www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzxfIwQaRIw

If you’re having trouble viewing the video, click here to watch Hitting the wall -- 5 months in China on Youtube.

The main content is in the video above, but as always, there’s some extra stuff to talk about.

Celebrity Status

I remember growing up and at some point learning the phrase “it’s rude to stare”.

I don’t know if this saying exists in Chinese, but if it does it’s certainly not followed when I’m around.  This attention can be completely intoxicating and utterly unnerving depending on my mood.

It’s great fun to catch a girl staring at me on the subway, as when I meet her gaze she will immediately look away, and then after a little while look back, at which point I smile and then she has no idea what to do next.  She’ll either immediately bury her face or instead manage a half-smile in the way a deer might freeze in a car’s headlights.

It provides a start contrast to the people I’ve met here who are quite comfortable around foreigners.  But they too can be impacted as there have been times when I’ve been chatting with a local, particularly women, and everyone around us will start staring, much more so that if it was just me by myself.  It’s like they’ve been thrust into the spotlight by association.

But on some days it wears thin. I was hiking on  a mountain last weekend by myself and it seemed like with every group I passed, someone would say “hello” and then snicker.  I’m sure it wasn’t intended to be patronising, but by the time I got the top I was really tired of it.

Yes, I have fair skin and blonde / red hair.  No I’m not from around here.  Get over it.

When I catch myself thinking like this I end up feeling really disappointed with myself, because the Chinese people that I’ve met have been so incredibly friendly and genuinely interested in where I’m from and what I’m doing here.  Hospitable to a fault.

It’s just that the friendliness can wear you down after a while and it can begin to feel like they’re taking the piss.  Some kid came up to me on the mountain and asked if I would have a photo with him. We took the photo but instead of being happy to have a fan, I felt drained.

If I had to deal with this all day every day, I’d no doubt go a bit nutty and put up some emotional walls like celebrities often do.

I hope I never get to that point.

Language Learning

5 months ago, my purpose for coming to China was to learn the language.  And after 5 months I’ve made a lot of progress but I’m still a long way off what I would call conversationally fluent.

I’m also losing motivation.

It seems like my emotions fluctuate wildly week to week with every small win and defeat.  One day I successfully order some train tickets, the next I forget all the words I know and can’t answer a basic question about the weather.

And it’s clear that I can’t keep a single focus on language learning as it’s just too exhausting.  To keep making good progress I need to continually break the habits I fall into and throw myself into new situations and learn from experience by making lots and lots of mistakes.

Breaking habits and dealing with constant change requires and huge amount of energy and right now it’s not what I want to do.  I’m certainly not going to pack my bags and call it quits, but instead switch into maintenance mode while I look for something else.

I need more stability.

Fundamentally, I’m most motivated and most happy when I’m spending a lot of time with great people, working as part of a team in a way that plays to my strengths.  I haven’t been able to find a way to do this for language learning.

So I’m exploring the idea of working with one of the many startup companies that I’ve met here.  Ideally this also includes using mandarin in some capacity, but even it if doesn’t, I think getting a great group of people around me will help me to keep a more consistent emotional state.

Beijing is a great place for startups, particularly in the mobile industry and it seems like every day I read another article about someone closing a round of funding, so I’m hopeful that something will come together.

Once I’ve got a stronger foundation and more emotional consistency, I can then start tackling language learning more incrementally in a way that won’t wear me out.

Or at least that’s the plan.

                                      

Peng, Matthew, Me & Kevin – photo by TechNode

Last weekend I participated in TechNode’s MeshUp Workshop here in Beijing – the goal being to rapidly generate ideas for mobile apps which could make life easier in China.

My team actually won the day, which was a nice surprise and the whole thing was a good experience for a bunch of reasons, which is funny because I almost didn’t attend, and I went in with the expectation that I probably wouldn’t get a lot from it.  How much can you do in 90 mins?

As it turns out, more than I realised!

