I work for a channel partner within the software industry. One reason I chose to work at my current job is the fact that we align with the customers needs, find a product that fits and help implement it. I appreciate that we go to market not because of a marketing brochure, we go to market with the clients needs first.

I had an opportunity today to learn about a new vendor that is in the space I focus, workload automation.

A big word for an industry that runs everything from your bank transactions to the Starbucks app (true story). This vendor is new to me but fits a segment of the market that we are not currently meeting. It does most things that our customers need and the company seems ethical.

I say all of this to tell you it gave me some hope today. I am in a position now where I am helping to shape the direction of my company and leave a mark.

Is that enough to go to work? I find that having purpose helps a lot. It gives greater satisfaction and focus when you have purpose.

Of course, my family helps in this regard, but family doesn’t always help with burnout. Sometimes it contributes when you’re getting woken up several times a night by the baby! Money can help sometimes, too, but I find it ultimately empty. It leaves you wanting more and never satisfied.

For me, I have found what gives me the most purpose is when my input is desired, I  heard and I contributed.

What gives you purpose?

Image credit: leesean

I’m here this week in Dallas, Texas for our company’s sales kickoff. Most of my company is remote and this also gives us an opportunity to meet in person for some quality bonding time.

I have found that these face-time meetings can create tremendous value as a company and as an individual rep. As companies continue to find talent from across the nation and world it becomes obvious that some time spent together can make a lasting impact.

Since we’re in Texas there are a few things that we must experience and do as a team. BBQ is top of the list. One of the executives within my company has a ranch in Texas and we had an excellent BBQ on the grounds of his property.

Basically, every cliché you can think of took place. Horses, cowboy hats, country music and great BBQ.

One takeaway that I learned during the evening was this, folks that travel for work get tired of restaurants. When we did the BBQ it was a moment for people to relax, spend time actually talking and not worrying about if we have tipped the server enough to stay longer.

It’s a good lesson to keep in mind when visiting clients as well. Give them some space to roam and you never know what you may find out.

Texas being Texas the week is not complete without going to a gun range. Now I realize that the gun debate is raging right now and even this week we have had another terrible school shooting. However, the experience at this range was able to cross political divides for at least one day. We had folks that are very experienced with shooting and those who have never touched a gun in their lives.

The feedback from the group was they were very happy to have had the experience to learn about gun safety from professionals and build a little confidence in what the weapon can do.

I am of the belief that weapons require respect and I carried that lesson into the events of the day. We conducted this event with clients and many of them walked away with a smile on their face after firing a gun for the first time. My takeaway from this is to get someone out of their comfort zone and you may just see who they really are.

So I went into this week with no expectations but learned three things:

Proximity matters. Give people space to roam. Create opportunities to expand your comfort zone.

They all help in business and in life.

Image credit: bryan…

A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read all If the Shoe Fits posts here.

This is a short post, aside from the quotes, and I honestly don’t care if you skip my part and just read the  main links, especially the last on from DHH.

It’s exactly two years since I saw a successful lifestyle business founder, Andrew Wilkinson of MetaLab and Flow, loudly and publicly say that he would rather be a horse than a unicorn.

Meaning, he would rather build his businesses organically and self-funded than take outside investment.

I wondered if his attitude was a harbinger of returning sanity.

Ha! Wilkinson’s attitude was an outlier, as opposed to a trend.

However, early as he was I see more successful founders following a similar path.

A few days ago I read a Medium post from Mara Zepeda, Co-founder and CEO of Switchboard, and Jennifer Brandel Co-founder and CEO of Hearken, coining a new term, zebra, to denote a sustainable approach to growth.

A year ago we wrote “Sex & Startups.” The premise was this: The current technology and venture capital structure is broken. It rewards quantity over quality, consumption over creation, quick exits over sustainable growth, and shareholder profit over shared prosperity. It chases after “unicorn” companies bent on “disruption” rather than supporting businesses that repair, cultivate, and connect. After publishing the essay, we heard from hundreds of founders, investors, and advocates who agreed: “We cannot win at this game.”

