Andrew Garrett’s Outboard Brain

…In Which Your Author Breaks A Rule for a Worthwhile Cause

Tim Ferris posts: How Much Does Your Commute Really Cost You?

Now, I’m trying really hard not to post links to other blogs in the place of content on this blog – which is why there’s the Tumblog* over to the left there (which you can also subscribe to if you’re interested) – but this post, I think, is well worth reading, and it fits in so well with my personal philosophy on this subject that it’s well worth sharing.

In most of NZ, people’s commute is fairly short – in my last actual job, it was a mere 20 minutes each way – but the odds are pretty good that we all know someone who takes more than an hour to get to or from work each day.

Add it up – 5 days a week, an hour each way – 10 hours of dead time a week. About 9% of your waking hours spent in the worst sort of unprofitable time imaginable – worse, it’s probably negative profit (a fancy way of saying that it’s a dead loss) when you factor in the negative effects of boredom and frustration on top of the fiscal costs.

Freelancing isn’t the answer for everyone, nor is telecommuting (at least not yet), but it’s well worth thinking of strategies to reduce your commute, or at least ways to make the time a little more useful to you. If your route to work is in heavy traffic, it’s quite possible to arrange a shift in your working hours – starting and finishing an hour later, or an hour earlier can be enough to halve your commute time.

More and more these days, employers are open to ways they can help their staff to improve their lives. If you can’t get out of the employment rut (which I know is hard), then perhaps you can improve your work life in other ways. It’s up to you, really.

Uncategorized Being Happy, Mastery

…In Which Your Author Returns To His Central Thesis

I’ve been a little sidetracked here lately, and focussing too hard on the blogging side of things.

This blog is intended to be about more than that – the lifestyle entrepreneur, small business (especially in NZ), personal/small business branding, and using blogging to tie them all together.

For a while now, I’ve been saying ‘Screw Work/Life Balance, I’m all about Work+Life Integration’. It’s a work in progress, but it is progressing.

Recently (as in, over the last few weeks) my wife and I bought a couple of new ‘bikes. We recently shifted to a smaller, flatter city, and we intend to use the ‘bikes to get around as much as possible – you know all the benefits of doing that, I’m not going to bore you by listing them.

So, Friday, we packed our bags, got on our ‘bikes and rode (the long way) to the beach, bought Fish and Chips from an award winning shop (honestly, best FnC ever), and sat on the beach and ate them (along with a salad brought from home, just ‘cos, you know, we’re healthy like that). Then we stretched out on a blanket, and worked (in various ways).

I didn’t bother taking my laptop with me, but I can do some of my work on my phone – I answered a few emails, and checked on Jaiku’s health, then put the iPod on (only to discover it wasn’t charged… d’oh!) and did some concentrated thinking and writing about a business idea I’ve been batting around in my head for a while, and about a blog concept that I’ve been working on with a couple of friends* (I very carefully packed my thinking notebook, so I could make notes while thinking). After an hour or so, a bit of a breeze had come up and it was getting chilly – so we packed up, and headed home.

Now, my time is my own – I could have justified leaving the phone and notebook at home, and just taking a book, and lying there in the sun reading instead of working. Hell, I probably would have, if I’d been in the middle of a really good book. But I like what I do, and don’t generally feel a need to escape from it – just doing it at the beach felt like a break, refreshed me, and blew off some cobwebs.

Integration. That’s what it’s all about.

[* more on these ideas will follow, if and when they launch]

Uncategorized Being Happy, Business, Mastery, Wellbeing, Work+Life Integration

…In Which Your Author Apologises for his Unexplained Absence, and Comes to a Realisation About Himself.



Sorry folks, had a little too much on my plate the last few days, leaving no mental space for blogging  – back tomorrow with some real content.

It’s likely that there are some further changes on the way – more on that as I sort out the details.

Anyhow – I had a client meeting today – a little while back, I made them an offer that gave them what they were looking for (but didn’t have the budget to do properly) and let me learn a new technology while getting paid (albeit at a discounted rate).  This suits me fine, I learn better when there’s something at stake, and these are good people, it feels good to be able to help them out at the same time.

I’ve long regarded myself as ‘not a salesman’, but I’m starting to get the feeling that that’s something that’s going to change. I’m slowly coming to realise that, for the most part, if I can get in front of a potential customer, and their needs are roughly in line with what I’m able to offer, that I’ve got a better-than-good shot of getting the gig.

Today, the customer said “We decided after our first meeting with you, that you were the one we wanted to work with.  No-one else even came close to understanding what we were looking for – most of them didn’t even seem to try”.

