In 2012, I did give my best.  What was challenging, even more than the fight forward, was staying sane enough to let go and to keep moving forward.

When things are outside of your control, when they don’t work out, you’ve simply got to push forward with your business and with yourself.  At work, that’s easy—keep doing the marketing, keep following up on the leads, keep building a great product.  But outside of work, it’s not so obvious.

When I looked back on 2012’s challenges, I mentioned that there were 3 things that got me through it.  Here they are again, this time with explanation.  I offer my formula to you, so you too can push through:

1. Take Care of Yourself

When shit got hard in 2012, I hit the track.  Without realizing it, I found myself in particularly good shape.  It’s been a (not quite) joke in my relationships that when things are peachy-keen I have nothing to write about.  I’ve uncovered a second truth—when things gets tough, I run more, too.  Try it—hard running feels a lot better than a marathon of Breaking Bad.

Beyond running, I went camping and kayaking and generally surrounded myself with the beauty that is the Bay Area.  Nature physically changes me, and a day away is a chance to get to know friends much better than breaking bread.

When it’s rainy or late, writing has always been a help for me.  If I’m too tired to write, I’ll simply record to my iPhone.  It’s amazing what sharing it all can do, even if it’s just sharing with yourself.

Lastly, I added chess to the mix this year.  Though I generally avoid games, something about the thinking that chess demands just felt right to me; it’s an escape that I’m comfortable with.

2. Find the Company of Friends or Family

As I mentioned, I try to stay active when there’s a lot on my mind.  I also try to surround myself with friends, even if it’s just their company when we’re working across from one another at a cafe.

I get a lot out of doing for others.  While it can be frustrating if they don’t reciprocate, I’ve come to accept that I’m the one who will likely reach out more.  We all have our own approach to friendships, and I know my friends appreciate when I include them.

While there are some ways that a friend can’t replace a significant other, it’s surprised me just how good a job they can do.  Whether it be reading together on a weekend morning or late night dancing or cooking together, most activities don’t have to be reserved for lovers.

3. Never Give Up on Doing What’s Right

Whether or not I have a chance to get outside or be around close friends, I at least try to avoid the things I might regret.  Somehow this is easy for me (I’ve never drunk-dialed), but I know that for others this is difficult.

By doing what’s right, that means I never say hurtful things, instead I over-communicate, and I blame myself whenever possible.  It means that I don’t always win, but at the end of the day I feel like I did what was best for the situation in the long-run, even if it wasn’t good for me in the moment.

This approach to being the better person led to one of the hardest weeks of my life, but now I know that I put everything in…so it’s possible to let go of the results.

If you’re not sure about something, write out what your instincts tell you.  Talk to a friend.  Sleep on it.  Sometimes it’s just a matter of letting time dull the situation for the right path to come to you.

–
These are the things that got me through the challenges in 2012.  I imagine that they’ll play a role in guiding me through the years to come.  I welcome any techniques you use to let go of the results and make it through the year.

* Wayne Willis not only helped me to let go of the results, he was a big part of knowing what path to forge.  I hope you too can find someone who’s been through similar life challenges and wound up on top.  Thank you, Wayne.

Flickr photo by sziliotti

I was lucky enough to be interviewed last week by Andrew, where we dug into some practical lessons-learned and shared stories and tips.  The video is embedded below.  So grab some holiday tofurkey and get ready to be productive…

Andrew and I discussed 11 specific and tactical tips for winning back time in the workday.  Below I’ve pasted the video interview.  On Mixergy.com, you’ll find a full transcript, an MP3 version, as well as a many (much more ; ) helpful videos for entrepreneurs.

Happy to answer any questions in the comments.  Meantime, enjoy your Turkey Day!

Flickr photo credit: jdlasica

Remember when we had homework and tests?  It was tedious and difficult to get A’s.  But even without a report card, the best results require the same struggle.

I hated high school, but I recall my last two years idyllically: most days I arrived by 7:30, attended seven classes, ran competitively at the track, and then spent 3-hours in a nearby university’s computer science class.  And I did well, even if my moniker “dot com” was hardly offered with affection.

