I was thinking...

…about my fears

2009-06-17T00:28:00.001-07:00

I think our childhood defines us a lot more than we realize. When I was younger, my personality was somewhat vague and primarily defined by my confusion of the world around me. As I’ve gotten older, I can see how the concrete is drying and defining my personality for the long-term. And there are some things that I need to fix before it’s too late.

I’ve had a rather strange and solitary childhood, which has manifested itself primarily as an awkwardness with people I don’t know. I don’t like large gatherings, I feel uncomfortable with strangers, and it can be difficult to discuss not-so-pleasant topics with people. At least that’s how I used to be. Over the last year, I’ve made a conscious effort to change. It’s not that I want to be someone else, it’s that I want to be comfortable with who I am.

The shy, introvert Arthur pisses the hell out of me!

I feel like I am already a different person, and I absolutely love it! The feeling is incredibly addicting. Yet, I realize that I am still not where I want to be. While I have make huge strides in how I feel around other people, I still have a problem with hurting people’s feelings. It’s something that I don’t like to talk about because it makes me seem weak, but being open about it is the only way it’s going to get fixed. See, I have this habit oh trying very hard to phrase things in ways that would minimize any chance of hurting someone’s feelings. It comes from a childhood insecurity that makes me scared that if I say something hurtful, that person won’t like me anymore. It’s incredibly stupid and simplistic, but it’s been embedded into me. It all comes down to:

Not hurting anyone’s feelings
Not making someone feel inferior by asking them to do something (even if it’s an employee)
Not coming off as cocky or self-serving

This has become my primary focus. I am making an active effort to make the phone calls I try to avoid and give the bad news that I try to delay. I’m not trying to hurt people’s feelings, but I am trying not to care if someone takes what I say the wrong way. I have goals that, unfortunately, aren’t going to happen on their own. The bigger I make my goals, the more people that it’s going to take and the more I have to take charge. You know what? The phone calls are never as bad as I dreaded they would be, and people are a lot more understanding than I give them credit for.

Inevitably, I sometimes instinctively still act like the old Arthur, but then I ask myself: What would Rahm Emanuel do? That always does' the trick!

…about the next 90 days

2009-06-06T17:34:00.001-07:00

90 days. That’s all that’s left before I become a married man. Time is flying by much faster than I thought it would, and there is still a lot to do for the wedding and our future plans. But that’s sort of the upside: I work best under pressure, and this is definitely putting a fire under my ass.

While I do worry about the future, especially financially, I am confident in my ability to rise up to the challenge. Already, I’ve made a lot of changes that probably wouldn’t have happened had I not been getting married. I am a lot more aggressive with new customers and am trying to get everyone to pay me on time. Before, I didn’t care at all if people paid me on time. As long as they eventually paid, I didn’t care. Not anymore.

Every day is one less day I have to take care of everything, and that countdown is providing me the fuel I need to motivate myself. Hey, if the President can change the world in 100 days, I can manage to get everything straightened out in 90.

I am really excited for the future. Every day is a new adventure and a new challenge. And that’s how it should be. It shouldn’t be easy to succeed, because half of success is the struggle to get there. I look forward to the struggle.

…about how I ended up doing what I do now (part 2)

2009-06-04T16:43:00.001-07:00

Condominium Budgeting.

That wasn’t what I was supposed to do. I had asked the client if he would be interested in funding my programming business. He came back with a lucrative counter-offer: Start a property management company. He would provide the funding and he already knew all the in-and-outs of the business, including all the right connections. At time time, it seemed like a sure thing and I was more interested in starting a business than programming, so I was all for it.

There was one catch though: He was really behind in his condominium budgeting business and needed me to help him get caught up before we could start on the management business. He would bring me in as a manager with a reasonable salary and within a few months we would be managing properties like no one's business.

That’s not how it played out. I was less a manager and more of a condominium budget preparer. I upgraded his complex Excel template with some VBA magic and ended up preparing budgets most of the time. I would get to work around 6am and usually leave around midnight… 6 days a week. My salary of $4,000 a month was great for a guy my age, but when I broke it down to an hourly rate, I was barely breaking $10 an hour.

I kept going, thinking each day was a day closer to being caught up and moving on to the original plan. I made detailed status reports and streamlined the budget preparation process. After a year of stress and frustration, we were fairly caught up. I was happy, not knowing that my boss was a workaholic and could never feel like everything is caught up, regardless of what was actually happening.

