On March 8th, 2012, I gave my first motivational speech (and my first major talk since 2000). It was delivered to about 150 creative employees at Hallmark Cards in Kansas City, and I talked about the relationship between my personal development and my successes in indie app development. Here is a video of the talk:

My first story is about Tarot and iPhone app development (starting at 1:46), and my second story is about meditation and 3D Porch (starting at 16:35)

This was one of five talks given during Hallmark's annual Trends Week. As you can see from the poster, I received the same billing as Temple Grandin, who was listed in 2010 by Time Magazine as one of the top 100 most influential "Heroes". I got the gig after a friend forwarded an excerpt from my upcoming book Dear Charlotte to the trends manager at Hallmark.

Transcript of the talk after the break:

(Thanks to Marita for organizing this event, to Eric Rltvty for the headshot, to Rusty for letting me use his picture, and to "kidjazz" for the intro music)

Continue reading . . .

I recently gave a talk at Hallmark, Inc. about trends, and I casually mentioned how scrum was slowly taking over other industries after it's success in the video game industry. One of the attendees emailed me recently asking if scrum was good for creativity, citing this segment from wikipedia:

In 1986, Hirotaka Takeuchi and Ikujiro Nonaka described a new tactic that would increase speed and flexibility at the cost of design and quality, based on case studies from manufacturing firms in the automotive, photocopier, restaurants food and printer manufacturers. They called this the holistic or rugby approach.

I think comparing scrum to creativity might be an apples and oranges comparison. When scrum was used at Aspyr, the game designers didn't use it as their actual creativity tool. Scrum was just the means of creating a regular occasion for the game designers to report their progress on making various creative outputs i.e. "chapter stories", "character designs", etc. In some ways, I liked scrum's impact on creativity because almost nothing got wasted. There were no lost months of head-in-the-clouds brainstorming about things we couldn't have implemented anyway in our time frame. It was like this: Monday, we need a story arc for this character that takes ten minutes for the user to complete; Friday, here it is.

In my talk, I mentioned how concepts like flow and scrum were being seized by corporations as a way to make work more efficient. I then urged everyone to seize these ideas for their own lives to achieve their own aspirations. That was the gist of how I became an indie application developer.

The attendee then asked whether these efficiency-bringing tactics have impeded or aided my own creative process. I've used flow to break down the chapters of Dear Charlotte into a todo-list/progress-bar. I use little symbols to mark when each chapter has progressed through a certain level of re-writing. I then keep a regular semi-daily time slot where I make pretty much the same progress every day on my book. It's this rhythm-finding and progress-bar visualization that adds a layer of daily satisfaction to my creative process. Because of this, flow has made more efficient, period. I write more frequently, but at the micro-level, in the actual minute-by-minute of coming up with ideas for what I'm going to say, I have no quota or anything like that. However, because I have the routine, I can see that on some days I was slower to re-write, other days faster, and I learn something about myself while reflecting.

I should also clarify a potential misconception about creativity. It's a misconception I've held for maybe twenty years. It's that freedom and creativity are best friends. I've been the most creative when I've had the most freedom. And I love this principle from improv: "Say 'yes, and' to everything." But this article by Jonah Lehrer, makes me think twice about whether freedom and creativity must be absolutely linked. After all, there is also the brand of creativity that comes from limitations.

I just went to my second hackathon in a month, and I'd have to say, I think these are the future. And it's not for the reasons you would expect. It's not that I believe the apps you create in a 24 or 48-hour period are somehow better than a full-blown production cycle. Rather, it's that I've rarely experienced such a high concentration of education, networking, and creativity in a such short period of time.

Backgrounder

What is a hackathon? A hackathon (also known as a codejam) is where a group of like-minded people agree to spend a day or a weekend making something arbitrary from start to finish. The most common example is a gaming hackathon like Ludum Dare. At the start of the event, a game theme is posted on the web, and you then have 48 hours to create a game based on that theme. Ludum Dare is conducted virtually, but the hackathons I've gone to were all hosted at real life spaces. There, you can form your own teams or let yourself get paired up with strangers. And hackathons are not just for games, but for any kind of thing where makers can get together and make a product from start-to-finish in a short period of time.

The most recent hackathon one I went to was Molydeux, where we had 48 hours to make a game based on one of the weird game ideas from the parody Twitter account Peter Molydeux. It's a parody of game designer Peter Molyneux, who is known for over-ambitious game premises. The classic parody game idea is, "Is it possible to make a green square feel alive?" The game idea that Zach and I chose was as follows:

So we thought of making a game where you start out as a soldier killing people for about a minute. At the end of the minute, though, a twist is revealed. All the people you killed become ghosts that stick to you when you return home. The ghosts represent your guilt, and you have to do good deeds to alleviate your guilt. Perhaps you have to help old people cross the street or stop robberies. However, because you have so many ghosts around you, the elderly get scared of you, and run away. You're a foresaken war vet, returning home, struggling for redemption.

