Today’s Weight: 377.2 lbs
Yesterday’s Water: 164 oz
Yesterday’s Steps: 3757 Steps
Yesterday’s Accomplishments: 3 Items Completed.
Crazy day – I managed to draft a survey I’m going to be sending out to people who sew, to get information about their needs (for the Stitchy project). I also managed to finish the book I was reading (Will It Fly) by Pat Flynn, as well as start and finish another book: Ask. These three tasks are all related – they have to do with validation of the concept behind Stitchy, plus understanding of the user base and their needs, as well as building a mailing list of potentially interested users. I’m not sure I’ve read a whole book in one day since high school. It helped that the book was only about 200 pages, but still, I’m proud of the accomplishment.
As time goes on with this blog, how I’m using it is changing gradually too. Initially I was simply logging my weights and water intake and talking about my specific struggles with weight loss. I added step counting when I started wearing my FitBit again, which is still on the primary intended topic, and then added accomplishments as well. Although the topic was originally weight loss, I feel like the topic has shifted over time to “life management”, which for me is an inherent part of weight loss, as I live a very complicated life right now. The easiest way for me to live right now is to eat out most meals so I have time to devote to other activities that are important, but past experience tells me that is a way to gain weight, the opposite of my goal. Also, my weight loss process has (more or less) become automatic – I’m watching what I eat most of the time, and trendwise, my weight is clearly going down. It does still require my attention, and adjustments here or there – I can usually tell when I’ve done something stupid, as my numbers are up for several days after.
So this has become more of a general purpose journal or blog than specifically weight loss blog, although that is still one of my major goals, so it figures heavily in the information I report – but most of the information I have to share is just facts and figures, which makes for a very short post. The other thing I’ve (re)discovered recently is how much I enjoy writing.
I’ve read quite a few books recently, so here’s some capsule reviews of each of them, along with a link to each of them (yes, it is an affiliate link) on Amazon.
The 4-Hour Workweek – Timothy Ferriss: The primary conceit of this book is that everyone should either 1) quit your day job and start your own business which you can then automate and outsource to various places so that you are only really working four hours a week, or 2) keep your day job and automate/eliminate all non-necessary elements such that you are only really doing about four hours of work a week but are more productive than you are currently. And the reason to do this is to live overseas in various countries, hopping around the world at will. This is perhaps a bit cynical of a summary – I did find a lot of valuable insights in this book. For example, there’s a lot of activities that I (and everyone I work with) do that look like work but don’t actually provide any real value. This book also introduced me to the Pareto principle, which is the idea that 20% of your efforts get you 80% of your results – so if 80% results are sufficient for you, identify the 20% and focus on it. Likewise from the other end, 80% of your problems come from 20% of your customers – do you really need those people. This book definitely got me thinking about how my day job functions and what I can do to be more productive with the time I spend there.
Oh Crap! Potty Training – Jamie Glowacki: My wife and I both read this book in preparation for potty training our children. We are about 3 weeks completely diaper free (even at night) and although there are still accidents, the kids recognize they are accidents and don’t want them to be happening. They are learning to control their bodies and proud of when they are able to do things for themselves. I credit the methodology in this book, plus my wife’s extreme patience with the children, with our success to this point. We are still in the phase where we are having to prompt to go to the bathroom a fair amount, but it beats changing diapers! The beauty of this book is you can read about 1/2 or less of it, and the rest is reference material for “what to do if” scenarios. So it’s not only a quick read, but you don’t have to read all of it. In general I’m really happy with this book and how well the method worked for us. Since we plan on having no more kids, this information will probably not be of much use to us going forward, but it was there when we needed it most.
