On delegation
I don’t care if I don’t cut the zucchini anymore
I’ve been looking for my Second Mountain for a while. Years ago I wanted to be able to live and work from wherever-with-an-internet-connection in the world, for however long I wanted to. That desire (see this other post on dreams) was sparked by Envato’s then-forward-thinking policy of allowing its employees to work remotely up to three months a year. It started with two stints of such lifestyle in 2016, then another one in 2017. Looking backwards, this was for me the first execution of a years-long plan to become fully geographically independent.
Later on, I started two companies (in Australia first, and now in Canada), found my own clients, started working from multiple countries in a row, cafés, AirBnBs, juggled with time zones… The digital nomad classic.
By all metrics I can think of, this has been a successful journey. I just wrapped up my Australian company as I don’t live there anymore. The Canadian one, at the moment, is mostly a shell for my contracting. It has one employee, me. I’m working on interesting projects, there are a few prospects for 2023, and, as weather was turning to rain in British Colombia, I packed some work and kitesurfing gear and flew to Brazil. I’m now entering the third month of warm weather and sunset-watching with a caipirinha in hand from a beach in Brazil’s sunny and windy Nordeste.
I’m happy.
Palm tree, a caipirinha, sand, and sea. Classic digital nomad vista
But, I’ve reached a point where three things are happening:
- My business income has an almost linear dependency on my invoiced hours. Thus, there’s a hard cap on profit growth as however I look at it, a day is still just 24 hours.
- I have plenty of strategic ideas about what to do next, but I’m struggling to take actions. To pursue the military metaphor, I lack tactical planning.
- I’ve become comfortable.
Brendon Buchard talks about Caged / Comfortable / Charged as various individual states, in growing order of desirability. Comfortable, for Brendon Buchard, is still a limiting state because it describes a life where even if nothing is inherently bad or life-threatening, it just flows along an easy but somewhat dull path. This relates to how we as humans get used to pretty much anything and how novelty is more appealing than consistent comfort. But that’s a whole other rabbit hole where I could talk about consumerism and addiction, at the very least. Another time.
Thus, being able to get to the Charged state is what, to me, I’d compare to waking up excited for a new day, every morning. I’ve been there before, but I’ve left that place a while back.
How could I inject energy back to my professional life in order to bounce out of the metaphorical overly comfortable sofa I was stuck in?
Thinking about that, I’ve taken a few steps to bring some level of discomfort in my life. They all articulate around this current trip in South America.
Creating discomfort (then Vs. now)
Pare down my office setup.
Back in Canada, I have a comfortable, quiet, dedicated room with a bunch of natural light. Two large displays, all the mic, camera, desk space I could need, and more.
Solution: scratch that. I’m traveling, so that stuff stays home. A small laptop, my faithful iPad as an external display, a mouse, keyboard and little portable stand are enough. Because I do care about my body and staying hunched over a laptop many hours a days is not healthy, I indulge in the mouse, keyboard and stand.
Comfort
(Relative) discomfort
Search for new clients
I have been sticking to a pool of clients I had built over the previous years, but there hadn’t been anything new for 2022.
Solution: Meet prospects, potential providers, and talk, talk, talk. I used to do a bunch of relationship-building work quite naturally when I lived in Grenoble, Wellington, then Melbourne. Nowadays in Squamish, I do none of that. I’ve been lucky to get enough word of mouth to get me through the last four years, but there’s a problem: It’s not enough to fuel the business evolution I’ve been chasing for a while.
Travel to new countries, which for me is fuel for creativity
I stopped travelling and working from new countries for the last three years, COVID and life getting in the way.
Solution: I went to South America. I didn’t really speak Portuguese or Spanish, and for all intents and purposes, I didn’t understand social norms or anything else, really, about that region. So I had to get out of my comfort zones, both real and metaphorical.
Find contracts that need more than one developer
Since I started working, I’ve marketed myself as a sole, skilled and experienced developer. It’s worked just fine. But it’s also created a silo, as I kept getting extensions of the same or similar contracts. As I’m trying to branch out of the sole contractor model and get into building an actual team of developers, it’s becoming a problem.
Solution: avoid getting contracts where I code, or at least plan for more than one developer when negotiating. That’s the core of my job that needs to become parallelizable.
Which brings me back to this post’s title and intro quote. I’ve always loved cooking for friends. Since I’ve moved to Squamish, a small, but growing group of awesome humans have started gathering at mine for diners on a regular basis. It happens to be quite a bit more involved to cook for twelve rather than three. As the group has grown, I’ve come to a conclusion I knew already: I needed to let go of control. I needed to share the work, it was the only sustainable way to do more past my sole personal time.
As it happens, I have already been doing this for years. Decades, even. Cooking for a group is a team sport. I know how to play it, I like explaining what needs to be done, enabling people by providing the tools, and then, the most important part, letting them do the job.
Letting them do the job, with their own flair, ideas, and personal experiences.
I’ve known for years how to let my friends chop the zucchini. Now I need to figure out how to find and enable others to build software together.
