Aligning my goals with my values 🎯
My 2023 intention, new year info diet, and a side hustle
Happy New Year, Community! I hope your new year is off to a great start. I thoroughly enjoyed my vacation time: we celebrated holidays with family, relaxed, and my daughters experienced snow for the first time1!
The new year is a good time to reflect and set intentions; the last couple of weeks were just that. This post summarizes my thoughts and intentions for the next year + a meatier info diet. Also, as a reader, I’d love to give you a $10 discount using the code “STARTINGBLOCKS” for my side-hustle Etsy Shop: ImaginedByAI (more on that later). Valid until the end of Jan. 🤖🎨
My intention for 2023
I often complete tasks because of external pressures: social guilt, professional obligation, or a feeling of competition. I like being productive… but am I producing things for myself or because of external validation? Too often, it’s the latter.
Being in Silicon Valley, it’s hard to know what I want vs. what I “should” want. There’s an endless onslaught of hustle porn, follower count comparisons, valuations, exclusive parties, ForbesX0s… it’s what’s talked about around the water cooler, and invitations to these elite communities seem synonymous with success. I’ve also been part of the in-crowd: I joined Google after graduation from Stanford (after a short-lived stint at an awful startup2) as part of the prestigious Associate Product Manager (APM) program. I climbed the career ladder quickly. I have some famous friends.
The flip side to being part of these communities is that their goals and values can replace my own. Over the last decade, I learned to play the game but invested little in getting to know myself.
Earlier this year, as I decided to leave Google, I went through a number of exercises to understand my values. It was good, hard work. I realized that becoming a VP at Google didn’t matter to me, and I crystallized the importance of honoring my family. But that got me no closer to understanding my next professional goal.
Three months after quitting Google, I’m left in a bit of a rut. I’ve experimented with some ideas; I don’t have an insatiable urge to manifest a specific something into the world. I often wonder if I should seek a brand-name term sheet or join an exclusive incubator to get some fuel and dopamine. Then I pause and realize that these are the goals I’ve been trained to value, not necessarily the ones I truly value. Getting into a fancy incubator might feel like progress for a short while, but I’d be on the same treadmill I’ve been on for the last 15 years.
My intention for 2023 is to align my goals with my values. Not just making sure they’re in alignment but also the additional work of quieting the voices in my head when my goals aren’t “good enough” if hypothetically measured by the communities I’ve been a part of my entire professional career.
To put this intention into practice, I’m committing to the following goals for Q1 2023:
Create a list of my top 5 guiding values and share them. By the end of the year, I plan to align my professional and personal endeavors with each of these values.
Test at least three hypotheses to understand how to shape my goals:
I can make money on my own - Since I turned 18, I’ve always been someone else’s employee. Not having a job is uncomfortable. To be entrepreneurial, I need to make money on my own, and I’ve never really hustled that way. I need to prove that I can do it and that I like it.
I can build a technology solution on my own - I’m not sure I can prove this one3, but exploring this will help me understand how to build future projects. I built an NFT from scratch and discovered how strange the crypto development world is right now. With Web2 and mobile development, I could go to Upwork and hire a dev team. With crypto, the upside for building in a back door is so high that trust is low. I also love to build and am a hands-on learner, so I want to indulge my interests, even if it’s not the fastest route.
I can be content not pursuing vanity metrics - I will actively reject goals around funding or membership in Q1. I’m going to reevaluate my approach to this hypothesis EOQ1 based on how content I am and see if I can make this one more measurable.
Jan 11 ‘23 Status Update
Success Metrics - N/A (for now)
Quick Updates and Lessons Learned
I’ve been thinking a lot about my last post, and while I believe the gifting idea is fun, I’ve been struggling a lot with the business model:
It’s not solving a burning pain point for any particular user.
The only way to make a business is to charge fees, which users are allergic to.
Even if it did get widespread adoption, it’s ultimately an onramp with an implied off-ramp to other services. After years of working on Grasshopper, which successfully onboard at least 5M+ new users to coding, I learned that most of the capturable value is created further down the funnel. If the value capture happens elsewhere, it’s hard to grow your business.
I’m not entirely scrapping it yet, but I’m back in primarily learning mode and grateful for the focus this first iteration gave me.
I launched an Etsy shop. 🛍️ I know it’s a little out of left field, so let me explain:
Over the holidays, I got really into Midjourney and had a blast making customized images for the kiddos in my life for Christmas.
As mentioned above, I would like to prove that I can make money on my own. Rather than wait to build “the thing,” I thought I’d launch a side hustle. But I didn’t want my side hustle to slow me down; I wanted it to be something I could enjoy.
Building a small scale side-hustle will give me some practice flexing my marketing, pricing, and business chops. Why wait until it matters to start flexing these muscles?
My Etsy shop extends the fun I had over the holidays and offers customers custom AI kid’s portraits or AI artwork based on combining a bunch of kids’ favorite things.
So, in the vein of flexing the shameless-self-promotion-muscle: Y’all can have $10 off your first order from my Esty shop! Valid through the end of the month. Just use the code “STARTINGBLOCKS” or click on this link. Imagine a kid who would be thrilled to get custom art just for them, like the images below… 😉
Where I could use your help
Thanks for everyone’s career coaching recommendations! 🙏 I’m digging in now and setting up some meetings.
Let me know if you’d like to be an accountability partner for my 2023 intention! :)
Promote my Etsy shop! Only you can make algorithms like me more 💗
Like my Etsy shop
Follow my Etsy shop’s Twitter profile.
Retweet my Etsy shop intro tweet.
Info Diet
I used the holidays to indulge in some explore-exploit reading, which I plan to carry into 2023. Here’re some of the fun things I read:
Two retrospectives: A reflection from my awesome sister-in-law Aileen Lee on ten years of Cowboy Ventures 🎉 and a thoughtful what-we-learned post from a friend closing down their startup after two years. Both are rooted in observations about data and humility about the difficulties in starting something new.
Jameson Lopp’s Bitcoin 2022 Review nicely contextualizes Bitcoin’s performance in the last decade while also predicting that VC $$s will probably change focus from crypto → AI in the coming year.
Claire Silver’s excellent tutorials about how to train your own AI model for making art in Stable Diffusion.
A 2014 essay recommended by a friend by Slate Star Codex: Reflections on Moloch. On the longer side and more philosophical. Reading it recentered me on how behaviors are emergent of ecosystems and incentives, ultimately resulting in “race to the bottom” scenarios. I appreciated how the essay also calls out explicit “breaks” on the race, including cooperation. I’m trying to contextualize the observation within the context of crypto attempting scaled human cooperation and how that might change the dynamics we see today.
Things I want to get into next: A friend recommended this 2 hr tutorial on training your own text-based ML model & I’m looking into these two tutorials for developing for Bitcoin.
If you want a fun head trip, watch this video about Grabby Aliens for a theory on why we haven’t yet encountered extraterrestrial life: we’re early.
Let me know if you explore any of these! I’d love to chat about them with you. And thanks to the folks for the recommendations. 🙏
Before my four-year-old's first encounter, I asked her, "Is snow more like cotton candy or an ice cube?" Her response: "Cotton candy!". When she touched snow for the time, she was very confused by how cold it was. 😂
It's paywalled, but I went on the record a few years ago in a book titled "Brotopia" about the rampant sexual harassment that occurred at Cooliris.
While I technically have a Computer Science degree from Stanford, it’s been made rusty by years as a Product Manager.