From Grumpy's Garage

What a week! My teammates from Sydney to Zurich all descended upon Seattle this week for our annual Ops-a-Palooza. It was a week of big announcements, personnel changes, workshops, and getting to know our teammates as more than avatars on a video conference screen. I tried to make sure we kicked off the week right. For those teammates who got into town early enough, I arranged for some wine tasting in the Woodinville Warehouse District. Patterson Cellars was better than I expected. It's harvest season, so the this working boutique winery was crushing grapes. We got to sample some of the grapes from the truck and watched as they cleaned, de-stemmed, and crushed the juice from them, all while our hostess visited samples of wine upon us. It was a fascinating visit. And, for a couple of teammates who stayed an extra day, we stole away on Thursday afternoon to sail from a nearby dock, gliding along by zephyr to the south end of Lake Union. I was able to point out the sights and give a l...

 That's the question that Jeff Goins poses in Chapter Six of his book,  The Art of Work . (While the main theme of that chapter is "portfolio work", a collection of different types of work that combine to satisfy a passion, each necessary but insufficient when taken individually, this question of "Why do I work?" has given me cause to pause and muse lately.) But life is too short to not satisfy my passions. And if I can satisfy my passions while also paying the bills, that is the ultimate success scenario. But if I cannot do both, I must ask myself, "Do I live to work? Or work to live?" If I work to live, I'm living at a mere survival level. I'm doing what I have to in order to survive. I might be surviving in high style, but if I'm doing it just for the money, I am prostituting my soul for a buck. I'm better than that. But if I live to work, then I wake up in the morning excited about the day ahead. It gives me energy and purpose. It l...

 When you are traveling down the road toward your calling, the pathway might not be as straight as you'd expect. In fact, it might not be very straight at all. In  Lean Startup , Eric Reis characterizes the path that a startup company takes as primarily a learning journey. Whatever initial funding your startup has defines its "runway": how long you have to get your company airborne and paying for its own existence. But you progress down the runway is not fixed. It's not just the rate at which your company is burning through its capital. Its how fast it's learning about the value it's trying to deliver and the market that it's trying to serve. The sooner you find that product-market fit and generate positive cash flow, the sooner your company can pull back on the stick and get the wheels off the runway. Reis calls that learning process the "build-measure-learn" cycle, and periodically, a startup has to reach a decision point, a crossroad where it ...

 Once you've crafted an experiment to explore the "space" before you and learn in which direction your calling lies, then executed that experiment, you should be looking for results evidence that supports or refutes the hypothesis. Ideally, you would have articulated the results you're looking for in the design of the experiment. Those results should inform your next steps. In  Lean Startup  terms, do you persevere or pivot? Pivoting is normal. It's not giving up on a destination. It's not admitting error. It's acknowledging that what you seek doesn't seem to be in this direction. Even if you have to stop in your tracks to consider your next move, like a basketball player who stopped dribbling, you can keep one foot anchored to secure your place and move your other foot around to get a better view of what to do next. To extend the basketball metaphor perhaps too far, your team does not have to score every time they get control of the ball. Yes, that wo...

I've been on a reading binge about finding your calling and aligning your life with it. (See my recent posts about  The Art of Work  and  Living Forward .) I've started catching up on some old podcasts. I find Michael Hyatt podcast remarkably valuable and, now, very timely. His recent installment,  How to Discern Your Calling , discusses how your calling is at the intersection of the intersection of Passion, Proficiency, and Profitability. In other words, he poses these questions that your true calling must satisfy: Do you love to do it? Are you good at it? Is it sustainable? He doesn't tell you how to find your calling, but he describes what it must look like when you find it. *** I also found this quote from the podcast remarkable: “The master in the art of living makes little distinction between his work and his play, his labor and his leisure, his mind and his body, his information and his recreation, his love and his religion. He hardly knows which is which...

  My program at Google got cancelled last week. It wasn't much of a surprise. I saw it coming. But it still hurt. I was passionate about that program. I loved what we might accomplish with it. I was emotionally invested in its success. When it got cancelled, it felt like one of my kids died. I was devastated for the next day. But I picked myself up. Now I have to find another way to create and deliver value to my team.I take my queues from a couple of books I read over a year ago: The Economy of You , by Kimberly Palmer Business Model You , by Tim Clark (and dozens of collaborators) These books helped me look at my career as a business of one person, even while employed by a company as large as Google. I have customers (my teammates). I create and deliver value for my customers. I depend on key resources and partnerships to create that value. I have a value proposition. I must do some marketing so my teammates are aware of the value that I can provide. I even have to sometimes sell...

 In  Lean Startup , by Eric Reis, he describes how a startup enterprise, or any group effort that is navigating unknown territory, such as trying to find the right product-market fit for a new innovation. He outlines, for a given plan or proposal, how to identify your assumptions and craft a series of experiments to test or validate those assumptions. As you learn more about the assumptions and their validity, you make more informed decisions about the proposed plan, such as whether to persevere or perform a course correction. The same principle applies when you're faced with career or other major life decisions. Will you find this new job opportunity implicitly satisfying? Should you change your college major or focus of study? Will John be a good father to our children? Flesh out these proposed plans a bit. Put some "meat on those bones." What things do you find implicitly satisfying? How do you know that this new job opportunity will provide those things?If you are ext...

Jeff Goins, in Chapter Four of  The Art of Work ,  Building Bridges , talks about when and how to make moves toward answering your calling. Taking a "Leap of Faith" isn't always necessary. You can often build a bridge to get to the other side. But you'll still need to get off your butt and out of your comfort zone. I've also recently finished reading  Living Forward , by Michael Hyatt and Daniel Harkavy. They outline a method to identify your life goals and craft a path to get there. Both books use a map metaphor: Living Forward helps you identify a destination and create a map; The Art of Work says you don't necessarily need a map to get started. "If you want to go to the beach, start by getting out of Kansas," Goins writes (my paraphrase). You can't make progress sitting still. And moving might be scary. Even if you have a map to your goal, it probably has a big section labeled, "Thar Be Dragons Here." Yes, there are unknowns. Yes, th...

 I'm waiting to board a flight to San Francisco. Before I left the house this morning, I figured I'd better pick a book to read from my vast collection of half-read titles. I wanted something to inspire me. I've been feeling anxious about my day job lately. And that anxiety was giving rise to feelings of resignation and a sense of ennui. Don't get me wrong. Normally I love my job. I work for one of the best employers in the country---probably in the whole world. Indeed, Fortune magazine has rated my employer as the best for the last seven out of 10 years. I work for Google. All those stories about how cool it to work at Google---free gourmet meals, subsidized onsite massages, 20%-time projects---they're all true. I have nothing to complain about. But am I living up to my potential? Am I doing what I was born to do? Increasingly I've been feeling like I should be doing more, realizing my dreams, my full potential. But what is my potential? What are my dreams? I t...