Like many people, I can be frozen by embarrassment – or even worse, frozen simply by the fear of embarrassment.

For example, recently I made an embarrassing goof during a podcast interview (one that insulted my guests), even though I’ve been working pretty hard to get better at interviewing. This goof affected my sleep for a couple of days – I’d wake up breathing slightly heavily and beating myself up: “How could I be so stupid?”

Whenever I experience something like that, I have an impulse to run away. For example, in this case, I had minor thoughts about quitting podcasting or dialing it back: “I guess I’m just not cut out for this.” However, I also knew that I had been working hard and improving, so I didn’t take that impulse too seriously. I observed my typical embarrassment reaction, but I knew instinctively that this was simply a bump in the road, and I’d eventually get over it.

This time, I took one additional step … I said, “I’m embarrassed” out loud. I was recording a test episode, and as I was pitching the next show, I mentioned my mistake. Instantly, I felt quite a bit better. At that point, I realized that it was simply a fact of my life: I did this, and it was embarrassing. I didn’t lose any more sleep. I’m still a bit embarrassed by it, but it’s not debilitating. 

I’ll probably take one more step and simply apologize directly to my guests when I announce the show. They clearly noticed my gaff, and if I were in their shoes, I’d be insulted – I might as well not shy away from it.

This seems like a repeatable approach to me, although I hope I don’t have to use it too often. If you want to know the specifics of this particular faux pas, you’ll have to listen to my podcast.

A (positive) habit is something you commit to doing on a regular basis – often indefinitely. A project is something you want to accomplish that has a distinct end point.

Developing habits is a strength of mine. For example, today is the 1,633rd consecutive day that I’ve run at least a mile. About 14 months ago, I started lifting weights 3 days per week, and I’ve been very consistent with it. I’m sure I haven’t missed 3 days of flossing in the last 25 years.

Finishing projects has not historically been a strength of mine, and I tend to beat myself up about that. A friend complimented me on my discipline a few months ago, and I was flustered by his praise: Me? Disciplined? … but look at all these things I haven’t done!” Of course, he was referring to the running and lifting and dieting and similar accomplishments. I, on the other hand, conflated habits and projects and only saw what I hadn’t accomplished.

Only recently have I noticed this distinction between habits and projects – and how they relate to each other. Now I’m trying to leverage my strengths with habit-forming to fix my weaknesses with project-completing. This began when I scheduled an hour each Friday after lunch (literally a recurring appointment in my work calendar) to work on my podcasts. After a month, it’s now become a habit. Slowly but surely, I’m completing a bunch of little podcast-related projects.

My boss, Harry, is not a project manager (far from it), but he’s really good at focusing on “one thing” … and that attitude permeates our entire company. We don’t have project plans – instead, each person just needs to know the one thing they’re working on outside of everyday support and sales. When you’re done with that little project, then you think of the next one thing and do it. It sounds simple, but I’ve often struggled with it. Now that I’m developing habits to support this approach – namely, setting aside time for my one thing (as well as additional time for recurring commitments like podcasting) – it’s finally starting to sink in for me.

At home, I have a ton of household projects that haven’t been getting done, which has been a source of stress for both Paula and me. About a week ago, we started talking about habits and projects and one thing. Ultimately, each of us can only work on one thing at a time at home, too – but I hadn’t been scheduling time to work on anything! (I’ve spent a lot of non-work time lately preparing Gus’s go-kart for the upcoming season, but c’mon … ya gotta have priorities.) We started scheduling some “project time” – for starters, just 30 minutes immediately after I’m done with work – and during each block of time, we work on the most important project in our household – whatever’s causing us the most stress. After just a few days, it’s making a difference. I’m very optimistic.

That’s it – I’m done with work for the day … time to spend 30 minutes on a home project.

Yesterday, Paula and I celebrated our 25th (!) anniversary with a great luxury – we watched not one but TWO movies. I enjoyed both immensely (but I enjoyed the time with my sweetie even more).

