The Advancement of Perceived Status

I was taking a nice walk and listening to yet another fitness podcast. The topic of the day for the podcast was answering listener email questions. One of the questions that came up struck me. I won’t go into the specifics of the question, because there is no reason to shame anyone here. Although the question made me think. In the email the man seeking help states he has worked out for over a decade, he proclaimed how serious he was, he stated he was an advanced lifter, then he proceeded to ask the most basic rudimentary questions imaginable. I had to wonder, if you’re so advanced, why did you have to ask this question?

I don’t know the man who asked this question, nor do I care to pass judgement on him. I know nothing of him, however his question had me thinking more about the perceived status we give to ourselves. I have no doubt that this man views himself as an advanced lifter, and maybe he is. We want to look like we are advanced, we want to look like we have lots of answers. Being an expert is good, but we are rarely experts, and when we are experts we are not experts at many things. We can limit ourselves because of a perceived status. We can fall into the trap that just because we view ourselves as “advanced” that we may not need help with a very basic thing or learn about something basic.

I have had my own failings with trying to have a perceived status. I wanted to be an expert web developer, I wanted people to think I was an expert. I often perceived myself as more than I was. This limited my career development. I was reluctant to spend time on the basics. I had done some more advanced things, so I did not want to “step backward” into basics. This hurt me long term. There were more gaps in my learning and skills than I would like to admit. I wanted so desperately to have some sort of status that I limited myself.

I would have had a much better run of things if I had accepted the level I was at. If I didn’t let some attitude about status into my head. I know I would have filled my learning gaps much faster and been a much better web developer. The status I perceived myself to have got in the way of reality and doing what I most needed to do.

A danger lays in perceiving more or less than reality. Imposter syndrome is the other side of the coin here. Folks with these issues perceive themselves at a lower level than they are. This limits them. An honest evaluation of skills and abilities is always the best. Status carries with it more.

Status is often about ego. No one cares how big or strong the listener asking the question in the podcast was. Status is often for ourselves. When we improperly perceive a status for ourselves, we will limit ourselves.

A Monticello Creative Community

I walked into the Monticello Public Library and my friend Caye at the desk started looking at my t-shirt and started reading. Next came the questions. I was wearing one of my Startup Weekend t-shirts, because it is the rotation and I literally wear like three things. She started asking some questions about the event and we started talking about what Startup Weekend was, and what I had to do with it. Before long one of the library managers was joining in and we were waist deep in a talk about entrepreneurship, tech, coding, YouTube show studios, and makerspaces. In short, everyone thinks these things are cool, and would like to see these things around Monticello, Indiana in some form. This wasn’t the first time this week that these things came up.

Earlier that week, the local tv news was talking about the now vacant Monticello Fire Department building. With a new firehouse in town the community has gained a rather large empty building downtown that is ripe for development. Proposals are being taken by city government about what might be done with the building. In the news story a makerspace was suggested, what all that entails, I don’t really know. A makerspace can mean a lot of things. Between this news story and my library conversation, it is obvious there are people in this town thinking about some very cool things.

Thinking about really cool tech community things, well that used to be my specialty, between organizing Startup Weekends and Meetups, I have thought about such things a lot. My brain being what it is, I couldn’t help but start to grind my gears a bit on what Monticello could even support as far as these kind of tech and startup type things. So I begin to ask myself how would I even go about seeding and starting up a tech/startup/maker community here in Monticello?

Monticello is a small town, there is a population of about 5,400 people in the 2010 census. At first look the main challenge I see is the critical mass of people needed to build a real community around these tech things. If you expand that to the rest of White County and Carroll County, well then you get to a population of something like 45,000 people to pull from. (Monticello sits on the border of these two counties, so yeah, it seems like a semi reasonable area to draw from for larger/cooler things.) This is a rather nice population, and the people around here are used to driving to do things. So could the town be a bit of a mini-hub for some of these activities people in town are talking about? Yes I think there is some level of potential. A challenge is defining what this community would even look like that people are trying to create. This new community would have to pull from a lot of different groups to reach critical mass, there just wouldn’t be enough software developers for example to create something cool.

Defining this community is a bit hard. How would I define it? Well I think the best way to define it is a “Creative” community. All these things I discussed with the library folks and heard on tv have one thing in common, they involve people doing creative things outside the norms for this town. Coding, woodworking, painting, entrepreneurship, writing, these things are all creative pursuits. The intersection of people doing these things can be really cool. People engaged in these pursuits can really learn a lot from each other and support each other a lot. That is where community starts, what the mix ultimately becomes is a question of leadership and community inclinations. This is more about planting magic beans and seeing where the beanstalk goes rather than building a bridge with a blueprint, I don’t see any way to really know where things will end up going.

I think planning and leadership is still very important in building any creative community here in Monticello. The creative and tech communities I have been involved with have greatly reflected the personalities and interests of their leaders. It is my opinion that most of not all of the leadership of a creative community needs to be people that have skin in the game. The actual creatives need to guide where things are going not “county or state economic development administrative types.” We all know that type, and if they are running the show, the spirit and magic of a creative community probably won’t work. These people should be involved, but if they represent the majority of leadership, bad things are bound to happen, this has to be a grassroots kind of thing. These initial leaders of a community will be instrumental in defining the culture, which is really all such a community is after all.

Defining the right culture is paramount to a creative community flourishing. The community needs to be open, playful, risky, and actually creative. Dealing with people in Indiana, ideas around risk and failure will be a hurdle. Creative acts are inherently super risky. A creative culture needs to accepting and not shaming of people that take those risks and fall flat. A lot of people around here will tell you to stop if you fail 4 or 5 times at something, where that is maybe just the beginning of the creative process. This mindset among others needs to be cultivated. Creating the right culture while hard could be doable because of the area does have a good cultural trait already. This trait has been told to me by transplants to Indiana time after time. People here are really helpful and nice generally in the Midwest compared to certain other parts of the country. We help each other. The more we leverage that the more we can achieve.

