After returning from my travels I decided to go full-time on my after-school computer programming lessons business, Breakout Mentors. We provide a depth of learning that is not available anywhere else by pairing mentors to work 1-on-1 with young students with a long term focus. I’ve been back in San Francisco for roughly a month now, which means I have completed my first month as my own boss. It was everything I thought it would be … both good and bad!

You can imagine the good parts – complete freedom of your schedule, no annoying coworkers, no nagging bosses, and a sweet mustache (until I taught my first students at least). But I want to focus on my major take-aways, in the hopes that you are better prepared should you find yourself in a similar situation one day. Or even if you don’t, so that you know it isn’t as easy as it looks.

The Lonesome Road

Starting your own company is definitely the road less traveled, even here in startupland. One of the goals for myself while traveling was to discover to what extent I need to be surrounded by people. And I decided I’m fine being on my own for most of the day – so many of my friends are in SF, I could never be lonely.

But there is a spectrum of workplace socialness and I am at one extreme – a solo founder. Hell, even having just one person to bounce ideas off of and talk fantasy baseball would be great. Someone to share in the successes and failures. I’m not lonely, far from it. I spend a good portion of my days talking to people about Breakout Mentors. But no one else is on this long and winding road with me, so the road itself is lonesome.

Fear and Doubt

I’ve heard about the emotional battle of starting a company from friends and the internet. Paul Graham has written extensively about it, coining terms like the “trough of sorrow” and “emotional roller-coaster”:

It’s an emotional roller-coaster. This was another one lots of people were surprised about. The ups and downs were more extreme than they were prepared for. In a startup, things seem great one moment and hopeless the next. And by next, I mean a couple hours later.

Ready to be shocked: I’m not a very emotional person. I like to think I’m too logical to be overtaken by emotions. Thus, I thought my emotional rollercoaster would be closer to Goliath Jr. than Goliath. Mark me down as one of those people that were surprised.

It takes just a couple emails from parents that are pumped about Breakout Mentors to get me jacked up. Unfortunately, it also takes just a few minutes for me to ponder “do I have any idea what I’m doing”, “is this really going to work”, and “is anything I’m doing actually making a difference”. Wuh-wuh-wuuuuuhhhhhhh!

My strategy is to combat the emotional roller-coaster with routines in order to put forward a consistent effort without thinking too much about it. During the lows I also remind myself why it is a goal worth pursuing. My execution of these strategies however leaves plenty of room for improvement.

It’s All About Results

There’s no one to impress by working hard. Thus, hard work in and of itself is not valuable like it is in a normal job. Take this extreme example: your boss tells you to add 1 on the calculator over and over again. It’s urgent and very important. So you do. And you do a killer job, working 16 hour days until the project is done. Unfortunately it is soon discovered adding 1 is the wrong strategy and the company is going in a different direction – all your hard work is thrown out.

Even though your work produced no value for the company, people at least noticed how well you did on the project. You took directions from your boss and crushed it, producing more than anyone could have expected. That will come in handy when it’s time for the company to consider raises and promotions.

But in my situation, looking busy doesn’t accomplish anything. I’d only be fooling myself. Executing the wrong strategy perfectly is worthless. It’s all about results! If I pursue a marketing effort that leads nowhere (which I’ve already experienced a couple times), it is just wasted time. It doesn’t matter how hard I work. It matters how smart I work, then executing.

This is exactly what I want out of a job. No kiss-asses trying to look good or make their boss look good. No navigating a bureaucratic org chart to get buy-in for your ideas. It’s all me – time to figure out how good I really am.

Happy Closing Thoughts

Now that I have sufficiently warned you of the negative aspects, let me jump back to the positives. I am able to use my flexible schedule to take a class at Stanford and enjoy San Francisco’s spring weather. I am learning a lot about myself and how to operate a business. I am being challenged. I have met some incredible people that I wouldn’t have if I found a paying job like is expected of me. Most importantly, I am adding a ridiculous amount of value to my students lives, whether or not it proves possible to economically reap the benefits – and that is a win-win!

The Blame Game is something I like to play. No, this does not mean projecting my faults upon others – do you really think that lowly of me? The Blame Game is where I assess the multiple factors of blame for a given problem. You will commonly see what I call the Blame Game used in civil lawsuits determining to what extent someone is financially responsible. A more commonly used term for this is comparative fault or comparative responsiblity.

I’ll explain it with an real world example – determining who is financially responsible for a car accident when both drivers are “at fault”. Bob rolled through the stop sign drunk, but James was speeding and didn’t stop at all. The court would have to decide who is responsible for the damages – the judge might decide Bob is 70% financially responsible and James is 30%.

I use the Blame Game as a way to think through all the factors that contribute to a problem. While driving around New Zealand, I noticed that the FM radio reception is piss-poor. Why is this? Well Brian, there are a number of things that contribute, it isn’t just a simple answer. Ok, so let’s break it down into comparable responsibilities.

Of course there isn’t really a right answer, just something that you can defend. If you are so inclined, help me out by assigning some percentages:

1. Landscape (lots of mountains in the way)
2. Lower frequency band than in the States
3. Differences in how signal is broadcasted (for example using less power to send the signal)
4. Shape of the earth (the spheroid bends away faster here, FM is line of sight)
5. Other
 

Our Blame Game answers can then be used to determine which corrective action will yield the greatest result (also useful would be estimates of how difficult each corrective action would be). Now you’re thinking like a product manager – effort and reward tradeoffs.

