Know when to hold it, know when to fold it
Sometimes you have to know when to hold it. Sometimes you have to know when to fold it.
One of the hardest life lessons I’ve learned is this: if the only person who knows (or cares) about a deadline is yourself, it’s not really a deadline — and don’t kill yourself trying to make it. I used to really stress out when I’d commit to something then not make the date because other things came up (even though I felt those things were more important, or out of my control). Even though the only person it mattered to was me.
I finally figured this out, and started teaching myself not to sweat over details that didn’t really matter. I decided back in 2006 I wanted to try to organize a second career around a camera; I never worked with Bill Atkinson, but you can’t be an Apple geek (or like me, an Apple alum) and not know about Hypercard, and in fact, I did a lot of work in Hypercard over the years. I did work with Dave Cardinal at Apple, and when I started dabbling with digital cameras and then run into their work, it was that seminal eye-opening moment that made me realize that I could make that shift as well, and that was the starting point for this second career planning.
That was in 2005.
In 2007, I thought I’d become a pretty good photographer and started seriously looking to fire up my second career plans. And then I blew out my knee by stepping in a gopher hole, then dad got sick (and then he died) and by the time I surfaced from helping mom through the estate, 2008 was almost over and it was time to try again. Then I landed the gig at Palm, and I knew it was going to an insanely fun few months and it went on hold again. And now it’s almost 2010, and I feel like it’s time to try again. So we will.
That doesn’t mean nothing happened in the meantime. In fact, the delays have been a blessing in disguise. I’ve spent a ot of time and energy in battling bits in photoshop and lightroom, in studying my work and really being honest about my strengths (and flaws) and working to fix the flaws; in studying other photographers and understanding their strengths and how to adapt them into my own work.
In 2007, I thought I was a good photographer. Today, I’m a much better photographer. Sometimes delays can be frustrating, but you turn them to your advantage.
There are always reasons to say “not yet” to your plans; planning is easy — and safe. Doing is hard, involves risk, and may fail. But sometimes, “not yet” is the right decision, even if you don’t like making it at the time. You might miss out on an opportunity, but if your plans are sound and your planning is done well, you’ll run into later opportunities later. (hint: if your plans revolve around a “now or never” situation, it’s probably a badly thought out plan. If you don’t have follow-on opportunities to build your business with, how are you going to grow your business?)
So knowing when to hold it — and using that hold time to improve your chances of later success as you can — can be a positive. You can’t be afraid to say “it’s time” and push the button and make it happen.
At the same time, you have to be realistic, and you can’t force yourself to push the button simply because it’s the date you said you were going to do it on — going in for the wrong reasons and at the wrong time makes the chances of failure skyrocket, and if it fails, it’s going to be harder to generate future opportunities or feel confident about going out and grabbing them when they happen.
There are also times when you simply need to fold the hand and try again. When I left StrongMail, I’d been working on a project called Dare2Thrive, and decided to take some time off and push that project into production. Once I left on my own, some outside factors kicked my motivation in the crotch, and I realized there were some fundamental flaws in my approach that I couldn’t easily solve.
The big one: I was putting myself into primarily an editorial role, not a creative role, and on a long term basis, I decided that was unacceptable; I wanted a situation that focused on my own material rather than creating an environment where I promoted the work of others.
That’s not something you fix by tweaking the CSS. I realized I needed to start over, tear it down to the bare assumptions, and starting over. I hated the decision at the time; at the time I felt it was fixable, but the external issues I was dealing with made it necessary. I realize now that not only was it the right decision — it saved me from almost certain failure if I’d pushed forward, and that was without taking into consideration what 2008 was going to surprise me with…
Holding it and Folding it. Never fun. To take something you really care about and want to do and stuff it back in the closet is hard. To take it out behind the shed and “Old Yeller” it is traumatic. If it’s the right thing to do, though, it has to be done, and many times, it creates new, better opportunities later if you let it.
And for the record, the core or Dare2Thrive — the piece that first made me want to do the project — is alive and well as part of this new project. And dammit if it isn’t even a better project now than it ever would have been in its original form.
And if anyone wants to buy them, I have the original dare2thrive domains available and parked, at least until I figure out a use for them….
Designing a Web Presence
Filed under: About Chuq, Designing a Web Presence: Towards Chuqui 4.0, Thoughts on "The Second Career"
It should come as no surprise that anything I’m planning for the future involves the internet.