Adam Eskin, founder and CEO of expanding restaurant chain Dig Inn and a former private equity associate at Wexford Capital puts it this way,

“Having a background in private equity, we don’t just want to grow this business for growth’s sake, lose passion for what we do, or the reasons why we’re here. I think that’s what some folks can end up doing when they raise this kind of capital.”

As a tech person, who has been seduced into believing that valuation is everything, why should you listen to an outlier or non-tech founder, let alone a couple of women?

Perhaps you’ll be more inclined to listening to the guy whose tech generates raves and may even be the source code of your company.

DHH (David Heinemeier Hansson), creator of Ruby on Rails, Founder & CTO at Basecamp (formerly 37signals), writer of best-selling books and winning LeMans racecar driver.

There is no higher God in Silicon Valley than growth. No sacrifice too big for its craving altar. As long as you keep your curve exponential, all your sins will be forgotten at the exit. (…)  The solution isn’t simple, but we’re in dire need of a strong counter culture, some mass infusion of the 1960s spirit. To offer realistic, ethical alternatives to the exponential growth logic. Ones that’ll benefit not just a gilded few, but all of us. The future literally depends on it.

Image credit: HikingArtist

It’s amazing to me, but looking back over more than a decade of writing I find posts that still impress, with information that is as useful now as when it was written. Golden Oldies is a collection of what I consider some of the best posts during that time. I wrote the following way back on 2006 and believe it applies even more now.

 People spend great effort learning new skills and pushing themselves to grow. They are busier, with more claims on their time; social media and FOMO eat hours and all of them require energy — especially change. Even the people who successfully juggle all this feel no joy; the zest is gone and happiness is a dim memory. Listen to their voice and you can hear that their energy is almost non-existent. Now, as then, I hope this post is of use.

Read other Golden Oldies here.

Do you have an energy budget? You should. Everything you do takes some kind of energy and your energy at any given time is finite.

As with any resource, it’s important to know where you’re spending it, how much you have left, and when you need to make a deposit.

It’s also important to recognize that you can spend energy moving forward or spinning your wheels—the first is an investment with discernible ROI, while the second is a waste.

There are three kinds of energy

• physical,
• mental, and
• psychic (different from mental)

and you draw some of each for any given task. This is especially true when working to change something in your MAP because you need to

• be awake and alert,
• think, and
• actuate, i.e., make the changes real.

Three kinds of energy, but only one bank for each type—not one set for professional use and one for personal.

Since an effort to change is ongoing, you’ll be drawing on your three energy banks at various times and in various amounts. These requirements need to be added to the energy needs for the rest of what you’re doing, both personally and professionally, and prioritized. The bottom line is that you shouldn’t bite off more than you can chew.

As with any bank account you need to make more deposits than withdrawals or you’ll end up like Enron. It’s your responsibility to keep them filled, just as it is to keep money in your bank account if you plan to write checks and gas in your car if you’re driving somewhere—it doesn’t happen by accident.

Moreover, what replenishes your spouse/SO/kids/pets/whatever’s energy won’t necessarily replenish yours (and vice versa).

That means that you need to learn what actions/inactions replenishes each kind of energy for you and then do them.

The end of the year is always a time for reflection. I can only hope that you take all these words and concepts to heart.

You will be a better person and have a better 2016 if you do.

From Jessica Herrin, founder/CEO of Stella & Dot

Making decisions: What/which has the greater upside? What’s the downside, and is it worth the risk?”

Learning: I had that typical early-entrepreneur hero complex, where it was about how well I did versus how well I helped other people do the work. Then a mentor told me that if I ever want to run a large company, I should go work at one. So I got a job as a middle manager at Dell, and I had to develop skills as a leader. I also got pregnant with my first child, and I was always sick and tired, so I had to become far more focused in how I was spending my time. I learned to focus on what really matters.

Stella & Dot: Our revenue is around $300 million, and we have over 400 people in the home office and about 50,000 independent business owners in six countries.

Culture: I wanted to hire missionaries, not mercenaries. The challenge, especially when you’re growing fast, is to be incredibly fierce about your hiring filters. You have to commit to caring for the culture more than the quarter.

From Jon Olinto, co-founder of b. good restaurants

Goal: to build a community around the idea of “real fast food”—made by people, not factories—and the team felt like one big family, all working toward that goal.

