A little over a year ago, I left the Robot Co-op and started Enjoymentland here.  Since then, a lot has happened.  My wife got pregnant and we had a son, to name perhaps the most life-changing one.  I continued to develop Locavore.  A worked on a little side project that ended up turning into 750 Words.  And behind the scenes, there has been another big project that I’ve been working on, which involved creating a tool for restaurants and bars to run more efficiently.  It was a paid gig, and I partnered with a great friend and a great business to put this together.  We built something amazing, really useful, and actual simple and fun to use.  Before I left for paternity leave, I had it at a point where it was 98% done and was being rolled out to our alpha testers.

Yesterday, we decided not to launch it.

It’s not that we don’t think we built something amazing.  I think it’s probably the slickest thing I’ve ever built, actually.  I put in a ton of work, and addressed some amazing problems with simple solutions that things like the web can now solve easily for businesses that are a bit behind the times, technology-wise.

Mostly, for me, it came down to a few frustrating technical problems (one of our data-suppliers decided to bail on us at the last minute), and the fact that selling new technology to non-tech companies is sort of difficult.  It reminds of the feeling I had when (as a hopeful young novelist) I had to start pitching manuscripts to agents and publishers.  The joy of writing and the joy of selling pull from two completely different springs.  One spring is bountiful in my soul, the other, not so much.

And then there’s the issue of opportunity cost.  Doing anything costs exactly as much as the price of not doing something else.  Sometimes it’s not enough to have a good idea, or a good business, or even big success… we should all be striving to find the success that best suits us, that ties our passions up with our work, that sustains our sense of purpose, that justifies this one chance on this planet that we have to do anything we want.

One of the benefits of small companies and few business partners is that we can make swift changes.  We can “fail” early.  We haven’t made any giant bets that we can’t take back.  There is not an irrecoverable amount of sunk cost.

So, without much further ado, we’re freezing the project, stepping back for a bit, and re-assessing.  Sure, it sounds suspiciously like The Dip, or The Resistance, speaking here, but I’m almost certain that we’re all doing the right thing (after a night’s sleep).  In fact, I think it’s mostly fear and uncertainty that would keep us on the project, rather than take us away from it.  Leaving the project is what I’m afraid of.  Especially since it means that I’ll be losing 66% of my monthly salary (which was already down 50% from The Robot Co-op), and we’ll be living on life support until something fills the gap.  Also, strangely, I was on their payroll as a means to secure a home loan originally (one that never went through since we didn’t sell our house before Niko was born, and now we’re off the market until next year) so that might become an issue again when we decide to move if I still don’t have an “official job”.  But whatever, right?

Talking with Kellianne last night about it, I think I’m going to give myself 90 days to either come up with, build, and become profitable on a new idea and business, or strongly consider re-joining the gainfully employed people of the world.  Which, back in the day, I thought I’d never be able to do because I was too spoiled by the luxuries of self-employment, but it turns out that luxuries also mask dangers and anxieties that taunt us in the night.

90 days.  That puts me at September 16th.  New profitable business or bust.  Now that I’m 100% above ground again, I’ll be posting here more.  Wish me luck!

I quit the Robot Co-op in June, and have been working on this tiny new company since then.  I think I’ve finally reached some definition on what exactly this company will be about.

Here’s what I’m working on:

Locavore has continued to sell at a steady pace.  Nowhere near enough to be a living, but definitely a nice supplement to additional streams of income.  I have realized that in order to sell 200/day regularly, I’d have to be mentioned in the NYT or be featured in iTunes pretty regularly, and unfortunately my app doesn’t really have “news-worthy” things to report often enough.  That said, I have been working on a new release that integrates with the wonderful work of Foodista (so long, Epicurious!) to show related recipes.  I’m very excited about this and can’t wait to show you what we’ve built.

Mirror, Mirror is my little photobooth side project that I’m working on with a good friend.  I am building one for Vain (to be installed any day now!) and another to be rented out to local weddings and events.  It’s a fun project, but also not a business idea so much as a cool gadget to play around with.