Brainstorming

Our only guideline was to come up with something that could “make life easier” – it could be in any vertical from helping poor farmers, to students, to expats etc

I find brainstorming to be really difficult and I know I work better when it comes to thinking critically about what is a good idea.   It was obvious that brainstorm wasn’t a strength for anyone in our group as while we were able to generate half a dozen ideas, nothing was ‘out of the box’.  We ideas we came up with were:

• something for language learning
• something to help find an apartment (HT Jen)
• something to find restaurant specials (HT @MikeBoyd)
• something to compare prices in store vs online
• … and a few others

Selection

The good thing about fewer ideas, means that you don’t have to spend so much time trying to work out which one to explore further.

… and without really discussing it, we went with an app to compare prices in store vs online, as this is something we had all experienced and understood the problem clearly.

It’s really annoying when you need to shop for a physical product (like a vacuum cleaner) which you know very little about and really need to go to a store to inspect it before you feel comfortable making a purchase.  The only problem is, once you’re in store and have decided which vacuum, you now have the problem of choosing where to buy it from.

You know you will pay a premium if you buy in store, but sometimes this is ok as you can get the product right away, but how much of a premium are you prepared to pay?

Ideally you want to know all your options, what price is it if you order online and does the saving justify the wait?  Having that information at your fingertips prevents post-purchase dissonance – no one likes to buy something only to discover they got ripped off.

This idea also easily ticks the boxes of:

• who is your customer?
• why would they use this?
• can it be monetized?

UPDATE: After talking about this idea with a friend, he suggested I look at ShopSavvy… which seems extremely similar oh well…

Thinking clearly, getting to the core of the idea

After some open discussion around the idea, we began to drill down on exactly what we were trying to do.  China has an interesting e-commerce landscape, there are a few big players, or online malls similar to Amazon and fewer small specialist retailers.  There isn’t one stand out place to buy from, which is the core difference from Amazon’s Price Check app.  In China there are at least 5 different “Amazons” so our app would need to be an aggregator.

Mapping out the user experience as simply as possible was the next challenge and broke it down like:

1. Capture product data (like taking a photo of the bar code)
2. Display aggregated search results
3. Make selection and show detailed information
4. If happy, make the purchase

It was really interesting to note how hard it was to simplify down to these steps, we kept on getting distracted by possible features such as comparing to other physical stores, or social network integration, and it was clear from some of the other teams’ presentations that they had also struggled with keeping things simple.

In 90 mins you cannot map out and consider every possible function so it’s critical that you stay focussed on the 1 core problem you are trying to solve and ignore anything that doesn’t directly address this.

For instance I kept on thinking about shipping and how that affects the reliability of online pricing – we could use the GPS location of the phone to get the postcode, and then calc shipping but what if the customer lives a long way from where they were using the app…. this level of detail is simply not important in early stage brainstorming!

Practice pitching

One of my favourite parts of these events is seeing other people pitch, and hearing what they have come up with.  Amusingly, 1 group had chosen to do a language learning app, and another had chosen a restaurant deals app. And another guy was independently working on an apartment finding app.  I suppose great minds think alike…

I love the art of the pitch, and my group nominated me to get behind the mic and I tried to stick with the proven method of opening with a simple story and basically walking through a case study of how the app would be used, using a clear real world example.

I pretended that my vacuum cleaner had exploded last week in a puff of smoke and that it was really frustrating going to the local home electrical store and trying to find a new one, especially when I don’t know anything about vacuum cleaners.

I think I did a reasonable job of selling the pain, and explaining how we could solve the problem.

And we were lucky enough to be selected as the team with the best idea!

Networking

The biggest take away from these kind of events though is the opportunity to meet and work with like minded people.  If I ever had to recruit in this space I would be going to these events all the time as there were clearly some smart people in the room.

I’ve got a couple of coffee and lunch dates booked later in the week with people I met to find out more about what they’re up to and I’m sure that they will spiral into going to more events, and meeting more people.

You learn about yourself

Finally, putting your hand up for these sorts of events teaches you a lot about how you work and who you work well with.  It also gives you a chance to play with leadership and public speaking, which you might not get a lot of practice with in your day to day work.

It takes a lot of practice to recognising the situations where you need to assert yourself and make decisions vs when you need to let other people take the lead.  I’m not great at this and know that I need more practise.

It also allows gives you a starting point if you’re looking for a new project or an idea to develop.  While no one in my group was particularly interested in taking the price check app any further, I can see how the idea might feed into a more extended “hackathon” style event, where you might be able to cobble together a functional prototype in a couple of days.

