Category: Relationships
About once a year I completely use up my extrovert capacity. I drain it completely to zero. Whenever this happens, I remember that I’m fundamentally an introvert. If you don’t know how to relate to someone like me when he goes into deep introvert mode, take a look at the great Atlantic Monthly article from 2003 titled “Caring for Your Introvert.”
The last sixty days have been awesome but extremely intense. My ordinarily full days had the Do More Faster book tour layered on top along with a bunch of other public appearances, interviews, speaking engagements, and events. About two weeks ago I started feeling a fatigue that I couldn’t get in front of and the last two weeks pushed me over the edge.
I’ve got one more big extrovert push this week at Defrag this Wednesday and Thursday and then I’m done for a while. Oh – I’ll be available – but if you have a physical sighting of me, you might be interacting with my new avatar.
My TEDxBoulder presentation on The Quarterly Week Off The Grid was recently posted on YouTube. I participated in TEDxBoulder on August 7th and it was an awesome Saturday evening in Boulder. Most of the talks were dynamite – the worst ones were merely good. If you are interested in work-life balance, this is one of my favorite algorithms for it. The video of my presentation follows.
If you’ve heard me talk about this before, you’ll recognize some of my schtick. You’ll also recognize this from the first chapter of Theme 7 of Do More Faster (Work-Life Balance). And if you were at Chicago’s Startup Mixology today you’ll recognize pieces of this discussion. But there are a few new gems in here that I had forgotten I’d used.
On my next Quarterly Week Off The Grid I’m going to eat less and exercise more. Man that belly looks unflattering in this video.
While at the amazing Tahoe Tech Talk, I heard Dave Morin mention a new service called Letter.ly. It’s a great example of brilliance through its simplicity.
In my never ending quest to use all the things I find interesting, I’ve started an email newsletter called Feld On Work-Life Balance. While I periodically post on Work-Life Balance, Amy and I are working on a book called The Startup Marriage. There is also a chapter on Work-Life Balance in the book David Cohen and I just wrote called Do More Faster. This is a topic that’s long been important and interesting to me, especially as I travel around explaining to my completely unbalanced friends how they are actually balanced and they just don’t realize it yet.
In the mean time, I’ll do some longer pieces on my Feld On Work-Life Balance email newsletter. It’ll also help me better understand yet another vector of media (in this case microsubscriptions) that I think is going to be increasing interesting and important in the future.
BTW – if you missed the Tahoe Tech Talk, we are about 66.7% of the way done and it has been unbelievable. The talks have been from Chris Sacca, Ben Kaufman, Dave Morin, Travis Kalanick, Kevin Rose, Dave McClure, and Alexia Tsotsis. Gary Vaynerchuk who organized it is up on stage doing his piece now talking about his goal of trying to humanize a conference. He’s also trying to say “Fuck” more times than McClure did. Great crowd – powerful stuff – well worth the 36 hours.
Amy and I created a tradition about a decade ago we call “four minutes in the morning.” We try to – fully clothed – spend four minutes together every morning 100% focused on each other.
I’m an early bird – usually getting up around 5am regardless of the time zone I’m in (except on the weekends – then I sleep until I wake up – sometimes 1pm.) Amy sleeps a little later (usually 6:30am). So – I often have around 90 minutes alone every morning, which I treasure. I have a well defined morning routine that includes a cup of coffee and 85 or so minutes in front of my computer.
When Amy gets up, I try to remember to jump up from my computer and start our four minutes. Sometimes I forget and notice it when she thumps me on my head or clears her throat loudly. But I eventually remember. We then leave the office area, go to our living room, or outside on our porch, and spend our “four minutes” together.
Of course, the “four minutes” is metaphorical. Sometimes it’s 15 minutes. A few times a year it turns into an hour when we end up in a discussion about something. But it’s always 100% bi-directional attention, except for our dogs who often want in on the discussion.
I travel a lot so this often translates into a phone call in the morning. We recently started using Skype instead and it makes an amazing difference. This morning, as Amy was in Keystone and I was in Boulder, we caught up with each other in our un-showered goodness. Now, if we only had smell-o-vision, the experience would have been complete.
I miss Amy a lot whenever we aren’t together. We’re lucky that we get to travel together a lot and that each of our work experiences have lots of location flexibility. Skype has helped in a surprisingly nice way with one of our routines.
My recommendation to all my guy friends out there – try the “four minutes in the morning” routine with your significant other. It’ll pay many dividends.