He kept dodging the question about when we were going to start the management business, so one day I made it clear I wasn’t going to brush the issue aside. He was quiet for a bit, obviously trying to think of what to say. Then he said it: “I don’t think you can handle it, and I don’t think I’m ready yet.” Words can’t define how I felt. The best analogy I can come up with is getting hit in the face with a baseball bat, then getting kicked off the team and having to live on the streets. Maybe it wasn’t so bad, but it sure as hell felt that way. I was devastated. I felt cheated. I poured my heart and soul into his company and got absolutely nothing in return.

After preparing a 50+ page budget for a Marriot property, I left a note on his desk saying we need to talk and left. I came in later that evening and told him that I since this isn’t going anywhere I need to focus on my programming and would no longer be able to come in.

I felt such a relief after that day. I didn’t have to worry about site visits that required hours of driving. I didn’t have to look at another budget. I didn’t have to waste 18 hours of my day. I slept in for a very long time the next morning.

But now I had no job and no programming clients. I had dropped them all since I had no time to do anything else. To make matters worse, I was really behind in technology. ASP.NET was the hot technology and I hadn’t even heard of it.

Then a high-school classmate contacted me and asked if I wanted to help with a website programming project. He had a client that needed a specific feature and he couldn’t do it, since he wasn’t into programming. So I took the mini project and finished it fairly quickly. Then he approached me and asked if I wanted to partner with him to start a technology business. The goal was to be able to provide everything from tech support to custom programming. I agreed, excited to start something new, and we found an office. My fiance, Araks, thought of the company name – CornerBLUE. I loved the name. We got a couple of programming projects and he already had a couple of tech support projects, so we felt like we had a good start.

We didn’t. Tech support and programming don’t go together. There was a lot of emotion leading up to the end of the partnership, but I felt that we weren’t compatible enough, our work ethics were different, and there wasn’t much synergy between the two divisions. After numerous heated debated and negotiations over who got what, we ended the partnership.

I was very adamant about keeping the name. It was something that the love of my life had thought of and I wasn’t going to give that up for anything. That caused a lot of very heated arguments, but in the end we came to an agreement. I had the name and the office, and I was happy.

After a few months, I realized I really didn’t need a two room office, since all I needed was a computer with an internet connection. I subleased the place to two different people, both of whom became clients. Even my part of the office was unnecessary, so I decided to leave.

I never did any marketing. One client led to another, then another. A couple of clients were long-term arrangements and I got to have a consistent income for a couple of years from these clients.

I took on more projects and was always so busy trying to catch up that I never had time to figure out how to expand. I tried hiring a few developers, but it didn’t work out. I would give them a general idea of what I needed and let them loose. But they always came back with sub-par code and a very bare interpretation of what I wanted. I spent thousands paying people for work that I trashed and redid myself. Mind you, this isn’t something that happened years ago. My most recent hiring and firing was only a few months ago, and it lasted about 3 weeks.

And that leads us to where I am now. I have a few big projects on my plate, so my main focus is on finishing these. But my wedding is in 92 days and can’t continue working 16 hour days once I’m married. So I spent a lot of time thinking about why I failed in finding and working with a programmer. After a few days of contemplating, I realized I’ve been going about it the wrong way. I was giving them work the same way I receive it – general idea of what the client wants and little to no supervision. I would check back a week later and be very disappointed. Now I realize that it wasn’t their fault, it was me not managing them properly.

I’ve always felt uncomfortable telling people what to do. Ironically, I’ve been a manager twice. In retrospect, I didn’t do a good job at either place. Now, I realize that telling people what to do isn’t pompous or degrading to them: It’s my job. They would do the same thing if they were in my position. Their job is to do the work I ask them to do, and my job is to outline their work clearly and follow up consistently. One of us wasn’t doing their job! I think I can do it this time. I’m going to finish the projects I have now and, once married, focus on turning CornerBLUE into a solid self-sustaining company, not a one-person consultancy. Regardless of what I’m charging now, I’m still bartering time for money. I need the business to be making money without being dependent on each hour of work I do.

I’m really excited about taking CornerBLUE to the next level with my new wife. I plan on documenting the journey on my blog once we get it going.

…about how I ended up doing what I do now (part 1)

2009-05-22T22:54:00.001-07:00

(Fair warning: This is a long story, and one that you might not care to read. Feel free to stop anytime.)

