My last post was about 2 weeks ago and you might have wondered where I disappeared to. Well, I’ll tell you.
I was feeling very disheartened about the lack of traction with ServiceChat. So I took some time away from ServiceChat – maintaining focus when you are down is hard, but it is precisely when you need it the most. This time was to try and get some perspective.
This time off was mostly spent building this and exploring alliances with leading customer service evangelists like Ian Golding and Flavio Martins (both of whom are graciously offered to write about bizbuzz and ServiceChat).
So here is my check in:
Glad I took some time out to think about whether ServiceChat is still what I should be doing. Right now, it is.
Glad I built Twumps as outlet for my disheartenment, it was fun and completely different.
Glad that I am discovering passionate people in the customer services/experience space.
Glad that my spanish one-to-one conversations are getting better and I am also being useful to my partner in his journey to learn english.
Glad an option to replenish my funding is getting stronger by the day.
Mad I have such a reaction to insect bites that has laid me low for today.
I’m grateful for the universe that conspires to help me be successful.
I’m in.
Improve On…
Keeping carbs out of my diet – especially the ones covered in sugar.
Today
Write this blog.
Start an insights blog post
Do some duolingo -I’m getting pretty consistent with this.
I was 25 when I watched “Jazz” the anthology by Ken Burns where he successfully introduces jazz music to a much wider audience. I love jazz and to be able to learn some of the dynamics of the bands and artists was hugely exciting.
Charlie “Bird” Parker was an exceptional saxophonist who helped create the bebop sound (and genre) and defined the music the influenced almost all other forms of popular music from that point. To many of his contemporaries, he was a genius . Yet he was also chronically addicted to heroin, though he was later rehabilitated from his addiction and seemingly remained clean till his death.
Why am I sharing this?
Well, I remember watching Jazz and especially learning about Charlie Parker who, as an aspiring saxophonist, I totally admired, At the height of his fame, his sound was adored by his contemporaries, almost worshipped. So much that many wanted to emulate it. But it was almost impossible to copy, so many variations, complex harmonies. Even Bird couldn’t teach you to play like him. In order to understand how one guy could be so brilliant – many who sought to gain the same abilities looked at his lifestyle and they saw heroin. Watching Jazz, I was shocked to learn that so of these performers, all pretty good in their own right, thought that perhaps his addiction gave him his abilities. So they took heroin too.
I see so many self-help blogs and the life-hacking culture that share so many ideas for improving one’s life. From weight loss to getting better at a language. I like to think all this information comes from a place of goodness – driven by the desire to share what has worked in one person to others. Yet they are sold as “this worked for me , it will work for you too”. In truth, you might get lucky and they might just work.
Start your day at 5.30am and go for a run! It will change your life.
Split your day into 90 minute sessions (because the science proves it) and you will get more done.
Fart before playing your numbers on the lottery, I won big, you will too. (ok, I made that one up).
My point is that what works for one person is not guaranteed to work for another. At best, one person’s experience is no more than a suggestion to another.
Lifelong curiousity is the real message
What makes one person explore a different routine to the one they have always had?
What motivates people to take up new skills or do weird experiments on themselves?
Often it is because something is not working they way they want. Often it is nothing more than seeking to answer “what might happen if…”.
This is such a powerful idea, one that fuels so much innovation and discovery and, I believe, is the central message of this life hacking, self help industry – which mostly sells the discoveries that are the result of curiosity.
But I think that most people who are into life hacking do not even realise that their discovery (as cool as it might be) is itself less unimportant than the spirit of curiosity through which they derived it. Curiosity to explore alternatives, to experiment and to discover.
I would much rather read about that than be peddled a 5.30AM run to start my day or a blended smoothie to boost my brain power.
We are each unique- even as the systems all around us want to make us believe we are not. The mainstream of everything requires that we can be categorised, grouped. How else do you understand 7 billion people? But we are each more than a category (easier to understand – we are each a category!). So let’s each find what works for us and contribute it into the larger pool of ideas that others can steal freely from as they emerge what works for them and as we do that, let us celebrate the spirit of curiosity that drives it all in the first place.
Learn to be curious about life, the universe and everything. You will live a better, more fulfilling life.
