I was excited yet skeptical about Google Wave at first, but after watching the YouTube keynote about it I think my excitement is outweighing the skepticism.

Yes, it’s true that it’s a bit of a trick to stretch your mind around it at first. Refactoring email and IM and collaborative document creation and wikis into a new beast is pretty ambitious. Also, when people say that they’re going to revolutionize anything before it has even launched, you can’t help but feel like they’re a little too confident for their own good.

However, the several subtle changes in the way people interact (real-time, shared documents, integrated with the web) are impressive at first glance (ie. aren’t confusing) and the way that they’ve brought in big new ideas seems to make communication easier and more fun rather than more advanced or more pragmatic. I am a believer that technologies that simplify will be adopted over technologies that have more functionality.

In the end, people just want to talk, share, joke, and chase each other around. Google Wave seems to allow us to do that. Therefore, I think it will be successful. I’ve signed up for a developer account for sure.

When I turned 30, my birthday motto was “Higher highs and lower lows.”

When I turned 31, my birthday motto was “Double down.”

When I turned 32, my birthday motto was “No problem.”

Each year, the motto has helped me frame the upcoming year and give it some kind of direction. Those three mottos are pretty much a table of contents of my 30s so far.

Today I turn 33, and I the motto for this year is going to be “Frugal to the max.” I’m starting a new company, we’re planning to start a new family, and I think it’s time for the essentials of life to come into sharp focus.

Last night I woke up around 5am and did my usual iPhone surfing from bed, but nothing was happening (other than Dita Von Teese returning from Paris). So I sat there and had this strange realization of the shortness of life. To be able to sit in bed, with an exciting day ahead, with the love of my life right next to me, while we’re young, full of energy and ideas, hopeful, excited, and the world seems to be in sync with our goals and hopes… it’s a snapshot of time that I truly appreciate. I laid awake and savored everything that I have right now, and promised not to let it slip by without being fully appreciated.

Turning frugal is how I’m going to appreciate. And from what I can tell from people who I’ve talked with this about, it seems like we’re all interested in getting back to basics and truly savoring the essentials of life: love, friendship, health, quality time, creativity, sustainability, balance, and sense of self.

Tonight I celebrate with friends, tomorrow I start something new.

Just listened to the 1 hour podcast of Merlin Mann and John Gruber’s podcast about using credibility and passion to build something interesting.  One note of note:

1. Don’t do stuff that you think is profitable, but potentially messes up the reason that you think people like you.

Exactly.

The month isn’t done yet.

Mint.com doesn’t have an easy way to export their little charts, unfortunately, so I typed in the dollar amounts for May into Google Docs and made this little pie chart.

I didn’t include dollar amounts because I’m sort of ashamed about how much I spend in an average month.  And yeah, May was an average month, even though we spent 6 days traveling.  Something like that seems to happen almost every month.

The main areas that I think I can make cuts are travel, food, and shopping.  So, assuming that I can also make some smaller cuts in the smaller areas, I am hoping that I’ll be able to cut my spending in June by somewhere between 33-50%.

Starting June 1st, I’ll be taking some serious steps towards implementing a new frugal lifestyle that will go along with the bootstrapping of my new company.  To begin, I’ll be taking a look at my spending, and separating them into fixed costs (mortgage, property tax, condo dues, gym memberships, subscriptions, etc) and variable costs (food, clothes, music, books, etc).

From there, I will create some new daily spending habits as I did when we were starting up the Robot Co-op.  Back then I was going through a similar process in my head, preparing for a serveral year bootstrap process (selling all of my possessions, moving into a tiny studio apartment, changing habits) that in the end wasn’t necessary since we found investment relatively quickly and were able to keep good salaries.

I also remember back in college when I lived in a 10-bedroom house with between 11-14 other people and paid $125/month in rent.  I made burritos and smoothies at Todo Loco and had a daily allowance of $11 (after rent and tuition costs).  I read books like Dharma Bums, walked around in kung-fu slippers, stole toilet paper from work, and did everything I could to save enough money to buy a CD every month or so.  So I know I can do this, and also do it happily.  I don’t look back on my frugal days of the past with distaste… to the contrary, a lot of the lessons I learned and philosophies I’ve created since then have very strong foundations from that time.

This time around, I plan on taking a slightly different track.  Rather than eating disgusting Ramen and Mac & Cheese, I’ll eat fruit and veggies from the market.  Rather than sacrifice cost for health, I plan on making as many cuts in the direction of sustainability, re-use, and non-commercial entertainment.

