Adam Decker

I was studying at BYU when I came across a book that would kick me on a different path. Tim Ferriss’ The Four Hour Workweek is a fantastic book. It shows how you can use a small, niche business to generated income for a lot of work up front, but that nearly runs itself once it’s up and going.

What this did for me was to open the door to the possibility of a non-traditional career path. So I began experimenting.

I discovered that I need to care about my business and really believe that it makes the world better. I tried several things such as affiliate marketing and a drop shipped Alibaba store, but left them behind. They didn’t, and I hadn’t.

My first hit was in taking a meme of Smaug and turning him into a product. You can read about that here. The reason that worked is because it built on my and other people’s love of The Hobbit and of Smaug. There was something cool and alive and joyful about it.

I think that joyfulness is what I look for when I try to create.

Finding Praxis has given me the opportunity to try that creative stuff in a business. There were some amazing projects that I’ve been able to work on during my apprenticeship at ADS Security.

Working here wasn’t as much about finding that joy and playfulness that I loved from the Smaug Etsy shop. It was about a crash course in how to get things made. Collaboration, thinking through all the steps and details, writing scripts and making materials for marketing were all essential things, but not the core of what I learned here.

Persistence, communication, imagination. I think those are the most important parts of really making a difference at a company.

Imagination, so you can dream of what’s possible for the company to become. So you can approach problems from new angles. So you can see what your competitors haven’t yet seen.

Communication, because building a company only happens when others can understand and believe in your vision.

Persistence, because there will be many, many roadblocks on any journey. You must be able to overcome them.

Those are really the things I’ve learned during my apprenticeship. And they’re the things that I look forward to bringing into my next job, and into all of the things I build over the next who knows how long.

As a kid I loved imagining how to bring things out of fantasy or science fiction and into reality. I imagined, with all the physics understanding of an 11-year old, that I could create a lightsaber by making a wide laser, focussing it about 3 feet out, and running electrons through it.  I imagined that I could create a force-push by attaching a fan to my wrist and making it blow 100 mph. I think I was a little optimistic.

I tried my hand at creating something like this around age 10 or 11. An engineering friend of our family’s offered to help me make a hoverboard, which I was kind of obsessed with at the time. It was a classic leaf-blower hoverboard, though I added my own touches in making it a scooter.

Afterwards, this engineering friend tried to lead me into the world of statistics and the math that eventually leads to engineering. But I wasn’t interested.

I wanted to make many cool things. I wasn’t interested in learning the nitty gritty details. I just wanted to make awesome things.

After that, and after I tried and failed to get other, more ambitious projects off the ground, that desire to make and build kinda hibernated. It wasn’t until I began my entrepreneurial journey that I even began to rediscover it. I’ll talk more about that tomorrow.

What are your goals? What do you really want in life? Do you want a great job and all the regular accouterments of the American Dream? Do you want to start your own company, travel the world, or just find some cozy place to live for you and your family? When was the last time you did something about it?

Goals and dreams need to be pursued. They need to be desired. They are constantly moving, so if you don’t reach for them, they’ll seem to be out of reach forever. They’ll find someone else who will pursue them.

Goals don’t need to be clenched at with an iron hand. Ghandi achieved his goals through satyagraha, or “the single-minded pursuit of truth.” There was not fighting or clamoring for what he thought should be his. He simply never stopped pursuing.

Often I think we get stuck in wishing for what we want, but don’t want to leave our comfort zones to pursue it. Don’t get stuck there.

Sit down with yourself. Figure out what you want. Then figure out what needs to happen to achieve them. Go to and accomplish.

Whatever your personality, I think we can all agree that life is exhausting. Work, social life, problem solving, bills, house care, all of it leads to draining energy and just plain old tiredness. The solution is to space short recharge times throughout your day so you can keep your energy up.

Introverts and extroverts have different needs and preferences for things that recharge. Introverts like private time. Time when they can go into a quiet corner and read a book, or even just sit and breathe for a few minutes. My office is a open floor plan, so I don’t have a private space readily available. I tend to use the break room at odd times, the stairwell to the upstairs floor, and the walkway outside when it’s warm.

Extroverts prefer conversation and socializing to recharge. Open office plans are great. Spend time by the water barrel and make time to talk to your friends at work. I can’t speak too much on this because I’m not a extrovert.

The important thing here is to make time for these moments. Figure out what makes your day smooth out, and schedule time. If your boss doesn’t like your preferred method of recharge, frame it in a way that he’ll understand.

For instance, If you’re an introvert and need time alone and in private to recharge/think well, talk with your boss about how your work requires deep thinking and that requires privacy. Some introverts have used that to negotiate working from home a couple days a week. Extroverts can talk about how their projects need collaboration, though that may not be necessary. American corporate culture favors extroverts and their tendencies.

Be creative. You need time to feel good so you can do your work well. Make sure it happens.

I’m currently reading a book called quiet. It talk about the unique strengths that introverts bring to conversations, such as deep thought, caution, thoroughness, etc. It also talks about how much a personality can stretch to be something it isn’t naturally. I want to talk about that briefly.