First we watched City of God. Not what you’d think of us as a romantic movie, but it’s extremely thought provoking and remarkably well made. It’s pretty violent, so if you don’t like violence, you might not want to see it. If you don’t mind the occasional gangster flick, see it. It’s subtitled, but we didn’t find that distracting at all. After you watch it, read about how it was made.

Later we watched The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. This didn’t get great reviews, but we loved it. I hate spoilers, so I’m not going to give it away, but if you haven’t seen it, check it out. This movie even qualifies as romantic, though it’s not what you’d think of as a chick flick.

I think it’s fun to relate seemingly unrelated things. These movies had one notable thing in common – in both movies, a character’s photography played a key role (this is clear in the opening scenes of both, so no spoilers there). Both even used film instead of digital. I guess that was the theme of our one-day film festival.

Any day seeing a good movie is a good day … a day seeing two good movies? With the love of my life? That was a great day.

Twenty five years ago today, Paula made me the happiest man in the world.

Our wedding was a bit different. Our first “date” was attending Catholic mass at the chapel on SMU’s campus, and we wanted to get married there. We also didn’t want our families to spend a lot of money on travel. We wanted to keep things simple.

Father Tom suggested we get married during normal Sunday mass … this is such a great option – I don’t know why more people don’t do it. We had 200-300 people attend our wedding, and all but 15 or 20 didn’t know they were going to witness a wedding that day!

We walked down the aisle together, while wonderful musician friends of mine played and sang. My friend Leslie’s husband took some great pictures, like this one, which still sits on my desk today:

One of our favorite memories is that we were waiting for Fr Tom to tell us it was time to kiss, and he never did. When he announced us as a wedded couple to applause, we just butted heads instead. To this day, we often lovingly butt heads.

Thank you, sweet Paula, for all our adventures. I look forward to many more together.

Ash inspired me, but I wasn’t willing to commit to a “real” startup … there’s something I really want to learn, but any effort has to fit into the constraint that it can’t eat up time that I’d rather spend with Gus and Paula. I’m also not willing to sacrifice our financial lifestyle to go all-in – no ramen-noodle startups for me.

After talking about the subject with my boss, he sent me a link to an article by Amy Hoy. I heard Amy give a talk at MicroConf a few years ago – I remember being very impressed with her no-bullshit approach to business, but I hadn’t thought about it in a while.

Along with her own successful SaaS business, Amy runs courses to teach people like me how to build no-bullshit businesses. Like most people, my challenge isn’t knowledge – it’s action and experience. I simply don’t have the experience of selling something I’ve made for money. If I ever want to build a sustainable business, I need that basic experience. I don’t know if I ever will build a “big” business, but I still want that basic experience!

Amy implores her readers to start small … build something absolutely tiny so that you can gain experience with all the other parts of the business – the parts that aren’t building the actual product. Building the product is the fun part – most creative types like me need to work on all the other parts (finding customers, exchanging value for money, supporting people, etc.).

Consistency is the name of the game here. Amy calls it “stacking bricks” – if I commit to consistent work on a tiny business, then before long, I’ll build on that success to make a slightly less tiny business. Eventually, I’ll build something substantial … but even if I never reach that point, I’ll be learning things I want to learn (it’s another form of practice).

After reading a bunch of Amy’s writing, I spent a few evenings making a site to help people choose a camera and paid about a buck a day to send some AdWords traffic to the “best for sports page” (yes! go there!) . When anyone clicks on the Amazon links and buys a camera, I make a few bucks (I got the idea for that kind of project from Noah Kagan, who also preaches small progress toward business-building … I also really like cameras). I ended up spending about $80 and have brought in $20 so far. Not a huge success, obviously, but I’ve already learned a ton – and it’s a hell of a lot cheaper than business school. Most importantly, it’s not too big of a commitment – I’m just pulling from a tiny bit of my relaxation time that I’d otherwise probably spend reading Gizmodo or ESPN.

Just this week, Amy came out with a new approach that she’s promoting – her year of hustle. It’s even more prescriptive about the steps to build a tiny business. I trust her, so I’m going to do what she says. I’ll keep you posted.