I suppose I could decide to move to Astoria and go to work in Starbucks. That’d be a perfectly acceptable second career — and if my other plans don’t work, it might still happen. That’d take a lot less work and planning, though, so I don’t have to think about that quite yet.
What I’ve known for a long time is that whatever this is going to be, it’s going to have a strong online component, which means a well-designed and well-built web presence. I use the term “web presence” here, not web site, because while a web site is a key aspect to this, nothing stands alone in the internet any more. You always have interfaces to other services, whether it’s social networking (Facebook, twitter), or communication (gmail) or to leverage other services instead of building your own (flickr, Smugmug, Cafepress, etc).
Because building a web presence to support this second career is going to be a large and complex beast by the time I’m done, and because one option both Laurie and I are looking at in the future is “build web sites for companies in Astoria” (or “build web sites for photographers”), having a portfolio site I can be proud of is crucial, and having the documentation on the how and why of the design and build process is a useful sales tool.
Besides, the conversation I hope this generates will help make it a better and more useful site; incremental feedback and early discussion is a lot more useful in fixing and tweaking when it’s easier and early.
So this is the second track of discussion that’s going to start showing up on the blog; there is the “why” of the second career, and here, the “how”.
But neither of those matters without the most important part.
Next up: the what. Because this all has to be about something, or it’s really rather silly to do.
One thing I’m not going to do…
One aspect of figuring out what to do in a second career is understanding what NOT to do. As I noted in the intro, one decision I made a while back was that even though my hockey writing was one of the largest segments of my blog’s audience at the time, I chose not to try to make it a focus of my plans. It might have been a leg to build an income stream on in the short term, but over the longer term, it conflicted with other, more important goals (like getting out of Silicon Valley), and I didn’t see any logic in trying to building a hockey audience knowing I was going to “retire” from it at some point.
I don’t know about anyone else, but I’m interested in a lot of things. Some days I think my brain is a magpie, always looking at some new shiny thing to go and explore. there are days when I feel like I need to put a huge sign that says FOCUS on the wall over my desk, just to remind me to stick to what needs to be done and not spend a few hours “researching”. (although research is necessary and useful, but not to the exclusion of getting real work done).
One of the things I’ve been thinking about for the last year — and reluctantly putting back on the list of things I want to do but can’t justify doing — is going back to fiction writing. At one point I was an active fiction writer, and unlike a lot of them, I was selling some of it. I gave it up for a simple reason: the pay sucked, it was a lot of hard work, and I enjoyed computers and geeking at least as much as I enjoyed writing and being a writer, and computers pay a hell of a lot better.
Fiction writing is a tough market. It hasn’t gotten any better in the time I’ve been away, in fact it’s harder now to succeed as a writer than it was 10 or 15 years ago, and the pay scale is about the same. Not “same adjusted for inflation”, but pretty much the same. A few writers make really good money, a good chunk of writers make enough money to keep writing, and a huge number of writers are fighting for waiter jobs with those actors and actresses and muscians and artists who are all in the same boat in their respective fields.
John Scalzi sums it up wonderfully.
I go back to what I felt when I decided to retire from writing: I enjoy being a writer (the act of writing isn’t as pleasant as having written) — but I don’t see anyway someone who WANTS to be a writer can successfully compete in a tight market against someone who HAS TO BE a writer. And I want to be a writer, it just isn’t something that wraps me in knots at night when I’m not writing. So even though my unfinished novel has been calling to me in the interstices of the midnight hour, one of the things I’ve decided I’m not going to do — is try to go back to fiction writing.
Although I’d like to. But I don’t HAVE to — and that’s something everyone should be brutally honest with themselves about when playing the “I want to be…. ” game. “Want to” isn’t a success strategy. In a creative industry, if it doesn’t come from somewhere deep inside, if the hunger isn’t there, chances are you won’t succeed, because someone who is driven by that hunger is going to fight for the same opportunities, and they’ll win most of the time.
Thoughts on the Second Career
Filed under: About Chuq, Thoughts on "The Second Career", Two for Elbowing: Hockey & Sports
As I noted the other day, I expect posting frequency on the blog to go up soon. About this time last year I started serious planning on my “what’s next?” project — that being my long-term look at how I want to make the shift into the second career. I see a time where I’m not going to want to work in Silicon Valley and hack high tech 24×7 (gasp), but I certainly have no plans on retiring.
The elevator speech: I want to earn a respectable income from my home office in Astoria, Oregon without telecommuting.
