Because you only live once…
My Story
UnWorkaholic Direction
Sep 10th
I want to take some time today to let everyone one know some behind the scenes information about where I am taking this blog.
In my last post, I wrote about the 4 Steps to Change Your Life. I’m going to change a few things about the blog to better align with those 4 steps.
I am currently working on an e-book series about Controlling Your Life. This series is meant be a step by step guide to auditing your life and learning methods that will let you track and control various areas of your life. Each of these books are based off of methods that I use in my own life to better control my money, time, projects, and more.
I will also be starting to offer consulting for people who need help is various steps of the process. You will see a page about this very soon. I love the idea of being able to help people on their own unWorkaholic journey.
I also want to be able to provide resources that you can use on your journey through life. This will include a resource directory as well as products of my own creation.
And of course, I will be updating the site regularly with more awesome content!
Lastly, I want to keep you updated on my own personal journey. I am currently working on two different internet based projects and I hope to keep everyone here up to date as I progress in each of them towards a steady income. The first is this blog and the other is an internet marketing company that I am starting. Currently neither of these projects are making any regular money, but I hope to change that very soon. I hope that you will see my updates as examples of how the unWork lifestyle is created and maintained.
Are there any other features that you’d like to see added to this site? What are you struggling with the most?
What is Cool?
Aug 7th
So Wordcamp today had a lot of cool. WordPress is cool. Matt is cool. We even talked about cool.
The question was asked to us in one of the session about what makes cool things cool. Why is WordPress cool software and Joomla not? What lessons can you learn from such companies?
WordPress is cool because it works and its easy. If WordPress required you to jump through as many hoops as Joomla, it probably wouldn’t be as cool. The iphone works really well. Zappos shoes are really good shoes or they will replace them or take them back.
WordPress is also cool because it is very focused. You know WordPress. It is a simple yet powerful blogging platform. Apple computers do well what they choose to do. They don’t try to be something for everyone.
James Dean was cool because he was James Dean. He had his personal brand and stuck with it.
Okay, great. So what does that mean for me, who has interests in a wide variety of areas? Can I make a personal brand? Can I be cool?
Even limiting it down to just my company, can I be cool? Answer me this: What is your one thing? What does ever action you take boils down to? If you can’t easily answer that, think of an action you take and answer Why a bunch of times.
Take for example a marketing firm. What is their one thing?
Well we do websites, SEO and article marketing.
Why?
We get our clients to the first page of Google.
Why?
We drive traffic to their site.
Why?
We want to increase their sales.
Why?
We want to make them more money.
Why?
We want to help the business be on better financial grounds.
Why?
We want to increase the happiness of the people in the company.
Why?
We want them to be satisfied with their lives and their business.
Wow. Check it out. I ended up in the same goal as I had on UnWorkaholic. Crazy.
So helping people live satisfying lives is important to me.
But thats not all I am about. There is also this other half of me that loves technology. For example, I’ve had a long standing interest in robotics and techie stuff makes me happy. I spend my free time reading about all sorts of nerdy things, from programming guides to electrical engineering textbooks. And yes, I have been known to do math on Friday evenings.
But nothing about this improves people’s satisfaction with life. In fact, I don’t really do it for any one but me. And yet I feel that that part of me is intrinsic in my personal brand, or it really should be. If I had to pick one this to do for the rest of my life and money was no issue, it would have to be programming. Yes, I am a nerd and I’m proud of it.
But why?
I love the puzzles and the challenge.
Why?
I like being able to come up with the solution to a challenging question.
Why?
I guess I get a bit high from being able to get things to work to my will.
Why?
It makes me hope that I might be able to add something to the world through my creation (even if my current creations are straight out of elec 101)
Why do I want to do that?
Because I want to add value to the world.
So both areas are about adding value to the world through technology.
So maybe my personal theme should be something like:
Making the world a better place one line of code at a time.
Okay, that’s kinda sappy, but I like helping people and I like to code. And those together and I’m pretty happy.
Nerd girl makes her stand.
What is your one thing?
Where is Hailey?
Aug 7th
So as you may have noticed, I haven’t posted anything here in a while. I kept writing about about finding your passion and then turning that into your life when I really am not a writer and writing for a living or even for a hobby is probably not what I should be doing.
That by no means that I’ve stopped trying to turn my passion and interests into ways to live the life I desire. I’m currently focusing on freelance websites and marketing targeted towards local businesses. I just don’t really plan to be writing about it that much.