Ash Maurya is one of my favorite business writers. He recently visited Grand Rapids and gave a talk related to his new book, Scaling Lean. It’s a follow up to his first book, Running Lean. If you run a business – or are thinking of starting a business – you should check out both books.

Ash’s talk inspired me to think about startup businesses again – it had been a long time since I thought seriously about what kind of business I would build if in fact I set out to build a business. Ash is so straightforward in his thinking, writing, and speaking that he makes it seem possible to build something great.

Ash reminded me that the first step is choosing a “who” – as in, who is my customer? For example, one industry that’s intriguing to me is hospitality. I’m a fairly picky consumer of hotel rooms, so I always notice opportunities in hotels. It would be fun and interesting to talk with small hotel owners and see what new software they’d be willing to pay for. Another interesting customer set is small manufacturing. Grand Rapids is home to lots of small manufacturers, and I’m sure there’s opportunity there. The first step is simply to talk with them.

After thinking about it a bit, I quickly came to the realization that now isn’t the right time for me to pursue these types of businesses … it takes a lot of effort, and I simply have other priorities. If you have the time and energy to pursue a startup seriously, study Ash’s approach. For me, I need something even smaller in scope. Tomorrow, I’ll describe what that is.

One of my favorite stories is about a ceramics teacher who ran a little experiment (I wrote about this a few years ago – this quote is from the book Life is a Verb:):

A college ceramics teacher decided to do an experiment with his two fall pottery classes. He told one class they would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced that quarter and their grade depended on the number of pots they threw — so the more the better! The second class was told their grade would be determined by the quality of their work and they only needed to produce one “perfect” pot.

The result? The better quality pieces came from the class that was graded on quantity. As they were making all those pots, they were getting better and better at pot-making.

It’s almost as if our brains can’t help but get better at something, even if we’re not trying hard to improve. The key is doing – it’s more useful to do something than it is to evaluate or analyze (at least for a beginner – things might be different when you’re pushing the limits of your craft).

If you want to get good at photography, take a ton of pictures. If you want to be a decent actor, try out for as many plays as you can. If you want to be a good computer programmer, write a lot of code.

Gus is interested in racing and seems to have a knack for it, so what he needs now is seat time – 10,000 laps will teach him more than Mario Andretti could at this point in his life.

When in doubt – throw more pots, and let your brain work its magic.

That’s why I’ve been writing more lately. On my birthday, I reflected on the rest of my career and what I wanted to do with it. Every option involved writing. I have a great opportunity at Moraware, and almost every way I can help the company involves writing. It’s clear – I need to write more.

So I’m practicing – I’m writing (and publishing) at least 250 words each work day (that’s about one typed page). My goal is to get to the point where I can write 250 words in 15-30 minutes without much effort. This counts.

My good friend, Steve, sells legal plans. I’m not actually sure what you call the category, but the brand is Legal Shield. Here’s an overview. Most of his customers are companies, because it’s a benefit that HR departments like to provide their employees (usually at cost), but he can sell to individuals, too. I used to have “group legal” at Microsoft, and I liked it, so a couple of months ago, I bought one of these plans from Steve and hadn’t thought much about it since.

Recently, our health insurance got totally messed up somehow. Multiple different practices have been sending us bills, because some of our claims were rejected. It’s super confusing, so it’s hard to tell whether the mistake is with the providers, BCBS California (my employer’s health plan), BCBS Michigan (my old self-serve health plan), or some billing service. It’s been driving us crazy!

I complained about my insurance snafu to Steve a few times, and he kept encouraging me to contact Legal Shield. I didn’t see why, since I don’t see somebody to sue. “Doesn’t matter – call them.”

Finally, I called (just a few minutes ago). Their process is amazing – a very pleasant lady answered my call (she wasn’t a lawyer … not sure there’s a correlation or not), made sure my info was up-to-date, started a case file, and worked with me to summarize my complaint. Just that process was helpful! Walking through the problem with her helped me understand better where the issue is.

The next step is a lawyer will call me back. I mentioned that I’m on the phone all day, so there might be phone tag, and she said, “What time do you get off work? Would you like a call back then?” Uh … yeah! It’s not a 24-hour thing (although they do have a 24-hour hotline to call if I ever get arrested), but it’s pretty awesome that they can work a bit outside my work hours. I should get a call back in a couple of hours.