So to really create a great creative community where would I start tactically? A makerspace would be cool to open up, but there is no community or group I am aware of that needs that space. There are a bunch of individuals that might need that space and show up. I am unaware of any larger connected group of people hanging out around here though. Building these groups would be a good first start. People need to start collaborating and talking about their projects and businesses. Various meetings, events, and networking opportunities start to build up some momentum to do larger things. This is where leaders and organizers can be found, and creative communities always need more of those. There is a belief I do hold, there are a lot of creative people doing very cool things in this area. They would like to connect to each other too, but just have not yet. The more these people can be connected the more likely a creative community will thrive.

These connections take a lot of time form, and the cross pollination between groups takes even longer. To build these creative communities, I feel like a multi-year mindset needs to be taken. It takes a long time for some people to become aware that communities even exist. To start collaborating and having network effects, well that takes a long time too. To get started, I would look at starting to hold a few ultra low risk events to get people out and talking. These are the kind of things I would consider first.

The first thing I would do is to hold a community meeting in the old firehouse to discus makerspaces and creative spaces. I would explain the kind of things that other similar communities have done. I would also have lots of brainstorming opportunities for the community to contribute ideas to what they might want. This could be some sort of formal activities or just discussions. Beyond collecting ideas, this would be a great way to see if we can get people to start connecting and talking. Something not to be overlooked is email and name collection, before any events these mechanisms needs to be in place. In the past groups I have been affiliated with have time and time messed this up. Structures like email lists make life a lot easier, so being smart about that would be a focus from day one. At this event we would have flyers for our next events. This is also something that gets messed up a lot, we should always promote our next event at our current event.

The next things I would do would be hold some general talks that are of interest to business owners and entrepreneurs as well as tech type people. These would be things like “Google Analytics Basics” or “Using Wordpress” these are things that anyone with a website would be well served in learning a little about. These would be hour long type things at the library or other community building. The main goal here is again seeding this creative community and making connections. So it’s totally acceptable to choose topics that are easy for speakers to do with little preparation. These don’t need to be workshop type things.

Next up I would try and identify 4-5 coders, software developers, or web developers in the Monticello area and start to hold some monthly meetups. Format would be a 30-45 tech talk on some code type thing and plenty of time to network. In such a large area to draw from there has to be a few coders, so personally I would dig in and do a little work and try and find them.

I would also really get engaged with some social media to try and see what is happening around the area. I would start some sort of Facebook Group called “Monticello Makers” or “Monticello Artists” and then just post up some things I was working on and some cool photos of projects. Then I would see what happens. This is so easy to do, and might suck a few people in.

In all these events we would be taking down info about attendees. Things like their professions and hobbies and other creative interests. The hope here would be to analyze what kind of community we have the potential to form and what dots we could connect and grow together.

Once there is some momentum in getting some people talking and working on things, well then we start looking at larger things within the city and area. Where this creative community fits into long term city planning and economic development comes into play. There is the question of where does Monticello as a community want to go as a city. What kind of vision are the city leaders going to provide? To have a creative community, you have to be a community creatives want to be in. This is a big deal. I personally don’t think city size matters much in the type of community a city tries to be. There are wonderful places with a few thousand people living there, and there are horrible places as well. This comes into city planning which I don’t know anything about, but I know it matters to some degree. I personally view communities that choose to be very good at something as being very smart. Indianapolis chose a long time ago to be very good at hosting sporting events. Over time this has lead to some really good things. I think smaller communities can take the same approach. I don’t think this kind of foresight costs excessive amounts of money, just time, thought, and commitment.

If the community can show some level of commitment and some level of energy around these activities then I think that is the time to take some larger risks. For the most part if done well coworking spaces can mitigate much of the risks of building out those spaces. A coworking space is mostly just an office. If things don’t work out then the space can be used for any sort of city functions or turned into office space for rent. I think there are ways to hedge your bets in the long term. Larger makerspaces do require more cash and equipment, so there is the concern of how to hedge those bets.

Lastly I would think about what kind of goals are even reasonable for a community like Monticello to expect out of such a space or creative community. There are all sorts of goals that could be the end goal. Quality of life is one thing the community could focus on. These spaces can be like a park, does it make life better for citizens? Economic development is another goal that can be achieved. Can you link economic development to such spaces? If you can then there is a lot of reason to fund these things.

This is how I would start thinking about bringing this kind of creative spaces to Monticello. There are lots of other factors to consider, but I think everything starts with the people. Can the city build communities of creative people? If they can’t then any place they build is just going to be a place to work for people who are too cheap to pay for an office. If that is all you can get out of such a place, then you are really missing the mark of what potential sits there.

Embracing The Craft

I was listening to an episode of the Tim Ferris podcast where he was interviewing Adam Savage the other day and became struck with a point Savage made. He spoke about his early days of being an actor, and the difference between himself and the other actors. He essentially stated that he wanted to be an actor, but the others wanted to perform the craft of acting. He was not as interested in the craft of it all. This story really got me thinking about a lot of things in my own life. I thought about the craft versus the work of the things I have pursued.

I have rarely embraced the craft of things. I think this contributed to many of my failures. I wanted the product of the work, I did not want the process and the craft. Wanting the product of the work is a good thing, as is embracing the path. At times I did embrace the craft. In my career I have failed to embrace the craft at virtually every turn, in retrospect the only place I might have really embraced craftsmanship was lifting weights.

In lifting weights I have embraced the craft in a pure way. I enjoy almost every workout, it has become a great source of joy. I enjoy becoming better at exercises. I enjoy the practice of really dialing in my form. I indulge in hours and hours of reading, watching videos, and listening to podcasts around fitness. As I have gotten older, I enjoy all this even more and more. I am content in the knowledge that I may ever only apply 10% of the fitness knowledge I have gained. I enjoyed gaining muscle, and gaining strength, but these have not a huge focus for the last decade, I lifted because I was a lifter. I did the things around lifting, because I did them. This was all very easy to do. I enjoyed lifting, it is a really fun thing for many people.