While I enjoyed the subjects, let’s be honest—few of us would’ve labored through so many chapters or worked out so many math problems if it wasn’t required.  The proof: the concept of “practice” is no longer in most of our vocabularies.

Nope, now we just do.  Do it right, do it wrong—business (or nearly all our activities) are about showing up and giving it a shot.  Mind you, I get to grade my team and I rarely let a B result out the door, but in this case it’s easier to be the teacher than the student.

As the teacher I have no trouble forgetting about the competition (as Seth Godin advises), but I still have to do my own work.  I can certainly show up and move things forward (“minimum viable CEO”?) , but the things that will make the most impact feel more like homework.

The difference between a B and an A+ may be 100 customers vs. a million.  Showing up is just lip service.  Pitching 50 journalists, writing 100 customers, creating another video…no one will ask me to do it, and no one will grade me if I don’t.

But it’s not just about work and making a startup succeed.  It’s the willingness to do something that’s seriously tough, even if the light at the end of the tunnel is far away and you may damage your ego in the process.

To be clear, I’m not talking about taking on more—no, ambition creep can be toxic.  I’m talking about taking the things that you’re reasonable/passable/or even good at, and bringing them to the next level.  (For me, that’s writing/marketing, and Spanish.)

As I approach my thirtieth year, I want to still be able to step up to the plate with the difficult things.  Not in response to someone asking me to, but because it’s the only way I’ll be happy with myself and will make a substantial impact before the next decade is up.

Growing up may be a struggle, but it’s also a myth.  We’re never grown up, and it’s never too late to take things to the next level.

But there are two common problems that will sabotage any distributed team’s progress.  We fight them every day at AwayFind, and here’s what we’ve learned.

A big part of remote (er, any) work is a need to communicate frequently, or even over-communicate.  But in a distributed team, there are two communication challenges that lead to big problems.

First, let’s make some assumptions:

• Others on your team have more experience with some of the things you have to do
• The work you’re completing now will change before it’s presented to customers

These are true in any company with a handful of people.  And depending on the degree to which you address these assumptions through communication and feedback, your team can sometimes suffer from:

• Over-perseverance – fighting through every new challenge completely on one’s own
• Over-polish – perfecting what one’s working on before offering it up for feedback

I love having a team that works hard and gets stuff done, so perseverance and polish are generally great traits…but when they lead to slow work and re-work, that’s both frustrating and dangerous.

And on remote teams, these two traits are even more prevalent.  First off, people who are attracted to remote work are often independent people who enjoy working through their own challenges.  But more importantly, in remote work there are far fewer casual check-ins:

• We’re less likely to ask for help form our colleagues when we don’t run into them
• We’re less likely to see a project before it’s finished when it’s not right in front of us

Think about it—when you’re working in the same room you see what they’re working on and hear their frustration.  We’re quick to help one another out and to address problems at earlier stages.

Now this isn’t merely an argument against distributed teams (I’ve long been a fan), rather it’s a warning to prevent these problems from occurring in your distributed team.  As a remote worker, you need to:

• Find a way to share your work well before it’s completed…and be open to reviewing others’ work while its unfinished
• Ask for help from your colleagues when you’re working with a new tool or technology…and regularly check in with others on your team to understand their skills and where you might be able to help

There is not a month that goes by where I don’t learn of someone who struggled with a project I could’ve helped with… or a feature that could’ve been corrected before it got to its present level of polish.  These things can set us back DAYS or WEEKS, and they kill me because they’re avoidable.  Fight back NOW.

These problems no doubt exist in every company…but in remote teams they’re even more prevalent and pervasive.  And if you want to work with people in different offices, you need to proactively combat these issues and architect a culture that supports early feedback and casual sharing of ideas.

While these aren’t the only challenges in distributed teams, these may be the biggest.  If you focus on them head on, perhaps you can reap the rest of the benefits…and join me on my next trip to Buenos Aires.

It’s no secret our greatest asset is time and our greatest predictor of success how we spend it, yet most of us have grown into our roles and task lists without giving it much thought.

