Andrew Skotzko

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

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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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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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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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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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How to Email Notes & Ideas Into Scrivener

Over the last several months, I’d fallen off the wagon writing-wise due to very heavy client workloads. I’m finally getting back into it after wrapping up a project. Given the restart, I got to wondering about my writing workflow and which tools I use.

In whatever I do (coding, writing, etc) I’m always concerned with tools and establishing a good workflow and rhythm. For me, that means mobility and cross-platform access to what I’m working on. I want my data stored in the cloud so it isn’t tied to any one physical device or location, and so it’s properly backed up off-premises. This protects my work from accidents (or stupidity) well, and gives me flexibility about when, where and how I do my work. I appreciate that.

After a quick chat with Scott (he’s currently finishing a book on product design), I decided to use Scrivener as the main organizational hub for everything, with all my files stored in Dropbox. In case you’re unfamiliar with Scrivener, it’s a professional-grade writing suite used by many journalists, authors, researchers, et al. Basically, if you’re doing serious writing, Scrivener is a one-stop shop and damn useful. It is also complex.

I’m a huge fan of Scrivener for overall project organization and editing. But I don’t love it for actual writing. The layout is too distracting and its composition mode doesn’t feel focused enough for me. So I pair Scrivener with iA Writer, which is my favorite text editor to actually write in. I do this by using Scrivener’s external sync via Dropbox, and voila! I have a beautiful cross-platform environment to write in. I also like the idea that my writing is safely stored in Dropbox, and I’m able to work on it anywhere, anytime, from any device. (I wrote this paragraph on my phone while waiting in line at the grocery store, and when I got back to my desk I just synced from Scrivener and carried on writing where I left off on my phone.)

I got to wondering: could I somehow easily email ideas into my Scrivener project from wherever I am? I often send myself little notes on the go by emailing them into my Evernote account with one tap using the Captio app, which is probably the most useful $1.99 I’ve spent on software. (For Android, it looks like Mail Myself or Google Keep could be good options for similar use case.)

Idea strikes, fire off email to my Evernote in 5 seconds, move on. It works well.

So, can you quickly email in ideas to a Scrivener project? Absolutely. Here’s how.

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How to Unlock Foreign Languages: 11 Principles

Heads up: This a long, detailed post (~6,400 words) so you might want to read it somewhere comfy. You can get the gist by skimming the headings and sequence lists, and then diving into the specific sections as you see fit. Be sure to check out the FAQ and resource links/downloads at the end. Skim time: 5 minutes. Full read time: 32 minutes.

From November until March I worked remotely and traveled in South America. Working remotely and exploring the world is something I’ve wanted to do ever since I first learned the term “location independent” as a college sophomore. But until this trip, I’d never done it. So with no lead time, in early November I booked a one-way ticket to Buenos Aires.

Just one problem: I didn’t speak Spanish. I took Spanish in high school, but I couldn’t remember anything useful. And I’m not sure I could apply it in conversation even if I could remember it.

Onboard the redeye flight from Miami to Buenos Aires, my lack of Spanish was immediately clear. I sat next to an Argentine man who turned to me and started speaking. Even though he spoke simply, I could not understand him. It had already been an eighteen hour day, and my best intentions failed within ten seconds. Flush with embarrassment, I admitted defeat: “no hablo español.”

Fast-forward six weeks to arrive at one of the proudest moments of the trip: I sitting in a dark little cerveceria named Konna in Bariloche, in Northern Patagonia, drinking beer surrounded by native Spanish speakers. And having real conversations in Spanish. Conversations that went beyond what foods I had eaten, what I thought of the town, and where I was traveling from and to. A real conversation amongst friends in a bar, for 2 hours.

This was what I’d been working my ass off for. The crowning point of the night when one of the women at the table, my lovely Spanish teacher Mariela, said that my progress amazed her. After a comment about my love of mate, steak, and naps, she declared that I was Argentino Argentino. I beamed like a kid with his first trophy.

I wasn’t fluent and my Spanish wasn’t perfect, but that wasn’t the point: I was having a blast, actually speaking real Spanish with real Spanish speakers in a real conversation. That is the point: the cultural experience and growth.

So how did a gringo like me go from “no hablo” to “Argentino Argentino”? That’s what this post is all about

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Permission to Fall

In life, I regret the things I didn’t do more than the missteps I made along the way.
– David Stanley

For the last three months, I traveled throughout South America. Despite what my Instagram photos may suggest, for the first month I was on the road, I was not enjoying it. Everything was new and stressful. There were no familiar places or friends to fall back on. The lack of regular schedules shot all my routines to hell. I felt lonely without my friends, and had no idea what I was doing. I drank too much, and exercised too little.

Searching, far from home

I had gone away to get out of the tech scene for a while, for a change of pace and scenery. I had recently left Chill, where I’d driven myself at a maniacal pace for almost three years. I needed time and space to think, refresh, and get some perspective.

But I was 6,121 miles away, and it wasn’t working.

On the night of December 21st, I remember calling Matt from my apartment in Buenos Aires. I’d talked myself in circles, about whether this crazy trip was still a good idea.

Should I just go back to California and take another job? Should I scrap the idea of trying to build something of my own? I was minutes away from booking a trip back to the USA so I could spend the holidays with friends and family.

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Analog Hearts In A Digital World

If there’s ever a time of year when we want to feel human connection, it’s around Valentine’s Day. And connection requires vulnerability and honesty, experiencing the world through another’s eyes.

Here are two questions that I’ve found helpful in authentically opening up my work and thinking to others over the last few months, which has led to some wonderful connections and conversations:

  1. What do the things that I feel compelled to do tell me about myself?
  2. Why do I want this thing that I want?

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13 Lessons for My Niece

After a long day in transit, I wanted to share a note of lessons I wrote in hopes that my future niece learns them earlier than I did:

  1. The world is both big and small and travel is one of the best things you can do for yourself. Embrace it. Get out into it.
  2. Learn to pack light. You need much less than you think.
  3. Keep asking “why?” and consider it as a major warning sign if someone in authority doesn’t want to answer, gets frustrated when you ask, or can’t answer the question without a tautology.
  4. “Because that’s just how it’s done” is the worst answer to this question.
  5. Learn to listen for and recognize the quiet voice inside of you that you know is your soul.
  6. Do whatever you have to in order to protect and cherish this voice. Some people will try to crush it.
  7. Avoid those people. They aren’t worth your time and are toxic for you.
  8. Basic personal finance and statistics will save your ass.
  9. Avoid debt like the plague. It is one of the oldest forms of slavery in the world, but is made to appear as “normal.”
  10. On that note, don’t watch TV, or whatever its equivalent is by the time you’re old enough to. It will try to lie to you about almost everything that is important and make you feel bad about yourself so you buy crap you don’t need or believe in ideas that don’t serve you.
  11. Curiosity and “dangerous questions” are what we need more of. All progress depends on these.
  12. Ignorance is not the same as stupidity. If you don’t know something, find out. Ask, learn, repeat.
  13. Avoid anyone who tries to make you feel bad for being curious, learning something, or trying to improve yourself and the world. This person is an energy-sucking vampire.

Love,
Uncle Andrew