I’m sitting here not really wanting to do anything else but code. I know it’s wrong – I’ve built something I passionately believe is valuable but not getting to even talk to the people I believe it is valuable for is deeply disheartening.
It doesn’t mean ServiceChat isn’t valuable (I honestly don’t have enough data to answer that). It just means I suck at knocking on doors.
So here is my check in:
Mad that my reach outs to the individuals in companies, that I have identified have a need and a hunch that they give a damn, has not provided the access I was hoping for. Both those hypotheses remain unresolved.
Sad that I’m facing this whole thing alone. I have advisers, family and friends but no one really in the space with me. I am resistant to going out and finding a co-founder, much rather they found me.
Glad that this emotion is strong and empowering – in a weird way – it is sparking a survival instinct in me.
Mad that my spanish conversational meetup (intercambio) was so difficult, it seems the more I know (vocabulary and rules of structure) the less I am able to apply. Rules as binds, who knew!
Mad I feel so mad.
I’m grateful for perspective, without it I would think my problems were the most important in the world. They are not. I have options.
I’m still in.
Improve On…
Getting back to my routine – I seem to fall off it when I get emotionally weird, yet ironically it is what gives me a way back to form.
Being courageous and picking up the phone to call people and arrange conversations. Enough hiding behind emails!
Today
Start my ‘insights’ series on the ServiceChat blog – where I share what the data from bizbuzz is telling me (and has told me).
Get back on track with Duolingo – I’ve decided to focus on this as vs split my time between it and Rosetta Stone (which is good also, but not as effective for me).
This post is a little overdue. I promised my daughter I would post her experience as she described it to me and here it is.
My daughter Brianna is 16. She is pretty smart (aren’t all our daughters!) and recently did her GCSEs (the exams young people do in the UK after 5 years of high school).
Actually when I say she did her GCSEs, I mean she did some GCSEs. You see, Brianna’s been doing them sort of staggered over the course of a couple of years. Her school encouraged her to sit for the subjects she was showing strength in early (like a year early), basically to give her a few chances of getting good grades – a practice run of sorts. It’s a great idea – can’t fault it. You can use the system as an improvement tool or as a testing only tool. Taking the exams repeatedly and exploring the student’s weak areas and then focusing energy on improving that is a great way to use a dysfunctional system that places so much emphasis on how you do in a 2 hour exam!
Well, Brianna did her English exams earlier on in January and she got a great grade – an A! So when the exams came round again in June, she was surprised to be told she would retake the English paper. Hadn’t she already aced the exam? She may have had weak parts of her knowledge, but what did those matter if she aced the exam? In any case, those could be improved without her sitting the paper again.
Side Notes
A side note about exams and the propaganda of how good a school is. In the UK, schools are judged, in part, on exam results. On how many students got an ‘A’, ‘B’ and so on. Not much is given to the innovation and creative thinking of young people or the real life application of knowledge or how well their learning was facilitated. As a school, if you put 80 students up for exams and 80 of them got ‘A’ , you are considered the best!
Ok, so now you have an idea of how the system works, perhaps it’s clearer why a school might put a smart kid into the same exam twice. If she aced it once, she most probably would ace it again – so they get twice the kudos for the same student. It’s the kinds of academic double accounting that would delight Enron management. This is what what the Politicians make the ‘educators’ do in order to survive in this system. It’s simply bananas!
Also, a side note about Brianna and exams. They place a strain on Brianna, she gets tired and worn out. Her school know this and yet, knowing fully well both her previous grade and her health concerns they still insisted she sit the paper.
Brianna 10 – Silly School 0
Well, my darling Brianna did something that surprised and delighted me in equal measure. As she sat for the English paper the second time, she took the decision, independently and without declaration, to stage a most fantastic protest.
She ignored all the set questions on the paper and penned a letter to the unknown examiner. Brianna wrote about pop culture, what bands she loved. She wrote about current news items and ,fantastically, about the unfairness of making a student sit an exam they had already passed, again. In her own words:
.. I wrote my opinion on current pop culture, my opinion on issues in the news currently, why I think it’s unfair to make someone who already achieved their target resit the exam when they have exams they haven’t yet got their grades in. I laid it all out the way we’ve been taught and used all the different presentational features but just didn’t look at the content of the paper
I always knew her intellect was sharp (goodness knows I have been on the receiving end of it once or twice), but to make such a silent yet bold act of protest gives me huge pride and a quiet assurance that at least one young person in this generation of gamers and stylistas is going to give the establishment a run for its money.