It’s too early to tell if my Legal Shield attorney will be the solution to this particular problem, but the process has certainly been positive so far. I’m impressed.

If you happen to be interested in such a service for yourself or your company, contact Steve at Legal Shield, he’ll hook you up! I also got the identify theft protection … had a few fraudulent charges a while back, and I’d like to make resolving that simpler in the future.

An API or Application Programming Interface is a feature that companies often include with their software. It lets other programmers write code to interact with the software, almost like a remote control.

Most social media software companies expose APIs, including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and many more. If you use a 3rd-party client for any of these, those clients only exist because they can write to published APIs. For example, TweetDeck used Twitter’s API to make a Twitter client for power users (and it was so good that Twitter ended up buying them).

Many business software companies have APIs, too – APIs let people build integrations to link together various pieces of business software into (hopefully) coherent solutions.

Moraware has an API as well. It’s not as complete as it could be, but it’s certainly better than nothing. It lets companies create integrations with their products, like this one for a laser measuring tool. It lets programmers write code to automate certain tasks in our software – we even have partners who have based their businesses on building solutions that use our software (inventory is a popular area where those partners have made compelling additions). That means we’re the hub of a software ecosystem now!

One of my favorite work responsibilities is supporting programmers who use our API … I’m in customer support, but I’m also a programmer, so it only makes sense that I’m the one who does this (it’s a luxury many small companies don’t have – usually a programmer who’s busy writing other features has to provide API support, which can be distracting). I always enjoy the transition from thinking about our user interface to thinking about writing code against our API.

I’ve even started answering questions by posting projects and code snippets to github. I’m pretty sure this technically makes me an open-source programmer (and project owner), which knocks an item off my bucket list. It also makes it a lot easier to reuse similar answers for different customers. It makes me strangely happy every time I check something in and share the link with a customer.

There’s a lot we could do to improve our API. I’m the biggest advocate for doing this, but we have finite resources, and these improvements haven’t risen to the top of the list yet (there’s no guarantee they ever will, either). A couple of years ago, nobody was even using the API, but now it’s being pushed to the limit.

When companies don’t provide an API into their software – or provide an incomplete one like we do – programmers end up “hacking” solutions instead … this isn’t nefarious – it just means using heroic ways to solve a problem, or simply doing things with software that were never intended (and aren’t supported). In our case, that means some programmers scrape the web user interface of our software to get the data they need.

By contrast, an API implies an agreement with outside developers that says, “This is what we explicitly allow you to do with our software, and this is what we’ll support.” Anything outside those bounds might happen to work, but there’s no guarantee it will continue working.

Now you know what an API is – it’s just a way for programmers to manipulate someone else’s software in a controlled, supported way.

Most of the work I do all day is writing or thinking or chatting with customers and explaining how to do stuff. It all happens in my head. This isn’t a problem at all – I like writing and thinking and chatting.

But it’s almost time for go-kart racing again … so for the last few weeks, I’ve been spending a fair amount of time working on the kart. I forgot how much I like doing this. I still have to think, of course, but it’s not an abstract kind of problem solving – it involves moving something physical from here to there and seeing if it behaves as expected. That’s remarkably satisfying to me.

This year, I’ve been getting a lot of help from my friend Chuck, so I’m learning even more than last year. I don’t think I could break down a kart and put it back together with my eyes closed yet, but at least I have a deeper understanding of why things are the way they are and how they’re supposed to fit together.

Our big focus this year is making the kart easier to maintain so that I’m more confident on race day. For example, I’m using fewer different types of bolts so that I can check them all without having to use so many different tools. Does that make it go faster? No – but as Chuck always points out, “you can’t win if you don’t finish” … making things easy to maintain helps ensure that you’ll maintain them – and thus finish.

It feels great to do something with my hands, and I’m happy it’s something that makes Gus happy. But now I have to admit to myself – if he weren’t karting, I’d have to find something similar to work on for my own happiness. I really like this stuff.