Yes, this is something that actually goes through my mind while alone. Not the nerdiest example either (it would probably involve maths (kiwis use “maths” rather than “math”)).

Photo: Randy von Liski

The most shocking thing about New Zealand is how few people there are here. I hail from California, where millions of people pack in, battle gridlock traffic, try to ignore the smog, and pay a premium to do so. So you would expect a land even more beautiful than California with comparable infrastructure would be swarming with people. Not the case.

It’s high season, which means the country is absolutely swarming with visitors from all over the world. Relatively swarming. Despite this huge influx of people, there is a rather deserted feeling – on some highways we would go well over 10 minutes without passing another car.

New Zealand is a little longer and much skinnier than California – in terms of area, it’s only 63% of the size, roughly equivalent to chopping off everything north of San Francisco. But with only 4.4 million people, New Zealand is quite empty compared to California’s 38 million. In fact, if New Zealand were a state, it would be the 27th largest most populous, right between Kentucky and Oregon.

A country with this much space has a different set of problems than what I am accustomed to back home. Take what you know about the difficulties of renewable energy, the malice of the lumber industry, the stagnancy of politics, and the horrors of factory farming – throw out all those old beliefs. You must reevaluate with the facts of New Zealand.

I won’t explore all of these in this post, but as a vegetarian I do want to quickly share my thoughts on the meat industry in New Zealand. Have you seen the “happy cows come from California” commercials? Anyone who has driven past cow-schwitz on the 5 freeway knows this is false propaganda. In New Zealand however, the cows must be happy. They have huge amounts of gorgeous land to roam and actually eat what comes naturally, grass (in the US cows eat corn and get sick because they aren’t well equipped to handle it, but are kept alive with anti-biotics long enough for the growth hormones to fatten them up).

Simply put, New Zealand doesn’t have the same factory farming issues that the United States has. Therefore, if I were to have grown up in New Zealand, I would not be a vegetarian right now. And yet I am not gorging on meat while here, why not? I firmly believe in the message in this Jack Canfield quote –

“One-hundred percent commitment is a breeze, 99 percent is a bitch. If you’re 100-percent committed, you never have to re-decide. It’s a done deal. If you commit 99 percent, every day you have to re-decide.”

Credit to Jonah for the cow-schwitz term. (It’s a play off Auschwitz, the infamous concentration camp)

Photo: Christopher Hynes

Most of us growing up in the Unites States have learned that hitchhiking is dangerous. Don’t attempt it and certainly don’t pick up someone on the side of the road with their thumb out. There is a pretty good Freakonomic radio podcast with some insights into why we all share this belief.

But now that I am in New Zealand, with the new culture comes a new mindset about hitchhiking. It’s fairly common in the south island and has been the primary way I have been getting around for the last month (but don’t tell my Mom since not everyone has adjusted their mindset yet). What have I learned through this experience?

• What we all accept as truth can and should be questioned. This is an excellent time to cite the oh-so-interesting monkey, banana, and water spray experiment.
• Both kiwis and other travelers pick up hitchhikers. In my limited experience the drivers have ranged from age 19 to 86. This tells me that its not just a narrow set of people that don’t know they aren’t supposed to pick up hitchhikers – anyone can recondition themselves to match the environment.
• People are interesting. So many of our conversations with strangers consist of smalltalk – well what if you were in a car with a stranger for 90 minutes? And silence isn’t an option, the main reason people pick up hitchhikers is for someone to talk to, so you better deliver. I’ve found that I have learned much about various countries around the world through these conversations. I’ve also found that these connections are pleasant surprises that would not be possible with an itinerary chock-full of tourist activities.
• The most important take away is that it has pushed comfort zone socially. It’s good to push your comfort zone in life – that’s how we achieve bigger and better things. I am not used to asking favors of strangers – anything beyond asking for the time or if they can take a picture. And then I found myself approaching strangers pumping gas to see if I could get a ride with them. I found myself low on energy talking about United States politics and thinking up unique questions about their home (if you must know, on my hitchhiking days I am generally dehydrated so I don’t have to make them stop for pee breaks all the time, thus the low energy). And I’m stronger for it. And to keep the growth going, I may do the rejection therapy challenge when I get back stateside.

Anyone out there have some other takeaways to suggest or awesome hitchhiking stories?

Here’s a little secret for you. Anyone who actually enjoys making small talk is boring. Do you think I really want to talk about the weather? I don’t have the patience to wait and see if you have anything better to say. Life is too short, there are too many interesting people out there for me to be wasting my time with you.

You don’t want to be Susie Smalltalk, you want to be interesting. What makes someone interesting? They have a passion for things. More specifically, they have an irrational passion for things. It’s far too common to be into cars, fashion, or football. Boring. But being passionate about something that is so random it seems irrational to be so excited about it, now that is interesting.

All you have to do is drop superlatives about a subject the person you’re speaking with has never thought about. Then back it up with supporting arguments that could logically make sense.

“The greatest travesty in the textile industry is that wool has been replaced by inferior technologically advanced materials.”

“Run DMC is the most influential music group of all time.”

This naturally lends itself into teaching them something, which interesting people will enjoy. It also gives your conversational partner the opportunity to challenge you – it is these people that you want to clench on to. Don’t worry if you lose the debate. Yes, the Beatles were also quite an influential band. Good for them. The important thing is that you are having an stimulating conversation and discovering whether the person is worth speaking with again.

Let’s get to thinking … what are some subjects that you are irrationally passionate about?

Photo: Noukka Signe