all posts tagged “dailylife”
I always wanted to be independent - I never, not once in my life, had the goal of working for someone else. It's not in my genes. In 2003 I founded Common Craft and in January of 2007 Sachi joined the company. Since then, Sachi has been the real force driving our goal of having a truly independent lifestyle.
And it is ALL about lifestyle. As I've written before, we make our lifestyle a huge priority. Why choose to be independent if you can't create a job and schedule that works for you? We've been trying to figure out what this means and I have a couple of examples.
Despite being independent since 2003, there is a part of me that feels like I need to keep normal business hours. This is particularly true in the mornings - I'm compelled to get up and start work. Even when we're up past midnight working - I still feel the need to be up early. This makes no sense to Sachi. She says things like "We're independent - you don't make that choice to conform to everyone else's hours. Work on your schedule." Of course it may be that my schedule happens to fit with the corporate world. On the other hand, I think Sachi is slowly becoming nocturnal - sometimes staying up till 3 and sleeping until 11. But hey, if it works for her it's a very good thing for us both.
There is part of me that still wants a weekend and sometimes they happen. I look forward to Fridays and part of me needs to have a Saturday like everyone else. Of course, Sachi is the voice of reason and says things like "Why would you go on a Saturday with all the other people? - go on a Tuesday when they're at work. Do you want to fight for parking and stand in line?" Of course it's a good point - we have made a choice to be able to avoid the masses. Sachi often reminds me that we can exchange almost any day for a Saturday.
I find all of this so interesting and we talk about it constantly. It's one thing to have a job that is independent of bosses and corporate structure, but it's yet another to use that opportunity to create a lifestyle that fits you.
The other day I was getting a haircut. Making small talk (it was a $15 haircut) she asks...
Barber: So are you going back to work after this?
Me: Sort of. I work from home.
Barber: Oh, that's cool. What do you do?
Me: Me and my wife make videos, in our basement. Well, I should say that we get paid to make videos.
Barber:
Me: We have a little studio at home and we make short videos for businesses.
Barber: Oh, THAT kind of videos. I hear ya.
Me: No, no, no. Not THAT kind I swear. Our videos are instructional.
Barber:
Me: I mean, our videos explain complex ideas in a simple way, using a whiteboard and paper.
Barber:
Phew. That was less of a vacation and more of a party. I need to sleep for about 28 hours to catch up. Good fun and lots of time with lifelong friends and family.
Photo: Lake Norman, NC, where I spent a lot of my childhood.
Sachi and I take our time off quite seriously and I was very inspired by a couple of posts by Hillel at Jackson Fish. It looks like they have a philosophy similar to ours regarding time away from work.
I don’t want to wait until I’m in my fifties, sixties, to spend extended time with my family, doing what i want, travelling the world, etc. To me the time to have those experiences is now. This is not a statement that having those experiences later in life is without value. It’s more that I don’t know why I should have to wait. I want to have those experiences now and later.
Hell yeah.
Hillel also talks about not spending his life working towards a big flip or IPO. His thoughts also remind me of another Seattle company, the Robot Coop, who set out from the very beginning to create jobs that they loved. They could have sold out long ago, but they're not interested - they have wonderful, sustainable jobs.
On the plane home yeaterday, Sachi and I were talking about the future of Common Craft and agreed that we're not focused on creating a widly successful business that may one day enable us to retire. More than anything, we want to create a wildly successful lifestyle for today - a lifestyle that includes hard work, regular income, independence and plenty of time to do what we want to do, when we want to do it (and that includes our work). Sure, one day we'll retire, but we're not going to trade our health and lifestyle today for a trip to Aruba tomorrow.
Thanks for the link Nancy.
Last night Sachiko and I were talking about monthly bills and what we could do without.
Cable/Satellite? Perhaps gladly.
Land line? Not a problem.
Cell phones? We could live.
Internet access? Never.
It was funny to me to think of the resources I grew up using and how, just over 7-8 years, Internet access has become one of the absolute must-haves. I could not imagine a world without it. Actually, I can barely imagine a world without wireless high speed access.
...Is that my brain hasn't quite caught up. The transition from IE was effortless in some ways, but I seem to be "challenged" by the tabbed interface. I exhibit great skill creating new tabs (ctrl + t), but when my intention is to go to another browser window, I still waste time looking at the bottom of the screen, like I would with IE.
I'm dedicated to changing this behavior because tabs are better and faster (like so many things with Firefox). I have been trained for years that new browser windows are located in the task bar and anything else simply goes against the natural order of things (or so my brain thinks). I'm thinking this is just a phase.
Oh, and let me say that my favorite extension is Spellbound. It's a spell checker for any web based form (like blog posts, online discussions)... like ieSpell. Second would be ForecastFox.
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