There is an examiner out there who marked a paper that was entirely a letter, who – whatever they think of Brianna – cannot have failed to be surprised. I hope as an educator that they recognise that they are not alone in challenging the nonsense that government policy vis-a-vis testing as a means of measuring learning is. I would give that paper a A+ for both ingenuity, civic innovation and creative expression!
I’ll hang out with my family and go to some friends on Saturday for a BBQ and on Sunday, we’ll head to Salobreña for our first San Juan celebration (no , I don’t really know what it is either!).
This weekend also, I want to try a little experiment, an experiment for good – well, at least start it off. It is a lovely juxtaposition between my dream and an idea for a game that I have kept putting off.
The Dream
All through my career I’ve met people who have said things like ‘give X away!? why – I’m not a philanthropist’ or ‘why give it when you can sell it’. I’ve quietly listened and argued with that thinking internally.
I am a philanthropist, there I said it. It’s not a dirty word (at least not how I interprete it). I don’t have much money, nor even much free time. But I do have creativity, innovation, curiosity and skills and I can/will and do give those and their various products freely to those who can benefit from it.
When I dream about my future, it always involves a few businesses that are generating incomes sure, but also joy. The money they generate is doing something wonderful in the world, not simply going to pay for expensive, unnecessary stuff. I’m delighted that I don’t have to wait long to start doing this – I support a few charities but mostly use Kiva to do microlending. I find microlending to be one of the most respectful and empowering ideas of our age (if you aren’t already doing micro-lending, I encourage you to check it out, you don’t need very much to start and the joy you generate far outweighs whatever limited risk of losing money there is).
The Idea
It’s called Twumps and it’s a game. If you ever played trading game cards or something like Top Trumps – a stats comparison game based around themed cards, you’ll love what I want to make.
Plus you don’t even have to wait very long to experience it.
The Experiment
Here is what I want to discover:
Can I launch a revenue generating thing that pretty much runs itself and use that to perpetually and increasingly fund the change I want to see in the world?
So, I want to build something (Twumps) that people can play and enjoy and possibly either make donations to or pay something for (this will emerge) and/or generate advertising from and can I extend that by making it continuously and totally fund some good in the world.
How
I want this experiment to be done as transparently as possible. Why? Well, why not?
Prior to its release, I’ll open a new @kiva account for Twumps and make it’s transactions public. Initially I will make all revenue payable to Kiva directly (from donations or advertising). If this experiment succeeds, I may deduct enough to cover operating costs (pretty much just the hosting) to keep it running smoothly and pass everything else to @Kiva. All those costs will also be entirely transparent.
Who knows, this might encourage other entrepreneurs to consider this as a business model – only one in which they do not personally benefit financially but one that they can leave a living trust for good work in the World. Now wouldn’t that be a beautiful thing?
What Next?
Stay tuned, I shall be asking for help.
Very soon I shall need some UI and graphic design help (I’m great at functionality but suck at making things look wow!) and later I shall need players and feedback and later still I shall need things yet unknown!
I had a funny experience last night. Not funny “hahaha”, more funny “wow that’s deep!”
Here is what happened.
I had put my sons to bed and a few hours later, I went to sleep also. Then, at about 3am I was woken up by my older son, Ruben , falling out of bed. I went in and lifted him back in, made sure he wasn’t hurt, gave him a cuddle and tucked him in.
Fifteen minutes later, as I was drifting back to sleep, Ruben calls out and I go in because he needs his nose blowing (he’s got pretty bad hayfever). I blow his nose, give him a cuddle and head back to bed.
Before long, I’m about to totally start snoring when I hear a sound, I wake up and notice Ruben’s light come on and then off. By this point, sleep deprivation has kicked in and I’m properly irritated. I call out in my deep, stern “this is your father speaking’ voice and ask him what he is doing. (damn it, it’s nearly 4am I need to get to sleep!). Ruben replies ‘Nothing’ and goes quiet.
Then something really weird happens.