So it appears I can sell.  Now all I have to do is find more people to sell to.  That, in part, is what this blog is about. 

Thanks to everyone who mailed in asking where/how I am. :)

Uncategorized Blogging, Business, Mastery

..In Which Your Author Dispassionately Discusses Passion

Passion sells. People identify with passion.

In your work, in your blog, if you visibly love what you’re doing and writing about, you’ll get more people on-side with you.

I find this really hard to do in text – culturally, I come from a culture of habitual understatement, of being ’staunch’, of not showing mammoth amounts of enthusiasm for much (except certain sports). I don’t find text a great medium for expressing passion – but it’s one of the things almost every client has mentioned to me, how I have an obvious enthusiasm for the subject, for what it can do for them.

If you don’t feel passion for your work, for your blog content, then that’s going to show through in your writing and your relationships with customers (unless you’re a hell of a lot better at faking it than I am).

If you don’t feel passionate about your work or writing, why don’t you find something you do feel passionate about?

Visible Passion is an almost essential element in any strong personal brand.

How can you show your passion more obviously?

Uncategorized Blogging, Branding, Mastery, Personal

…In Which your Author Considers the Value of Honesty…. but not Too Much

One of the reasons branding and blogging work so naturally together, is that they’re both at their best when they’re honest.

You need to be honest about your brand – live up to the image you’re putting out there. Your blogging also needs to be honest, you need to stand behind what you have to say, you need to believe it.

While you must be truthful, you should also be circumspect, and above all, Keep On Target.

Your readers and your prospective probably don’t need to know about your reading habits, what sort of music you like, your dietary tastes, your sex life, your RSI, your favourite scotch. They don’t need to know anything that isn’t about your blog’s niche subjects or your business.

Unless your blog is on that particular subject, they definitely don’t need to know about that fight you had with that company (or that person), your lunch date, your medical issues or your taste in erotica.

We all have different faces we put on. Blogging Andrew is a different person from Husband Andrew, and a different person again from Friend Andrew.

I’ll mention my wife on here when it’s relevant to do so. Maybe even by name. Similarly, conversations with friends may come up, an idea I get from something I read may get posted about – if it’s relevant.

Be relevant, because the alternative is… well, obvious.

Uncategorized Blogging, Branding, Mastery

…In Which Your Author Expands On the Idea of Goals

OK, so yesterday, you came up with a few goals.  I know I took time right after that post to write down what I had in my head.

Now, your goals are what you’re working towards.  That’s fairly obvious. 

Here’s the trick to making them happen:

Every single (blog related) action you take should move you closer to one or more of those goals.

If you’re commenting on someone else’s blog, you should do so with a goal in mind (increase my positive visibility in this field).

If you’re writing a post on your own blog (At least 6 well thought out posts per week, increasing readership).

If you’re adding google ads into your sidebar (actually, I removed google ads, since they weren’t moving me towards any of the goals I had in mind).

That last one is key – if you’re considering an action that doesn’t move you towards one of your goals, that’s probably a sign that it’s a bad move for you.

Every blog related action you take – an email to a commenter, contributor, or even the support desk of your web host.  You never know where your next big link will come from, you never know what’s going to cause that traffic spike until it happens.

It should be fairly obvious, but this is a recipe for life as well – you should have goals in your life, and every action you take should be evaluated against those goals.  Me, I’m not enough of a life-master (yet) to truly think like that all the time – but I’m trying, and I’m making progress.

Uncategorized Blogging, Mastery, Wellbeing

…In which Your Author talks about the Myriad Benefits of Routines.

Routines are boring.  I’m not self employed in order to do the same thing at the same time every day.  That’s boring, that’s not what I’m about – I want freedom to mix it up, to do what I want to do when I want to do it.

It’d be nice if my brain worked that way, but it doesn’t.

If I don’t deliberately put routine around my day, then I fall into a routine – and that one probably doesn’t get the stuff done that I need to get done.  Building a routine deliberately lets me focus my attentions on one particular thing for a block of time, guilt free, with no (well, few) concerns about other things that are on my list to be done.

Daily routines are easy, but what works for me probably won’t work for you, and that’s not what this post is about.  Weekly routines, however, that’s something different.

The hardest thing for me about blogging isn’t the actual writing; to be honest, I find that part the easiest, even easier than the pure technical stuff of blog maintenance and server administration (which is where my professional history would indicate I’m strongest).  The hard part, for me,  is coming up with on-target content on a sufficiently regular basis, without resorting to link posts.

One of the ways I’m working on to inspire myself to write is the Weekly Feature – I started yesterday with Friday Fellow Traveler #1, and as I come up with more ideas for other regular features, I plan to add another 2 or 3.

