fit, happy
Posts tagged freelancing
Big Omaha 2011
0283 days
Speaker Q & A Session, Day 1*
I spent two amazing days last week at Big Omaha, and I’m still trying to process it all… It’s year three for me and it’s still as overwhelmingly inspiring as ever. It’s impossible to condense everything that is Big Omaha into words, and it’s hard to know how to describe it at all…there’s a part of me that just wants to say: you just have to be there.
It’s a conference that’s part entrepreneurship, part business, part technology, part inspiration, part philanthropy, part philosophy. There’s as much talk of responsibility and work/life balance as there is about landing venture capitol or choosing a co-founder. And above all, everyone is happy to be there. There’s an air of excitement that I’ve never run into anywhere else, and a feeling that anything is possible if you add enough passion and work. It’s a booster shot of motivation like nothing else.
I should add to this a disclaimer: I am biased. Not because I live in Lincoln, and Omaha is practically in my backyard. Not because I’ve spend hard-earned cash to get in for three years running and I need to justify my dollars. No, I’m biased because Big Omaha literally changed my life. Well…Big Omaha, plus a little Gary V.
New Perspective
Gary + You = brain asplosion
It went like this: One day in 2008, see a random link to Gary Vaynerchuk’s 2008 keynote at the Web 2.0 Expo in NYC. Mind asplodes, as the internet would say. Despite the fact that I was working at the time in a job that I loved, with people that I loved, and I couldn’t really imagine wanting to leave my job, I was set on fire by what he was saying. It was a way of looking at the world that was different than anything I’d come across before. I had an idea of how life would go, work would go, and the way the world was, and suddenly it was possible to look at it differently.
To save you a long and tiring story, I shall condense: Because Gary was going to be there, I heard of and went to Big Omaha. And without Big Omaha and Gary, I would not have invested in building a personal site that, at the time, seemed uneccessary. I would not have had my eyes open to opportunities outside of my job, and I would not have spent any time thinking and preparing for freelancing.
Big Omaha...People seem to like it
Because of Big Omaha, I had options when I needed them. I had the inspiration and the courage to get out of a bad situation and start freelancing full time, and I had the contacts to make it happen. Because of Big Omaha, I made it though a year of freelancing and didn’t starve. Because of Big Omaha, I am not trying to figure out why I hate what I do every day, and I am not trying to convince myself to go to work every morning anyway.
Because of Big Omaha, my entire life is different. That’s not something you usually say about a conference.
Inspiration is universal
Each year I have come to Big Omaha from a different situation, and this year I’m on a very different career track, but it has never made it any less life-changing. This year I feel much more at home with where I am and where I’m headed than I ever have; I think that let me absorb things and apply them to what I’m already planning, whereas in years past, I used the energy from Big Omaha to drive me to change my plans and the rut I was stuck in.
Millions of $ to fund a cat picture web site? Why not.
But that’s the beauty of Big Omaha: it doesn’t matter that much where you are, what project you’re working on, or what industry you’re in. Whoever you are, the lessons all transfer, and the conversations are still relevant. Inspiration and entrepreneurship are universal. There is no industry that doesn’t need new ideas and innovation, and no business that is not about building relationships with people (that’s right, B to B people, you are still selling to people. I have yet to see a building pull out a checkbook). So anyone can come to Big Omaha and learn – although the jokes will be a lot funnier if you know what an LOLcat is.
Oh, and for those of you following my medical saga: my foot survived. I defied my better judgement and my physical therapist and wore heels (only once), danced (twice), and generally spent too much time on my feet (did I mention that I spent the day after Big Omaha at the zoo?), but I didn’t come out too badly. I used half a roll of athletic tape, I was pretty sore and there was plenty of ice involved, but it’s actually feeling better than it did before I left! Please do not take this as license to ignore your physical therapist, if you have one. They are very smart people and you should listen to them. But sometimes the party’s too loud for talking and you just give up and dance.
*All photos by the spectacular, amazing, incomparable Malone & Co., courtesy Silicon Prairie News.
Forget the Rest
0I’m exhausted…I don’t have much of an excuse, but I am. My workout for today was teaching tkd class, and walking my roommate’s dog, and that’s going to have to suffice. Bless the after-school coordinators, though, because they finally stopped letting in every kid who wanted to join club and went to a lottery system. I actually had a manageable class size, and it was amazing how much more I could get done when 90% of my time wasn’t being sucked up trying to control the chaos.