Stay tuned for a series of posts on this topic.  For now, I’ve got one more week til my 33rd birthday where I can spend however I like, and I will certainly enjoy the send off.

After reading this little article called The Benefits of Distraction I picked up one of the books it mentioned titled Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life. I’ve got a love/hate relationship with the topic of attention and focus, but the book makes a few interesting points that are helping me come to terms with my confusion about the subject.

Basically, I see a lot of talk about attention and a lot of it seems to contradict itself:

• Our brains can only give attention to one thing at a time; multi-tasking is really just the process of shifting your attention between multiple things.
• Our brains can’t pay attention to any one thing for very long without a lot of effort.  Meditation is one way of honing this skill.
• Yet, meditation isn’t about focusing on any one topic or subject, it’s about letting your attention diffuse across all things, paying attention to no one thing in particular.
• Flow, as described by the book of the same name, is an ideal state, often referred to as a peak experience, and it is the state of immersion in a task, becoming one with the task, and losing your sense of self.  It’s goal-oriented, but loses a sense of time or effort.

See why I get confused?  What exactly are people talking about when they talk about attention, and what is the right skill to hone: the ability to focus, or the ability to not focus?  The ability to stay on a single subject, to take in all subjects, or to immerse oneself in an experience?

I personally think that “flow” is the correct state to seek.  It’s a creative state, not a willful state.  It is open to the unexpected, and highly adaptive to new inputs from outside.  It can have elements of multi-tasking, as it’s not all about the conscious mind doing one thing after another… it could involve several tasks at the same time (for example, in the case of a soccer player, taking in the location of teammates while also maneuvering the ball, being aware of the clock, your own skills, the chance of scoring, etc).

Being “rapt” is potentially the same as “flow”.  I think that’s what she’s trying to get at, at least.  And yet, her description of the state of being in rapt attention is very top-down.  Deliberately paying attention to the things you want to pay attention to.  Focusing on your iPod’s song instead of the dirty bus you’re on.  Focusing on the positive rather than the negative.  Her premise is captured in the opening quote by William James, “My experience is what I agree to attend to.” It’s a very Type-A activity.

What I learned

The part that triggered something for me, though, was in the dichotomy she’s created between bottom-up attention and top-down attention.  Bottom-up is the attention that is experiential, immersive, open to all incoming stimuli, reactive, and often prone to whatever your subconscious believes is the most important current input.  Top-down attention is goal-oriented, controlled, and pragmatic.

Bottom-up attention helps you navigate through traffic while top-down attention helps you notice the right off-ramp to get to where you want to go.

And so, to me, it’s obvious that the two should be balanced, never to bottom-up that you forget where you’re going on what you’re doing, and never so top-down that you drive through the tree in order to get to the forest.

The Robot Co-op

About 5 years ago, I was starting up The Robot Co-op with Josh and Daniel. We were about to sign a lease on our own little office in Capitol Hill (our first day there was September 1st, 2004).  We didn’t even know what we wanted to build so much as how we wanted to build it and who we wanted to build it with.  We talked those days about a lot of things that I think were crucial to the success we eventually found.

• Building a company that was as much a product in itself as the products that it created.
• Being able to walk to work, working in the heart of the city.
• Working with people you like.
• We liked the etymology of the word company. With bread. To share bread with. And so our office was organized like a dinner table, and we ate together pretty much every day.  Often, we would talk about how we started the company simply to have friends to share lunch with.
• Build something that, if successful, you’d still want to work on. For example, not just working on personalized text ads because it would be successful even though it might not be fulfilling in itself.
• We found companies that we admired and tried to imitate their strengths: 37 Signals, Flickr, Craigslist and LiveJournal especially.
• Start small, and scale without having to keep hiring people.  Don’t try to grow simply for the sake of growing.
• Avoid the Delmore Effect. Do your best idea first.
• Build something quickly. Test your idea with something that’s as simple as possible. We started by simply asking people what they wanted to do with their lives on a 1-page site with no account logins.  It was called Twinkler, and it proved that the idea of talking about your goals was infectious.  The fully built site came a few months later.
• Be ambitious in vision.  Expect success, and that you’ll have to work for it.