So that’s what I did on Saturday afternoon.

                                      

The case study (all 3500 words of it) has just been published on Entrepreneurs-Journey, a well known internet marketing website.

You can read the full text here:

How I Made My First Internet Dollar – A Passive Income Niche Site Case Study

(as published on Entrepreneurs-Journey on 4 April 2012)

                                      

I’m in a good place in my life, I don’t really need anything in terms of gifts and while I love seeing people wish me happy birthday on Facebook or call or email me, it always strikes me as goodwill poorly directed. And I think this is my fault for not giving the people who care about me a way to show that they care in a meaningful way, so they just default to what’s available to them, like a message on Facebook.

I’ve seen Tim Ferriss (one day I’ll find someone else to idolise I promise) do something neat for his birthday the last couple of years. In lieu of gifts, he asks his community to make a donation to a charity to build a school in Vietnam. He then promises to match their donations, dollar for dollar to a maximum of $20,000.  And he also throws in a few incentives to make sure the message gets spread far and wide.

I’m not Tim.  But yesterday I thought about getting my friends to donate to something for my birthday, and maybe I could of squeezed them for $500, an amount I would of been happy to match.  I even priced a well, thinking maybe we could get enough to have a specific, tangible outcome from our donations, but I was disappointed to find well’s are expensive.

The other problem is that my birthday is only 1 day.  And if you don’t check Facebook every 30 seconds, then you might miss my post.  Or maybe a friend wants to help but is too busy with something or just doesn’t have the cash this week.  How can you extend the window of giving?  Your birthday is the 1 day of the year were people are predisposed to give you stuff, so how can you take maximum advantage of this for a good purpose?

So there’s a bunch of problems here:

1. Lots of goodwill, with no where to do
2. A call to action to give to charity needs to be meaningful
3. Your birthday is only 1 day – a flash in the pan. It’s very easy for your message to get lost or ignored.  Or people see your message, but don’t have the ability to take action in the moment.  They need to be told a couple of times.

Let’s explore points 2 and 3…

What does meaningful charity look like?

In my experience charity is most meaningful when it is personal, tangible, builds community and creates permanent change.

Personal means that you know the person whom is asking you for help – if your friend asks you to support a cause, you are way more likely to help than if it’s a random person wearing a Red Cross hat.  If you don’t help your friend, you might even feel like you’re letting them down.  No such negative feeling when it’s a stranger.

Tangible means you get to see how you helped.  Some charities are getting better at this – for Xmas the last few years my Mum has asked for a goat.  Which ‘costs’ $50.  But this is just a card with a picture of a goat on it.  The $50 just goes into the charities ‘pool’ and is allocated as they see fit.  There’s no goat in Africa with my mum’s name on it.

There are 2 instances where I’ve seen charities really make the donations they receive tangible, 1 is the sponsor a child people. You get regular updates from the child with photos and news – they create a feedback loop so you see how you’re effecting change.  And the other is when you do something BIG, like building a school.

The problem with the sponsor the child is that many people don’t want to commit themselves to a recurring donation (read: never ending guilt trap) and the problem with a school is that it’s expensive and very few people can donate $20k in a hit.

Building community, this is fundamental.  We humans love feeling part of a group or team and shared experience is a great way to create this.  This is one of the reasons why Movember is so effective – instant camaraderie between participants. I’ve high-fived complete strangers on the street, just because they have a dodgy moustache and it’s November.

Permanent change is vital because it means that the person you’re giving to isn’t going to turn around and ask you for more money next month.  If the change is permanent, you get a much stronger sense of achievement; you’ve ticked the box, marked it off, can move on the next challenge.  You’ve won a small battle.  Winning feels good.

Window of opportunity

Now, as for the small 24 hour window of opportunity, that is your birthday.

We know from marketing 101 that the more times you can get your message in front of someone, the more likely they are to notice and subsequently take action.  But in the case of your birthday, you have a very limited scope for repeating your message without annoying everyone around you.

Maybe you could announce to your friends, as week before the actual day that you’d like to donate your birthday to charity, and then give a reminder on the day before, and then really push on your actual birthday.  But you seriously risk creating resentment by being too pushy – everyone else only gets 1 day of magic… why do you need 7?