Through this hackathon and the one that I went to before it (where we had to create an app for our city government), I got to ...

1. Learn about the creative process

Zach and I have been friends for a while, and we have the same crazy sense of humor, but we have never worked together. He's always made comics on his own and I've always made iOS apps on my own. But here, I could see how our pattern of banter that we've developed over the years translated really well into coming up with a funny game idea. With him curating tweets from Molydeux's account that he thought would get a laugh out of me and me adding the moral twists and cruxes of the forsaken soldier, we were in sync like improv actors. I've always shied away from collaboration, but this event opened my eye to new possibilities.

2. Pop my cherry on engines and toolsets

The start of a hackathon has the same adrenaline and intensity of a race start. Because of the compressed time scale, you have to be incredible resourceful. After coming up with a game idea, I needed to choose a game engine fast. There were three clear choices: Unity, Game Salad, and Game Maker. So I simultaneously downloaded demos for all three and started fiddling with them. I then peppered other attendees at the hackathon as to what engines they used. I carried around a piece of paper, tallying the engine choices, which provided a very quick-and-dirty market survey.

3. Zoom through steep learning curves

I got stuck while getting started with the Unity engine, but sitting 10 feet to the right of me was someone who was already familiar with it. The 10 minutes of coaching that I got from him was equivalent to two hours of going through tutorial videos. It was so useful because it was applied tutoring. I had a specific thing in my mind I wanted to accomplish (setting up a 2D overhead game). He told me, "okay, use a fixed camera here, add a plane object there, put this there" etc. and bam, I had my scene all set up. This was an incredibly richer experience than the Q&A I saw when I Googled on forums with the same question.

4. Develop deep connections

Plus, since he had been working at the table next to my group, we bounced other game ideas off of each other and we got a feel for how we worked. I later added him in Facebook, and it turned out that we had worked at the same company Aspyr years ago, and that he went on to work at BioWare (both video game companies). Who knows, I may return back to the game industry and this connection will prove useful. Plus, this shared experience at this hackathon will probably be much more memorable than a random handshake would have been had I bumped into him at the Austin Game Developer Conference instead.

5. Mingle with people who actually want to Get Things Done

The quality of attendance was so much better than at a conference. I went to a Game Developer Conference in Austin once, and there are so many people who'd never created a game or worked in the industry. At the hackathon, there were tons of industry folks as well as dabblers. I think a hackathon raises the bar much higher because everybody is there to get things done. Yes there may be "wannabes" but they're at a level where they want to actually get their hands dirty. Nobody is there just to network or just to watch. Those are all secondary to gaining experience actually making.

6. Get an insider's look at an industry

About a month ago, I did the Code for America hackathon, and that was a thrill. Code for America is a non-profit that helps governments (city, state, or national) leverage the web for civic benefit. I worked with a random group that made an app for bicyclists to help report good and bad intersections from their smartphones. I've always wanted to know what it would be like to actually do something for my city, and I felt like I learned more in that day than I would've spending two months as an intern at the City of Austin.

7. Make new friends who know how I work

Because it's like a race, there's such an intense shared struggle, it just naturally binds people together. Afterwards, I went to a follow-up happy hour and even presented at a board meeting at the City. The event attracted a lot of activist-minded people, and so I feel like if I wanted to do anything in tech and government, I would know exactly who to email. Everybody got to see how I work, and so in a way, the experience was like a trial interview.

The Future

I'm always looking for new ways to work. Both of these hackathons were hosted at my home co-working space, Conjunctured, which is a place for independent mobile professionals to share office space. I find co-working to be an experiment in a new kind of work. Perhaps hackathons are a similar conceptual experiment. It's like re-imagining the workplace as a venue for events and shared experiences. If you are a designer, artist, sound engineer, programmer or anybody just interested in making something, then you're missing out if you haven't tried a hackathon.

A little over a year ago, I wrote a post titled, "Eight Changes To My Life After Just Four Weeks of Meditation." The post generated a lot of traffic, but many people wanted to how I motivated myself to stick with it. Some even doubted I would stick with it beyond my initial honeymoon.

Well, one year and 28 days later, I am proud to say that I've meditated on every single day since I started. All the changes I mentioned in that post have been permanent. What follows are all the stages of self-motivation I went through to install meditation into my daily routine:

The Background (1 year before meditation)

I had tried meditation twice before. Both times I did it because I read articles describing the mental health benefits of meditation. I had struggled nearly my entire adult life with bouts of neurosis, but I was also very reluctant to get hooked on anti-depressants. Meditation appealed to me, because it offered a way to stop myself from over-thinking without any extra bodyload, side effects, or chemical dependency.

