Two weeks from now I will be in New York, first attending a wedding and then visiting a few friends. If you would like to meet then, let me know!

There are a few news items I would like to share for this month.

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The first one, definitely at the top of the list with regards to its impact on my mental health, is the cleanup and remodel of my yard.

Walking up to this at breakfast every day for the last couple of weeks has been pure joy. To compare, until last month it was still full of debris from the construction project, and a small mountain of sand laid where the gras now grows. The landscaper helped with surface work, and I did the planting and sowing after that. I am also planning some furniture, but this will come after next spring.

One of the unresolved questions is what to let grow on the vertical surfaces. My original wish was for a wisteria around the shed.

Sadly, I was informed that wisteria is a near-invasive species and would require frequent trimmings (once per 2-3 months) to remain contained. As much as I like my plants, this is too much for my time budget. Some other candidates include jasmin and passiflora, but planting season is about over now and I do not want to rush this. I will revisit this in February or March.

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The second news item is that I have started this “incubator program” that I was writing about two months ago. It is organized by the secretary for commerce of my city council, as a way to stimulate the local entrepreneur scene. It has four components: personal coaching (with a professional business coach), group coaching (promotes group accountability and lateral thinking), a buddy system (personal accountability) and monthly workshops/classes with industry professionals.

The goal of this program is not to each us how to run our business; it is to work together on mindset and receive some experience from other business owners on operational topics like sales & marketing and just plainly networking. Which is precisely why I registered in the first place. Morever, the other members of my group are engaging, quite self-motivated, active in very different branches yet very curious about each other. This feels very good.

One of the other participants in the program is also running a social group for active professionals in my neighborhood. I loved to learn I now have access to like-minded folk within a one-kilometer radius! I also learned just last week there were 4-5 different entrepreneurship networking/influence groups in my region, and that several of these are actively recruiting new members.

Back in July, I was set on seeking optionality, and this definitely feels like it.

There are two things happening here that are quite important to me.

The first is validation. For context, my pre-existing social network is primarily implementation-driven. Folk either know each other based on their implementation prowesses and then that is what they like to talk about; or they consider their work to be a side matter in their life story and would rather talk about something else. Through the last year, I have developed interests in corporate governance, relationship building with customers and suppliers, how to create and develop a leadership culture, etc., and I sometimes feel like these interests are far from my friends’. It does feel nice now to meet folk who enjoy sparring on these topics; it feels nice not to be the odd one out.

The second thing is focus. Starting or running a business, especially a side one, requires sustained motivation and focus at odd hours. While it may be slightly easier for me than I had expected (more on this below), having a group around me of people also working to kickstart their thing has amplified my motivation. I am grateful for that.

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Another news item is a recent discovery, that I am not very happy when I only care about one thing at a time. This discovery needed some work because I am quite happy to focus on one thing at a time, even for relatively long periods. What gives?

In hindsight, it is relatively easy to explain. I can focus well, but this tires me. If I continue to focus too long on the same thing, my mood deteriorates: I need a break. However, I am also deeply unhappy if I fill my breaks with things that I find uninteresting - things that I do not deeply care about, or things that do not stimulate me.

Here is how it looks. Say, I need to take a break at the end of a workday’s worth of tasks. I can try to walk outdoors, but I would likely get bored (unless there’s someone else to talk to) and that would stress me out. Ditto with watching television or playing video games. Working on chores, while they provide some sense of accomplishment, also makes me restless: I feel vaguely that there are more important things that deserve my attention, and that also stresses me out. So most of these things do not provide me with rest.

My life coach had previously asked me to evaluate whether the reason for this restlessness was that I was dissatisfied with my primary work things. So I tried to change that, and it turns out that the restlessness comes back as soon as I need to take a break from the new thing.

After much introspection and comparing notes with other folk, it turns out I am not alone. There’s quite a few people out there who find it detrimental to their well-being to have only one thing important in their life. Like me, they thrive on 2-3 things going on at a time, preferably 4-5. It sounds like a lot, but remember that thing 2 provides rest from thing 1, thing 3 provides rest from thing 2, and so on, so they do not really “stack” in terms of effort. Also, with more than 3-4 important things, by the time my focus arrives on the next thing, I haven’t looked at it for a while and it feels like a new thing again, which is fun.

(Some of the important things need to include activities that help shift mindset into a creative or contemplative mood; such as traveling, looking at or hearing beautiful things, etc. This also works for me.)

The other topical thing that I learned: there are lots of folk like that, and they are overrepresented in the population of folk who operate multiple businesses side by side, or works with very varied contracting projects. Because that is how they achieve balance in their life. LOL. Why did it take me so long to learn this.

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Feeling stronger from this nugget of self-knowledge, I now feel confident to explore multiple opportunities side-by-side. (Previously, I would have felt ashamed, or at least limited myself, from prejudices around “lack of focus.” It turns out my focus is just fine, thank-you-very-much.)

One project I am trying to start through the incubator program has to do with international trade (primarily between the US and the Netherlands). I have spent quite some time in the past studying the legal frameworks on both sides, the available treaties, and the cultural differences in corporate governance, and I figure that perhaps I can turn that knowledge and experience into a business. Incidentally, this aligns with some of my long-term goals as well. This is very preliminary at this point so there is not much I can say yet.