The other thing I’m working on is actually a full-blown company with a good friend and a local business.  I’ve commited to working 40 hours a week for the next 9 months on it, so it’s gonna be a big chunk of my weekly work.  I’m super excited about it because it’s something that’s practical, has a good business plan, and caters to both my interests and my skill set.  I always scoff at people who withhold details about their projects for fear of being copied… I am withholding details because there’s a bit of an issue of protecting the company we’re working with.  Otherwise, I’d tell you all about it.

A thousand little projects also keep me pretty occupied.  I am helping the guys at Track Your Happiness to build better reporting and such for their data (I also just recently launched Twitter integration for getting your random notifications through the day… try it out!).  I’m helping a friend in California build a website for her new business.  I’m thinking constantly about moods, standards for meaningful work, and event planning, to mention a few of the bigger ones.

Keeping busy, and loving it.

Two of the things that people mention most when I mention that I’m working on my own:

1. It must get lonely
2. It must be difficult to stay on task

It’s true.  Though, personally, the feeling of loneliness (in geographic space, not in the strength of relationships) is one that I sort of like.  So, the main thing that I really have to worry about is how to work alone and stay on task.

This week I’m trying a new experiment.  No social networks, email, chat, etc before 3pm on my laptop.  I can periodically check email on my phone, mostly to make sure that nothing urgent is waiting for me, but because it’s not that easy to reply on the phone, I’ll just leave them there until 3pm or so when I can then think about all of the people I need to reply to.  I keep chat open, but “away”, so that I can still have work-related conversations with people.  And Tweetie is completely closed because I can’t help but be distracted by the amusing, witty, and constant updates from friends (and celebrities).

The other thing I’m doing is bringing back my practice of writing “daily pages”… ~750 words a day to myself, that sort of help me get everything out in the open in my head and so that I can find a bit of clarity in my typically scrambled thoughts.

Anyone else have tips for working alone?

Fear has been on my zeitgeist lately, coming up in a lot of conversations about business and personal life. It’s a strange emotion, and our culture has a lot of different ways of spinning our reaction to fear.

No Fear.

Etc.

And then there’s the un-spoken but all too real feeling of fear that we deal with on a daily basis. That makes us balk before action, that makes us change course, load up with accessories of safety, and sometimes even pre-emptively strike.

I’ve been consumed by my own new set of fears recently. Quitting a job and starting up something brand new is a scary thing to do. Suddenly you realize just how much money a regular pay check offered. And there’s a secondary fear in there… knowing that you are completely free can trigger a strange fear of freedom. And the third layer… the guilt of possibly having too much of a good thing and having a fear that the universe will unleash some hidden mechanism that hangs back the teddy bear just when you started getting attached to it.

There’s fear. And there’s our response to it.

Fear is an emotional response triggered by a perceived threat or danger. To completely rid ourselves of fear is probably not a good idea. Threats and dangers would then have a sitting duck to target at their leisure. It’s important to pay close attention to our own cognitive response to fear, and it’s slower acting cousin anxiety.

This secondary response, the cognitive response, is in many ways more helpful or harmful to our lives than the original causes of the fear. Maybe this is what FDR meant by fearing fear itself — how we respond to the things we are afraid of could end up hurting us more than the actual things we are afraid of.

Like many people, I am afraid of failure. That fear makes me obsess over the amount of money and time that I have to live on. It makes me have trouble sleeping at night, and makes me a little antsy at all times, probably leading to quicker emotional responses to negative stimulus. It affects my health and ability to enjoy things in the moment without wondering if that moment might in some way be hastening the end of all enjoyable moments.

In a more productive sense, it also makes me explore business options, keep an eye out for new ideas at all times, execute on ideas quickly to see if they have lasting value, etc. Fear is a great motivator and can help get to the real point of what you want to do. It discourages dilly dallying.

When people think about their ideal world, a world where we’re all millionaires and all doing exactly what we want to do with our days, madly in love with our spouses, family, friends, career, and selves, I’m guessing that most of the time people would neglect to add a healthy dose of FEAR to the mix. And yet, it’s fear that brings us to ourselves and makes us focus on the things that are most important to us.