Sustainability: You just have to look for and seize every opportunity to make your people feel valued and purposeful in their work.

Engagement: we incorporated features to reflect our family culture [on new mobile app], the app has also boosted staff engagement in a way we never even expected.

Finally, life advice from teen Jake Baily.

Jake Bailey found out he had Burkitt Lymphoma just one week before he was due to speak at a prize giving ceremony at his school. As senior monitor, it was his duty to represent the class. In the midst of intensive chemotherapy, Jake was permitted to leave the hospital for a brief period to deliver his speech. 

Is there an eternal answer to the eternal question of ‘what should be learned/done to make oneself promotable’?

Yes,

The answer was recently expounded upon by Xin Li, a Staff Software Engineer At Google, in response to a question posed on Quora.

I work at Google Mountain View.  Here, if your base salary is around 200K, you are most likely a Staff Software Engineer.  The defining characteristics at that level are:

1. Go beyond being a technical expert to also being a domain expert.  You need to know what should be done, rather than just how things can be done.
2. Be an owner.  The buck stops with you.  If something goes wrong with your part of the product, it’s ultimately your responsibility, even if the mistake wasn’t made by you.
3. Work for your people, rather than have your people work for you.  That is be the one to volunteer to take on the tasks others don’t want to do.  Your job is to make your people look good.  Give them the opportunity to grow professionally, and support them where they need it, and clear obstacles for them, so they can be at their best.
4. Be a leader and a consensus driver.  Real world problems don’t have cookie cutter solutions, and not everyone will agree on what the right solution is. You need to have a vision, work across teams, and bring people together, resolve differences.
5. And of course you still need technical chops.  You need to be good at technical system design.  Be able to create an architecture that is as complicated as it needs to be, but no more, and no less.  It needs to serve the requirements of today, while robust enough to be extensible a few years down the road.

If you want to get to this salary level as a software engineer, I think the requirements are fairly similar everywhere.  As you can see, these requirements have less to do with any particular language you may or may not choose.  Focus on delivering value for your employer, and the rest will follow.

Xin Li’s response specifically addressed a software career path, but is universally applicable.

“Focus on delivering value for your employer, and the rest will follow.”

That’s as close to a guaranteed formula to drive success in any career that I’ve ever seen.

Best of all, it’s never too late to start.

Flickr image credit: Chad Sparkes

As I was entering AO OnDemand 2014 and moving toward the main conference auditorium, I ran into Kevin Longa, a young entrepreneur I had met two years ago at a Hackers & Founders meetup.  We got to talking and I found him very pleasant; having just graduated from UCLA he was on a search for what next he wanted to do.  Keving found that deciding on whether to join a startup, go traveling to experience more of his Asian roots (he’s mixed) or continue his education was challenging and in some ways confusing.

Well, whenever I meet young people at that stage in life I believe it’s important to impress upon them that taking some time up-front to experience life in other parts of the world and with other people than usual is often a good way to get perspective and get started on the next stage of life.  I believe it’s important to actually take some time to experience life, before being continually caught up in the hustle and bustle of one of the most stressful cultures on earth—American society.

To my surprise he listened attentively to my pontification and later embarked upon a long trip to Asia while also shooting a documentary series encompassing the four passions of his life – food, entrepreneurship, travel and film.  He has now reached the point where he is in post-production with some of the work he has created and is continuously adding to his body of work.  And above all—he seems happy.

Encountering him now, two years later, was a great experience for me.  After his travels he received a scholarship to Draper University where he further immersed himself in the art and craft of entrepreneurship.  His greatest takeaway was how to think about problem solving, team building, adversity and loneliness as an entrepreneur, rather than hard skills such as law, market research or accounting.

There is no doubt in my mind that Kevin will be successful.  He has an ability to learn and to adapt to new situations in a way that’s unusual for a lot of people.  In addition, he has that quality that is absolutely necessary in an entrepreneur: tenacity. 

I’ve seen so many get out of the game just as they were about to break through.  The level of determination and sacrifice necessary to succeed is rarely stressed enough, but anyone who has succeeded knows that success would often elude us, without “stick-to-itiveness” and an almost masochistic ability to increase commitment when others would judge it hopeless. 