Let Go – Pat Flynn: A blogger/podcaster who I started following in about May of this year, this is his first book. It is extremely short, but I got it for $1 or $2 on sale and I feel like it was a fair deal. It tells a very personal story of how he was let go from his job as an architect and accidentally stumbled into having an online audience from a blog he was writing to help himself study for an architecture exam. Ultimately he turned the posts on that blog into an ebook, which he sold online. In the end, he more than replaced his income from the job, and started a blog/podcast about how he did it. His blog (smartpassiveincome.com) has followed his various attempts to make money online through to the present day, where he is earning more than $100,000 a month. I have stuck with reading and following him for a few reasons – he seems like a fairly ordinary guy – an everyman, if you will, who through a combination of hard work, deep thought, and luck has found success working for himself. Also, unlike most of the writers/bloggers/speakers in the “how to make money online” space, he actually seems to have a conscience, and is more interested in providing value to his audience than making a quick buck – with the assumption that if he provides value ethically, the money will follow. And for him, it certainly has. Pat demonstrates his methods work outside of the “making money online” niche by actually running business on other topics, which have been quite successful. He is also extremely transparent – he publishes information about his income and where it comes from each month on his blog, and combined with the information he provides about his various web initiatives and properties, you can easily see what is working and what is not, and how the various experiments he runs have turned out. If there were ever a role-model for me in the online space, I think Pat would be it. I’ve learned a lot from the various information he has shared. But this book, while a quick enjoyable read, is really more of a memoir – it simply tells his story in a way you can relate. It also has a lot of multimedia content associated with it, which breaks up the read a bit. I did enjoy the videos – they were well done, but I think it was more interesting as an experiment in a book with associated video content, than the video content being actually valuable itself.
The Lean Startup – Eric Ries: In some respects, I feel like the universe demanded I read this book. It’s the book being read and implemented by a lot of the management at my day job, it directly relates to the model I am using to start up Stitchy, and it is also relevant to the continued growth and development of Alice’s business (Fabric Ninja). I ended up seeing references to it on Pat Flynn’s podcast, at my day job, and elsewhere online, all in the same week. So I caved and bought it and read it immediately since it was so immediately relevant. Overall I feel like the book spent a bit too long focusing on the author’s experiences with one product, and it was a bit light on details of how to do the process, but there was still valuable information. The core idea is figuring out what your customer’s want, building it, validating it with the customers, and being willing to change your offering substantially/often as you learn more and more about the needs of your customers. It also features a heavy focus on measurement – looking at metrics from various cohorts to see what effect your changes have made to the actions of your customers.
Will It Fly? – Pat Flynn: Pat’s second book, it covers validation of a business idea from start to finish – starting with your own personal goals and desires for the future, carrying through what aspects of past jobs you’ve enjoyed and then gets into the meat of the book: doing research on the market you are looking to enter. Key questions researched include: who they are, what they need, what are their challenges, what websites do they use, what blogs are available on the topic, what products are already available in that space, and what language/jargon do they use to describe their market/challenges. In the end, you can take the results of that research and see if you still think your idea will be successful, based on everything you know. I’ve read the whole book, and completed about half of the activities within it. I’m just getting started with the more serious market research portion, but I’m excited to do it because Pat provides very detailed instructions on how to find the answers to the questions and map them out. This book provides a lot of very specific actionable tasks, which make it much more useful than his previous book.
Ask. – Ryan Levesque: This book covers what the author calls “The Ask Method”, which in short, is a series of four surveys to send to people in your target market. For me, most of the value in this book came from the first survey, which identifies your target clients and asks them questions that help you find out what their needs and wants are. I’ve built (as mentioned earlier in this blog entry) a draft of a survey that I will be sending out to people who sew, trying to find out what their biggest problems are so that I can make sure Stitchy does something to solve those problems. The other surveys in the sequence revolve more around building sales funnels for your products and encouraging people to buy once you’ve already built. In a lot of ways, the other surveys are of less interest to me because they seem to be a bit more “pushy” in trying to get people to buy – I want the products I build to speak for themselves. In some ways, I think it helps that Stitchy will have a free version as well as a paid version, as the barrier to starting to use the tool is a lot lower, and users will be able to see exactly what it is they are getting if they upgrade to the paid version. I also think that even the free version of the Stitchy tool will have a lot of very specific value to most people who sew, so I’m choosing to be a lot less aggressive with how I market it.