Where do we kick ass…and where do we struggle?  Where do we have leverage..and where are we a replaceable worker bee?

At a dinner the other night, we got on the topic of "what are you best at?"  An interesting question perhaps, but it led to a couple better, more specific ones:

• In what area are you uniquely skilled, relative to others?
• Of your unique skills, which can you leverage the most for impact?

Take two minutes to consider your answers.

Though there’s scarcely one right answer, it’s likely that your responses will not be how you spend most (or even much) of your time.

I believe my answer is my ability to offer feedback and communicate advice in a way that’s useful and specific.  With my team that comes in the form of product vision, specifications, and feedback.  With the outside world it comes in the form of speaking and writing.

And as I look back on the past decade, my only regret is that I haven’t written more, created more, and shared more.  Like many of you reading this, as my team and responsibilities have grown, I’ve dealt more with unplanned situations, rather than setting my own agenda.  But, as I wrote a few months back, that’s not the way to make a difference.

How about you — are you spending most of your day in an area where you kick ass and leverage your time?  Any advice, for you or for me, for how to get back on track?

And if you can’t see it, maybe it’s worth looking for.

I’ve always been a believer that we have two voices—the one where we want our companion to hear us and the one where we want others around to listen in.  The one where we’re talking to blend in with the surroundings, and the one where those outside our group can catch the whole story.

I don’t know if I’m right about this.  But I catch myself using the different voices, especially when the one I’d like to hear me isn’t the person to whom I’m speaking.

It’s not just the volume that’s different.  I can’t quite put my finger on it, but I think that as my intention changes so does my voice.  And in all our actions we run into this subtle distinction of intent.

Sometimes that intention is to make something happen, other times it’s to follow the steps that would make something happen.  In some ways it looks the same, but in others it’s all the difference.

There’s someone I’ve worked with recently who never finishes things.  She completes all the steps, but somehow things aren’t done.  We could make a checklist, we could do the tasks together, but it’s not finished.

The steps are checked off, but the result is incomplete.  The intention just wasn’t there.  At least that’s how I see it.

People know when I’m using those different voices.  People can see when we’re just following the steps.  I think we have to recognize when it is that we’re just following the steps, because we’re never going to get there.

Don’t be that guy.  Founder or not, everyone should be able to represent their startup.

I find this all too often—people work to make a living, but no one puts them through the training necessary to represent the company—neither as an employee nor as someone speaking on its behalf.  If founders can’t sell their employees on their idea and get them to understand it clearly, then employees are severely handicapped at succeeding in their jobs.

I’m going to an event tomorrow night that’s about employee equity—what’s great about the event is that it’s targeted to people who work for startups and need to better understand their compensation.  It’s an event for people who aren’t just in biz dev or on the management team.  More events need to be targeted toward the regular folks who do much if not most of the real work.

One of those events needs to be on pitching, on selling, on the elevator pitch, and on why on earth they’re working at a startup.  I’m not slaving away for a dream because I want a quick buck, and I don’t think anyone on my team is.  Right now we’re not to the point where we can look back and say “it’s beautiful, it’s done,” but whether or not the baby’s ugly, I expect my whole team to stand behind it.  And to understand where things are going.  Is that too much to ask?

I hope someone (or, heck I will) puts on an event about this.  And that we all invest a little more time in the people who work with us on the vision.  Regardless of one’s role in a company or the company’s stage in the market, this is crucial for so many parts of a company’s success.

Flickr photo credit: tantrum_dan

For a time I wasn’t sure where I belonged…and then I realized that I could choose my community regardless of location.  Maybe if we all worried less whether our needs were fulfilled nearby, we’d see just how much we can be part of, and that there are no walls or beltways to stop us.

Polyamory’s Not So Bad

There’s an endless stream of discussion about the best place for startups.  An abundance of local sites and discussions.  All of this creates awareness and camaraderie…but also a sort of blindness.   Communities help us to grow, but they don’t have to define or limit us, and we get to choose where we call home.  Why not sleep around?

Successful startups and active community groups are everywhere.  But for the success of your business, it comes down to knowing who you need to know.

