Andrew Skotzko

altMBA recap: 84 hours, 105 kindred spirits, and countless lessons

I recently completed a month-long, intense online workshop called the altMBA. It was created by Seth Godin, one of the thinkers and leaders I most respect.

Raven: spirit animal of the altMBA

My intention here is to debrief myself on my experience and share some of the lessons learned from the experience. I’m writing this as much for myself and a reminder to future me as anything else.

I hope that this contributes something to your own journey. Let’s get into it.

Why’d you do it?

I’m the kind of person that is always looking to learn and grow. I love my life now, and I’m obsessed with getting to the next version of myself. I love who I am today, and this version of me better be obsolete compared to who I am and what I’m capable of in a year.

I took the altMBA for three reasons:

  1. to level up as a leader and creative
  2. to learn to ship work regularly and overcome my perfectionism / to beat “the resistance“
  3. to push myself (and be pushed) to get clear about the change I seek to make

In this context, “shipping” means putting work out there for others to engage with.

What does it cover? Is it a “real MBA”?

First off, no, it’s not a “real MBA,” not in the way you mean it if you’re asking the question. There are no degrees and few “right answers” in the altMBA. And, you learn a tremendous amount about business, yourself, and being an effective changemaker and leader.

Does it work?

Unequivocally, yes.

I got everything I wanted out of it, and much more.

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Book notes: The Art of Possibility

A brilliant book on redefining your perceptions and experience of what is possible in the world and in life. Absolutely shifted my experience of life.

Amazon book link.

Introductions / Premise

Our premise is that many of the circumstances that seem to block us in our daily lives may only appear to do so based on a framework of assumptions we carry with us. Draw a different frame around the same set of circumstances and new pathways come into view. Find the right framework and extraordinary accomplishment becomes an everyday experience.

The history of transformational phenomena—the Internet, for example, or paradigm shifts in science, or the spread of a new religion—suggests that transformation happens less by arguing cogently for something new than by generating active, ongoing practices that shift a culture’s experience of the basis for reality.

Practicing

Our practices will take a good deal more than three minutes to master. Additionally, everything you think and feel and see around you will argue against them. So it takes dedication, a leap of faith, and, yes, practicing to get them into your repertoire.

When you are out of the boat, you cannot think your way back in; you have no point of reference. You must call on something that has been established in advance, a catch phrase, like “toes to nose.”

Practice 1: “It’s All Invented”

Experiments in neuroscience have demonstrated that we reach an understanding of the world in roughly this sequence: first, our senses bring us selective information about what is out there; second, the brain constructs its own simulation of the sensations; and only then, third, do we have our first conscious experience of our milieu.

We perceive only the sensations we are programmed to receive, and our awareness is further restricted by the fact that we recognize only those for which we have mental maps or categories.

Our minds are also designed to string events into story lines, whether or not there is any connection between the parts.

“It’s all invented anyway, so we might as well invent a story or a framework of meaning that enhances our quality of life and the life of those around us.”

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Computing and the Battle of the Futures

One of my earliest memories is of a decrepit, dusty blue Toyota pickup truck lazily rolling past our house. It was June 1991, and my family lived in N’Djamena, Chad. I was five.

The bed of this truck was spilling over with African men carrying rifles. In the middle of the truck bed, there was some sort of tower-like thing sticking up. Something tall and alien looking poking its head out above the gaggle of men in the back of the truck.

It was an anti-aircraft gun.

At first, I didn’t understand. I mean, I had seen a gun like that before when I went on a tour of a retired battleship from World War II. But what was this huge gun doing in the back of a truck? And what was it about how it looked that seemed so… wrong?

Then it hit me: The anti-aircraft gun wasn’t pointed at the sky.

The gun was mounted for use at street level.

That anti-aircraft gun, and that truck full of men, were on their way to kill people.

I have never forgotten that.

I spent years of my youth in Africa and Asia, and was evacuated from countries a few times due to civil unrest and armed conflict. From early on, I saw that the world could be a very harsh place.

But I also saw grace, compassion, generosity, tender moments of intimacy. So far, I’ve been to 53 countries and all 7 continents (yes, even Antarctica). Even when they had nothing in the way of material possessions, I’ve seen how people from all walks of life could joyfully connect with each other and compassionately share the experience of being alive here on our pale blue dot.

But you know the most important thing I saw in these travels?

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Understanding the Internet: How Messages Flow Through TCP Sockets

One of the questions that has been coming up a lot lately as many people are building with Akka.Remote is this:

How big of a message can I send over the network?

I’ve been asked about this four or five times this week alone, so it’s time to put out a blog post and stop re-writing the answer. This is a great question to cover, as it starts to reveal more about what is going on under the hood with Akka.Remote and the networking layer.

Up until I worked on Akka.NET, I honestly hadn’t thought much about the networking layer and so this was a fun question for me to dig into and research.

When does this come up?

This comes up all the time when people have large chunks of data that they need to transmit and process. I’ve been asked about this lately in the context of doing big ETL jobs, running calculations on lab data, web scraping, for video processing, and more. People asking about sending files that range anywhere from 20MB to 5GB.

All of these contexts involve large amounts of data that need to be processed, but no clear way to link that up with the distributed processing capabilities that Akka.NET provides.

So what’s a developer to do?

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Curiosity, and a Walk Through the Desert

I’ve been feeling damn frustrated since I got back from South America. Since I returned, I’ve been exploring different technological landscapes, looking to see which area draws me in.

From May through July, I spent a lot of my time building crappy prototypes. And trying to come up with new ideas. And I didn’t like any of them.

Organic interest

Either the ideas were just plain bad, or weren’t sustainably interesting to me. There were quite a few that would work and make somebody a lot of money, but not me—I was just the wrong person to deliver on that idea. I mean, if I couldn’t get myself interested in working on something for more than two weeks, how could I possibly build it into something real and interesting for other people? Nonstarter.

There has to be a basis of organic interest.

The (wrong) question?

By July, I felt very frustrated by the lack of progress and the desire to have a direction to run in. So I started asking other entrepreneurs, “what do you do in this situation? what do you do when you’re trying to come up with something interesting and hating everything you’re coming up with?”

This was a mental walk through the desert. This became The Question.

The Question generated a lot of answers. Mostly useless answers.

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