So after years travelling, having fun seeing, eating, and experiencing interesting things it's about time I get down to writing about my journey and laying out my path forward.
The last 5 years of my life have been spent travelling around South East Asia checking off goals along the way like competing in Muay Thai 15 times, travelling overseas, to then visiting every country in SEA, to then working for a start up in Thailand, to then working for a Thai company.
I have treated my life as a fast moving blur of physical and mental training to get where I am now(currently sitting in a bungalo on Koh Tao, Thailand). But I never sat down to reflect or share too much of the journey.
Since teaching myself to code I was adamant I am a programmer. I write code to make things happen—which turned out to be quite the money maker also. Writing was always a way to communicate with the team and clients.
Today that changes.
A history of not writing
I didn't "get" writing. I grew up enjoying drawing, playing video games, and riding my BMX bike. Without seeing through the forest the thought of writing was far down the list of my priorities.
During school I didn't know what I wanted to be. I had trouble understanding the paths an adult could go down.
Astronaut? Nope. Firefighter? Nope. Business? I don't even know where to start.
From the time I was 15 I worked casual positions after school at a hobby store and then a local $2 store. Writing had no impact on my income or productivity. I had no idea how to work up a ladder but to be deligent and work efficiently.
So when it came to decide whether to study at university I chose to stumble my way through manual labour jobs, an admin position, to then finally go back to my roots of design by diving into a 2 year Advanced Diploma in Graphic Design and Multimedia.
The course taught me a range of design skills but just as my previous work positions the work was primarily measured design skills. Drawing, sketching, painting, and then digital tools Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop designs were the measurements of success for the first year. The second year of I designed and created 3d environments and responsive websites—again, no writing but I discovered writing. The language was not English but html, css and Javascript.
Out of college I was lucky to take on a position as a "systems developer" aka web developer at a Bank. Although I was primarily writing code, the jump immediately pushed me into a world of needing to be clear with my communication.
Emails, meetings, and 1 on 1's required a form of written communication that pushed me out of my comfort zone. Without knowing it the skills I never thought I had became second nature.
Fast forward three years past a lot of mistakes, I had adapted to the business style of writing, code was delivering business outcomes and I wanted to push onto bigger goals. I wanted the freedom(and endless hours of work and stress) of running my own business.
Observing the start up world from the outside I watched one company be built after another. I continued learning how to build a complete application, writing lines of code, designing in the browser, spinning up cloud resources, creating api's and creating fun side projects for myself but something was missing—writing down how exactly I'm going to make something people will use.
What changed
Since going on to work for different start ups and work directly with clients on projects, my dream of having a business materialised in a way. I have been able to see the good times and possibly too many bad times. One thing in common was formalising with words what is going to happen in a project and why.
In an effort to fill the chip on my shoulder I spent countless hours getting away from writing code to learn the other aspects of business.
Tim Ferriss
It may come as no surprise to most that Tim Ferriss has been a key figure in inspiring a new way of thinking about work (opens in new tab) and life. Though he has dropped off my radar recently Tim was the online mentor I used to form the habits and tactics of writing.
The following points are in one way another influenced by Tim Ferris and have therefor changed my life in many ways for the better.
Reading 20 minutes a day
I didn't think I had anything to write about so I went on an adventure to learn from the greats by educating myself.
What started out as pain and suffering has turned into what has become a lifelong interest. Wake up, make a coffee, head to the balcony and enjoy at least a chapter of a book each morning has made a big shift in how I think.
In true Tim Ferris fashion I started out with The 80/20 principle (opens in new tab) by Richard Koch.
Daily journaling
Another life changing moment was adding the 5 minute journal (opens in new tab) to my morning routine (opens in new tab).
The daily journaling is a simple process which has helped me take baby steps towards writing on a daily basis. And it turns out writing for a few minutes each morning not only got me writing but substantially changed my view of life. The 5 minute journal consists of 3 questions in the morning to start the day and then 2 follow up questions at night to reflect on the day.
Morning questions
- 3 things I am grateful for
- What are 3 things that would make today great
- Daily affirmation, I am...
My favourite take away from jotting down a few notes each morning has been challenging myself each morning to find what I am grateful for. Asking myself what I am grateful for each day took me away from the daily struggles to thinking more deeply about the bigger things in this experience of life.
Some of my repeating grateful things: my parents sacrifices, the internet, remote work, knowledge passed down from the greats of the past.
My 5 minute journal went through a few iterations until I landed on the beautifully made stoic app (opens in new tab).
Letters to myself and others
After some time reading and understanding the writing process, I learned a critical peice of the puzzle I was missing. A light bulb moment for me was when I heard Tim Ferriss mention on his podcast (opens in new tab) about writing to his friends. I am an avid learner
By directing the words to a face or persona I have been able to find a voice and direction for what I would like to write about. Since this is my space on the internet I can take chances, make mistakes and enjoy typing without a worry.
Be a better thinker in business and life
The best part of writing in a journal has been translating the crazy thoughts in my head into structured legible sentances. I am in a transition phase broadening my engineering skills to incorporate ux design and product management strategy and tactics to my arsenal.
A wall I keep hitting is writing. Writing PRD's (opens in new tab), UX interview guides (opens in new tab), and general UX and product management documentention comes with a host of exciting new challenges that I want to excel at.
Goals
I will be writing about goals and systems to achieiving certain objectives so I will leave this here for now. I hope to come back to this and laugh.
Objective: Create a writing habit
- Write 50 500 word blogs
- Increase monthly views from 0 to 100 - have to start somewhere!
- Achieve 3% CTR
- Create a backlog of SEO keywords
- Tweet 100 times
How I'm going to achieve those goals
Some notes to self.
Push past perfectionism
Work is never perfect and I know it. Let go of the fear of making mistakes and embrace the feedback loop to improve.
Write publicly every day
Just put in the work. For this objective I will be focusing on quantitity over quality to get things going.
Systemise the writing process
I currently use Roam for my writing tool of choice for forming ideas and getting thoughts down. I will go into this further as a I blog and lay out a clear system to myself.
Conclusion
Writing this has near killed me and I'm exhausted. To get where I want to be I believe sharing publicly and being output driven is the key.
I hope to come back this post in the future and laugh at how bad this was.