I’ve been programming since the beginning of middle school, so that makes it a total of about 12 years. As stupid as it sounds, I actually had wanted to be a magician, but every time I was practicing my card tricks, my brother would call me upstairs and ask me a computer question. He loved playing around with the computer (keep in mind this was back when the Internet wasn’t close to mainstream and there wasn’t much you could do on a computer). For some reason, he was obsessed with organizing his contacts and friends’ birthdays.

It started off with Excel. Then I learned about Visual Basic. That was an eye opener. The idea that I could build something from nothing was extremely fascinating to me. Since I didn’t have much of a social life and, living in an apartment with no friends nearby, didn’t have much to do outside, I spent the vast majority of my time reading and playing around with the computer.

I met a friend in middle school, Ara Mahdessian, who was also into programming. He overheard me talking about programming with our middle school Algebra teacher and he approached me. We had completely opposite personalities but we somehow were able to work very well with each other.

In high school, we started a company – Blue Media. We got our first client and made them an accounting system for their business. It was actually pretty damn good for a couple of teenagers. Then we got our second big client and made a web-based company management system for him. That took a lot of time and, in retrospect, was extremely overkill for what he wanted to do. We added accounting, inventory control, users and user groups, dynamic permissions, online orders, offline orders, and a whole slew of other features I can’t remember at the time. We got paid for it, but the client never even looked at it.

By the time we were done, high school was over and Ara was off to greener pastures at Stanford. We had an emotional yet happy farewell and went our separate ways.

At the time, I had decided I wouldn’t go to college just yet. I went to community college to take a few classes but had a horrible back incident that required surgery and some serious time off from school. By the time I got back, I was so behind that it wasn’t even worth trying to catch up. So I started working with our second Blue Media client and ended up staying there for over a year to help him improve his business. On the side, I would still take on programming projects, which led me to my next job: condominium budgeting.

To be continued…

…about my aspirations

2009-05-21T01:16:00.000-07:00

What goal am I trying to achieve in my life? I don’t think enough people ask themselves that. I bet if you ask 10 people who they look up to, who they aspire to be, only a couple would have an answer.

Something happened to all of us as we grew older: we stopped dreaming of being rock stars, surgeons, lawyers, politicians, and CEOs. The vast majority of people are cruising through life, taking it day by day. No goals mean no failures. And no successes. I don’t want to be like that. I want to reach the absolute highest goals I can imagine. I don’t want to regret not having taken any chances.

But it’s hard to start. It’s really hard. You think about it one night, then next morning you concentrate all of your powers to try and stop time, just so you can get a few extra minutes of sleep. It all goes downhill from there.

Why is it so hard? I was thinking about that for months. I would have enlightenments and want to jump out of my seat and get started. But I didn’t. I had work to do, or it was time for bed, or I didn’t feel like starting right that moment. “Really soon” I would promise myself, but that was quickly forgotten.

I have a plan this time.

You see, the best and the brightest people are only slightly above everyone else. Even the best basketball team is statistically only a few percentage points better than the 2nd best team.

So why not try to be only marginally better each day?

Instead of trying to change everything, change 1 thing. If your goal is to be the President one day, ask yourself, “What can I do today to get myself one step closer to that goal?” It doesn’t have to be anything big. There might be 6 million steps between what you do today to your goal, but all you need to take is one step. One extra sales call, one extra read-through of a report, one extra hour at work.

Surprisingly, even this is hard to do. Here’s a simple example: flossing. It’s not difficult, and it doesn’t take that much time. But we don’t do it. “Really soon I’ll start.” Sound familiar? And you know that once you start, it’s no big deal. So how can you convince yourself to take that step?

Convince yourself.

Just like others can convince you into thinking you actually like their idea, you can convince yourself that it’s worth doing right now. The easier way I’ve found is to not feel like you are making a commitment. You don’t want to floss because you don’t want to have to go through this headache all the time.

But you just need to convince yourself to do it this once.

You aren’t deciding to do it everyday, you aren’t setting yourself up for a lifetime of flossing. You are doing it just this once. That’s usually enough to convince myself to do it. Then I go through the same negotiations every day. The more it happens, the easier it gets. And it happens like magic. Our brains will embed patters and make them something you want to do, all without you making any decisions. And that momentum will make it easier and easier to succeed.

I’ve tried to start on my life goals many times, but now’s the time to start. Not “really soon,” but right now. That’s why I’ve deleted my old blog and am starting fresh. I’m going to focus on my little journey to a better life. And I’m going to take it one day at a time. So I guess this makes my blog a journal of my adventures and my thoughts (hence the blog title).