Yes, you could potentially contract and consult from there (although if I were going to do that game, I’d do it from Ashland or Medford — like, it sometimes seems, half the population of those towns) but that’s not the point. At some point, I know I want to get out of the Silicon Valley rat race and do something else. The question is — what?
I want to emphasize something: this is a long term (3-5 years) thing; in fact for about the last 15 years I’ve been keeping (with more or less intensity) a 3-5 year plan. That’s the first lesson in something like this: planning is good, because it helps you map a path, but it should also be flexible because as you do the planning, you’ll change your mind, new situations come up, the unexpected happens. For me, the planning on the second career wasn’t so much about implementation, but on understanding where I wanted to end up and to influence decisions now that will make it happen someday. And occasionally, after a really bad day at the office, as a way to keep my sense of humor and sanity. Well, okay. My sense of humor.
Now, the day for that second career is closer. I’ve known for a few years roughly what I wanted to aim at here. Various decisions I’ve made over the last couple of years have been driven by this long-term planning. My move of the blog from Typepad back here to chuqui.com was because I knew I wanted total control over my online environment, and I wanted it under my own domain name for branding purposes. I chose Wordpress because I really like that tool as a platform for it’s flexibility and the community ecosystem that exists around it (my second choice, even thought I’ve occasionally described it as sportfishing off of an aircraft carrier, is Drupal, and the drupal community has done a really nice job of cleaning up issues that bothered me back when they couldn’t even run the Drupal site on the Drupal 6 release).
Another decision I made was shutting down the “Two for Elbowing” blog on hockey and de-emphasizing my hockey writing. I did that for a few reasons; originally, that blog was supposed to be for both myself and Laurie to write about hockey (“two for… get it? heh. heh.). Laurie’s life took her in other directions and it turned into a solo gig (although the hockey world is missing out on a damn good hockey geek, and I’m not talking about me); as a solo, I much preferred putting all of my writing into one place (the branding thing) again. Also, think about my long-term goal: moving to Astoria. Building an income around writing about hockey and the Sharks and moving to Astoria conflict. Just a bit. Besides, there are plenty of good hockey writers out there now, and if I was 25 (instead of 50+), I might take a run at doing something like what Rich Hammond is doing with the Kings. Instead, I made a decision to enjoy hockey, not sweat about what to write about it — and I only write when I want to. This is a feature, not a bug.
I’m firmly convinced that what Hammond and the Kings are doing is the future model for journalism in pro sports as the newspaper business continues to evolve and implode. NHL teams that haven’t figured this out yet should take a close look and find a good beat guy to bring on board and nurture. The Sharks could do a lot worse than hiring Dave Pollak and bringing him in-house, for instance. Having been writing about hockey online since before the Sharks existed, I do sometimes wish that the online environment that exists today had existed 15 years ago, but it didn’t. Sometimes timing is everything, and understanding that is a key aspect of designing success into your plans.
To succeed in ANY career path, not just a second career, it’s important to know what NOT to do, what not to sidetrack yourself on, what not to invest time and money in. That may be even more important than knowing what to do, in fact, because that’s how you stay focused and moving in the direction you want to end up.
In any event, this is the first in a series of articles on the idea of a second career and my thoughts and plans. I’m hoping this becomes a conversation, not a lecture; I’m doing this in public both because I hope you find it interesting and learn from it to help refine your own plans and ideas — and because I hope you will help me improve my own ideas and fix the flaws in my thinking and make my own second career success happen as well. I hope you find this interesting and useful; I know I’ll learn from your feedback and comments and end up the better for it. Together, everyone wins — and how can that be bad?
So, onward. The future starts today.
Chuq
Footnote on Astoria: For those not familiar with Astoria, it’s about 2 hours from Portland on the coast, and it’s a very nice, small, homey town, but has some really nice places like the restaurant Baked Alaska and Cellar on 10th that make it more than a small rural town — and it’s well located to a lot of great photographic opportunities). It might not be Astoria (I’m really falling more and more in like with Morro Bay, for instance, and I love the northern Oregon Coast so it could be anywhere from Astoria to Newport…), but that’s a nice placeholder for what I’d like to do.
Small, inviting, not urban, on the coast, lower cost of living but with some nice amenties and close to civilization when I want it. The kind of place most Silicon Valley Geeks seem to wish they lived, unless they’re the hard core urban type. I’m not, but Vancouver tempts me to convert…
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