Finally, there’s the chance that your timing is bad.  Some news event breaks or your birthday is on the same day as Melbourne cup day.  You’re screwed.

How can this problem be solved?  What would a success model look like?

Given all that, how can I leverage all that good will and direct it to something that meets all those criteria.  Right now I don’t think I can.  Which is why I didn’t ask everyone for money yesterday.

But a little bit later in the morning I realised that if I make it a team effort, it might actually be possible.  What if I was to get a few other people who have a birthday around the same time, and combine our networks and goodwill?

We all donate our birthdays, each putting up a little bit of seed money and then tell all our friends.  We cross post for each other so that the message is seen multiple times.

It extends the campaign timeframe from 1 day out to several weeks.  If you have 3 or 4 people, working to gather with birthdays spread across a month, all working together with the same call to action, you have a much bigger chance of getting attention as you can show multiple calls to action without them becoming inappropriate.

It also has great social proof, as each person’s effort builds for the team.  If someone see’s a call to action, and 20 people have already signed on, they are much more likely to join the fray than if it’s just 1 or 2.

Finally, it removes the risk of a single point of failure.  Even if a big news story breaks and 1 person’s message gets lost, there are others in the team to help support the effort.

In terms of the charity criteria, because it’s drawn out over a longer time period, you have more chance of creating community, first amongst those to donate their birthday, then amongst the supporters.

And because you’re tapping a larger number of people, you should be able to raise enough money to get a tangible outcome that creates permanent change – like building a well which you can then take a photo of and the people who participated can claim it as ‘their well’.  You can hang a plaque off it with everyone’s name… that kinda stuff that creates the winning feeling.

Points to think about

I’m going to explore this idea early next year for my 30th birthday, and here’s some things I’m going to do:

• Identify all my friends and family who have a birthday in March, ask if they’d be interested in donating their birthday.
• For the ones that say yes, ask them to identify their friends and family who also have a birthday in March and ask them as well, and so on…
• Get a calendar full of peoples birthdays.
• Identify a charity and agree on a project to work towards.  I think it would be best if everyone supported the 1 charity, rather than trying to do their own thing.
• Make sure the charity has low overheads and isn’t going to suck your money into administration
• Come up with an achievable project, based on how many people have pledged their support.  Might need to liaise directly with the charity.
• Create a simple website that explains what the cause is, it should tell a compelling story.
• Create a few simple messages for participants to distribute to their family and friends explained that they’d like a donation for their birthday.
• Make sure everything is trackable so that people who donate are seen – anonymous donations don’t create personal connections or build community. (but if people really want to be anonymous that’s cool too)
• Consider creating Kickstarter style incentives to give a positive feedback to donators in the short term.  Big projects like building schools / wells have a long lead time.  Internet people have an attention span of minutes.  If someone gives money that will ‘someday’ go to a well, its hard to feel good about it now.  But if you donate and you get some acknowledgement immediately from the person you’re donating to  (e.g. high-5, coffee date, phone call) AND you get your name on a well later, it feels really good.
• Consider creating incentives to assist with promotion.  Run a competition like “whomever can get this message retweeted by the biggest celebrity figure gets blah blah blah”
• When the first participants birthday arrives, the whole team retweets / fbs / likes etc to drive the message.  This happens for each person in turn so that the message is spread to as many people as possible, and is seen as many time as possible.  But it’s spread naturally in the network so a no point does it become too agressive.
• Make sure that when the campaign finishes, the results are shared and there is much patting on the back.
• Make sure that when the project is build, everyone who participated is informed and treated like a champ.  Need to capture emails / contact details to be able to get this message out.

So there you have it, a model that might turn birthday goodwill into cool shit that helps people.

If anyone wants to do this, I’d love to hear how it goes and I’ll even chip in.  Otherwise, I’m going to try my best to make something like this happen next year.

Finally, if there’s anything I’ve missed which might mean this isn’t such a good idea, please let me know  – feedback definitely welcome.

                                      

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ry55sNArWzc

If you’re having trouble viewing the video, click here to watch 3 months in China on YouTube.

The main content is in the video above, but there are a couple of points that I want to expand on.