Amy and I have been up at our house in Homer, Alaska for the last two weeks. We try to spent every July up here – something we’ve tried to do every year for the past decade (we missed in 2007 and 2009.) I’ve had a lot of people say things similar to “I hope you are having a great vacation” which I corrected for the first few days (we aren’t on vacation – just living in Homer for the month) but I got tired of this so I stopped correcting folks after a few days.
Our lives are generally insane. Anyone that knows us knows that we both travel a ton, work like maniacs, and generally cover a lot of ground. We don’t have kids, so we get a lot of time together in between things, but there are rarely any uninterrupted stretches of just “living together.” We address this four times a year by going off the grid for a week of vacation (no phone, no email) but these are special events rather than just the normal tempo of life.
Our month in Homer gives us a chance to spend a real month together each year. As I type this, we are both sitting at our dining room table (our “office”) typing on our laptops listening to the Augustana channel on Pandora. It’s a beautiful sunny day – I’m going to head out for a run after I post this and then I expect we’ll both settle into an afternoon of writing. The days are long so we don’t worry too much about pacing as the sun doesn’t go down until 11pm or so and we usually just sleep until we wake up. We spend most of the 24 hours a day physically near each other – often less than two feet away – for an entire month. This is just priceless for me.
The past two weeks have been a little too busy for my taste. I don’t have any of the normal friction of work (travel, meetings, getting from point A to point B) so I expected things to calm down a little and give me some room to finish the final draft of the TechStars book now that David Cohen and I are in the “march to publish with a real publisher” process with a goal of having the book in the stores and on Amazon by October. I’ve had little bits of time between things but no real space to just concentrate because of all the other stuff going on in my work world.
When I look forward, the next two weeks are a lot less scheduled so I’m optimistic I can finally get in a rhythm. Amy says it takes two weeks to knock off all the stuff from life when she tries to settle down to write. She’s correct.
The one thing I get to do when I’m up here that I wish I could incorporate into my non-Homer time is to sleep more. I wear a Zeo when I sleep and during the week I usually score in the 50’s and 60’s each night. I’m always a little tired and sleep whenever I’m on a plane and often do long stretches of catch up sleep on the weekends where I score 120+ and sleep 12 to 14 hours. I know this isn’t healthy long term, but I haven’t figured out a solution. The last two weeks I’ve been averaging 10 hours of sleep a night and scoring between 90 and 110. I’m not using an alarm – I just wake up when I want. After two weeks of this, I feel well rested and physically much better.
We have two more weeks up here and I feel myself shifting into a mellow gear where I can concentrate on longer arc things rather than just reacting to all the day to day stuff in my work world. We don’t have any visitors so I get to spend another 336 hours in a row (minus a few) with my best friend. Life is good.
I love summertime.
Amy and I spent Memorial Day weekend in Manhattan. We stayed in Soho, hung out with some friends, ate a lot, and just wandered around. Oh – and I slept 17 hours yesterday once again demonstrating that I have amazing sleeping powers. I needed it after two full days at the Glue Conference, a day at Tech Wildcatters in Dallas, and a full week of “normal work.”
I’m on the east coast (New York and Boston) the next two weeks. One of my favorite things to do when in New York is eat – we’ve already had four great meals at Kittichai, Spring Street Natural, Market Table, and Excellent Dumpling House. Whenever I’m here it blows my mind how many amazing places to eat are within walking distance of whatever hotel I’m staying at. As Amy and I were walking down Broadway on the way back to the hotel, we both had a moment of being completely overwhelmed by the Soho and Chinatown crowd, looked at each other, and agreed it was time to get back into the isolated comfort of our hotel room.
I nourished my inner 14 year old with my friend Warren on Sunday by going to a matinee of Rock of Ages. Journey, Styx, Whitesnake, REO Speedwagon, Foreigner, Bon Jovi, Quiet Riot, Asia, Night Ranger, Twisted Sister, and Pat Benatar. Seth would have been in heaven – maybe I’ll take him the next time we are in town together.
I love the hot, sweatiness of summer. Bye bye cold and snow – see you later. Time for a run outside in Soho.
I had a 19 hour day yesterday – it started when I woke up at my hotel at 26th Street at 5am and ended when I hit the sack at midnight. I had a bunch of meetings, a few scheduled phone calls, was on a panel, and stayed on top of my email throughout the day. I even managed to keep my FishVille fish fed and got my Cafe World food served before it spoiled.
When I crawled into bed, I was toast. However, when I woke up this morning, I had this deep happy feeling from yesterday. As I took a shower, I remembered four great things that I did in the midst of a very busy day.