However, each time I tried meditation, it was always touch-and-go. In the first week, I meditated about three times for twenty minutes each. The initial sessions were eye-opening, and I would promise myself to meditate everyday. But then after my fifth session or so, I would lose that initial glow, starting to hate the practice, and I'd give up.

So I'd say there were two important elements to my background: 1. My past failures with meditation made me realize I had to try something completely different if I wanted to get into it again. I wanted to only meditate if I could guarantee my commitment. 2. I believed I really needed something like meditation to stop the reign of terror my mind had been causing me.

The Lure (2 weeks before)

At the start of 2011, an article popped up on my radar titled, "Mindfulness meditation training changes brain structure in 8 weeks". It described a study of non-meditators who were given meditation training, told to meditate for 45 minutes a day, and were given MRI scans before and after. The subjects were told to keep a journal of how often they meditated and the results were astounding. After just eight weeks, with an average of 27 minutes a day of meditation, the subjects showed increased activity in parts of the brain associated with stress-regulation, anxiety-control, self-awareness, and empathy.

This specific study, and the way it was structured, was crucial to me sticking with meditation early on. This was the first time I had ever seen the mental health benefits of meditation laid out so specifically. This kind of set up (measurable inputs, measurable outputs) is a key feature for achieving flow, and it provided me with a straightforward program. If I didn't stick with it for eight weeks at 27 minutes a day, then I couldn't blame meditation for not delivering. I could only blame myself.

The Pact (1 day before)

I forwarded this article to my friend Ricky, who loved it and also noticed the same flow-like characteristics of the study. He then asked me, "Why don't we try to duplicate the study ourselves?" I initially hesitated, given my past stumbles with meditation, but I eventually warmed up. Ricky wanted to create a spreadsheet where we could keep a log of every day we meditated. This would add a layer of competition to the program. Plus, the study was very concerete and specific about what you had to do and what you could expect. While I didn't have a MRI machine, I could pay attention to see if my anxiety levels did go down or if I noticed any other changes to my life.

Finally, I promised myself that I was going to proactively motivate myself this time around. I told myself not to meditate unless I could, everyday, commit at least some time to make sure that I was committed to meditation. Call this a meta-commitment.

With my meta-commitment, the pact with Ricky, and the perfect structure of this study, I felt like this time would be significantly different than all the other times I meditated. And so I agreed to meditate everyday for eight weeks, 27 minutes per day.

The Attitude Shift (2 weeks after)

The first meditation sessions were similar to the other times I tried to meditate. The sessions were eye-opening, and I remember in those first couple days, laying on my back after meditating, in awe of life. This feeling faded quickly though, and I then hit my first motivation hurdles with meditation.

Before each meditation session, I often sat there, seeing if my body naturally wanted to meditate. If it didn't, I'd then talk to myself until it did. My conversations in those first couple weeks were all about changing my attitude toward meditation. Why was it that it didn't require any effort to do physical exercise every day, but I struggled with meditation? Theoretically, I argued, my mental health was more important to me than my physical health, so I should be even more motivated to do it.

I then realized that part of why it's easier for me to go jogging is because our society encourages it. Especially living in Austin, I see beautiful people jogging and biking every day. I told myself that while physical exercise has a very public component, millions of Americans meditate in private. And of those that don't meditate, they have other routines like daily prayer that feed their soul. I then Googled around about famous people who had meditated, and found out that Albert Einstein and Thomas Edison both were into the practice.

These thought exercises helped re-condition me to not think of meditation as something exotic or weird. I started to think of it as something fundamental, essential, and more importantly, normal.

Observing Results (4 weeks later)

I think I have a special skill at describing my inner mental state, and I think this was key in solidifying my commitment to meditation. A key aspect of flow is having measurable inputs and measurable outputs. While I didn't have an MRI machine, I paid special attention to see what changes happened to me psychically and emotionally, and writing these things out in a blog post helped reinforce the practice.

If you can see concrete results, even if they're incremental, you'll become more confident about your inputs.

After the Pact (8 weeks later)

The spreadsheet that Ricky and I used worked marvelously. Our natural competitiveness made us have to meditate every single day. One time he sort of "missed" his meditation, or as he describes it, had a split-meditation, where he had to meditate a little bit in the morning and a little bit later in the evening. He voluntarily put an asterisk by his entry, and I ribbed him about it later. This motivated him to get a perfect streak for the rest of his sessions, and I had to also bolster my streak, lest I get an asterisk like him.