Having seen what this looks like in my lifting, I have never seen the same craftsmanship and embrace in my career. The same kind of things, the same depth of experience has never happened for me in my career. My career has been dictated by the end goals, by impatience. I like to think I have worked hard, and tried to do things the right way in my career. I don’t believe there was some moral failing on my part. I was never as into things as I maybe should have been. A lot of people can succeed without embracing their craft and career, I don’t think I am one of those people. For me, I am at a place in life where the craft of things must be embraced more.

What does embracing the craft look like? There are a lot of things it means to me.

I must be patient. This is biggest thing for me. If I am not happy where things are at, then I want change now. This desire is fine, but I can’t let that desire for instant change to govern things as much as I have in the past.

I must pursue repetition.

I must pursue the craft daily if possible.

I must accept that I don’t always need to see the ROI immediately of everything. I must seek knowledge and skill for their own sake.

I must emotionally and mentally accept the craft.

Embracing the craft for me, must be a pursuit, I need to look for ways to embrace it more.

I must accept I must embrace the boring to get to the cool. The bigger the base the higher the pyramid can be.

For me when I embrace the craft of something the results are a lot better. I think we know in our hearts when we have really embraced something. This embrace creates results, peace, and more fun for me, and isn’t that what I want from everything?

Maxims of Community Strength and Growth

I have spent a lot of time the last several years floating around tech, startup, and coworking communities. I have organized events, I have spoke at events, and I have just hung out at many others. I have built a startup that crashed and burned. I have coded, and I have consulted. I am convinced a strong community can work to the benefit of all involved. These communities should always be growing, strengthening and evolving. These are the maxims if implemented, pondered, and explored that I believe can lead to a strong community that is enriching and beneficial to all those in it.

Maxim 1. Everyone that is willing should be allowed to participate.

2. This is a team. You must make the team stronger. If you do not make the team stronger you must leave.

3. Every single person in the community must help every other single person become better.

4. We exist in each other’s lives for mutual benefit. Great profits are to be gained elsewhere. The team is not for profits.

5. Failure is not failure. Failures are data points and practice.

6. To be included you must create. You can’t wait years to be in the game. This is not a place for waiting.

7. Limitations are to be left at the door. Someone far stupider and lazier than you has made it work.

8. What works for one person doesn’t work for everyone.

9. Only one project at a time that isn’t making you any damn money. You are not Elon Musk. One fight at a time is enough.

10. You are what you create. You are not your race. You are not your gender. You are not rich or poor. You are not ugly or sexy. You are not your age.

11. People that don’t need help still need help. Society likes to help people. It seems rather logical and meaningful to us to help people that are disadvantaged in some way. Even people that “don’t need help” need help, and we can’t forget that.

12. The community will reflect the leadership of the community, leaders should be chosen wisely.

13. Entrepreneurship at times is about breaking the rules. If we all followed the rules we would all be working at Purdue University and no one would be building companies. We have to allow people to break rules.

14. If we are not competitors we should be helping each other a lot.

15. Wizards, Jedi, rockstars, and ninjas are rare. Even the ones you find likely suck at most things in their life.

16. There must be events that bring all parts of the community together.

17. You only have to be good at a few things to get success.

18. There must be a cultural expectation to produce. Floating around isn’t good. The term production will vary from person to person.

19. Everything looks different for everyone. You don’t know people’s stories.

20. New leaders must be groomed and sought out, almost immediately.

21. Leaders cannot be overextended. There is a tendency for this to happen. Community leadership carries more weight than it appears to from the outside.

22. Leadership must be distributed. The community cannot collapse because of the removal of someone or even a few someones.

23. Fewer, better events are usually better. Resist the urge to expand too fast with meetups and events.

24. Leadership must play matchmaker, and ensure people meet each other. There is an art to this, and it must be done proactively.

25. The community must be grown to stay alive.

26. You need true believers.

27. False prophets and unbelievers need to be ostracized.

28. A community is a garden, and must constantly be groomed, weeded and watered. There is no rest to this and no relenting.

29. A vibe of energy must constantly be cultivated. Success requires much effort and long hours. An energetic community helps one through the long hours.

30. The individual needs to be supported more than the company.

31. Many entrepreneurs are lonely, and grinding hard alone. This is not the most mentally sound of positions. The social aspects of the community should not be discounted for such reasons.

32. A cultural expectation to go to and support book launches, product releases, etc. We should be more excited about a book launch than someone having a baby in our community.

33. The community is a living vibrant thing, it does not stop. Weekends are just days. Holidays are just days. We cannot stop. Taking summers off is for school teachers.

34. If you run with the lame you will develop a limp, most limps can be fixed.

35. Weakness must be purged, but the weak must be allowed to enter.

36. Community members should have a voice, and representation. Leadership should consist of people active in the community.

37. “Normal”, “work life balance”, and “reasonable” are the enemy.

38. Speaker fatigue must be limited. A speaker cannot speak too often.

39. Steel sharpens steel. There must be steel.

40. You cannot tell people to stop. The community must enable. Even to the detriment of the entrepreneur. Success is often found only after all semblance of reasonableness has been left behind. There are costs and sacrifices to be paid. If someone wants to run face first into a brick wall, we must help them. Then when they break their face, we help them put the pieces back together. Their process, their journey doesn’t have to make sense to us.

41. We keep trying and swing that bat, until we win, or we’re broken.

42. Impossible is a four letter word. We figure things out, that’s what we do. Culture must facilitate that.

43. We must create places for failures to land. Otherwise they may not be able to try again.

44. It is good to have a clubhouse where the community can do whatever it needs to do. Multiple clubhouses are best.

45. Once you’re in, you’re in for life.

46. We must avoid people that have accomplished very little being exalted as luminaries in fields and competencies they know little about. The blind far too often lead the blind.