As I lay in bed – totally irritated and getting so totally wound up by having my sleep disturbed repeatedly, I heard this voice inside my body. I mean inside my entire body, not just my head. This voice (which I still don’t recognise) spoke loudly and matter-of-factly (but not angrily). It said “Listen, I know you’re angry but I’m telling you there is no room in here for your anger. There is only space here for love”.
What!?
The voice went on, and I could hear it as loud and as clear as though I was the only person in the audience at a stadium performance. It said again “there is no room here for your anger, there is only room for love. So, forget your anger and just let love in”. What struck me was how resolved and reassured it sounded. Like an OccupyNewYork style activist who had occupied my heart and was refusing to let anger share the space.
At this point, I am physically super-tense and the voice coaxed me : ‘You’re tense, look at what anger is doing to you – shake it out and let it go on its way, there is no room here for anger”. So that is what I did. At 4am in the morning, I did a shimmy shimmy electric boogaloo breakdance move in bed to shake out the tension in my body. I instantly felt the tension ease off. And that is when I thought I was having a heart attack.
But not really – what was happening was that my heart muscle had been so tensed up and then very suddenly relaxed and the resulting sensation felt like your hand feels when it has been clenched in a fist for a while and you suddenly relax it. It wasn’t painful – just weird.
A deep sense of calm came over me and the voice had gone. Slowly I get up from my bed and walk quietly into Ruben’s room , he is still awake (but barely) and I cuddle him, speaking gentle and soothing words to help him fall back to sleep. I stroke his hair and kiss his forehead, then I went back to bed and got some sleep.
When I woke at 8am, I thought it was all a dream and to be honest I have no explanation about what happened beyond what I share here.
I do know that as this voice was speaking, I was filled with a deep sense of love for my son and my family and an intuitive acceptance that it was speaking an undeniable truth (well as undeniable as you can get at four in the morning) – I don’t have space in my heart for anything but love. Not anger, not irritation and certainly not hate. I could reason with it, that anger is part of life, as is grief and as is love, but this voice wouldn’t engage me in whether those where valid, inappropriate, right or wrong. It simply insisted that I had no space in my heart for anything but love.
I am deeply grateful to this voice, from wherever it came. Its message was fully and gratefully received.
As ever on this blog and especially on this post, I want to share what you think? Have you had a similar weird but beautiful experience.
I do not have space in my heart for anger. Do you?
Q: Does a daily blog have to be done every day? A: Not when it’s @mhsutton’s blog – obviously.
So much has happened in the last 13 days, I don’t really know where to start. I’ve been away because I’ve been a little discouraged with the progress of ServiceChat (no, I haven’t been in rehab – just nose down trying to move it forward!) – So I took a break from writing and the routine, to focus 100% of my time on completing my customer discovery experiments. It was an ineffective move, what may have been more useful might have been to talk to my @saintsal sooner and continue with my routine but with differently prioritised work. Most things suffered in this hiatus – I ended up being able to do less pushups for example!
So here is my check in:
Glad that I spoke with @saintsal – who very kindly listened to my challenges and offered his honest appraisal based on what I communicated. Sal was gracious but honest – I have been coding an awful lot with real focus on business building and validation. I knew this, but it was hard to accept from myself.
Glad that my funding strategy is sorted. I’m taking a consulting gig in August that will help me fund the next 7 months from 6 weeks work. Ha, the joys of living a lean life.
Sad that whilst I’m doing the language study, the practical experience is not really happening. I feel less capable of speaking Spanish now than I did in January!
Glad that my intercambio is starting on Monday – an hour talking in Spanish, hopefully twice a week.
Sad to hear of the sudden death of James Gandolfini – who played Tony Soprano on the Sopranos. That show was a large part of my rehabilitation during my divorce.
Sad/mad that my collaboration with FounderSync fizzled out after one blog, it was actually none existent. A thoroughly poor set up. Chalk it up to experience, I guess.
Glad I got to talk with @scottcrowther about ServiceChat and he was lovely and kind enough to share more than 20 ideas for improvement and growth with me (including moving back to the midlands!)
Glad I feel more engaged and more present.
I’m grateful for saints who pop up with truth and grace.
I’m good and getting better. The future is less dark and almost entirely my own making. I’m in.