The spreadsheet also contributed to the flow-like aspects of the program. Seeing a column of "Yes"-es grow was like watching a progress bar in a video game:

Afterwards, Ricky and I agreed to move beyond the spreadsheet. But since I liked the device so much, I fashioned a similar one in the from of a calendar. I then crossed off every day I meditated. Here's my calendar from last year:

Like the spreadsheet, crossing off days on the calendar provided incredible satisfaction. Plus, there was a fear of having an empty spot in the calendar. If you do the calendar method, I actually recommend doing exactly what I did, and use a physically printed calendar, as opposed to an app. With the physical calendar, you can keep it right by your meditation area, serving as a constant reminder. Also, every mark you make on the calendar isn't going to be exactly the same, so visually, this makes for a much more interesting thing to look at instead of a never-ending series of the same symbol on a screen. Thirdly, when you finish a whole year, the calendar can serve as a wonderful artifact. I've laminated mine which serves as a kind of trophy commemorating "The First Year I Meditated."

Cultivating Natural Motivation (20 weeks later)

Those early phases of self-talk, when I tried to change my attitude toward meditation, achieved their goal. At this point, I felt like I valued and prioritized meditation very highly in my life. However, after eight weeks, I was no longer in awe of the changes I was experiencing. Plus, I couldn't summon any more new arguments to myself about meditation, because my attitude had already become very positive.

I'd sit there, waiting to meditate, hearing myself think, Yes, meditation is really good for me, but for some reason, I don't want to meditate. I then realized that I could no longer rely on my attitude toward the idea of meditation to push me forward. Instead, I would have to rely on a natural real-time interest in the activity. My motivation for meditation had to become as natural as my motivation to play video games. I had to want to do it for its own sake, not because of some external benefit, like improving my health.

This is where some key passages in Mindfulness in Plain English came in handy. Gunaratana suggests that it's when we don't want to meditate that we really need meditation. This coincided with my experience. I found that when my motivation to meditate was low, I was also usually in a neurotic or pre-neurotic state-of-mind (i.e. I had woken up on the wrong side of the bed.).

So then I asked myself, "Okay Phil. So you don't want to meditate for 30 minutes. What do you want to do instead for the next 30 minutes?" I would then outline what I would likely do next. In those dystonic mindsets, I imagined myself surfing Reddit or Huffington Post for thirty minutes while munching on something someone said to me in the back-of-my-mind. Or I imagined myself working and re-working my business plans, trying to forever optimize my career choices. When I presented myself with such a dreary picture of the 30-minute alternative to meditation, I immediately pushed away from my desk and went straight to meditating.

This eventually became a habit, and I only occasionally need to do this thought experiment now.

Dealing with Schedule Changes (30 weeks later)

Inevitably, life will throw wrenches at you, and you will find it difficult to meditate because you're on a 3-day road-trip with your family or you live in a college dorm. The first family vacation I went on posed some major challenges. My parents didn't know I meditated, and so I was initially apprehensive about saying, "Hey guys, I need thirty minutes by myself, and I can't be disturbed." So I tried to sneak in my meditation whenever my parents took a gym-break.

When you go someplace new, the first thing you do should is designate a sanctuary. I've found that stairwells in hotels are the best places to meditate if you have other guests staying in your hotel room.

Buy noise-canceling headphones. These have been an indispensable tool for me. They block out lawn-mowers and they let you meditate on an airplane. In other words, they give you more options and opportunities to meditate.

At the start of your day, you should always know when you are going to meditate. I have a normal routine: first exercise, then errands, then meditation, then lunch, and then I go to work. But sometimes, due to sleeping-in or appointments, it's not convenient to meditate in the morning. When this happens, I immediately look for the next most convenient time in my schedule. If I anticipate there are potential interruptions to the new plan, I find back-ups, and I cancel some other commitments. i.e. if you can't find room, make room.

Oh, and I finally told my parents I meditated. They love the idea of it, primarily because they see how much it's improved my life. Now, whenever I meditate at their house, I put a little sign on my door that says, "Please do not disturb for the next 30 min. Thanks!" and everybody in the house respects it.

My Current Meditation Setup (now, 56 weeks later)

I meditate for 30 minutes every morning before I start my day. I follow the vipassana practice of monitoring my breath. My techniques come from Mindfulness in Plain English and Wherever You Go, There You Are. I fix my attention to a spot under my ribcage where I can feel my chest expand and contract. If I get distracted by thoughts for more than 5-15 breaths, I follow these five steps: I estimate how many breaths I missed because of the train of thought, I notice the content of my distraction, I observe my mental state, I observe my state of distractedness dissipate, and then I return my focus back to my breath. I try not to switch to counting my distractions too often, so as to keep the primary focus on my breath.

I sit upright in a chair, but I don't force my posture, and sometimes I lean against the backrest. I use the Clock app on my iPhone (which is on mute), and I set a count-down timer to 30 minutes with a harp sound to finish.

It's taken me a year to get to this specific setup, and I still tweak my process every couple weeks. Those books should help you with your personalized progression.

---

If you like this blog post, please be on the look-out for my upcoming book Dear Charlotte, which tells all about my journey through self-improvement.