47. We must learn how to be truly helpful. Offering help once is polite, offering help numerous times shows you care.

48. We all need lots of help.

49. This is a safe place, but since you’re my brother, I will bloody you.

50. We must take care of each other.

51. Going lone wolf makes people crazy. Encourage partnerships, whether formal or simply good friendships.

52. Physical spaces should facilitate work. Chairs need to be comfortable.

53. Quit talking about the coffee so much, it makes you a loser.

54. The building cannot matter, burn it down tomorrow and the community should remain.

55. The community must take pride in itself. It is what it is. This should be celebrated. You shouldn’t try to be bigger and grander than you are.

The Hidden Power of Startup Weekend

It’s Monday morning, another Greater Lafayette Startup Weekend is in the books. It was a weekend of creativity and just a bit of chaos. These events are a bit odd, a bit silly, really cool, and I wonder if they don’t just happen to teach us how to live a little bit better in our everyday lives.

If you had to describe what a Startup Weekend is, you could be brief and simply say “Energy and Optimism.” In fact these events are filled with people that are 100% optimistic and seeking a touch of magic. They find that magic by simply suspending disbelief for just a weekend. Negativity and doubts are disregarded in favor of action, exploration, and wonder. Taking nothing more than idea, everyone is trying to breath life into this idea of theirs. Once there are some teams formed around some of these ideas, then some really cool things start to happen.

These groups of mostly strangers start with business ideas, and they try and figure out if these ideas have any legs to them. These strangers then spend every waking moment for the whole weekend helping this team of theirs move forward. Then at some point something else cool always seems to happen, all the other teams of strangers, start helping out all the other teams full of strangers. Then at some point a bunch of coaches and mentors show up to bring even more help and expertise to the table. A lot of these people are professionals that bill out their time at over $100 an hour, and they just help all weekend for free. This creates some sort of vortex of creative energy that is hard to find in the world. This energy unlocks things, it can unlock people.

Before long these teams will realize how flawed they are. Most teams are lacking something pretty big they need to pull off their vision. Web apps are hard to build without a developer. A team may not have anyone that is good at public speaking to present their vision. A team of engineers may not have much experience validating a market or talking to customers. These teams are flawed, they know they shouldn’t succeed. That story they tell themselves is bullshit. Most of the time they cut through this bullshit and move forward. It’s not uncommon to see people that meekly pitch an idea on Friday, stand up on stage Sunday for final presentations and own the room. People quit thinking about what they “can” do, and just start doing, and in the process learn just a little about themselves.

As the weekend progresses people become more aggressive. Passiveness and indecision melt away. There is just no time for that nonsense. People enter an attack mode, and a lot of stuff starts to get done. A lot of first-time attendees of the weekend leave a bit surprised how much they accomplished in the weekend. A lot can happen in the course of a weekend or even a day. You could ask yourself why couldn’t this happen all the time?

The answers are simple. Focus, the only thing that matters for the weekend is the team, the business, the mission, its almost like a state of mediation. Passion, the passion people bring in is contagious. Playfulness, people feel free to try things and experiment. Inclusiveness, everyone finds a way to contribute to things, and everyone that enters the building is a part of the game in some way, no spectators are allowed. We start to act a little different, and we start to get something different as a result.

Why don’t we all help each other more? Why do we put up with our own bullshit stories in our heads? If we all acted like this a bit more every day, where would we end up? There is nothing stopping us from doing this all the time. There is only the hinderance of choice. What is stopping people from choosing passion, focus, energy, openness? Maybe that’s what Startup Weekend is good for, learning how to unlock ourselves and get out of our own way.

My Experiences with Celiac Disease

Disclaimer. This is not meant to be any sort of recommendation or anything of that nature. Go to a doctor for that kind of stuff. This is just my personal experiences.

For many years now I have been sick. I have celiac disease. In short when I eat gluten, my body attacks itself and damages my intestines. There is no cure. This is largely self diagnosed with the help of a doctor. I did not go through all the tests out there, but yes its rather certain I have Celiac Disease. If it’s actually something else, well I don’t know that it matters, the story, symptoms, and results are the same. I write this as a statement of what things are like for me, these are my experiences.

The Basics.

For people with celiac disease when gluten is eaten, the body overreacts to the protein gluten and attacks the villi of the small intestine. This can lead to a host of symptoms and medical problems.

Gluten is a protein found in wheat, barley and rye. Those are the most common sources, there are other less common sources.

If you are interested in finding out more about the medical definitions and specifics of celiac disease then you should check out https://celiac.org/ and https://www.webmd.com/digestive-disorders/celiac-disease/celiac-disease#1

Treatment

There is no cure. The only treatment is to avoid gluten in diet.

What Peak Sickness Was Like

For years I was sick on and off. This started to become more noticeable in my early twenties. I would get sick when eating at restaurants. I was also more tired and sluggish than before. This kept getting a little worse over time. That’s what made celiac disease hard to catch, it got worse slowly and the patterns were hard to recognize. This continued to progress until I reached a level of peak sickness.

For me peak sickness was like having food poisoning or stomach flu. When I would eat I would get sick. Sometimes this did not happen, but it happened a lot. I was sick with your normal food poisoning symptoms almost every single day of my life. There were a few days where I wasn’t super sick, but for the most part it was daily. When this sickness would hit, it could last a few minutes, or all day. This was the biggest struggle, there were also many other symptoms that manifested.

Brain Fog. When my symptoms act up and I get sick, I often get brain fog. When I was at peak sickness my brain was just fuzzy. I was not as sharp about things as I had been in the past. Some days it was hard to do much thinking at all. This kind of hanged over me at all times, some days better, some days worse.

Trouble with Seasonal allergies. Before I went gluten-free, I had lots of trouble with your normal seasonal allergies, things like pollen, mold, dust, flowering trees. I took monthly shots for over 20 years to deal with these allergies. As I got sicker from the celiac disease these got worse. For example when I was at peak sickness I had a stretch where my eyes were burning so bad from allergies that my shirt was soaked in the front because I cried all day long. This went on for several days. I was miserable many days of the year because of the normal allergy symptoms all sorts of people get from seasonal type allergies. These have all gotten far better after going gluten free.