Improve On…
Blogging consistently – this and other non-coding things are the highest priority items I have to do now. I basically need to drum up interest in what ServiceChat does. BizBuzz was part of that effort and now that I have gifted it to the public to search , I would like to see more interest in how businesses engage their customers on Twitter.
Today
Start my ‘insights’ series on the ServiceChat blog – where I share what the data from bizbuzz is telling me (and has told me). The first is a summary description of the types of support behaviours I have observed and I’ll try and evangelise with best groups for the topic on LinkedIn.
Reach out to Huffington post and explore how to become a huffblogger.
Reach out to my top 5 ideal customers and get a dialogue going about using ServiceChat
Blog, blog, blog.
The Trello board…
Seek beyond what you know. It is dangerous. Most things worth anything are.
For the last few months , I’ve been working on my startup (ServiceChat) and trying to understand how businesses do customer service on Twitter.
It has been a fascinating endeavour – it still is. I’ve learned so much – mostly how not do it – but also seen some amazing individuals really engage with customers to try and solve their problems. I’ll blog about that separately – consider following me on twitter and signing up for my blogs.
In trying to peel away the noise, I built a tool to help me see the conversations I should be following and the businesses I should be talking to. I would love to share that tool with you. It’s called bizbuzz.
In many ways, bizbuzz is info-porn. But in the right hands – it is actionable data. You can use it to decide to do business elsewhere, demand better service. Businesses can use it to decide to improve their engagement with their customers (I’m happy to share what I have learnt, drop me a line ).
Why are you sharing this?
Well, it’s based on publicly accessible data, only reframed in a certain way – the public , especially customers of these businesses , should see it.
Also, we are all consumers and for far too long businesses have paid poor attention to customers after they have taken their money – I want to end this. We each deserve to have fantastic service from the places we do business with. Competition was supposed to let the ‘best’ rise to the top – it hasn’t. A lack of information is a primary cause of this, followed closely by a lack of care. My part is to help with the first bit and to trust that you will help with the second bit.
I would like you to ask the businesses you spend your money with to listen to you and quit wasting your time and burning your emotion. Demand that they meet you where you are and not funnel you into some queue that suits them, seek to have a human relationship with them instead of the scripted zombie systems they deploy to frustrate you.
What can I do with it?
Find the companies you are interested in. You can search for their names. Have a giggle at their responses, guess which ones have auto-responders and the ones that genuinely respond.
Explore some of the conversations on Twitter, maybe reach out to some of their customers and show some empathy.
Bookmark bizbuzz and check to see how your businesses are doing. I’ll add an RSS feed soon.
Talk about this with your friends, share your stories. Share them on here too (as comments). We all deserve better service, honestly!
Use your consumer power wisely. You do have choices, choose to be treated like a person – with respect and empathy. Make better choices.
But before you rush off to tell the world…
Don’t judge these companies too harshly – these are the ones that are actually on Twitter and respond to their customers (albeit many do it with autoresponders) – there are undoubtedly thousands who are not even on Twitter. There are those who are on and never respond. However, I believe if they are on Twitter, they need to be effective and use the platform to its full potential to change customer experiences, not simply add it as another channel to frustration!
The search that drives the data on bizbuzz is tailored specifically at tweets written in English and which specifically include ‘Sorry email us’ or ‘Sorry DM us’. It has been surprisingly effective at finding businesses offering customer service. Ask me if you want to know more.
Whilst I’ve been iterating on building bizbuzz, there have been inevitable gaps in the data. This is less than 100 tweets over about 80 twitter profiles(out of over 8000 tweets and counting)- so makes very little statistical difference. It has been tracking non-stop for at least the last 12 days.
psst. The tech behind bizbuzz is really interesting too, if you get turned on by that sort of thing (like I do), let’s have a chat.
The last few days have been like driving in a tunnel, with occasional pauses to check the map. Sometimes where you want to is actually a bloody long way away!
All this grind has yielded a bunch of exciting potential pivots – bizbuzz as a data visualisation tool for businesses and opportunities to use it to encourage business to explore ServiceChat. All this is rather cryptic, I know, as they become clearer , I’ll share more.
