The Invisible Mentor

Archive for January 5th, 2010

Today we present the second part of Steve Spalding‘s interview. As was the case with the first part of the interview, part two is very detailed and loaded with solid information that you can use.

Tell me a little bit about yourself.

What I’ll tell you is that I find questions like that to be hard, on principle. The problem, I guess, is that I never know what it is that you want to hear.

The easiest thing to say is what I do. I run a small firm called Crossing Gaps LLC. We help big brands and small creatives tell their stories using the web, which really is a fancy way of saying that we do strategy design and consulting.

On top of this I write. I write for my blog, howtosplitanatom.com and I write for our stable of side projects.

When I’m not doing that I spend the rest of my time waxing poetic on Social Media channels. Right now I’m pretty deeply interested in psychology, behavioral finance and how all of that ties back into the ways we use the web for business.

As an Invisible Mentor, what is one piece of advice that you would give to readers?

Setup a system to organize your work, immediately. I am not talking about a productivity system or anything complicated like that (though those can be useful for some people) what I mean is a systematic process for achieving your long term goals.

Entrepreneurs tend to get stuck on either the “big picture” or the small details, both of which are myopic viewpoints by themselves. To get anything done you need to be able to have a grasp of the actionable steps that have to be accomplished in order to achieve your goal. These steps need to be real and concrete for you. You should write them down and check them off as you accomplish them. Not only that but every so often you should look back at the list and see how far you have progressed, what you are getting stuck on and just how off the rails you’ve gone since the last time you looked. The more times you revisit, tweak and refine that list of steps the better off you will be.

How do you integrate your personal and professional life?

Once again, organization is key.

Entrepreneurial types are chronic workaholics. We have it in our heads that working more equates to working better. This is fine and dandy when it’s true, but there are a lot of times when we work so hard that we become useless to ourselves and those around us. The smartest entrepreneurs know that those are the times to stop and step away from the desk for a while.

The way I work it is that on weekdays I keep working until I feel like I am losing focus, when that starts to happen I step away and run some errands or read a book or do something outside. Once I’ve cooled down a little, I come back and start again. I also carve out at least one day a week where I don’t work at all, and if I do it’s only when something is critically important.

I’m definitely no expert on work/life balance, but this system is a whole lot better than the other ones I’ve tried.

What’s a major regret that you’ve had in life?

I am sure that if I were being really hard on myself I’d be able to come up with something, but honestly I don’t do regret.

Everything bad that has ever happened to me has contributed to who I am today. When I’ve made mistakes, those mistakes have kept me from making bigger ones later on. It’s really difficult to predict how changing our actions may have affected a situation, There are far too many variables and far too many things working behind the scenes. If you think about it for too long and wallow in regret, you’ll go insane.

To protect my sanity, I just try my best to deeply consider my actions before doing them so that even if I regret an outcome I can say that I did everything that I could to make it right.

What are five life lessons that you have learned so far?

1. You can’t predict the future, though you should try to come close
2. You’ll never be perfect, though you should try to come close
3. You’ll fail over and over again and if you aren’t you should be doing more interesting stuff
4. The only way to learn anything at all is to do it over and over again until your brain is too annoyed at you to forget it
5. Everyone has something to say, everyone is interesting. It’s up to you to be humble and to accept this and learn from as many people as you can

When you have some down time, how do you spend it?

I read (mostly science fiction), I write (mostly non-fiction), I travel (mostly in the U.S.), and I am an assistant coach for the University of Florida Fencing team (mostly to keep sane).

When you live behind a desk, it’s nice to have something that forces you to go outside and interact with people. It’s also nice to have something that gives you a little bit of exercise.

Other than that, I try to keep up on the industry and keep working on any of the dozens of little side projects that are floating around in my head.

What process do you use to generate great ideas?

Remember when I said everyone is interesting and it’s important to recognize that? Well, there is an adjunct to that — to me — everything is interesting as well.

Most often I get my ideas from books, movies, conversations, podcasts and just about everywhere other than my work. That’s why I spend so much time buried in one of those. I think it’s good for knowledge workers to have wide experiences, as you never know when you can draw connections from something seemingly unrelated that will become critical for a project.

What’s your favourite quotation and why?

I have so many of them.

Most recently, it would be this one from Pulitzer prize winning author Annie Dillard,

“If we listened to our intellect, we’d never have a love affair. We’d never have a friendship. We’d never go into business, because we’d be too cynical. Well, that’s nonsense. You’ve got to jump off cliffs all the time and build your wings on the way down.”

It’s sharp and true and wonderfully apropos for any entrepreneur who is trying to figure out an honest way to look at risk.

How do you define success?

Success to me is being happy to wake up and go to work more days than you aren’t.

It doesn’t mean that you aren’t annoyed or frustrated. It doesn’t even mean that you have to like the details all that much. All it means is that when your eyes open and you think about how you are going to spend the next 8-10 hours of your life, you are content with what you come up with.

Money, fame, cash and prizes all come afterward but happiness is critical. Without happiness the rest — as they say — isn’t worth a hill of beans.

In your opinion what’s the formula for success?

Pick something that you want to do. Make sure you are capable of doing it. Break it apart into small, achievable goals and then work until you’re bleeding on the floor to accomplish those goals.

Somewhere in there you also have to be willing to recognize when the environment changes and it is time for you to adapt your goals and your wants to the new landscape.

Stagnation is the kiss of death in entrepreneurship, and worse than stagnation is believing that you are right. You are always wrong, the faster you get used to that the better.

What are the steps you took to succeed in your field?

I made a lot of mistakes.

It didn’t stop there though, in the wake of every failed idea or half-cocked project I tried to pull out that reason that everything went wrong.