Another project I am excited to start simultaneously is a small coaching program, for people with ADHD (and optionally autism) who are already professionals and wish to give a boost to their career. I recently realized that I have been doing this already on a voluntary basis for the last few years, I want to become better at it, and also perhaps partner with support organizations so that people with a recent diagnosis due to burnout etc. do not “fall off the system” after they receive initial care. Also not much details to share yet.

Meanwhile, my project from last April is currently hibernating: I hit a snag regarding the business model, and so I am not sure how I can justify giving it more runway as a standalone thing until I figure out its supply/demand equation. However, I might give it some love as a low-priority hobby so I can still showcase it at events.

Since I intend to bootstrap all this, there are some financial constraints. To make things work, this month I also onboarded a new customer in the tech industry (doing the usual old thing, delivering some leadership and project management services), hoping to leverage some of that cash flow to kickstart the other projects.

One thing I am still unsure of, is how to explain all of this. At the networking workshop I learned that I badly need a one-sentence pitch of who I am to share at events, with a business card and link to e.g. a LinkedIn profile. That seemingly small requirement is actually a rather complicated task at this point. It might take me a few months to figure out.

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On the health front, there’s two wins and a snag.

One win is that my cholesterol levels are not alarming and so I do not need to start treatment just yet. We will review this decision in 6 months. The other win is that my tennis elbow situation is slowly getting better. I am going for “better” and not “good” because I am still unable to hold a book (or my phone) for more than tens of minutes at a time. I can do without the phone, but the book situation has started to weigh on me quite a lot. There is so much I had wanted to read this summer!

The health snag is that my shoulders are taking much longer than expected to recover. Many exercises are still painful in both arms. I am also still unable to move my left arm like I used to. The doctor suspects that my tendinitis is slowly getting better, but through lack of movement (or compensatory positions) I have reduced the mobility range of some of my shoulder muscles. So now I have to navigate the balance between stretching the shoulder (which is painful, but necessary, because of the reduced range) and not doing it too much (which is painful because of the tendinitis and could make that worse).

We are also entering the humid and colder season where I routinely fall victim to respiratory ailments. I am anxious to get my flu and COVID booster shots a.s.a.p., and frustrated at the realization that I will likely still suffer through the regular colds etc. Not looking forward to that.

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Despite my limitations w.r.t. reading, I still managed to explore a few things this month.

Besides meeting new people (in progress), my quest to understand masculinity better brought me to the following:

Boyslut: a memoir and manifesto - Zachary Zane

Where the author shares his life as a bisexual and hypersexual man through the late 1990s and since then. This book was intended primarily as a “how-to” for bisexual men on how to live unashamed and how to free themselves from cultural prejudice. Not being part of the target audience, I was especially interested in the author’s personal experiences; first as a coming-of-age story, and then as a recollection of his navigating many social networks, all with different social norms and expectations.

To me, this was a fresh take on issues of intersectionality. Much has been written before to help “normies” understand diversity from the perspective of visible minorities; this story was different, showing how even the most cisgendered, straight-passing white guy can experience unexpected tensions around acceptance. An eye opener.

Sex (2024) - Dag Johan Haugerud

This Norwegian movie won this year’s Best European Film Award (ref). It is mostly a philosophical dialogue between two middle class workers on the nature of masculinity and gender norms. It was very topical to my current inquiries, and is just around very well made.

I also studied some more work-related content:

Normalization of deviance - Dan Luu

In this essay, Dan reflects on things that are done poorly in organizations but where they have been done poorly for so long that folk consider them normal. It makes it very hard to work on improving them. The two lessons the author takes away (which I was suspecting when I started reading) was “mind your incentives” and “pay attention to weak signals.” The overall story is very good.

Dan has much more cross-org experience than I do so I will keep his writeup bookmarked as a go-to link to share to anyone who is wondering what to care about besides “building a great product” to make their organization successful.

People can read their manager’s mind - Yossi Kreinin

Where the author highlights that a manager’s reports are very good at detecting discrepancies between what a manager says they want, and what they actually reward. (Incidentally, I arrive to Dan’s writeup above from this one.)

Little was new to me in there, but again I find this writeup very good and, foremost, quite succinct, so I plan to keep it around to introduce this topic to folk with a short attention span.

Your company needs junior devs - Doug Turnbull

I started reading this expecting it to support two of my long-held beliefs. One is that hiring junior folk is important to make the organization more robust: by maintaining a working training program, it becomes easy(ier) to respond to loss of staff (due to accidents or downturns) by hiring and training new staff. The other is that it contributes to maintaining a healthy pipeline of talent throughout the entire industry (via the prisoner’s dilemma: if every org takes a bit of the responsibility to train a little of the junior folk, noone faces the real risk to run out of talent entirely in the long run).

In fact, in this essay Doug covers an entirely different topic: that hiring junior folk is key to fostering a culture of psychological safety, which in turn is the engine that powers innovation. I was very surprised (my assumptions were challenged) yet happy to add one more argument to my toolbox.

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Some heartwarming news to close this: allowing prison inmates to adopt kittens. The MeowMates / MuttMate program in South California and the Canine Cellmates program in Georgia pairs inmates with abandoned pets. This results in an observable and stark reduction in prison violence. Who would have known?

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References:

• Zachary Zane - Boyslut: a memoir and manifesto
• Dag Johan Haugerud - Sex (2024)
• Dan Luu - Normalization of deviance
• Yossi Kreinin - People can read their manager’s mind
• Doug Turnbull - Your company needs junior devs