Living the Dream

It’s written inside of most self-help books out there. Goals! Focus on goals! Imagining success was thought to be one of the prime ways of motivating yourself. Turns out that this was proved false. Imagining yourself losing that weight or as a successful startup CEO actually saps you of energy to pursue these goals. I know this is true from personal experience as well. 

One of my favorite quotes about this is “Losers have Goals, Winners have Systems” spoken by Scott Adams (aka creator of Dilbert). Overarching focus on goals is not the way to succeed. Instead developing a system that gets you where you want to go is the surest path to success.

Nowhere is this more apparent than investing. Investors dream of a fat payout and easy money, but end up making poor choices and emotionally driven gambles that cost them their life savings. I’m not proud to say this, but I was guilty of the same during my first foray into day trading. I picked possibly the single worst asset class to day trade (equity options) and traded based on hunches and guesses. Several thousand dollars in losses later I bucked down, shifted my strategy (and asset class) and began to make money.

The only change? I completely systematized my practice. I recorded every single trade I made into a spreadsheet, and outlined my strategies in a trading journal. I read up on technical analysis and statistics and began completely automatic, emotionless , methods. By making systematic, emotionless day trading a habit, I broke my losing streak.

This technique can be applied to any area of life. Need to exercise? Develop a habit of going to the gym periodically. Need to improve your diet? Design an eating plan and stick to it. Looking for a job? Develop a process to locate and apply for job leads and yep you guessed it, make it a habit. Habits are difficult to gain but easy to maintain. Once you’re in step it’s much easier to stick to the process (just follow your habit) and your goals accomplish themselves.

With Twitter being in news due to some drastic platform changes, it has gotten me thinking on how much value do I derive from the service. I’ve been using Twitter since 2010 when I opened up an account with the goal to keep up with the Valley.

I was working for a company in Ann Arbor then and one of my responsibilities was to keep up with and periodically update the CEO on any new events, trends, opportunities, etc. The physical distance between me and California was not very conducive.

Twitter helped immensely with that. By getting a constant feed of useful bits of data, links from some of the most smartest and awesome people in the Valley it felt like I was in the middle of all the action. Since that community was one of Twitter’s earliest adopters, it represented a preview of what the service looks like today.

Twitter is different from Facebook because can be used to pursue and track your interests as opposed to just your social circle. That makes it an extremely valuable tool for consumption.

I’m still watching app.net to see if they can match the breadth and activity of Twitter.

I’m happy and proud to announce that my startup’s first product, Spear, is now in private alpha. 

Check it out here for more info.

Spear simplifies your financial life by letting you learn about and compare investment decisions. These are some of the most important decisions that you will make over your entire life, and being better informed of your options helps you make them more effectively.

The ultimate goal I have for Spear is to become a valuable educational tool for investors, and to allow anybody develop a deep and nuanced perspective on how the markets work. You could say it is an educational slash software product. And I believe that as more people can learn about the market really works, the market itself becomes better as a mechanism for price discovery and resource allocation.

When I was first tossing around product ideas in my head, I knew that I didn’t just want to build a useful and well-made tool. It also needed to be something that plants seeds of change into the world, and to potentially leave it a better place than it was before.

This is only the beginning, Spear has amazing additional features on the way, sign up to give it a try today.

Last August I stepped off a plane at the San Francisco airport and faced the most terrifying experience of my life.

Thirty days before that I had a long heart to heart talk with Bobby, the founder and CEO of Saagara and the best boss a crazy kid like me could ask for. It was at that point that I decided to transition out of Saagara and work on my own idea.

The idea itself was this amorphous thing in my head, at the time I had no marketing plan, no code, no prototype. Just a concept and a name. I decided to not return to Michigan in September, and extended my leave of absence indefinitely. And then I buckled down and started planning. And coding. And planning some more.

After living in Ann Arbor for 5 years, I got restless and decided to move somewhere else. Since I was building a web / mobile product, the Bay Area seemed like a natural choice. That and I missed Cheeseboard pizza.

So back to me at the airport, I barely made my connecting flight in Chicago and my checked luggage got left in Chicago. I arrived into Palo Alto with a small carry on and my laptop bag. Luckily the luggage arrived the next day. I stayed with a friends family for a week, rented a room in a small town called San Bruno, and got back to work.

I worked out of coffee shops, restaurants, my mattress, and even a couple of bars. I extended my limited knowledge of iOS development, learned Python, Ruby, Rails, some CSS, some Javascript, some design, some marketing. It felt like school all over again, except I got to assign myself grades.  When my savings ran out, I hired myself out to large company to build an iPad app for them. This was the first time I built a software product from start to finish (my own product wasn’t complete then).

I had terrifying moments. I had strangers I met on the caltrain call me crazy and tell me to go back to school and get a proper job. I didn’t care. I was stressed out but I truly believed in what I was doing and loved the ups and downs of the experience. Most importantly, I know the product I am building will change the world. So when everything seemed dark and I was running on empty, that fact sustained me and propelled me forward.

Now I am about to enter a new stage where I put what I learned to the test. This is going to be a fun ride.