Skin problems. Before I went gluten free with things, I had nasty skin. My skin was having so many problems that my forearms were starting to crack and bleed. This really didn’t bother me much, because I am not a pretty man. I ignored this mostly, because I was doing the tough guy thing. It was still a sign that things were not right at all.

Abdominal pain. At some points I was having sharp abdominal pain and cramping. If this had continued it might have become debilitating to some degree. There were a couple days where I had gotten to the point I was laying in bed in pain, just trying to ride it all out. If I had not gone gluten free, I have no doubt things would have gotten worse.

Fatigue. When I was at the peak of my sickness, I was always tired. If I did a lot of work on a given day, I would spend the next day laying around sleeping as much as possible. After I went gluten free I quit laboring so much in in life. This was very pronounced in the gym I could instantly hit the elliptical machine much longer and harder. The gym was a good measuring stick because it wasn’t based on perception, it was based on real measurement.

ADHD. They say celiac disease can be a cause or contributing factor of ADHD. I have been diagnosed with ADHD. I can’t speak to whether or not celiac disease is the cause of my attention issues. It is there though so it’s included for the sake of being exhaustive.

Bleeding. Yup blood was showing up in the toilet. That’s always fun! Luckily that is no longer happening. That is a new kind of scary, because if you look down in the toilet and see blood there is something really bad going on.

There might have been more things going on due to the celiac disease. Finding true causes to everything is a bit hard, so this is all my best guesses.

Note: Not everyone experiences the disease in the same way. An individual’s symptoms may be lesser or greater in severity. They could also experience other symptoms as well. I personally never get headaches, but I know migraines are common with celiac disease.

Going Gluten Free

In March 2013 I went completely gluten free with my diet. A lot of the symptoms got better. Some of them have still exist. I do not have days off from the diet. I do not take cheat days. I have not eaten any gluten on purpose in 6 years (it can sneak in, more on that later).

Even though I am gluten free, things can still get triggered up. I am not healthy, I am not cured, there are still problems from this disease.

Triggers

I can still get triggered up and be sick from the celiac disease. This happens often, in fact there often more days in a week where I am sick than healthy even after 6 years of being on a gluten free diet. So there are a few triggers that seem to cause problems.

Gluten is the main trigger I have to be careful about. I don’t purposely eat gluten but gluten can sneak into food lots of ways. I don’t know how much my body can handle. Is one crumb too much? Or will that not cause a problem? I don’t think there is any good answer to that. Cross contamination is a constant worry. Even using a wooden spoon that was used with gluten things can spread it to non-gluten foods.

There are times perfectly safe food can just make me sick. I have developed some issues with dairy as well to the celiac disease. I don’t know if they are related. It seems as though anything I eat might make me sick, every meal is a roll of the dice. Eating too much food makes me sick and stirs things up too.

Stress and fatigue also have an impact. These things make me more susceptible to having problems. I need to be careful about sleep, and just relaxing. This means there is a price to be paid for staying up too late at night and other things. That seems to be how things feel a lot of the time to me, there is just a higher price to be paid for things.

Where Things Stand Today 6 Years Later.

So six years into eating gluten free and trying to manage celiac disease best I can where do I stand?

The food poisoning feeling and symptoms is still there. At the time of writing this, 3 of the last 4 nights I have been sick from the celiac symptoms. I am sick often, and have to assume I may be sick at any given time. This is not near as bad as it was before going gluten free. I have “good days” now, and before there weren’t really any good health days.

I get hit with the brain fog pretty often too. When the stomach and intestinal problems start, I usually get pretty fuzzy in the head for a little while.

My attention span is not what it used to be. I have trouble thinking like I used to as a teenager. It seems like that horsepower just isn’t there anymore. I don’t know if that is just perception or reality. As a teen I used to play in all day competitive chess tournaments, I couldn’t dream of focusing like that anymore.

Lastly there are other just weird problems that are probably not really problems at all. For example alcohol really hits me hard now. I am a super lightweight when it comes to drinking. Last time I drank I had 3 small glasses of wine, and that was enough to make me super drunk and silly. I weigh 240 pounds, this has never been a problem before, but now it seems my body doesn’t process alcohol well. It seems like the celiac disease might be to blame at least in part. My body has become weird. My body just does not react like it is supposed to in many situations.

One thing that has definitely gotten better since going gluten free is my response to seasonal allergies. They barely affect me at all anymore. I get a runny nose now and then, and things like that, but its not a bit deal. I have gone off the allergy shots I was taking and have noticed no negatives to that. I used to notice allergies a lot in the spring and fall, now I don’t have that problem to such an extreme.

Overall things are better, but not “good.” I am still sick a lot.

Repercussions.

So that is all the nuts and bolts of what is going on with my health at any given time. There is the other side of how it complicates, changes, and impacts life. My entire life revolves around managing the symptoms and handling being sick. This governs every decision in my life at this point.

Anywhere I am there is a good chance I end up being sick. Anywhere I go I may end up camped out in the bathroom for some long period of time. So do I want to be camped out there? There is no waiting until later, the sickness comes up on me fast. I can go from feeling fine to being in rough shape in a matter of minutes. This impacts every area of my life.

Career.

Celiac disease has really hurt different aspects of my career as I try and establish it. Being ill limits me. It does not stop me from being able to do work, or from doing good work. It does make things more complicated and convoluted. I just do can’t or don’t feel comfortable doing things in the same ways other people might.

I spend a lot time sick and in a state of impaired general performance. At some jobs this can be a problem, at others it is something that is manageable. A job where there is lots of time pressure and tight deadlines is not going to work for me. I just cannot honestly commit that I will be able focus or perform at any given point in time. Ask me to do something in the next 4 hours, and it just might not happen. If I am having a flair up of illness, I can’t help it. Delivering work in a timely fashion in most cases, I can do that.

Since I get sick without warning and at time. I cannot really commit to being in a given place at a given time for any period of time. I can for the most part be where I am saying I am going to be. But things like being stuck at a machine in a factory, or a cash register in a store, that is just not possible. It will not be long before I have to shut things down because I am sick. This limits the kind of jobs I can just go get to pay the bills. I can’t just go grab a random person type job. It just won’t work for me. Lots of jobs are not cool with you walking away from customers every single day because you are sick.