My Facebook groups is an interesting sample—Baltimore Tech, DC Tech, and two private groups related to startups.  It’s kind of a metaphor for my general approach—get out there in the community, but find what’s best for your business, not just what local community has to offer.  Note that I’m not even in a San Francisco based group, and I’m not sure that that matters.  Maybe I’ll start one.

Create your Own Community

I started Ignite DC partly because I knew the folks at Ignite Baltimore.  I started Bootstrap Maryland because I saw the education on the west coast that DC wasn’t getting.  I got to be one of the first social media “experts” in the area because I didn’t want the region to miss the boat.

Most of what I’ve done that’s been good for my community came from somewhere else.

It’s great that so many in a region like DC/Baltimore are now offering so much support for startups.  But it’s a piece of the puzzle, and locally it’s still very difficult to address at least two of the most core startup challenges today: funding and distribution.  (And there’s a lot to learn elsewhere about partnership, culture, customer acquisition, and even team dynamics.)

There isn’t a need to move.  And there’s a lot of value to growing together.  But that will never be enough.  You can define yourself by your location.  Or you can define yourself as the one who makes things happen, wherever those you need to know reside.

Consider which community can help you the most in 2011.  Or create a new one.  But just because things are looking good where you are, don’t forget to look around.

Here’s a review of 2010—but feel free to skip to “slogging to speediness”—those changes are what got me through 2010 and may help you, too.

Sink or Swim…treading water on the critical path

I began the year with the goal of simply making it through the year—as my theme was to swim.  In 2009 I had set a lot of things in motion, and I suspected that 2010 would determine whether those things would prove fruitful or not—whether I’d sink or swim.

The first half of the year was swimming—treading water, actually.  I waited a long time for the big things to come through.  Claire, Yvonne, Tim, Paul…you all heard me go on and on about how things were going from a 20% likelihood to 50% likelihood to…FINALLY.  July ended up being the magic month—when I got a big check for selling SET and raised the first big bit of money for AwayFind.  Prior to that, it was a long, and at times cruel, waiting period.

And then everything changed.  Sure, I was ready for the changes, but they couldn’t have come too soon.  I up and went to San Francisco.  Or, first I went to London and Barcelona (had some fun goofing off with my friend Maria, to the right), and then San Francisco. 

I’ve re-learned a lot this past year—the power of patience, what it means to focus on one thing and give it everything, where I have skills and where I don’t, the power of bringing people together, and that you can never give too much but you can give enough.  I hope to write more about those lessons in the coming year.

I don’t think there was another path to where I am today, and I couldn’t accelerate it.  There are also opportunities available to me now that weren’t a year ago, and I know in a year there will be more opportunities.

What that means to you—it takes forever to get to your dream, so you’d better be working toward it.  As 2011 approaches, I really hope you have an idea of your critical path, and that you’re ready to both work and wait it out.  I don’t mean to be cliché, but take it all starts with a first step.  Take it.

Some People and Places

When you look back at a day, it feels like nothing happens.  But when you look back at a week, a month, a year, there can be so much.  I know I checked some more boxes, grew a business,  danced with beautiful girls, and grew up a lot.

• People have given so much to me this year.  Nevermind our investors (thanks, guys!), people like Paul Singh (to the right), Lauren Jacob, Dave McClure, and Chris Gordon have made this year possible. Others, too—but you four above all.
• I visited Buenos Aires twice.  I have several coworkers there, and while I really enjoyed the city, I fell in love with my work again.  My team has grown into such a great group.
• Along with Paul, I put on the biggest event I’ve organized to date, Bootstrap Maryland’s second conference, which lit a fire under a lot of startups in the area
• I organized my second panel at SXSW.  And like with last year, that experience led to some great relationships.  Jay Cuthrell became an advisor at AwayFind, and Daniel Raffel became a good friend out here in San Francisco.
• From Snowmageddon to rainbows at Golden Gate Park to drives down the Coastal Highway I’ve seen so much beauty every day.  And I’ve begun to take out my camera again—I took this with my phone today after a dance at Golden Gate Park just today…

I could go on with these kinds of highlights, but I realize that that won’t help you a lot.  Sure, I had another good year, traveled, grew my business, yadayadayada…  but this blog isn’t about Jared’s adventures.  No, this blog is about how I can apply my experiences to help you and your business.  So…

What Really Happened in 2010 – slogging to speediness

What really happened in 2010 is not the exciting stuff, but a series of frameworks, processes, and routines.  So much has changed that I’m pretty much living a different life.