The first was a thirty minute tour through the Guggenheim Museum to see the Kandinsky Exhibit. Kandinsky is one of my five favorite artists and Amy encouraged me several times over the past few weeks to go see the exhibit. I happily paid my $18 (I have a reciprocal membership with several other museums but I prefer to pay for special exhibits to support the museum), turned off my iPhone, and spent 30 minutes slowly walking up the Guggenheim ramp to the top, spent a few minutes at the top looking down at the crowd, and then wandered back down slowly. It was a really special 30 minutes.
At 1:15 I was on a panel at Columbia University for NY Entrepreneurship Week. My dad went to Columbia (‘59) so when I got to the campus 30 minutes early, I called him from the cab to have him guess where I was. I gave him the address (64 Morningside Drive) and he immediately said “Columbia University!” I put him on speaker phone and he told the cab driver where to take me to give me a tour of Columbia and Harlem. As we drove around, the cab driver told me his story. He moved to the US from Israel in 1970. His parents were Rumanian and were concentration camp survivors during World War 2. They were rescued by the Russians and his dad was conscripted into the Russian army. A year later he “escaped”, found his mother and her young child, and emigrated to Israel. By the time the cab ride was over 30 minutes later, I both had a great tour of Columbia and had made a new friend with a deep emotional connection.
After my panel, I got together with a long time friend Len Fassler. Len and his partner at the time Jerry Poch bought my first company in 1993 and both have been incredible mentors for me. Len and I have invested together, succeeded together, and failed together. He’s a special guy and sitting in a restaurant on Amsterdam Avenue just catching up and being together was wonderful. We didn’t have any particular agenda – we just sat, drank tea, and talked.
Finally, at 8pm, I joined up with Fred and Joanne Wilson and Matt and Mariquita Blumberg at Convivio for our annual dinner. This is a tradition – which includes Amy, although she missed this one because she didn’t come to NY with me this trip – that we’ve been doing at the end of the year for the past five or so years. Fred and I are both investors in Matt’s company Return Path and have been since 1999/2000. But more importantly, we have all become very close friends as we’ve worked together and grown together. Our dinners are long and delicious, the conversation is a mixture of catching up combined with talking about what’s going on in the world, and as we left the restaurant around 11pm, I decided I’d finish off the day by walking 20 blocks back to my hotel.
When I look back on yesterday, it’s typical of my life. I worked extremely hard and covered a lot of ground. But I didn’t forget to live my life during the day. I encourage you to find at least one special moment for yourself today, and every day.
I’m sitting in the early dawn light in a cabin in Tabernash, Colorado drinking a cup of coffee and getting ready to go for a run in the mountains.
I’ve just spent the last 18 hours with my Foundry Group partners at our quarterly retreat. This is an approximately 24 hour affair that includes staying overnight somewhere in Colorado within driving distance of Boulder. We’ve been doing this quarterly since we conceived of the idea for Foundry Group.
Our retreats aren’t “portfolio review sessions” nor are they complex travel boondoggles. They are a simple, focused, 24 hours away together to discuss our business, reflect on how we are working together, and explore ways to improve things.
In Feld Technologies (my first company) I used to do this monthly with my partner Dave Jilk. We lived in Boston at the time so we had our retreats within driving distance of Boston. Same drill – leave in the morning of day 1; return in the afternoon of day 2. Spend the time talking about our business and how we were working together. Deal with any hard issues head on and try to figure out what we were going to do about them. Dave and I managed to do this 10 out of 12 months a year (we’d occasionally miss) but when I think back on Feld Technologies, these were some of the most important and satisfying times we spent together.
While my life is frenetic, the world around us is chaotic, and as I like to say “something in my world somewhere is totally fucked up every single day”, I generally achieve a very deep calm. On the surface I appear to be extremely busy, but at my essence I hear the birds chirping and think of fields of golden retriever puppies.
I woke up thinking about this and realizing how incredibly powerful it can be. The lights on one’s existence go out suddenly and often unexpectedly. There are endless (and daily) twists and turns in the path to happy, whatever you define happy as. I’ve often said anxiety and fear are useless emotions in most contexts; a deep calm helps counteract them when they arise.
I encourage you to ponder this as you go about your day. Time for a run.
On Wednesday I did my final One-on-One with Phil Weiser on the topic of Work-Life Balance.
Rocky Radar did a great job of summarizing it in the post Feld on Life Balance: “Accomplish What You Want, Not What You Think You Have to”. w3w3.com recorded it – you can listen to it here.
Since it was at 5:30 and on a beautiful evening, I figured there would probably only be 10 people in the audience. The room was packed and the questions were really fun. Hopefully everyone got something out of it.