workaholism

Music please:

Last night I tried really hard to party. I ended up drinking a Sparks Plus ("SPARKS PLUS!!!") and then falling asleep about 20 minutes later. This is both a testament to my relative level of fatigue and a pretty shitty way to get rest.

The upside here is that I was trying to party because things have gone well and I felt justified blowing off a little steam. I've been doing 8:30am to 10:30pm for two weeks straight (Noon to 8 or 9pm on weekends) and with this level effort and rallying significant support from a killer team of developers, we are getting over the hump.

While I don't want to get locked into the pattern of 80-hour weeks as a norm, this has been good for a number of reasons:

Part of the problem with working a lot as a matter of course is that you don't necessarily have a ton of "afterburner" power. I can go from zero to sixty pretty quick and steady, but that top-end power — the 60 to 100 — is harder. Still doable, but comes with more stress than I really like.

Plus I haven't been taking awesome care of myself, so the physical plant isn't in top condition. Months of decadent living, no bicycle, bad posture; relatively speaking I'm probably in some of the worst shape of my life.

All of which leads to various and sundry fantasies of training, getting back on track, cue the theme song from Rocky and all that jazz. They're fantasies, but the idea of imposing more will and intention on my day to day has been caroming around my head for months now: eating better, getting sweaty, reading and writing more, early to bed and no TV, flossing twice a day. You know, the things you're supposed to do as a good and healthy human being.

It's approaching the point of a crisis of confidence, where I begin to doubt my own ability to get my shit together. So I guess we'll see what happens here.

I'm headed back down to SF this afternoon, will have to start carving out some routines, pretend I'm training for the champeenship. Books and brawn, that's the plan I think.

Existential crisis of meaning. Four years in Chapter Three. Leaving Westhaven. A new life is coming, but what sort? Well dude, we just don't know.

So here's this table from a slide from a presentation my business partner sent me as part of our ongoing project to raise the level of our entrepreneurial game. It's about people's motivations for starting businesses:

Hippy music, please:

One of my most important original philosophical catchphrases is "The Most Important Thing Is To Stop Struggling." It's something I remind myself of frequently as my career goes through its whips twists and turns. Sometimes you find yourself in one of those situations where everything seems hard, impossible to begin on, just overwhelming. Sort of like being waist-deep in rubble.

Often the short term answer is to roll up your sleeves and dig out, because this is sometimes a devastatingly effective cheap psychological trick. That pile of dirty dishes never takes as long as it feels like it'll take, for instance.

But, then there are the times where you feel constantly like you're getting reset to that buried state, where you're beating your head against the wall, doing the Sisyphus shuffle. When you notice that, it's time to take a breath, look around, and see where/how/when to *move laterally*. Because as much as life is unfair, and full of adversity and strife and honest-to-goodness challenges, it's also supposed to be — like the CSNY song there — sort of Easy.

With a good four full days off work now and no other project to fill up my mind, I begin to really honestly decompress, and this is where the scary part begins. This is the part where I have to face head on the fact that life outside of professional nerdly pursuits has grown pretty barren. Much great promise withered on the vine.

Some of this is a feature of my genetically-destined workaholic lifestyle — devote yourself 110% to anything and you'll find the rest in neglect — but it occurs to me now as I start in on this sad-sack self-pity topic that a greater portion of this barren sensation is really due to a failure of imagination, confidence and will more than anything else.

I mean, as a for instance, I know people who work professionally in the entertainment industry, and contra what you might think about the glamour of stage and screen, when you're working you're fracking working, and there's not much room for anything else if you're more than halfway serious, which, if you got there, you'd better be.

Maybe it's just the grass being greener, or deeper personal shit I'm not privy to, but none of these successful working actors and musicians I know feel like their lives are empty or barren when a gig runs its course. Doubtless there's some let-down and a rough reentry to a more normal civilian life, but by in large these folks seem to bear up over the longer haul because they have a whole inner world that fits with this, they're living the dream, and nourishing creative embers that burn even through the longest roughest stretch of worky working, ready to flare up the moment oxygen's back in surplus.