Language Learning

At the moment I’m amazed by just how tough this is. Every day I’m trying to do the things necessary that will help me improve but this is without a doubt the hardest thing I’ve ever tried. A university degree has got nothing on learning a language. The thing that makes it especially hard is that my success is dependant solely on me.

Self discipline is not my strongest skill and its becoming obvious to me that the people who succeed in learning new language are the ones that just stick at it day in day out and constantly work at it. It’s difficult for me because I’m motivated by being held accountable to other people and also by being placed in a competitive environment. Language learning doesn’t naturally have these elements. Unlike uni, where if you show up for 3 years, do a bit of study and write the exams, you’ll come out with a degree. Job done.

So what I’m trying to do is build in these elements. I have a class which I’m attending 3x a week with another student that is at a similar level. This creates accountability and informal competition.

I’m also meeting with a private tutor a couple of times a week, for conversation practice as well as doing my own study.

But my underlying strategy is just to throw time and effort and hope these activities bring me closer to fluency.  The analyst in me hates this approach.

I’m finding that I’m at a level where I’m having no problem making myself understood to the people around me and getting what I want. I know lots of words. The difficulty is when someone speaks to me in an unscripted environment (like IRL) and I struggle to work out what’s being said.

Once this next set of classes wraps up I’m going to need to find a way to get more unstructured listening practice.

People

On watching back the video, I realise that I sound impatient. I know quality relationships take time to build & it’s been great being able to regularly keep in touch with people on Skype so that I don’t go insane.

If I come away with nothing else from China, I want to have a great network of like minded people who know me well. The projects can come second. The problem with having people know you well is that it’s risky. The more honesty you give, the greater the risk that you’ll inadvertently rub them the wrong way. It’s easy to have a relationship with someone when all you talk about is the weather. It’s a bit tougher if you want to be able to debate Kony2012.

This problem reminds me of a book by Jim Collins called Good to Great, in which he argues that companies that assemble a great team, before setting the strategy, have a better chance of success. So that’s what I’m going to do -- spend less time on “what am I doing here” and more time with great people.

Finally, a shout out to Greg, Teresa, Konrad, Simon, Atilla & Jake, thanks for keeping me company in HK.

                                      

Photo by mr.bmonroe

Today I screwed up. It’s the biggest mistake I’ve made so far this year. I hurt another person that I care about. The fact that it wasn’t intentional is irrelevant.

There’s so much writing on mistakes and how they’re a good thing in life and how it’s a sign you’re challenging yourself and doing new things. Look for the silver lining. Look for the lesson.

Well the feeling after you’ve just realised that you’ve screwed up is still crap. It’s especially crap when your actions upset another person that you care about.

There’s no real message here for me to offer, I’ve screwed up and have done as much as possible to make amends. I’ll try not to do it again – but whether the other person forgives me or not is out of my hands.

I’m alternating between feeling like shit and laughing at my own incompetence.

Life is difficult and sometimes I just seem to make it harder for myself.

Further reading: Neil Gaiman’s New Year Wish

                                      

Photo by Zach Bulick

Just as I think it’s valuable to look back on the last 12 months of progress, I also think that planning is at the core of actually getting what you want in life. This post is the counter-part to my 12 month review post.

What’s the big picture?

My purpose is to grow, with courage & openness, sharing love & honesty, and inspiring others to do the same.

I wrote that early 2011 and I’m pleased that 12 months on it still resonates strongly.

As I mentioned in my 2011 review, I’m at a unique point in my life – I feel like I’ve just hit the reset switch in many ways. I’ve cleared out all the clutter, have ended almost all the projects I was working on and now have a clean slate with a lot of available capacity. The challenge is to make the most of this opportunity and not just get lazy and pile a bunch of crap back in. Already this week I’ve spent more time than I care to admit playing iPhone games.

If I look out to the horizon, and try and picture where I want to be 3 years from now, there’s a number of themes that I identify with. Above all else I want to continually experience situations that challenge me and force me to think about myself, the things I do, the people I spend time with and the world around me as a whole. Already I’m beginning to identify things I’m doing here in Beijing that aren’t optimal and I will need to change at some point.