This is a long ramble, and one likely to continue as I unravel my own fate in the presence of fear, but I guess my only point at the moment is to say that at the end of the day, I’m glad I’m afraid.

I’ve been in my little office for a couple weeks now and am loving it. I’ve been working on Locavore, the photobooth, and another new iPhone app. I’ve been drawing pictures.

I’ve also got a little table with notecards: one notecard for each business idea that I am currently pondering. The freedom I have at this moment with what to build, how to build it, in which order, etc, is incredible. But it also requires serious thinking. So I sit on my couch (given to me generously by a friend) and move the note cards around, and think about how they link together, how they express what I’m trying to express with this business, and how the contribute to the world.

I’ve started spending more time on the couch this week and less time at the desk. I’m reading Small Giants, a wonderful gift from the Small & Special conference I attended last week.

I realize that this little company is a meaning-making machine. It is a vehicle for expressing ideas, and building them in a sustainable manner. The first chapter of Small Giants is about the freedom for a business to choose what it is. What does it want? Does it want to be rich? Does it want to be really big? Does it want to change the world? Or does it want to be great? Or does it want to bring out the best in its people? Or does it want something else?

How do these decisions get made? Who makes them? How do they get set in stone? How do they come to life?

The beginning of a company is a flexible time. The soul hasn’t yet set in the body. Like a comfortable chair, it has to be used in order to find its true personality. And with all of the volatility, there’s a chance that negative qualities can infuse themselves in the business. Perhaps the fear of failure puts claw marks in the couch. Perhaps the fear of not being good enough wears down the arm rest. Or can insecurity and fear be used to motivate and inspire? To push me to make the purest and most real decisions. This is my chance to make the right decisions and to build the right thing, and I fully intend on sitting in that couch as much as is necessary to get it right.

I got a new iPhone 3GS yesterday and figured out that by taking video in landscape mode it’s possible to email them directly to Flickr and Vimeo.

Here’s a quick virtual tour of my offices:

I was reminded of that joke we used to play as kids when our parents tell us to “Wake up!” and we yell back, “I am awake!” and the joke is that if they want us to get out of bed and get ready for school that they should be more specific and in the meantime we’re following all orders to the letter.

As adults now, we are all supposed to “go to work”. And somehow, the act of going to work is enough to satisfy some mystical authority figure that bestows on us our duties. Being unemployed can lead to an existential crisis unless you’ve found the enlightenment in the separation of employment and identity. For the rest of us, we go to work. But of course the mystical authority figure is only going to be tricked for so long before it realizes that you can still lead a meaningless life while employed.

What does it mean to go to meaningful work?

Just like being awake is more than just having your eyes open, going to work should be more than just being at a workplace trading time for money. It should be meaningful. But where does meaning come from? Of course, it comes from ourselves. We put meaning into things, and share our meanings with others, and teach each other how to build meaning out of what is in front of us.

That said, if meaning is created from the act of work, it’s a matter of finding that work which, to us, feels meaningful. I’ve been in many work situations that seemed dreary and dull until I decided to find a way to make it meaningful. The desire for meaning creates a shift in how I work… I pay more attention to the details of work that I find delightful, I find ways to learn something new, I experiment with different ways to do the things that I’ve gotten bored of doing. The actual product of the work may not change, but suddenly it has life.

It also becomes apparent pretty quickly that I don’t have to be at a desk to do meaningful work. A mid-day walk through the park where I tease out a creative idea in my head becomes meaningful work. Reading a book about something that helps me find a new design or idea becomes meaningful work. Conversations become meaningful work. And when I am at a computer, I can design and build with a sense of purpose and meaning that the stereotype of a desk job has no clue ever existed.

When’s the last time you went to meaningful work? How many of us have been meaningfully unemployed for longer than we care to admit? Think about what meaningful work means to you for 10 minutes and see how it changes the way you work immediately into something with a bit more life and spark.