Things that steal my life.

So tonight among other things I half-watched two sequels: Rambo II and Lethal Weapon _Dos_. Both feature plot turns where the primary (male) character's (re-awakening) love interest is killed by the bad guys. I guess that's how Hollywood rolled in those days.

It's an interesting romantic trope: ultimate possibility (slain interest) coupled with revenge fantasy. "I could have been happy if only..."

Here in the real world, for my part I got in a solid days labor, and am hoping for the same tomorrow. It's not glamorous or the most fun, but it's what needs doing for the moment, and I can live with that.

It was a lovely day though, and being around drinking my coffee as the sun slanted in from the east made me think of Jodie's and Eggs Royston (which no one seems to review, suckas). Overall I might like more excitement and zazz in my average weekend, but I also recognize the sometime necessity of occasionally buckling down and doing Teh Work.

I decided to take a peek at my google analytics the other day, and I discovered that by far and away the most popular post on my site over the year to date is one I'm actually rather proud of: Me And Maslow's Pyramid of Human Needs Down By The Schoolyard. Almost 1000 people have seen that so far this year. Even assuming half of them were robots (and hey, robots need philosophy too), that's still immensely gratifying.

Its no secret I've been burning the candle at both ends lately. When I come down to SF it tends to get worse, feeding my workaholism. Even though this is ostensibly a thriving cosmopolitan metro area, I really have no life here, and with an office it's easy to stay at work to the point where coming home is just a trip you make to sleep before getting up to do it again. It reminds me of the MFA days in a way, or college. Any of those times when I was doing stuff for 16+ hours a day and having no sex.

Not that I'm complaining. Coming home late and hungry and unable to find a can-opener to make myself some tuna salad notwithstanding, I'm a ways away from the point where this pattern really generates any kind of meaningful irritation or negative response. Indeed, for as long as things can be kept in the power curve -- never forever, but what is? -- this isn't a bad way to exist. It makes me productive and relatively happy w/feelings of accomplishment, etc, and possibly even provides good grist for later milling when time is less tight.

And still, I can't help but feel like something is slipping past me here. I mean, the impending birthday is probably driving these feelings, sure, but I can't shake the sensation that I'm whistling into oblivion. I can't help but note the toll my current pace of activity (and past times of uber-business) put on my existing relationships, the massive impediment it poses to forming new connections.

This is my new hat, courtesy Molly Dove, which I debuted at the Cornell Club housewarming a few weeks ago. I've come to really like it. It's hip but not too hip. Nerdy but not too nerdy. It keeps my head surprisingly warm, the sun off my face, and I can choose whether to sport it at a jaunty rakish angle or straight-ahead squaresville. I think it's quite fetching.

It's also a good one for the figurative "hat" I wear at my job. For the first year and a half of our bootstrappy startup we operated under an implied "everyone does everything" organizational strategy. This works when it's just the three of you, and it's good for keeping managerial overhead down and equality high, but ultimately people have talents, and these are distributed unequally. Specialization is necessary at some point if we're to grow.

For the first year of our work I had an informal (and largely unwanted) authority position as the oldest and most business-experienced member of the team. It was not the greatest fit as I have no particular desire to be the boss, and I haven't been living in the same town as my partners. It was what it was and I'm glad things worked out as well as they did, but nevertheless I'm happy that things are changing.

To wit, the defined roles are going to emerge. I'll be working more and more on the technical side of things; not necessarily writing more code directly, but taking designated responsibility for the code that our (eep!) employees will be crafting. Matt has already taken over the general operational management of the business, as his personal drive and passion for todo lists makes him a natural fit there. Zack is returning to his strong suit of evangelism and high-level Drupal architecture; he'll be out in front of our clients and working in pair with more (eep!) employees in the office to guide them through implementations and up the learning curve.