My vision for the future is surprisingly clear, and I can see for the first time how some of the different aspects of my life are likely to come together. I reads like this:

I have developed my mandarin language ability to a point where I can think & speak without having to translate to english. I can read newspapers, understand marketing messages and work in mandarin, needing to look up or clarify unknown words only a few times a day. Every day I work with people I respect and admire, in a way that plays to my strengths and utilises my language ability. It is with an Australian, American or Chinese based company or companies, that has a profit motive, which does business between East / West, heavily utilising new technologies. My role is meaningful, inspires me to do my best work & I am compensated at the top of the industry. I live between China and a 2nd country, and spend most of my time in China.

My life is simple, unhurried & focused. I earn enough that outright cost is never a factor in my decisions. I have amazing friends and a peer group that shares my values & supports me in the things I choose to do. I have a relationship with a woman who is intelligent, caring, shares my values, offers a different perspective and is accomplished in her own right. My environment is free of clutter, warm, nurturing and gives me what I need.

I am fit and healthy and know how to get the best from my body. I am at all times confident, secure, relaxed and unthreatend by interactions with other people and all social situations. I am regularly approached for advice.

A lot of that sounds a bit wanky, but I’m going to run with it anyway.

Some principles

Just as last year, there are a number of principles I’d like to follow, they’re mostly the same but with a few tweaks:

Help others, when it doesn’t burden me to do so
Essentially this is a combination of charity, generosity & contribution.

Be honourable, honest & authentic with myself and others
One of things I’ve been noticing in myself and others lately is how we talk about other people in their absence. When someone I’m with bad mouths another person I’m always disappointed. But it’s something that I do too and I’d like stop. Quite often I am hyper-critical of others, but I feel this needs to be at all times delivered in a way that caring and respectful – would I say the same if they were standing next to me? This doesn’t mean i have to pretend to like everyone, or stop being critical – it just means that whatever I say must come from a place of caring rather than spite or jealousy or envy.

Give everyone a chance
I’m insanely judgemental.

Your shoes don’t match your belt? Clearly you’re an idiot.

While it would be nice to pretend that I could switch this off, at the moment I don’t think it’s something I can change. Rather, I’m going to accept that I judge, acknowledge this, and then work to give everyone the benefit of the doubt until they prove otherwise.

Do what’s important first
Too often I get caught up in being busy, rather than doing the things that matter.

Banish mediocrity from my life

Make time daily to check in with my vision, identify what the important tasks are that support this vision, then execute them

Be elegant & take my time to do things right

With the vision above and the principles I’ve outlined, must of course come practical, actionable steps.  For many of these I’m will develop a separate plan of attack but for the time being I’m just going to list them.  Some will no-doubt get their own post in the future.

Practical stuff

• Develop a daily rhythm, that helps me perform at my best & stick to it 6 days a week,
• Do a 3 month HSM (starting 25 Jan 2012),
• Exercise regularly, current options are yoga, dance, hiking,
• Develop my mandarin so I can have a casual conversation effortlessly & read a newspaper,
• Develop my online income streams to a point where I am earning $500 pm,
• Produce a meaningful body of work that is a calling card for amazing job offers,
• Build my china network,
• Bring an existing niche website to a point where it aligns with my principles & write a case study,
• Write regularly; and
• Develop and test a video marketing business idea.

                                      

Photo by Nick McIntosh

For the last couple of years now, I’ve been doing an annual review and making a plan for the upcoming year.

This post is my 2011 review, and it will be followed by my 2012 plan in the coming week or so. To review my year, I go back through all my photos, videos, blog posts, emails, calendar entries and journal to jog my memory about what projects I worked on, the people I spent time with and the places I visited. This year I also made a number of video journals as well as keeping some written notes as to my thoughts and emotions during the last 12 months – these in particular have been really interesting to look over as I can clearly see the emotional peaks and troughs I experienced.

If you’re interested you can also read my 2010 review and my 2009 review.

At the start of 2011, I set a number of goals, a summary of which were to…

• provide a meaningful contribution to others,
• show generosity with my time and money,
• improve my honesty with myself and everyone around me,
• be open to new ideas, people and situations,
• manage my time effectively, every day,
• produce my best work. EVER; and
• be elegant.