Take yesterday—I uploaded photos from March thru November (yes, I had gotten behind).  Though it was a ridiculous delay, the process yesterday was wonderful—it was smooth and fast.  Over several weekends I’d been architecting a process for editing and uploading.  So yesterday it was a joy.

That’s kind of like what this year has been.  I haven’t so much been iterating on the tangible, but on the intangible.  My biggest personal accomplishment for 2010 was probably the routine I built and managed to stick with. 

In other words, the real accomplishment for this year was all the processes that made it into my life and my company’s day-to-day.  It means that things have gotten a LOT easier, and will continue to.  It’s been a slog to make these changes, but the light at the end of the tunnel is bright and beautiful.

In the event that it might help you, here are some changes I’ve made to my day-to-day…

• I’ve eaten well nearly every day
• I’ve adjusted my diet so that I consume more protein and fiber, and very few carbs for breakfast and lunch, which has led to so much more predictable energy for me
• I’ve run at least 4 miles over 95% of the days that I’ve woken up in San Francisco
• I’ve woken up before 7am (and made it to work before 8:30) just about every weekday here in San Francisco
• I’ve found an environment that really contributes to my daily productivity and happiness—working at Parisoma has been a huge boost to my quality of lifeeverything.
• I achieve Inbox Zero every day, in no small part due to the tools below

These tools have changed my life:

• Thanks to Flickfolio for Android and Lightroom 3 for my computer, I can sync my Facebook, Flickr, and mobile photos without doing anything twice, thrice, or even storing things in separate places.  This has literally made me want to reinvest in photography as it made a huge burden into a great experience.
• I’ve switched my calendar over to Tungle, which has made scheduling so much easier.
• I switched from Exchange to Google Apps early this year, which meant that my mobile integration, particularly with Android, was way better.  And that meant fewer mistakes and less time spent looking things up.
• I switched to Google Tasks and installed some great sync apps for it on my Android and iPhone.  I feel so much more clarity in every day now.
• I switched to a secure password manager that syncs across my machines and phones, and now I feel much safer.
• Thanks to Pulse, I now read my RSS again.
• Thanks to Tweetdeck and lists, I once again enjoy Twitter.
• Upgrading to fancy noise cancelling headphones, and then to the best ones out there has helped my concentration a great deal.
• I managed a week at my new office without a big monitor.  Talk about a way to kill your productivity, if you don’t use a monitor in addition to your laptop’s then you’re simply crazy.
• And with my team, we’ve switched from Basecamp to Trac, which integrates with Subversion.  Nevermind the details, but this change means I now know and am able to manage the priorities of the whole company pretty quickly and clearly.

You know, for a few years I ran a newsletter about the tools I use, and I’d stopped that.  But this list makes me realize that I ought to go into depth about each of these in the near future..as I do believe they could help you, too.  Feel free to comment on that below if this was useful or I can provide more tips like these.

Wrapping Up

This has been a fantastic year.  I sold a company.  Moved across the country (roommate, Lauren, who is one the four people I mentioned above, is to the right).  Ran several large events.  Raised some money.  Acquired over 1,000 businesses and 10,000 individuals as customers for AwayFind.  And worked with some really awesome people along the way.

But in writing this post, I realize that these things are in no small part due to the changes to my workflow.  That’s crazy to me, because I’ve been writing about improving your workflow for years, and yet apparently there was a ton of room for growth for me.  And I already have a really big workflow change I’m excited about for next year…

Addendum

This post came in at over 1500 words.  But it only took a couple hours.  I’m not going to edit this as much as I usually do—for instance, now that I know the highlights, I’m not going to just place them at the top.