The initial theory is that personalities are rubber bands. They can stretch to include traits not naturally part of them, but only so far. I’ve thought similarly, though I felt there was more flexibility than the book implied.

However, some introverts can be very extroverted in certain situations, and some extroverts very introverted. This gave rise to the theory that there’s no established personality, just packaged situational traits. This theory has fallen out of favor.

A new theory has come around in recent years. It’s called free attributes, or something like that. It’s the idea that we have a core personality, but that we can pick up and develop new attributes for things that we love. If we care about something enough, we develop the personality traits that will nourish that thing.

An introvert who wants to live on acres of wilderness gives a lecture as animatedly as Tony Robbins. An extrovert scientist calms down and focuses intently in the lab. A curmudgeon uncle mellows out and is kind an loving for his favorite niece.

I like this theory. It give us the power to look at what we love, and then develop the personality traits that benefit those things.

Essentially, if you care enough about something you can actually change your personality. Not at its core, but you can add a module to it. I think that’s really cool

Tonight I’m gonna put an idea I’ve got for a book out there. I’ve had this floating in my head for years, so I think it’s time to actually write something about it. This is just the idea for the setting, because I still have no idea what the story should actually be.

 

This fantasy world is dominated by a dynamic flow of time. The combat magic revolves around controlling your flow of time against your opponent’s. You might be able to slow down your perception of time to a crawl, making a sword swing by at a snail’s pace. This is achieved through an understanding of the geometry of time. Gargantuan, insubstantial beasts and leviathans roam across the land. Each one unique, and each one brings with it a different flow of time. As one passes a village, time stretches. The sun hangs in the sky far longer than a day. A month could happen in a single day, while outside of that town, only 24 hours have passed. A different creature might speed the sun along, so what feels like 24 hours would see the sun pass 20 times overhead.

The great swords of this world are literally forged by the earth. A stone placed at a fault line between two sliding continents can stretch into a blade, and it has the ability to extend your control of time to others.

This world might not have oceans. It could be that their oceans are forests, with the canopies a vast, level sea of green. As you go deeper and deeper into the forest, the trees grow larger, and the beasts as well.

 

The above equation is simplifying, and may be oversimplifying, but I think it’s a thought worth exploring.

Creativity rarely happens in a vacuum. I’d actually venture to say that it never happens in a vacuum. I remember a young me trying to create something that had never been done before, and I couldn’t do it. Everything I tried to make had already been done before or was an obvious riff off of someone else’s work.

As I grew, I learned that I needed to “Steal Like an Artist,”  and “learn from the masters.” I learned that creativity is not something made from nothing. It’s many separate things brought together and made into something new. You must have knowledge of something in order to be creative.

But, more is required. You have to be able to make your idea real. That’s where application come in.

Application is 2 things. It’s also applying that knowledge in new ways, and  it’s actually creating something.

Coming up with novel ways to mix established knowledge is how creativity really happens. Excellent writers learn the writing styles of the masters before building their own. Artists study their idol’s work before branching out.

It’s the mixing of several, sometimes contradictory styles that marks something as truly creative.

But the other half is that you actually have to make something. All the good ideas or great works of art in the world aren’t worth much if they only ever live in someone’s head. Make them real.

Go out and make your own ideas. Think about several things you love. How can you combine them in a way that no one’s ever done before? Now go make that real.

I want my life to be fun. I want each day to be, on the whole, really enjoyable. Now, I definitely understand that there’s opposites in everything and unavoidable hardship and such, but I think that we do more of that to ourselves than otherwise.

I’ve made it a practice to wake up happy on purpose and enjoy my mornings. I’m not perfect at it, but I actually enjoy the vast majority of my mornings because that’s what I’m shooting for. So why not apply that to work?

It seems to be working. Again, not perfectly, because this is a new skill, but it’s kinda cool. Since i’m looking for the fun parts, I’m finding them. And sometimes in surprising places.

There’s a report I make at the beginning of the month. For a while, it’s been a drag because there was a lot of hand-entering information that I didn’t know how to automate. Well, this month, I finally figured out how to make it all work by itself. That was fun.

Getting the flash of insight that was the shape of the improvement, working out exactly how it needed to function to work properly, finding the last few functions that I needed to make it click, and finally piecing it all together was amazingly fun.

Yeah, I’ve probably gone insane. But at least I’m having fun while doing it.

Give it a try! What do you want your work days to feel like?

Have to write something.

Mind fog blocks everything now.

Perhaps tomorrow.

Just a short one tonight. I touched a little on it yesterday, but I wanted to write down a few more thoughts.

Most of the time, we do things because we’re trying to avoid pain. We try to avoid work we don’t like. We try to avoid stress, we try to avoid feeling tired in the morning.

I think we have it totally backward. We need to spend more time moving towards the things we want. How else are they actually going to happen?

I’ve seen it at work. I was experiencing a lot of stress for a while, and it was starting to get to me. After I talked about this with a mentor, I stopped trying to avoid stress, which just seemed to compound it. I started focusing on what I wanted: getting my work done quickly and easily. And you know what? The past three weeks have been some of the best in my life.

What do you want? Decide. Decide how you want to experience life. Now go and get it.