With some more specific plans to…

• learn 100 mandarin characters (simplified),
• complete 2 short-term consulting jobs to complement my existing client work,
• book flights for my next overseas trip,
• monitor and improve my health; and
• create 1 new source of cash flow.

So how did I do?

Incredibly, I hit everything except the mandarin, but I’m happy to say that I’m well on the way and I also feel like a did a good job of sticking to the principles that I outlined.

Some of the things I did were…

• measured my generosity & did some volunteering,
• exercised regularly and even went so far as to do a couple of experiments with gaining muscle mass,
• built an income producing niche website that is generating a small amount of money (enough to pay my mobile phone bill) each month,
• took a 1 month trip to China and tested if my business was location independent,
• worked with some great people, on projects I found interesting, doing things that played to my strengths,
• worked hard in my business and made enough money to cover my costs,
• continued participating in a Men’s Circle; and
• worked hard with my friend Gideon on a new business idea.

There were also a number of things that came to an end in 2011…

• after 3 years of running The Hive in Brisbane with Mike & Walter, we decided not to continue running the event in 2012; and
• after 2.5 years of meeting monthly with several friends and discussing our goals, we decided mid year that GAS had run it’s course.

But by far and away the 2 biggest things that impacted me were…

• my 3 year relationship with my girlfriend came to an end at the start of 2011; and
• selling everything I own, and leaving Australia to live indefinitely in China in December 2011.

The relationship that ended at the start of 2011 is the longest relationship I’ve had and I had no appreciation for the emotional turmoil that I would experience as a result. After looking over my journal notes, it clearly dominated my emotional state for the first half of the year and I owe my friends a lot for listening to me and giving me support during that period.

External influences

Last year there were also several events that happened around me that impacted my thinking and my actions, until now I haven’t really acknowledged or noticed things external to my little bubble but during 2011 I watched my friends face challenges and succeed, time and time again:

• Clint walked the length of the South Island of NZ,
• Mike launched Cupstart,
• Simon completed his PhD,
• Ehon launched Soften The F*&% Up,
• Jen handled a massive life change with amazing character and courage (and still took the time to listen to me),
• Chris went from strength to strength with HSM; and
• Yaro dealt with an incredibly tough year with a degree of emotional maturity that I didn’t think was humanly possible.

I’ve been incredibly lucky to be surrounded by these people and to be able to cheer them on, but it’s also a huge call to ‘step up’ because if they can do it, there’s no reason why I can’t.

However, with this inspiration came a reality check. This year for the first time in my life, I can say that I noticed death:

• a guy I went to uni with died of cancer, he was 25,
• a good friend had her close family friend pass away in her early 30s; and
• my friend’s mother had a stroke in June and she remains in hospital, 7 months on.

I’ve never been to a funeral. I still have 3 of my 4 grandparents above ground and the closest death has come is when my dog died a couple of years ago. For better or worse it’s fair to say I’ve been sheltered.

While none of these events touched me directly, 2 degrees of separation was enough to demonstrate to me that life is unpredictable and we don’t know what’s around the corner. The biggest impact of these events was that I decided to book a 1 way ticket to China, leaving Australia at the start of December, and prioritise learning a 2nd language which is something I’ve been wanting to do for several years, but haven’t pulled the trigger. I’d been waiting for a time when ‘all my ducks were in a row’ and I decided that was a poor line of thought.

The bigger picture

So…. after spending 1/2 a day reflecting on all the above, what speaks loudest about the last 12 months is not so much “look at what I achieved” but instead, “look at how unfocussed I was”. I’ve identified before that I have a habit of trying to do too much, the result of which is that I’m always busy, but it’s not necessarily work that is moving me closer to my goals. 2011 had a lot of that.

Interestingly, I’ve ended the year in a position where I’m very comfortable. Everything in my life is good. A coupe of years ago my focus was on moving away from pain (crappy job, a lack of like-minded friends and my own limiting beliefs) but I feel like I’ve levelled up in the hierarchy of needs to a point where my focus is now on moving closer to the things in life that I want. The only problem with this is that it’s MUCH harder to define these things than it is to define points of pain.

This is perhaps one of the reasons why I’ve been rather scattered – I haven’t had a good answer to “what do I really want” and the default is to do anything and see what works. It’s also really hard if your doing many things that are good or very good, to justify dumping them while you search for the thing that is ‘great’. I’ve encountered this problem before.