The benefit of this is that now, I have a definite thing to write about on a Friday (well, a Thursday night actually, but that’s just the way my daily routine works out).  It’s a matter of picking one of the many people I regard as great examples, and talking about why I think they’re great examples – what they’re doing well, what this means, how I interpret it, how I think you (and I) can use it.

While I’ve only written a whole one (that’s 1) of these so far, it feels like a concept that will stick around for a while.  I guess, like many things, we’ll see about that.

Uncategorized Blogging, Mastery

If making a difference matters to you, you can make a difference to your own state of mind by helping make a difference for someone else.

As I’ve mentioned, I’m contracted part time to Jaiku.

A lot of people think services like Jaiku are pretty pointless, that they don’t add anything to the world, that they have no value. That’s probably true, in a purely fiscal sense. Where they do have value, is putting people in contact with people.

What I’m seeing, from my interactions with the community, shows that people are taking a lot of value from their interactions with other people via Jaiku. They’re posting little questions, and getting answers, saying that they’re feeling a bit down, and getting friends cheering them up, arranging ‘Jaiku-meets’ so they can actually meet (and in some cases, hook up, I think) with these people they’ve been Jaikuing with.

What amazes me is how positive the vast majority of these interactions are – there’s very little negativity on the site.

One of the first things I do in the morning, is review the last few hours of Jaikus by my contacts – firstly, because it’s part of my job, but more recently, ‘cos it helps put me in a good mental place to start my day. Firstly, because being around such a positive vibe helps me be positive – secondly, because of the satisfaction I take from looking at Jaiku, and the connections people make there, and being able to feel that I was a part of making that happen.

Uncategorized Mastery

It’s easy to be who you are, but who do you really want to be?

It’s been said so often – we all wear masks – we change them depending on circumstances, but we all have personae that we adopt to fit what we’re doing.

What’s less commonly understood, is that if you adopt a personality traits persistently enough, then those traits become part of your natural personality, part of who you really are.

To put it more briefly – “Fake it ‘Til you Make it”.

Or, more classically  (just to prove this really isn’t a new idea): “Pretend to what is not, and that the passion’s over, so you’ll become, in truth, what you are studying to be.” (Ovid)

If you adopt the attitudes of confidence, then you’ll become confident – and your confidence will become justified.

Focus on being the you that you want to be.  Wear the mask for long enough, and you’ll find that you’ve shaped yourself.

Your personal brand should reflect who you want to be as much (if not more) than who you are.  I’m not suggesting that you lie about who you are (because you’ve also got to be truthful), but you’ve got to tell the story that portrays the persona you want portrayed.

Yes, there’s a line to walk there.  Your story needs to be truthful enough that you can live up to it.

If you haven’t read it already, you really should read All Marketers Are Liars (Seth Godin)  (Seth’s blog is here, and is also well worth reading on a regular basis).  In there, Seth talks about the lies that marketers tell, the stories that make up the brand behind the product. If they do it well enough, the lies become the truth that matters.

The same applies to your personal brand – you’ve got to be telling a good story.  Not only that, but your story has to be consistent, both internally, and over time.

Once you’ve build your personal brand (I also tend to think of it as my ‘game face’), you can put it on and take it off as you need to, just like every other mask.

So, go get your game face on – because it’s time to play :)

Uncategorized Branding, Mastery

Why Your Free Time is Boring – lifehack.org:

Or, as I’ve been saying it for a while:

“Screw Work/Life balance – I’m all about Work-Life Integration”.

(note – much easier to have that attitude when you’re self employed).

Balance implies contention – that you work and your life are fighting for your resources/time in some way.  Which I guess is true, if your job is just a job, just a thing you do to make money so you can live.  Personally, that’s very much what I’m NOT about.

Integration means you can work in the evenings, and do personal stuff in the day time with no guilt.

It means that you don’t differentiate between ‘work’ and ‘life’.  You just live, and your work is as much a part of that as your hobbies, your relationships, your sleeping, eating and ablutions.

Practically, it means that I can get up, feed the cats, check email and do some reading while I have breakfast, answer Jaiku support questions, go have a shower, do some work, head into the library and supermarket, go out for a ‘bike ride, have some lunch while reading some feeds, write a blog post, write some code for a couple of hours, take a break and read a book, come back, catch up on reading some feeds, answer a few emails, go make dinner…  etc etc etc.

It means that I rarely get bored – I can always find something to do to liven things up for myself.

It’s all my life.  Some of it just happens to make me some money :)

Uncategorized Being Happy, Blogging, Business, Mastery