So here is my check in:
Sad that I’m not getting the level of end-customer conversations as I want. I feel that this is vital validation I am missing. Plod on.
Sad that my consistency with language study is dropping. Sad that even though I attend at the scheduled time, I’m not present.
Glad that both my advisors were excited about the work I had done to find valuable customers. Their insights about other potential uses of the tech is hugely encouraging.
Glad I have decided that ServiceChat does not really support a freemium model and making plans to change this.
Glad I decided to go to the beach with my family yesterday, taking a break help reinvigorate me and revitalise my relationships. More memory making.
Delighted that I was accepted to blog for FounderSync , it will be the bulk of my startup experiences.
I’m grateful for what I don’t know. It is the foundation of my curiosity.
I’ve got a stonking cold, but I’m in.
Improve On…
Being present in my scheduled activity
Today
Complete a spike into making bizbuzz more of a public tool.
Work on a biz model canvas for bizbuzz, to explore how it might work as a pivot.
Talk to more of the end customers that I am discovering for ServiceChat
The Trello board…(a slight expanded version)
Remember your limits. Seek to extend them, but remember them.
A dog has died
I buried him in the garden
next to a rusted old machine.
Some day I’ll join him right there,
but now he’s gone with his shaggy coat,
his bad manners and his cold nose,
and I, the materialist, who never believed
in any promised heaven in the sky
for any human being,
I believe in a heaven I’ll never enter.
Yes, I believe in a heaven for all dogdom
where my dog waits for my arrival
waving his fan-like tail in friendship.
Ai, I’ll not speak of sadness here on earth,
of having lost a companion
who was never servile.
His friendship for me, like that of a porcupine
withholding its authority,
was the friendship of a star, aloof,
with no more intimacy than was called for,
with no exaggerations:
he never climbed all over my clothes
filling me full of his hair or his mange,
he never rubbed up against my knee
like other dogs obsessed with sex.
No, my dog used to gaze at me,
paying me the attention I need,
the attention required
to make a vain person like me understand
that, being a dog, he was wasting time,
but, with those eyes so much purer than mine,
he’d keep on gazing at me
with a look that reserved for me alone
all his sweet and shaggy life,
always near me, never troubling me,
and asking nothing.
Ai, how many times have I envied his tail
as we walked together on the shores of the sea
in the lonely winter of Isla Negra
where the wintering birds filled the sky
and my hairy dog was jumping about
full of the voltage of the sea’s movement:
my wandering dog, sniffing away
with his golden tail held high,
face to face with the ocean’s spray.
Joyful, joyful, joyful,
as only dogs know how to be happy
with only the autonomy
of their shameless spirit.
There are no good-byes for my dog who has died,
and we don’t now and never did lie to each other.
So now he’s gone and I buried him,
and that’s all there is to it.
Translated, from the Spanish, by Alfred Yankauer
Pablo Neruda
(Sourced from: http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/a-dog-has-died/)
Why I Love This Poem
I have had dogs for most of my life.
Even now, I feel a void in my existence without one.
And I love Neruda. I imagine him as uncle Pablo. He has such a beautiful mastery of language, yet he is very matter of fact.
I can imagine strolling with him through the streets of Santiago or Paris, talking extraordinarily about the ordinary!
This poem reminds me of dogs I have been privileged to have in my life. That I have loved and have loved me. You only need to sit with a dog on your lap, contemplating life, to comprehend a simple yet full and total bliss.
I am reminded of play, of the freedom to be myself – never being judged or judging.
‘A dog has died’ also transports me back to moments of deep sadness and loneliness with only my dog has my companion – who listened and somehow was deeply empathic.Even now I weep.
Yet when, one by one my dogs died, there is a practical aspect to it, they must be buried and mourned. But life goes on.
Neruda surely felt the same about his dog. Deep connection, love and affection, yet in the end, moving on.
All relationships shape us. I learnt much about empathy from my dogs. Much about non-verbal communication too.
That is all there is to it. And that is why I love ‘A dog has died’.
You?
What do you think of ‘A dog has died’?
What memories do you have of the animal companions that you have had?
In what ways have those relationships shaped you?
What are your favorite poems and why do you love them?
I would really love to share them. (and if you don’t currently read poetry, this is a perfect time to start)