I am also finally pursuing a lifelong interest in robotics which is leading to some fun and nerdy friday nights full of math and code. I am trying to fill in many of the gaps in knowledge that I have in the realm of electronics. But I will bet that you won’t find too many other people who discuss the quadratic formula over breakfast who are not complaining about the math homework that is due that day. And yes, I’ve been reading Discrete Math textbook for fun.
Okay, enough about being a total nerd. I would like to keep posting here, but I warn you now that this blog will no longer be maintaining the super professional lifestyle design focus it originally had. I’m just going to be writing, when I write, on my own journey towards unwork and following my interests. If the topic change is not of interest to you, I will not hold it against you for removing me from your reading list.
I am at Wordcamp Houston, which is one reason I decided to pull out this app and post. Its kind of inspirational being around so many bloggers. It made me wish I liked writing more than I do.
Well anyway. Peace and nerd power to everyone. 
Hailey
Fear of Being Normal
May 10th
Throughout my whole life, I’ve struggled with fear. Growing up, I was afraid of fire and thunder and stuffed bears. As I’ve aged, some of the fears have lessened and changed, but I’m no way over my fear. I’ve replaced my fear of bears with the roar of the airplane that is about to take off under my feet.
I still fight my fears. I still go on trips and light candles. But there is one fear that I’ve had for my whole life that I will never hate and will never try to get over. It is the fear that, until college, ruled my life.
It’s the fear of being normal.
I fear conformity. I fear the crowd. I fear that people will look at me and claim that I’m just another one of the sheeple. I fear waking up when I’m 40 and realizing I never did anything with my life. That I’m am ordinary.
Because I want to be extraordinary.
In college, I got beaten down a bit (not literally) and burnt out. By the end of college, I just wanted to veg out and do my job. I had turned into one of those dreaded sheeple. After graduation, I got a job as a web developer. As jobs go, it’s pretty nice. I make a decent living working 4 days a week.
But as the burn out from college began to subside, my old fear began to come back. I felt normal. Well, I was normal. And that needed to change. I began searching for myself. I wanted to prove that no, I wasn’t just an ordinary girl. I could be extraordinary.
That’s what got me to where I am now. I started this blog and am working on some super awesome projects.
And never again am I going to be normal.
Want to join me?
Photo Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pinksherbet / CC by 2.0
My UnWork
Apr 27th
Many people have asked about my story. I get questions like:
- Are you UnWorking?
- What is your UnWork?
- Do you have a job?
My Journey
I am a programmer. Even before I learned to program, I had a logical bent to my thinking. But it also meant that I had a bit of a crazy streak. Not the go-wild-and-do-drugs kind of crazy, but the I-am-not-going-to-do-that-just-because-you-tell-me-to crazy. In middle school, I cut all of the belt loops off my pants so I didn’t have to wear a belt. Yeah. That kind of crazy.
Well, I grew up a bit and got my first job. It was an after school envelope stuffing position, which was great for me at the time, but I learned a good lesson – I didn’t want a traditional ‘job’.
During college, I tried blogging, but didn’t really have a good topic. I quit that soon after it began. Then I got a job at the University programming web sites. As far as jobs go, it was awesome. It was a cool environment and I was learning a lot. I liked programming.
Graduation rolled around and they liked me as much as I liked them, so they offered me a full time position. It was super flexible and fun work. I took the job.
Towards UnWork
After working a little while, that same notion began to return.
“Didn’t I say that I wasn’t going to do this?” I said to myself one day. “But it’s fun. It can’t be that bad!”
But I needed something else. I had to do something different in my free time. So I sat down and asked myself what I was really passionate about. What did I enjoy doing?What did I want my life to look like? What could I do to create something of my own while still working where I do. UnWork is what came out of that session. I realized that above all else, the idea that I could do whatever I wanted with my life became my focal point and I wanted to spread this idea to others. That’s why I started this blog.
But I didn’t want to quit my job. It was fun, so why should I quit? I decided to take a day off to blog and take an art class (two things on my list of goals), so now I work 4 days on and am off 3. It works great. And that is how I want my life to be set up. It’s also giving me a little extra income while I get the blog and some other, at this point, unannounced projects off the ground. The extra income also allows me to donate to charity.