With these problems and my rules around food and that kind of thing, I become the “weird guy.” People do not accept the weird guy in general. People act really weird when I am someplace and I don’t eat anything. They can act like it’s some travesty I don’t eat their snacks. This cannot help with a job. Think about all the jobs that have meals as part of them. I can’t do client lunches. Meetings where you are given a box lunch, well I can’t eat then either. This is more of a problem with everyone else than me. I can skip a meal. This kind of thing is just a disadvantage, in some ways that is what celiac disease is, a list of disadvantages.

Social

My social life has taken hits because of being sick. If a social gathering revolves around food, I do not want to participate. There is also the issue of getting sick, I don’t want to be sick in the wrong places. Think of all the places you wouldn’t want to go if you had a stomach flu, I don’t want to go to those places either. The thing is, I have this going on every day. From a certain perspective, this makes me more distant, there are just things I don’t do that other people do. It starts to add up over time, and make me feel as though I am a part of things, but not all the way a part. I feel a bit separated from other people, it’s just not fun. Time and time again I am presented with social situations, that I would rather just opt out of.

I have been invited by friends to meals at their homes. I have declined. I have two options if I go show up. The first is don’t eat anything that might make me sick, in many cases that means eat nothing. Eating nothing at a dinner make me look like a weirdo. I could also talk to them ahead of time and make the entire menu about me. That makes me feel like a jerk. They are planning to do something and I’m saying “hey do my thing instead” when they already had a menu in mind. There is also the issue of their ability to pull off a truly gluten free meal. It does take a little learning, and there are tricks. So I have to trust them not to mess up the food preparation. It is really hard to get right at the beginning, so is the risk really worth it? I have to ask myself that. The result is I just decline invitations.

You don’t realize how much food is everywhere, and how many social events have food as component. I don’t feel like I get to participate in these. Go to a conference or meeting where they serve meals? I don’t get to eat that day. I have snuck outside at so many events, gone to the parking lot, and ate food from a cooler I packed by myself. I did this at rehearsal dinner for a friend’s wedding, I still got sick and have to leave early. It’s not a big deal, but its depressing.

Its depressing when I look at the affect being sick has on the ideas of dating and marriage. How much of dating revolves around food? Like I would have to be weird on a date and be like…. “Yeah but we can’t eat.” And besides that, what reasonable lady would want to date a person that is sick all the time. And even if they wanted to date me, why would I want to put this nonsense on another person. As sick as I am, I can’t rationalize doing that to someone else. I am also likely to get sick on a date. So I would likely have to just leave and go home because I am too sick that night. I ask myself if I can’t even make it through dates, how in the world could I think about things like marriage? It feels as though there is no real path for dating to even make sense. It feels as though even the possibility is eliminated for me. I just choose to opt out at the moment of that entire part of life, that may change in the future, but I doubt it.

Opting out of all social events and things is what I want to do. I know if I opt out then I know I lose friends, friendships become weaker. I force myself to go do things, even though I know there is a price of discomfort to be paid. Still despite efforts I become more isolated, and that is not any good. The decisions of what to do are not fun or easy. It is like I am constantly playing mind games with myself.

Mind Games

There is no doubt I am sick, the real question is to what degree and that is where the mind games of celiac disease starts for me. It can be hard to know when I am having a real problem and when I am just being a wimp. These thoughts enter my head. Maybe I am making a bigger deal of things than is reality. When I am getting hit with being sick and getting brain fog, am I really that fuzzy mentally, or is it an excuse to not do work? There is no way to know the answer, so in general I try and move forward best I can. These thoughts are just where the mind games begin.

If I tell you 20,30,40,50 times I can’t eat gluten, and you keep bringing up eating pizza or some other thing, then you really don’t listen to me do you? This kind of thing makes me question friendship, or the quality of a friendship we might have. At the same time it’s also hard to remember who all I have told about being sick. I don’t react or get nasty with anyone I think is ignoring the words coming out of my mouth, since I might be wrong about this. But it sits there in my mind, and I know some of these people should know, but they just don’t pay attention. Thinking about this makes me question who actually cares, and what friends are actually worthwhile friends. I think the real takeaway is we all need to listen closer to our friends, because have we all been told things by our friends 30 times and we keep ignoring them?

A more vague concern and problem is that on one level I have no desire to ever leave the house. I really am content not to go places. This is all due to the celiac disease. I used to like going places and doing things, I don’t like it as much anymore. If the situations are right and I am comfortable then yes I like going places still. Over time though I am more and more content to just be at home, and I don’t see that changing.

Outside of social worries there are some very legitimate worries and concerns about my health. I wonder if my health plateaued or will things keep declining? Long term nutrient malabsorption has to have some penalties. Maybe Celiac Disease won’t put me down, but could it wear me down and make me more susceptible to other things? I don’t have an answer.

Many signs point to the fact that I have reached the peak of my life and am on a pretty fast downhill slide. Am I going to be dead from this in the next year? No, but I could be in really rough shape at 50 years old. I can see that being true. The general health decline I have faced from age 24 to age 34 is not a positive sign at all. The damage accumulates.

I don’t know what damage is being done, but I know that it is happening. There are all sorts of neurological diseases that may be related to celiac disease. I may have brain damage because of this condition. It’s a scary thought, to have a condition that may rob me of my mind.

I have spent around five years working as a web developer and coder. In those five years I never got good at it. I can do some useful things, and build some cool stuff with code. I have never gotten good. I wonder often if being sick has diminished my mental abilities to the point where learning complex things like computer programming is just something I won’t be able to do. I can do good work, but at the same time, it feels like it’s a lot harder than it should be, and harder than it was before I had as many sickness issues. This might be all perception, but the thoughts and questions remain.