Further, after doing these annual reviews for several years, I’m now able to look and see the broader trends within the context of a longer period.

2009 was a year of exploration and discovery, it was the first time I actually took a hiatus from work and thought about whether or not I was on the right track. 2010 was focussed on being honest about the things in my life that weren’t working for me, and then actively removing them
& 2011 looks to have been a year of beginning to move towards the things that are important to me.

I’m incredibly grateful for the last 12 months, as there’s no doubt in my mind that above everything else it’s been a big growth year and it’s given me a lot of clarity on where my time and energy is best spent.

Stay tuned for my 2012 plan.

                                      

www.youtube.com/watch?v=mFJEeSP-XEs

If you’re having trouble viewing the video, click here to watch Language Learning: First Impressions on YouTube.

It’s a now just on a month since I moved to Beijing, and for the past few weeks I’ve been immersed in my first ever intensive language course.

I’ve been attending classes from 8am -- 12pm, 5 days a week at Beijing Language & Culture University and will continue until mid-January, just before the Chinese New Year holiday festival.

4 hours of classes a day has been a massive shock to the system.  I originally planned that I would be able to use the rest of my day to focus on other activities, but instead I’ve found that after each class I come away absolutely exhausted and I feel like I’m having my brain slowly pushed through a sieve!  After class I find that I need to de-compress and the last thing that I want to do is sit in front of a computer.

So What Have I Learnt?

My goal for this course was to simply attend and try my best to keep up with the content and not beat myself up if I didn’t master everything instantly. I’m extremely impatient when it comes to learning new things and I need to keep reminding myself that I’m here for the long haul.  The course has been a great start but it is only that -- it’s bleedingly obvious that the way the teaching environment is structured isn’t optimal for me and I’m looking forward to arranging a tutor or perhaps attending a different school where I can have more input into what materials are analysed.

A good example of this is that we have been taught the words for dormitory, dining hall and mineral water, but not the word for toilet. Go figure.

Despite this, we have learned a significant amount of vocab and it’s amazing to be able to actually see and hear how the foreign signs and sounds are unraveling in front of me.  For instance, I took a bunch of shirts to the dry-cleaner a couple of days ago and when I was leaving he said “ming tian, wan shang” which translates to “tomorrow evening” which is when the shirts would be ready.  I had only learned the words “ming tian” and “wan shang” a couple of days earlier and it was incredible to actually understand what he’d just said to me.

Most of the time I feel like everything I hear, whether it is said directly to me or not, is like static on a radio. Very occasionally though, someone will use one of the few words that I know and can recognise and then for that brief instant I will get perfect reception, before dropping back into ‘static’.

Hopefully with time and practise, the amount of static will decrease and my ‘reception’ will get better.

                                      

www.youtube.com/watch?v=6YXwl00ZizQ

If you’re having trouble viewing the video, click here to watch The China Plan on YouTube.

So one week ago, I left Australia and flew 9000 km to Beijing, China which is where I will be living for the foreseeable future. I sold up everything I owned and have little more than a suitcase with some clothes, a backpack and a laptop. The feeling is both incredibly liberating and utterly terrifying.
This post, and the video above is about answering the #1 question that I’ve asked since I announced that I was moving to China, which is…

What on earth am I doing?

For quite a few years now, one of the things that I’ve wanted to experience in my life is to learn a second language, and learn it to a point where it is an asset, not just a novelty.  It’s quite uncommon for people in Australia to be fluent in a language other than English, and I only know a couple of people that are genuinely bi or multi-lingual.

So I decided to pack my bags and immerse myself in China, because I think it will be a valuable life experience.

Why China? Why not Spain or Germany or Indonesia?

I think for better or worse, China is going to be THE country that shapes the next 50 years of human history.  Rather than stick my head in the sand and pretend it isn’t happening, or worse still try and resist it, I’m here to learn everything I can about this country, its language and the culture as I’m sure that there will be great opportunities that will appear in the coming years and I want to be prepared.

One of these opportunities that I’m already investigating is the process of arranging manufacturing in China and how to setup a supply chain that enables single point global fulfilment.