I want to write more often in the new year.  Expect more content from me, and hopefully a willingness to just sit down and purge, without holding back.  I move too slowly sometimes but I want to just get some stuff out there—so I can help you and share more—I won’t ever waste your time, but I need to show up more, even if that means less reworking and more quick content.

I won’t be writing posts this long much, but I will be writing more often.  I hope you’re in for the ride.  And I hope you had an amazing 2010.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.  If you’ve learned a lot this year, feel free to share those tips (or a link to them) below.

Don’t fire your team after reading this, but do consider how to get to a better place.  Growing (with) your team is as important as building your product.

Investors and Entrepreneurs

When investors look at startups, they discuss the idea and the market, but ultimately they’re betting on the team.  An idea is a sheet of paper and a market is a spreadsheet–only a team can create a product that serves its customers.

We entrepreneurs somewhat grasp this—we accept that our assumptions about product and market could be wrong.  We talk of concepts like prototype and beta to describe the product, and we try out our early visions on different size customers from varying industries, conducting interviews throughout the process.  But what about our team—what words do we use to describe the hodge-podge, ever-evolving group we’ve assembled to become the next Google?

If you look yourself in the mirror you get yourself, flaws and all.  We have the team that we have, and if we think carefully about it we know that there are weaknesses.  Maybe it’s experience, maybe it’s personality, maybe it’s motivation… but whatever the case, both skills and chemistry don’t just magically come together.  Much like the product we build, a team starts with a prototype and comes to maturity in different shapes and sizes throughout the product lifecycle.

But we don’t usually act on this knowledge, we just focus on shipping on testing.  The extent that we think about team is to look out for the connected cofounder and then the ninja UX guy, hoping that more skills and horsepower will come together like puzzle pieces.  But people are raw materials, not pre-fabricated components, and there will be holes in our company beyond just technical skills.  The puzzle will start to take shape but it won’t be the shape we pitched to investors (or ourselves) once upon a time.

Teams Change

People change.  People work together differently.  People leave.  These are all options for our businesses.  We all get caught up in “lean startup” hype, but all the processes we’re attempting to put in place are carried out by a team.  And maybe the changes you need are deeper than development processes.

Maybe.

The Reality of a Team, of my Team

I’ve run several organizations and worked for all sorts of managers, but I don’t always know what’s best for my team.  Even when I do know, I can’t (or don’t) always follow through.  I try to do what’s right with the circumstances and resources.

That means listening to issues with technology, process, and communication.  That means working together on quality control, personality conflicts, and personal matters.  And one by one my team has worked together to address these issues, reassign roles, and sometimes let people go.

My Team Came Out of Beta

Think about Google for a second.  We place them on a pedestal for their engineering culture, quality of life, small teams.  Whether or not that’s the case, it’s how many perceive them.

I’ve had my share of issues in my companies for the past 8 years.  Sometimes my team didn’t deliver or it took way too much “management”; sometimes I could’ve done better.  There were a lot of reasons for that.  My biggest mistake was probably being too patient, leaving people in roles they weren’t ready for.

But working together with my present AwayFind team, who’s been growing steadily since June of last year from 2 to 3, to eventually 6 full time people…our most recent release was a beautiful thing.  We worked smarter, relied on each other, and gelled.  Every product role that we need today is met, and I feel pretty damn good about things.

Right about now a giant thank you is in order—you guys seriously rocked.  And what you did had little to do with me.  I don’t what I’d want for a better group.  Thank you.

My Team is about to Enter Another Beta

But it’s not over.  As Tony Wright articulated in Startup Founder Evolution, the role of product and business development have to shift as a product company evolves.  So, very soon, we’ll hire and change a little.

We as founders with small teams should recognize that as our companies change we need more engineers, more business people, and we need to let some people go.  We need to pay attention to issues with development process, keeping people happy, and making everyone feel a part of things.  I’ll be very up front and say that the team building AwayFind today is very different than what it was when I began it as a side project at SET Consulting.

I’m proud of how we’ve evolved, and look forward to what’s ahead.  Keep your eyes open and be ready for these changes, because with the right team you really can be something great.