My UnWork
So to answer the questions, I am UnWorking. You are seeing the results of that now. I really have a passion for helping people (myself included), design and create the life that they want to live. Do I make a living at this? Not yet, but I believe that I will. I know people who are living the UnWork lifestyle and making full time incomes at it. Will a little effort I (and you) can to.
iPad Only
Apr 12th
I got my iPad a little over a week ago. I’ve been using it so much that it feels like longer. I have been watching a few people on the Internet try to use only the iPad for a month, specifically Ed Dale and Paul Colligan. I haven’t vowed to go iPad only, but on my personal work (aka anytime that i’m not being paid to code), I have been pretty much iPad only.
The two main exceptions to this have been when I was testing some code that I got back from a contractor and watching some videos on Vimeo. The code was in python and needed to be run locally, so couldn’t do that on my iPad (although I do have an FTP and SVN client running on my iPad for non-local stuff). The videos were a webcast that was going to be taken down that I really wanted to see.
The only other thing that I haven’t been able to do well is post to my blog. I had to work out a system where I write out my blog entries in Pages and then get my VA to post them for me. Still working on this one, but I think it will be doable. I really wish the iPad WordPress app worked better than it does, but without copy and paste and rich text display, it’s just not real usable right now. I also didn’t have much luck editing via the web interface. For some reason, my rich text fields are not working correctly.
But some of the things that I have been able to do on my iPad make the limitations well worth it. I love writing on the iPad. Typing is really easy in the landscape mode and since the keys and the text are right next to each other it’s really easy. And pages is super pretty.
Yesterday I finished my business plan using one of the Pages templates, and brainstormed on my new web app using a combination of MindNode and iWireframe. Both of these tools work great in their infancy and I expect them to get even better. Once I finish my diagram and wireframes, I just need to email them to my designer and programmer and that will get the project started. All from my iPad.
For notes, I have ended up using an app called CourseNotes. It is made for students, but does a great job at collecting and organizing notes on various topics. My only wish is that I could name a session of notes, but that feature is probably coming.
I have even gone iPad only during play time too. My relaxing time has been spent playing iPad games and watching Doctor Who on Netflix. At some point, I’ll go back to reading actual books, but for now, it’s all iPad. I have yet to try reading a book in iBooks, but I have my doubts about the backlit screen hurting my eyes. But i’d really love it if iBooks would store PDF files as well as epub. A lot of the books I read are PDF ebooks that I get online. It would be nice not needing a separate PDF reader.
Well there are some of my initial thoughts about the iPad. I am really looking forward to coming up with even greater tasks to try to do on my iPad. This device is truly awesome!!
Photo By: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ivyfield/ / CC BY 2.0
A Book Changed My Life
Mar 20th
It was a nice fall day in Houston, Texas. I was planning to meet some friends for dinner at 6. It was 3 and I was already in the correct part of town.
Driving around, I saw a Borders bookstore off to my right. What a great way to waste some time! As a total book junkie, I love just wandering around aimlessly in bookstores with all those book and their seemingly endless supply of knowledge. So I pulled in.
In a bookstore, the books draw me in and lead me from place to place as something new catches my eye. Today, it was the self help books that were calling to me. That’s when I saw it. ‘4 Hour Work Week’ was its title. Little did I know, that book would change my life.
I sat down with some quality time with Tim Ferris as I started to read the first chapter. In it were exciting stories about Tango and Travel (both of which I love too). Well that book had me. I bought it and read it all that weekend.
Speaking to my Heart
What that book was able to do was to awaken a deep desire inside of me. Growing up, I had always claimed that I would take the bull by the horns and live a life that was uniquely me. I wasn’t going to work for someone just to earn money. I wanted to make a difference.
What Tim Ferris’s book awakened in me was that same desire. Decrease the work and increase the play. Or for me, if was to decrease the work and increase the ‘UnWork’, or the actions that you are truely passionate about and adds to your life and to the world.
UnWork
I coined to word UnWork to distinguish it from being lazy. Going to start a preschool in Asia or traveling the world to further develop a better understanding of your world neighbors is not lazy (as opposed to spending all day watching TV), but its also not work as in sitting in a cubicle and doing whatever your boss tells you to.
So my goal… decrease the amount of Work I do and increase the amount of UnWork. I want to be judged by the amount of UnWork that I do. As such, I am becoming an UnWorkaholic.
If you had all the money in the world, what would you do to make a difference?
Photo By: http://www.flickr.com/photos/adangarcia/ / CC BY 2.0