The Celiac Disease Foundation says children of people with Celiac Disease have a 10 percent chance of having the disease. That doesn’t sound like a big chance, but it’s also a pretty big chance when you’re talking about giving a child a rather not fun medical issue. I really don’t know the moral implications of giving a kid a good chance of having all these problems. I wonder what percentage chance of passing this on to my offspring makes me an asshole for having children at all. I am in no way in a place right now where I want to have kids, but this sits in my head. I have to really think about it.

Barring new research that finds some cure, I am stuck with this sickness, every single day the rest of my life. That isn’t fun, but its real. This fact adds a weight to life. I don’t know that being sick makes things impossible. But it is making every situation harder.

Conclusions

These are my experiences and how life is for me dealing with celiac disease. It is one thing to read a disease description on a website, its another to hear a real story.

I know I wrote this to show that celiac disease is a serious thing. I try not to complain and talk about being sick. There is no real benefit to it in most cases. I suppose if you want some takeaways from all this then I can give you a few.

If you know someone with celiac disease I know they will appreciate you acknowledging or respecting how bad things can be for them. There are minor medical conditions, for many of us with celiac disease, it is not a minor thing. There is a real burden to having this disease, it causes real problems.

Try and catch this stuff early if you or someone you know has this kind of problem. The older and longer this goes on the more the damage seems to be. If you are the type to “tough it out” you need to know there is probably damage being done. Go to doctors, be smart.

Lastly just be cool about a sick person acting weird. We likely make up a bunch of rules about how to stay as healthy as possible. This might make us weird in some situations, but we are probably doing it for a real reason. So in short, just be cool, let us do our thing, so if that means bringing along our cooler of safe foods, just be cool whatever it is.

I paint a bleak picture. There are good days where I don’t feel sick. I just don’t know when those days will be. This makes planning hard, because I must plan as though every day may be horrible, because enough of them are. Overall life is harder, I feel ill often. I approach this all with whatever perspective I can. There are far worse conditions I could have. The facts of how being ill are simply the facts, I cannot change them. I can only react as best I can. That is how celiac disease is for me, it can be worse for some, better for others, but that’s how it is for me.

How Building Software Improved My Deadlift

This June I walked into the gym at 34 years old, after 20 years of lifting weights, and lifted my heaviest deadlift ever. This was a most glorious day. It was a day, just a couple years before I never would have thought would come. Over those two years I started working on a fitness startup app. The app was focused on providing feedback to lifters and doing all sorts of normal workout journal things. The process of product managing and building this app was fun, challenging, and ended up making me stronger in the gym.

I thought I knew a lot about training and lifting weights. I have been doing this seriously since 14 years old or somewhere around there. The plan was to take everything I knew and distill it into an app. I did do this, but I had to do so much more to get to where I felt the product was of actual quality. I had to move from lifting to understanding lifting. The journey resulted in a pretty cool app, me understanding lifting better, and being the strongest I had ever been.

To build a product that was useful to other lifters, I had to move from being just a lifter, to being someone that understood lifting at a higher level. I spent so much time on YouTube and reading to learn more about the programming side of lifting and look for commonalities. These commonalities would become features in the product I was building. A side benefit to this was that I was absorbing large amounts of information about all sorts of lifting things. I also spent countless hours in deep thought about working out and lifting. This was a level of thinking about lifting that I had never engaged in before. I thought I was reading a lot and thinking about lifting a lot until this process started. One of the easiest ways to lift heavier weights is to become a smarter lifter. Before I was long into this process I was starting to get stronger and my body was feeling better than it had in years.

This process was all a search for features to put into the app I was building. All the features were to track variables in a lifter’s training that lead to increased performance. I was looking for common variables that lots of lifters would want to track. I settled on a handful of variables that I knew were important to most lifters. I started tracking these few variables in my training and I got stronger. It was only a few variables. I focused on getting enough repetitions of key exercises in during a week, and I focused on breaking records on a regular basis. Those were the main two things I worried about. I manipulated my workouts around those principles and I kept getting stronger. Before I had started in on this I would have told you that countless variables make a difference, and they do. I also learned for me at that time if all I thought about was those key variables, then the results got better. I think that is probably true about all sorts of things in life.

While researching to build this product, I was starting to look at all sorts of training theories and methodologies I had ignored in the past. For most of my lifting life I have done the exercises, methods, and routines that I liked. I got results from this approach and did not worry much about things outside my interests. This is ok, but new results usually mean doing things we have not done before. My research was exposing me to all sorts of new ideas and I started to implement some of them. These new methods helped me do some cool things. I was able to rehab a pec tear while only missing a couple workouts, in the past that would have sidelined me for a long time. I would not have been able to pull that off before my research. This is just one of the ways this process was serving as a catalyst for strength.

Any good app or software requires testing, and I became the tester for everything I built. Having to put my workouts into an app and see how hard I was or not working was a great nudge in the right direction. It was my job to be better and stronger, so I was better and better. I think this nudge is all most of us need to be better at something we are passionate about. Building this app poured gas on my already existing passion.

I am through the whole process of building this lifting app. I built it to learn technology, to make some money, to build up my resume, I didn’t think it would result in lifetime best lifts. In retrospect I think building software or products around a hobby is a great way to get better at your hobby and get a deeper appreciation for it. I am deeper into lifting weights now more than ever. If you want to get better at something, I can now recommend building products around it. It will force you to learn, it will force you to understand more, and it will force you to grow. These products could be software, physical, informational, podcasts…. I don’t think it matters, it only matters that you are forced to grow and think.

Control Issues

“I have no idea what to do.” I told myself this looking in the bathroom mirror at the public library. I spend much of my time there these days. The wifi is free, and they let you hangout all day which is a good deal. This is where I go to do my “work.” What my “work” consists of any given day is a mystery. I have a little bit of client work I do. I have a zombie startup I have been working on, I call it a zombie, because it might be dead at this point, I don’t really know. My career is not going all that well, I need a job, and I have no idea how to get one.

I lack a clear path forward towards any job. My resume and work experience are lacking, I am working to remedy that, but that is still the fact. My health is compromised so that limits options a lot. These realities purge a lot of the simple solutions. It looks and feels like there are no reasonable options in front of me. I have no idea what to do.