This is true regardless of industry and calling—the cost of entrepreneurship is high and fraught with failure.  People like Kevin will succeed because he works tirelessly, learning and pushing forward even when things are difficult. 

Over the years some people take my expanding box idea and try and tell me that the boxes are actually replaced, not expanded as I described yesterday.

I (respectfully) tell them they are wrong.

It isn’t about replacement or creating boxes within boxes, it’s about expansion.

Everything that existed in the old box continues to exist, but new dimensions are added, because the box is larger.

And it especially isn’t about ‘using up’ what’s in your box before you can expand it; it’s about choosing to explore beyond what’s known and/or comfortable—or not.

We all push our boundaries organically as we age; it happens through experience and just plain living—and we’re not even conscious of doing it.

Some folks enjoy consciously pushing back boundaries in evolutionary ways, exploring new areas a bit at a time.

Others take a revolutionary approach and willingly leap into the unknown, not knowing where they will land or if they’ll survive. Very scary—but the unknown has always been scary.

Most of us combine all three types, organic, evolutionary and revolutionary, with ascendancy changing depending on what’s happening in our world—as well as the larger world.

What needs to be understood is that the person who leaps into the unknown is not intrinsically more valuable than the person whose box enlarges organically through their own life experiences or the ones whose boxes increase incrementally through conscious, measured efforts.

All three types, along with their varied, changing combinations, are necessary for life and for Life to continue on our planet.

Look at any list of great innovators from the past and then think of all the people who enhanced/changed/added to the original ideas; then add on all the lives involved, one way or another, with these ideas.

All the contributions have value within their own world—what is different is the size of each innovator’s world and since society tends to equate size to value—the bigger the greater the worth.

Not all of us want to/can change the world, but each of us can take care of/improve our little bit of it.

As for me, I’d hate to live in a world where all the little bits were a mess because everybody was out changing the whole.

Flickr image credit: Leonora Enking

As I said Sunday, I won’t be posting again until Monday. And to sweeten my time off my gym is closed until Monday (Now that’s something to be thankful for!).

I decided to share my first (2006) Thanksgiving post today, because I honestly believe it is one of the most important concepts I have to offer.

It’s mind food for you to consider and digest along with tomorrow’s feast and the leftovers during the weekend.

Don’t judge who you were and what you did in the past based on who you are and what you know now.

Everybody knows that hindsight’s 20/20, but that doesn’t stop people from laying a coulda/shoulda/woulda trip on themselves.

Each of us is composed of multiple, past “me’s,” each a different, stand-alone version from the current one.

When you look at past actions (Why did I…) you need to first ask yourself if you made the best decision/action possible based on the information you had at the time in conjunction with the person you were at that time.

If, in fact, you did, then the you you-are-now has no right to judge, i.e., beat up on, the previous you for that decision.

This doesn’t mean that you need to condone everything—today’s you may decide that in the future you should do more research or whatever—but it does preclude you from taking your former self to task.

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Thanksgiving is a time when we’re supposed to be thankful, but exactly what you give thanks for is a very private matter—I have one friend who gives thanks for her family, another who gives thanks that her family is far, far away.

So, no matter your age, when giving thanks be sure to include all the past you’s, whether you love ‘em or hate ‘em, since they got you where you are today and their very existence guarantees that there will be many more in the future as you grow.

Have a wonderful holiday and I’ll see you all on Monday.

Flickr image credit: Karola Riegler

It is always useful to have a pithy way to get a point across, but how many of us can think that fast? So in the interest of making my readers sound both brilliant and cool here are four “pithyisms” to use at your discretion—with attribution, one would hope.

Oscar Wilde said, “Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes.” Try that on your boss the next time you turn left when he says go right.

Have you wondered why VCs and pundits of all stripes keep telling entrepreneurs and managers that attitude is more important than skills? Ralph Marston has the answer, “Excellence is not a skill. It is an attitude.”

It is said that once the genie is out of the bottle he can not be put back; this is especially true of personal growth, or, as Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. said, “A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions.”

Personal growth is a wonderful thing, but it does require taking risks. However, risks can be mitigated, even when following Mark Twain’s recommendation, “A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way.”

And remember, it’s always a good idea to

Flickr image credit: quinn.anya