very much believe that if you are attempting to obtain Happiness directly that, by definition, you will not obtain it.  There is no possible way to obtain it directly and any attempts to obtain it will yield the opposite result.  Like Alice and the Red Queen, the faster you run the further away you will get from your destination.

So, earlier I said this weird phrase “type well-being”.  What is a type of well-being?  Social, Emotional, Mental, Physical — our whole selves are composed of these components.  The activities in our lives, including external factors, affect each and all of these components which, in turn, yield Happiness or lack thereof.

What might these affectations be?  Stimulation.  Meaning.  Engagement.  Love.  Or lack thereof for all of these.  This is, obviously, not a comprehensive list…just an illustration of what might influence or types of well-being in such a way that yields happiness.

Of course, all this is very abstract, so let’s bring it back down to the ground: if you’re seeking Happiness, stop.  Stop now, because you will not find it that way.  

Instead, go do something that may or may not stimulate your social-emotional-mental-or-physical well-being.  Exercise.  Read a book.  Call a friend and talk.  Something, anything, it almost doesn’t matter…do not be afraid that it might not be just the right thing…just pick the first thing that comes to mind and do it.

Then, when you’re done, ask yourself if you enjoyed it…did it make you happy?  If so, then do it again.  If not, then try something else.  It’s just that easy.