When I have no idea what to do, I feel like I have no control. As a Christian though, should I have ever thought I was in control anyways? God is in control, the Bible says that in countless places. Trying to be in control, when God is, well that seems like a path to stress and everything not good. I can work, I can try hard, but the fact is I am never the boss and in control. Trying to wrassle control from God is like trying to wrassle a Grizzly bear, it’s just not going to go well.

Daily Nehemiah 5, Not So Bad

Not so bad. It’s not so bad. I tell myself that kind of thing all the time. I think it gets me in trouble. “Not so bad” it lowers my standards. “Not so bad” allows me accept the unacceptable. “Not so bad” is part of what is breaking me.

“Not so bad” allows me to sit far too idle and not take the action I should. I have cultivated this ability to sit in pain and failure, and weather the storm. I can sit there, and just sit, instead of taking whatever massive action is needed to move out of the pain. This is the tough bastard side of “Not so bad.” There is a line between being tough and persistent, and being an idiot that is getting his head kicked in.

In matters of faith and morality, “Not so bad” is one of those tricky tools of the devil. Doing one wrong thing can be justified because it’s not as bad as another thing. To have faith there has to be some acceptance of a concept of sin and morality. There is combat of Truth versus Evil. “Not so bad” can provide a false rationalization that we are winning this battle when in fact we are not. I am doing lots of wrong things, but I’m doing a lot better than other people. “Not so bad.” It is easy to see how that kind of thinking can start to creep in.

“Not so bad” rarely stays not so bad. “Not so bad” has a funny way of growing and becoming a bit more. “Not so bad” is like an invasive species inside the human spirit. Years of putting up with “Not so bad” can do a lot of damage. Using these words is probably a cue that I need to evaluate if things are a little worse than I thought.

“Not so bad” are like magic words for me. I fool myself with them. Your magic words are probably something different. They are still a cue you are fooling yourself, and probably fooling yourself in completely different ways than I. Finding your magic words can just be a step in cutting through the nonsense you tell yourself, unless you’re doing “Not so bad” at that already.

Guilty Of Startup Misadventure Part 1.

Many are guilty of startup misadventures, I am no different, this is one of those tales…

The day is Friday, 9/14/18 and I feel a bulge in my abs. I know the feeling, I had that same bulge on the other side two years earlier. That bulge was an inguinal hernia that required surgery. This time would be no different, sooner or later there will be a surgery to fix this. There is no training around this thing, there are no alternative treatments, the surgeon has to cut me.

The next couple days were filled with a feeling of impending and complete doom. I felt assaulted, and broken on many fronts. Firstly there is the whole surgery thing, some doctor is going to shove some mesh inside me and sew me back together. This is going to hurt, the rehab hurts, but I have done that before, and I can do the pain. Barring a surgeon butchering his job, I know I can come back fine from this thing. The real doom was felt around the fact that I am currently building almost all my life and career around fitness and lifting.

My only hobby is lifting weights. I am studying to become a personal trainer and get a job doing that. I am also building a startup focused on fitness. Everything in my life revolves around the fact that I have been under the bar lifting weights for 20 years, and the fact that in all that time I have learned a trick or two. My body is currently broken though, I cannot be under a bar. I am early into the development of the injury from what I can tell. I’m by no means crippled, but doing a deadlift would be really stupid right now. I have spent a lot of time thinking that all is lost. I cannot do the central activity around which my career and startup are focused.

All the product testing done on Incelerate(my super cool fitness startup) has revolved around my own training, and working with the actual data and processes I use to train myself. All of this is done now. I can’t work new systems, or build new features to experiment with, I am stuck sitting in a chair indefinitely. This entire product I have built is the product and tools I have wanted and would have liked to have in the past. I have put everything on myself, the product development, the testing, the marketing, everything.

I am early on with everything with this startup but have started to think about and start moving with my content marketing. Again most of this content revolves around my own weight lifting and things inspired from that. Everything has been on the table to do, from hardcore exercise science articles, to fitness and lifting stunts on YouTube. Now that feels limited, I can’t even take a picture of myself in the gym for Instagram, because well, I’m no longer in the gym. A lot of marketing doors have closed with that. Really it feels like a lot of doors have closed for me in the several days.

Really I have come realize pretty fast here, that these feelings and perceptions of my reality are nothing but a lie I am telling myself. Building a fitness startup, or even personal training, they are not about me actually working out. This startup is not about me at all. These ventures are about my experience and passion, not about what I can do today. I lost that somewhere along the way. I am a coach, I am a cheerleader, but I’m not the one playing the game. It matters that a basketball coach used to play, it doesn’t matter if he can still play. I kept falling into a mental trap, thinking that heavier lifts would make my startup better in some way.

Nothing I could do in the next year in the gym would have really made a difference that the last 20 years wouldn’t have already done. More experience and domain knowledge is always good. 20 years experience means I have those boxes checked. In fact if you look at some of the other lifting apps out there, I have more time under the bar than their entire founding teams. I have the experience and knowledge to build a quality product that can help a lot of people.

I think experience and wanting more knowledge is a mental trap for startups. Most startups are about helping the common person and intermediate people. Elite and advanced people are going to need something a little different, and I must ask myself if I am the guy to help those people. I am not elite, I am a hobbyist at this stuff. If I was going to be elite, my body would have responded by now and become elite. I have the skill and experience to build some cool stuff for normal people wanting to be strong. I will NEVER have the experience to build tools for elite athletes without a lot of outside help.

All in all I lost sight of what mattered and why I can build a pretty cool app and startup. There are really two things that I have going for me. I have passion and I have experience. Those are the two things that matter. How much I lift today doesn’t matter. How fit or healthy I am at the moment doesn’t matter. A focus on myself put me in this position, but to build a business, focus on others is far more important. A lot of good startups start from a founder’s hobbies or interests. This is a good thing. But if you’re not careful you’ll end up like me thinking if you build up your bench press you’ll build up your business, and that’s really not how this all works.