43 Things just passed 2 million accounts (that’s people who have one or more goals on their life lists) this month.  The Robot Co-op has been profitable for several years now thanks for advertising on goal pages and a few other things.  We started with 6 people and now have a whopping 7 people.  We still eat lunch together, and some of us still walk or bike to work (the others look nervously out the window every 2 hours looking to see if their cars have been chalked since there’s no real parking in our neighborhood).  We like the things we’ve built, and have found that it is possible to have a lot of success without selling your soul or doing something that you don’t want to do.

I’m thinking again about where it all started, because, as some may know already, I’ve decided to leave the Robot Co-op and start up my own 1-person company (aka going solo, since we always fancied ourselves as a band). A lot of these early thoughts and conversations are coming back to me, and the surprising thing is that they all still ring true to me.  If anything, starting up Enjoymentland will allow me to go even further in the execution of the ideas that have proven themselves over the last 5 years.  In other words, the experiment worked, and now we can take the experiment to the next level.

The Robot Co-op, I feel, transformed me from an aspiring developer into a tested entrepreneur filled with big ideas, and I will always be indebted to the conversations we had around those 4.5 door desks in 2F.

Enjoymentland

My new company will be headquartered in an artist studio above the fantastic VAIN salon in downtown Seattle (which is funny to me because I got a lot of flak from a Salon article that made fun of the fact that I said The Robot Co-op was above a yoga studio).  In any case, it will be just me, a desk, a computer, and leftover art from McLeod Residence.  It will be an experiment in ultra-minimalist tech-startupery.  In the beginning, until I have become somewhat sustainable, I will not be hiring anyone and hopefully will not even take any money (we’ll see).

My wife, Kellianne, works at VAIN, so this means we can sneak out for a snack once in a while.  The salon is 5 blocks from our house, and 3 blocks from the market, and also 3 blocks from my gym. I’ll be able to adapt to her work schedule so we can have the same days off (a luxury we’ve missed since she started working Saturdays and Sundays).

The philosophies of the kinds of products I’ve built and want to build are also going to be applied to the company itself.  The company should make my life more enjoyable.  It should be sustainable, it should promote health, and it should be social.  It should be open, transparent, friendly, personable, and good.  It should focus entirely on products that also express that vision, and which work to make the company sustainable within the first 6-12 months.

What will I do?

To begin, I’ll be working on Locavore — making it more social, expanding into different kinds of food other than fruits and vegetables, and also expanding to other countries outside of the US.  I’ll also be working on several other social iPhone apps that are focused on making life more enjoyable.  They will often have in common the fact that they encourage sharing, communicating, building relationships with friends and family, and becoming more aware of the life you are living.

It’s another bold bet, and a bit of an irreversible step, leap of faith, whatever.  But more than that, I see this as a chance to continue moving towards the kind of work that is truly self-expressive, life-improving, sustainable, and fun.

Once I get the basic building blocks set up and I’m officially in the wilderness, I’ll be posting as much about it all here and on my @enjoymentland Twitter account.

A lot more is about to happen.

I’m making a photo booth for one of my favorite local businesses, VAIN, a hair salon in Seattle with locations downtown and in Ballard.  Building off of the popularity of the McLeod Photobooth, I’m gonna take the general idea and upgrade it to use a better camera and to have more social features.

Parts purchased:

• Mac Mini
• Nikon D60
• 15″ touch screen
• USB button
• Large 2-way mirror

After hooking this all up, I’m going to write a bit of software that connects all the dots.  The software will basically be a Mac desktop app that triggers an Automator script to take the picture, save it to the computer, and display it on the screen.  From there, it’ll will allow you to delete the picture, take another, tag the last picture, or browse all pictures taken.

The main differences between this photo booth and the traditional photo booth is that instead of printing out a picture for you, it simply uploads it to Flickr. This saves paper, and creates a social element around the photobooth that typically doesn’t exist. By having pictures available immediately on Flickr, anyone can browse all pictures taken, comment on them, and have a semi-live stream of what’s happening at the space at any given time.  During the 2 years that the McLeod Photobooth ran, over 33,000 pictures were taken.  Thousands of comments and favorites have been made on those photos, and now they exist as a strange history of the whole endeavor.

The photobooth I’m making this time is also going to have a couple extra features to make it more appropriate for a hair salon.  For example, having before and after pictures.  Being able to browse pictures by stylist, and by customer.  It will be encased in a large mirror so that instead of framing yourself in a grainy webcam shot you can simply frame yourself within lines in the mirror.  The camera will literally shoot through the mirror, via 2-way mirror technology.  Isn’t that cool?  Also, the lighting’s gonna be a lot better.

I’m excited about this little project.