Being at heart a writer, creative person and goal-achiever, I’m a big fan of the mission statement. It’s my chance to craft a succinct statement about the desired goals of a certain collection of people and ideas.

In order to write a mission statement, I first need to back up a little and consider what my values are. Basically, an ideal world. The kind of world I want to live in. In my brief brainstorming this morning, I came up with these words that describe my values:

Frugal. Sustainable. Artful. Meaningful. Strong. Small. Good. Social. Futuristic.

These are the words that are resonating with me right now.  They are the seeds that are causing me to want to add something to the world.  To help create a world that is more frugal, more sustainable, more artful, more meaningful, etc.

The next step is to think about how I see myself in this world.  What is my contribution to this world?

Since I love constraints, I have decided to restrict my mission statement to being exactly 125 characters.  I chose 125 because I plan on making a piece of art out of this mission statement, in order to make it official.  It will be reminiscent of something I made Kellianne for Christmas last year:

This is a hand-drawn sheet of 1,000 paper cranes.  They are colored in order to correspond with a 125-character message translated into binary.  Each binary character is a series of 8 zeroes and ones, which conveniently make 125 characters 1,000 zeroes and ones.

In Japan, there is a tradition to fold 1,000 cranes in times of great intention.  Each crane is an intention, and when all 1,000 are together, they represent a great hope or wish for health, community, and strength.

What better way to set a mission statement in stone (slash paper) than to transform it into an artful, meaningful, intention?

I’ve got my first draft of the mission statement ready.  I’m going to sit on it and revise it and then turn it into reality.

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.

Imagine eating an orange. To the extent that eating it is enjoyable (rather than repulsive or neutral), I’ve come up with 9 primary ways in which the enjoyment can be processed.  They are cumulative… it’s possible to enjoy it for all 9 reasons at once.  Such an occurrence might be called an Enjoyment Yahtzee.

1. You enjoy it because it distracts you from something less enjoyable (escaping)
2. You enjoy it because it’s the easiest thing to eat at the moment (practical)
3. You enjoy it because it is tasty (pleasing to the senses)
4. You enjoy it because it’s healthy (nourishing to the body)
5. You enjoy it because you’ve never had an orange before (novel)
6. You enjoy it because it puts you in a better mood (mood-altering)
7. You enjoy it because a friend is sharing it with you (socially meaningful)
8. You enjoy it because you think eating an orange makes you look good (ego-validating)
9. You enjoy the orange for what it is (intrinsic)

In rough order of weakest to strongest forms of enjoyment:

Escaping

This is enjoyable by comparison.  Watching television can be enjoyable if you are watching it in order to avoid engaging in an argument, or facing work that you don’t want to do.  It’s the cheapest form of enjoyment.

Practical

The enjoyment of what is simply practical is a pretty shallow form of enjoyment, but it is at hand and that is what is enjoyable about it.  You may want to be an ballerina, but you’re 7’3″ and the star player on your basketball team.  Being an all-star basketball player is enjoyable because it is available to you, it is right there, and it can be taken.  Perhaps a more mundane example would be the enjoyment of eating frugally, making the best of the ingredients you have, rather than daydreaming about that steak at that fancy restaurant that you can’t afford.  There is an enjoyment of living within your means, making lemonade out of lemons, and eating the whole walrus and using all of the bones for your igloo.  It is frugal, it is neat, it is present, and it is self-sustaining.

Pleasing to the senses

Because something is cold, because it is tasty, because it is beautiful, because it sounds good, because it feels good.  Enjoyment of the senses is something that is core to all of our experiences and often labeled as a potentially dangerous form of enjoyment.  It leads to hedonism, pursuit of immediate gratification, etc.  But there is nothing inherently negative about pleasing the senses, unless enjoyment of this particular avenue eclipses all the other kinds of enjoyment.  Eating oranges alone in your closet even after you’re full at the cost of being social, trying new things, and nurishing your body has been the downfall of more than one that I know.