I think it’s OK to fail. I think that entrepreneurship of all stripes, especially in something as esoteric as the web, is about testing and iteration.

That being said, I also think that all this embracing failure stuff only works if you understand the fact that you need to use your failures to make better decisions in the future.

Sometimes people listen to folks like me and get too comfortable failing. You should never be comfortable failing! I don’t want you to fail, ever if you can help it but most of us can’t and I want you to accept that and do your best to lose the fear, minimize failures and learn from the ones you can’t get away from.

What advice do you have for someone just starting out in your field?

First, do your best not to listen to “experts.”

Second, use your common sense.

If a strategy or tactic doesn’t sit right with you it might be because it doesn’t work.

The best thing anyone can do when trying to learn something new is to consider the incentives driving your teachers. Do they have a book to sell? A consultancy that is based around some particular tactic? Maybe they are trying to butter you up to parlay a speaking gig.

Figure out why someone might be trying to sell you on something counter-intuitive, and take their advice with whatever grains of salt you think their biases deserve.

That being said, don’t be afraid to listen to everyone. Even if someone is motivated by something that isn’t in your best interest, there is a chance that there is a kernel of truth in what they are saying.

If you are going to work on the web in any capacity, you need to learn to become a good filter and to never accept anything at face value.

If trusted friends could introduce you to five people that you’ve always wanted to meet, who would you choose? And what would you say to them?

I like people who tell stories, so if I could meet any five of them they would be:

Malcolm Gladwell (Outliers, Blink)

Ira Glass (This American Life)

Joss Whedon (Buffy, Firefly, Dollhouse)

Neil Gaiman (Sandman, American Gods, Stardust)

Quentin Tarantino (Pulp Fiction, Resevoir Dogs, Kill Bill)

As to what I would say — I have this friend of mine who bakes. She’s great at it. Seriously, she is fantastic, if it has sugar and goes into an oven she probably knows something about it. Well, it was my birthday one of these months and she was going to bake me a cake.  She called me up and asked me what type of cake I wanted. I told her that I wasn’t going to tell her, in fact, I wasn’t going to say anything at all about it because I can’t cook my way out of an Easy Bake Oven and anything I said would probably just make her cake worse.

That’s how I treat the second half of your question. Each of these people is very, very good at what he does. If I tried to lead the conversation, I’d probably miss out on the best parts of what they had to say.

If I have to ask questions, I’d ask them each to tell me what they were currently interested in, what was keeping them up at nights. I think that would work pretty well.

Which one book had a profound impact on your life? What was it about this book that impacted you so deeply? Did you have an emotional or intellectual attachment to this book? Why?

I read a lot of comics as a kid. Heck, I read a lot now but I tend to call them “graphic novels” these days. When you work with stories and help people tell narratives it’s a very good thing to understand a variety of narrative forms yourself.

Anyway, the only “super hero” comic I can read without cringing is Iron Man, and I think that book profoundly affected the way I deal with the world. You’ve probably seen the movie or at least heard about it, but the long and short is that it involves a super hero without super powers. He is just a regular guy, rich as all get out and brilliant, but otherwise as normal as either one of us.

What always interested me about Tony Stark’s character is that the best parts of the books aren’t the super-powered fight sequences, they are when Tony is using his smarts to get over seemingly insurmountable odds. He is like Batman but for Engineers.

It’s a little strange that a comic would have such a profound effect on me, but it taught me that determination, discipline and knowledge where extraordinarily powerful weapons and in the hands of someone who knew how to wield them, they could change the world.

Melodramatic, maybe but that’s what comics are for — right?

If you were stranded on a deserted island, what are five books that you would like to have with you and why? Summarize the book in two sentences.

Catspaw (Joan Vinge) – This is the first Sci-Fi novel I ever read. Considering I’ve read dozens and dozens of others since then, I think this would definitely be worth keeping around.

Freakanomics (Stephen Levitt) – I am a big fan of economic theory turned to explain society and culture, that is what Stephen Levitt does in his book. I’m a sucker for anyone who can breath life into numbers.

What The Dog Saw (Malcolm Gladwell) – This is a great anthology from one of the more interesting thinkers of our time.

Something written by Andrew Keen – I so rarely agree with him that I figure time on a desert island might give me some new perspective on his work.

Have you read any books that inspired you to start a business, service or invent “something”? If yes, which book?

As I said I get my inspiration from all over the place. It’s hard to point to one particular book that has spurred me to create a new business. These days I am very deliberate about starting new projects, it would have to be quite a book to get me to go through that process.

What excites you about life?

There is so much that no one knows yet.

Really think about that for a second.

There are questions that exist that we can’t or haven’t answered. Not only that, there are just as many questions that we have answered incorrectly.

For an entrepreneur, that is a massive landscape to work within. Having the drive and opportunity to try to answer a few of those questions and make the lives of others better in the process is an extraordinary gift to me.

How do you nurture your soul?

I think I have the soul of a teacher, so to nurture it, I teach.

I might not have a huge amount of time, but I always try to make myself available to people who ask for my help. Sometimes that means falling behind on things, but the truth is that none of this has a point if you aren’t using a few cycles to try to make the world a better place.

If you had a personal genie and she gave you one wish, what would you wish for? Or, if I gave you a magic wand, what would you use it for?

I would give myself more hours. You can buy just about everything in the world except for time, and in this new world we are all living in time is the biggest and most scarce resource that we have.

If I could wish for anything it would be for more time to work, play, and learn.

Complete the following, I am happy when…..

I am awake.

How can you apply information from this interview? What are your thoughts? Let’s keep the conversation flowing, please comment. Many readers read this blog from other sites, so why don’t you pop over to The Invisible Mentor and subscribe (top on the left side) by email or RSS Feed. I created a Mini Learning Toolkit and you can grab a copy by clicking here.


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