I think I need to eat more early in the day…I’m not hungry when I wake up, and don’t eat that much for lunch, then as evening comes on I find myself starving. When I tried to work out yesterday I crashed hard, and I think it’s because I’m running on almost no food, and I have nothing left by afternoon. Then I eat a lot at night, and no wonder. Anyway. If my stomach didn’t hate me in the morning, it would be an easier resolution.
So client work sucked up my morning, teaching sucked up my afternoon, and by the time I got home and walked the dog I was done. I tried to find the energy/motivation to do P90x but I’m exhausted, so I think I’ll say I got some activity in and go to bed early. I’ve been good for nothing all night, should have been doing homework reading but it will have to wait until tomorrow. So…half my day was productive. ‘Do your best and forget the rest’ is the motto, guess I’m following that tonight.
Oh yeah! I changed my site design yesterday. I want to do more with content reorganization, and to add some stuff, but for now it looks all pretty – and it is actually my design and only a partial hack, instead of being an off-the-rack theme. The cobbler’s children go barefoot, or however that goes…usually my own site gets very neglected but I finally put a little bit of time into it.
And why a hack and not a clean, made-by-me theme? Because I don’t believe in reinventing the wheel, or spending weeks coding up a rock-solid wordpress theme out of pure hubris. So 95% of everything is exactly the same as it was before; I just swapped out an image and changed a little css here and there to clean it up. I might do more later, but…there’s that whole cobbler thing and for now I’m happy. And if this entire bit was greek to you, well, don’t worry about it. Things look different, everything else is the same, carry on and no worries, my friend.
Y(awn)oga
2First of all, I should follow up on my previous post and note that one of my roommates spontaneously offered to figure out how to get more P90x-friendly food on our grocery list, about 2 seconds after I complained about it, so I am a horrible person, yada yada. Still not sure how we’re going to work that one out, but I shouldn’t complain so much. :)
Thursday, Thursday, why are you so crazy? Got up, started laundry, did client project, went to the bank, got (healthy) groceries, made lunch, did more laundry, read psych reading assignment, wrote response paper, did 45 minutes of P90x yoga, took a shower, went to class, went to second class, came home…and now it’s 10:16p.m. I am, how you say….tired.
I say ’45 minutes’ of P90x because that’s all I had time for. So I did about half of the power yoga and skipped to the balance/stretch part, and had time for about half of that before it was shower or be late to class. If I had done my reading/writing for school earlier this week, of course, I would have had much more time, but alas. Yoga is a stretch for me anyway. I think it’s something I might enjoy doing with other people, but it’s the one P90x workout that just drags for me. It’s challenging, and all that, but it’s looooong, and very hard on my poor foot…I may switch it out with something else for a while, just so I can keep motivated and have time to do a workout.
On the road to bionic joints
0401 days
Well, I remember how to write code, and that’s good (I keed, I keed). It has been a few weeks since I was into hard-core development, and it’s always funny how fast my brain becomes rusty. It takes a good half-hour of beating my head against things to start things flowing again, and it’s hard to find enough motivation to push through. But push through I did! Made some good progress, too, even though it doesn’t feel like it.
I had to tear down someone else’s crappy old code and build everything from scratch, but make it all look the same…what I love about coding. At the end of the day it’s a hot mess and it’s only a fraction of as functional as it was, but it’s progress! Gotta build up the framework or it’s all going to tumble down, no matter what anyone thinks who just sees the outside. There’s a fitness metaphor in there somewhere, I’m pretty sure, but I’m not feeling the metaphorical vibes enough to try to pull it out.
Plyo rocked me yet again, and I managed to get through with my foot being only mildly sore, instead of screaming in pain. For some reason there’s no spot for that on the workout sheet, I wonder why. Hey, at least I’m being good and modifying the workouts, kids…more than I do sometimes.
On that subject, can I get some new freakin’ joints in here? I was going through my pile of braces and I have: ankle x2, elbow, knee x3, back, wrist, and the various and sundry arch supports for my stupid flat feet. Of those only the elbow and foot are current, although my left knee was complaining a little bit the other day. And of course, if there was a decent way to brace my separated shoulder, I’d have one of those too. Viva la fitness!
