Business

A 40-hour work week for sanity?

Posted by abraham.williams@gmail.com on in Business, Stress, Success
Check out this article. A friend from work sent this to me.

I do work a lot. I try to work every hour of the day that I’m awake. I love the struggle. I’m working at Intuit, I’m working at home, I’m working where ever I am…work and play are the same to me. It’s not like I’m some softy who got lucky. I have had to work to like working. I used to be incredibly lazy and irresponsible doing only what I deemed necessary to prevent some huge failure. It wasn’t until I worked a lot at my work that I really started to enjoy it. That may sound odd, but that’s how it was for me.

I used to think I needed to find my calling and then I would love to work. Well, I have found that I love to  work by doing it a lot and that work has become my calling. I love to solve problems. The experiments of problem solving are very exciting to me. It allows me to get ideas out of my head and find out how far off-base they are.

Also, I have realized that my time with my family at home was work also. The same kind of deductive reasoning and experiments are the same as when I am at home or when I am at work. How do I want my children to behave? How can I get them to want to behave that way? How should I set up my finances to reach my goals? Which bank is best for this? Where to take my wife to dinner? How should I commute to work today? Where shall we take a vacation? What kind of experience will we want for our children? It’s all action around relationships and outcomes. That’s what work is to me. I just try to make sure that what I am working at is going to get more of what I want: health, happy family, wealth, etc. That’s what productivity is to me.

Anyway, I completely 100% disagree and agree with the article. I think employees should make sure they are rested and advocate for time in their lives away from work to get rest; however, I also think that every employee should consider themselves their own “small business”. If you ran your own business, would you limit yourself to 40 hours a week just on principle? You just might go out of business doing that. It’s not about time, it’s about productivity. I completely 100% agree with that. 

Calling 1099 Contractors!

Posted by abraham.williams@gmail.com on in 1099, Apps, Business, Personal Finance, Product Management
Are you a 1099 Contractor? I mean when you get paid do you get a check with a single amount with no taxes taken out? Do you track reimbursable expenses or really want to? Or, do you have trouble getting all your income and expenses together for tax time?

If so, I need and want to talk to you. In return I can tell you about what other 1099 contractors are doing to make their lives easier. I can also get you a nice employee discount on QuickBooks if you are interested. Please connect with me on LinkedIn here. 

Alchemist Customer Development Series

Posted by abraham.williams@gmail.com on in Apps, Business, Lean Startup, Product Management, Success
My wife told me about a course on Customer Development and Metrics from the Alchemist Series with the Citrix Accelerator that starts on March 13th. I realized Steve Blank will be teaching, so I signed up in a heart beat! It’s a very special course because it is a small group of students learning from top-notch Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and VC’s. This particular course is being prepared as a lecture series for the top 30 universities, so we get to ask lots of questions from the best and be a part of some stellar new curriculum. It’s not full.  If you want in, visit the link above and get your butt there.

Last night’s session was with Alan Chiu, principle with X/Seed Capital Management. It was a super interesting session. For the business I am working on inside of Intuit, I got solid advice for scrappy/crafty ways of finding customers to interview, knowing when to experiment for design vs. price, knowing when to build, etc. More posts coming on those later. One of my big takeaways was that my previous main two questions are now three.

  1. What question are you trying to answer?
  2. What’s the fastest way to answer it?
  3. What’s the cheapest way to get it answered?
I’ll use these questions the rest of my working life.

Coach B!

Posted by abraham.williams@gmail.com on in Business, Health
Today, I got to work with Olympic Weight Lifting Coach Mike Burgener. It was a fantastic opportunity to learn from the best and I’m so glad I pushed to make it happen. We focused on the “snatch”, and I learned about my performance-limiting mistakes that have been with me for about four years now. It’s huge when you can work with an expert to raise your game.

I mentioned how I had improved my deadlift by doing single-limb bodyweight progressions, and he was not surprised. He conveyed one of his main principles, “range of motion before strength and bodyweight before barbells”. From there he conveyed how crucial range of motion is for technique and how bodyweight movement allows you to really learn how to move efficiently with that technique. People who are impatient and forgo technique so they can throw as much weight as they can end up having to go back and learn the fundamentals.  He also said, there is no such thing as overtraining…it’s really under recovery. That’s a huge topic to be covered later. I learned so much from him in just this one day.

In the last two months, I have accelerated my interactions with experts in business and sport and have been much the better for it. I recommend you look for experts in your fields of interest and find the quickest way to work them. Your velocity will increase as you catch the pivotal points they know like the back of their hand. Do it. Now.

Be responsible for everything in your life

Posted by abraham.williams@gmail.com on in Business, life, Success

Each time I find I’m irritated at something that’s happened to me, I can’t help but realize that I put myself in that place. If I’m unhappy because of a little yapping dog in my house, I have to acknowledge that I let that little rat into my house. If I’m unhappy because I’m not successful at work, I have to acknowledge that everything at work I’ve done I’ve done.  It wasn’t some manager to blame for not deciding to put me up for promotion. It was my actions prior that led to how I was perceived by the entire group of people around and above me. Either I wasn’t working in the right way or not working on the right things. These were choices that I made along the way. Likely, I wasn’t thinking big enough. If I want to be successful at work or anything, I need to be very specific on the aspect of successful I want and then move in that direction with an unstoppable drive. I need to change my actions to those that will create success.
Being responsible means thinking things through. Thinking things through helps you know if you will create something that helps you or injures you in the future.  We live with the choices we make whether they are conscious or not.