Nourishing to the body

Our body needs certain things to maintain basic function, and luckily it rewards us for satisfying those requirements.  Drinking water when we’re dehydrated, eating the necessary amounts of protein, carbohydrates, and fiber, BREATHING.  All very enjoyable, right?  This level of enjoyment also extends to getting enough sleep, being warm enough, and exercising.  They contribute not only to the strength of our bodies, but to a very clean form of enjoyment.

Novel

The first time we experience something we experience it in a way that can’t be replicated by repeated experiencing.  The novel experience is enjoyable because it is connecting things in our brain that have never been connected before: the flavor of squid, the view from a hang-glide, sex for the first time, smoking pot or getting drunk the first time.  They are enjoyable for themselves, true, but there is an additional element of something almost resembling fear, or anxiety, or excitement, that is enjoyable.  More to some than others.

Mood-altering

We are all strongly tied to our moods.  So much so that we defend them as a core, possibly unchangeable, part of our identity.  Getting angry when we feel angry is a basic right of humanity, and we often don’t feel responsible for our anger as much as simply unavoidably angry.  At the same time, we are all obsessive tinkerers of our moods, always trying to lift ourselves into a better mood, or indulging a weak one.  Regulating breathing, drinking caffeine or alcohol, eating something sweet or fatty, shopping, watching television, doing yoga or meditation, exercising, and slamming a fist on a table are all simple mood-altering actions that, in some way, create enjoyment (regardless of their additional strengthening or weakening impacts).  Enjoying something simply for the fact that it indulges or enhances our mood taps into a very powerful aspect of knowing yourself.  Knowing the most effective mood-altering activities, and knowing which moods are impacted positively and effectively (and avoiding the indulgement of harmful emotions) is one of the best studies we can make of ourselves.

Socially meaningful

This is a very interesting and broadly reaching form of enjoyment.  Enjoying something because you’re making money, for example, is a form of socially meaningful enjoyment.  We enjoy money because it has meaning in our culture and gives us power that we didn’t previously have.  Socially meaningful enjoyment also includes that enjoyment of sharing an experience with a loved one.  Doing something becomes more enjoyable if it helps you gain the respect of your peers, friends, family, or even strangers.  A wedding’s enjoyment is largely based on the public enactment of vows, traditions, and symbols that gain the weight of our culture.  Doing a favor, participating in a group, being paid, and receiving credit are all forms of enjoyment that gain their flavor from being socially meaningful.

Ego-validating

The ego loves being validated.  It loves feeling big and fluffy, and that love is expressed in the form of luscious enjoyment whenever something happens to give it a stronger form.  For example, the act of being known for something, like eating the most hot dogs in a 6-minute period.  That in itself is a form of socially meaningful enjoyment, but the next time you’re on stage and the gun fires and you begin stuffing your mouth full of hot dogs as fast as you can, the ego-validating enjoyment of “THIS IS WHO I AM” kicks in and takes it to a new, inwardly facing enjoyment that exists outside of society, outside of the pleasant taste of hot dogs, into a tiny world where only you exist and you are doing what you were meant to do on this planet.  And it is lovely.

Intrinsic

This is the truest form of enjoyment, the kind that perhaps only deities are fully capable of.  The love of something simply for what it is.  Unconditional love.  To appreciate that orange for what it is, you have to be equally okay with losing the orange as eating the orange.  You have to simply want what is best for the orange, and never need recognition for what you are giving the orange with this unconditional love.  This enjoyment of what is intrinsic about the world, a detached but fully engaged perspective, transcends all other enjoyments in its ability to satisfy, because it cannot be touched, has no limits, and lasts forever.  We should all strive to fully enjoy in this manner at least once in our lives.

My intention here is to create a factory of social learning projects that work towards a common goal and gain momentum by rolling down the hill together.

A project, for the purposes of this site, is something that meets the following criteria:

1. Has a well-defined objective
2. Requires learning something new
3. Contributes to a well-balanced and healthy life
4. Brings attention and appreciation to a neglected topic
5. Produces something
6. Has a social or sharable element
7. Has good intentions

Once a project is begun, I will track it.  Tracking my projects here is a project in itself.

See all projects.