This is the first in a 3 part series of posts based on an interview with Hunter Nuttall. Come back tomorrow for the next post in the series or subscribe to the blog. Read other posts from the interview»
You know these are the questions that always trip me up. The things that are so obvious to me are often hard to put into words for somebody who doesn’t know me.
I guess that’s a question you can answer on many different levels. Mostly obviously, I could talk about my career. I’m a software developer by day. By night I’m a blogger and a personal development student who is always involved in the strange sorts of experiments that most people wouldn’t want to get into. That’s one way to look at it.
I recently updated part of my home page to better explain what my blog is about. I said that this site is “personal development for smart and bold students of life.” That’s the most concise way I’ve come up with to explain what my blog is about and, by extension, that’s what I’m about.
But what I’d like to be known for – is somebody who was always pushing the limits of what he knows about the world. That’s really what I am when you get down to it. I’m very curious by nature. I always like to learn, explore and grow, and I would like to be remembered that way. Now as far as how that actually gets succinctly expressed, I don’t know.
The title of your blog is from a Thomas Edison quote, right? When he invented his storage battery, he tried 10,000 different solutions that didn’t work. With every “wrong attempt,” he eliminated a possibility, he got more data points – with every wrong attempt, he got closer to finding the solution.
He course corrected all along the way and eventually got what he wanted. A lot of us aren’t willing to try 10,000 different things. A lot of people tend to give up – and that giving up is the real failure.
Making “wrong attempts” is just part of the process that leads to the eventual success.
Even I tend to get discouraged long before I reach my 10,000th try. But I always keep coming back to the fact that ‑ well you know if you stop trying, then nothing’s going to change.
I recently took a 4 month hiatus from my day job to see if I would enjoy full-time blogging. I was at a job that I really liked. The people were nice and I liked working with them, but I had just gotten to the point where I was bored with the position and was considering something else.
I thought, “If I just move on to something else how is that really going to be any different? Maybe I just need to take some time off.” I wanted to take some time off, but I needed to make sure I had enough of an emergency fund saved up.
I really wasn’t looking forward to losing the income, but as time passed, I was more and more certain that taking the time off was the right thing to do.
I woke up one morning and I thought, “I’m going to resign today.” Well, that’s the day they announced the company was probably going out of business. I stayed on board until the company went out of business and I was able to get some severance.
I ended up taking about 4 months off and, well, my results were mixed.
On the one hand, I just loved my time off. I’d been working non‑stop on software development for 10 years, and while I do like it, it was awfully nice for the first time to be free to do whatever I wanted.
I found that I really needed that break – that taste of freedom.
But in terms of me being able to create an income online that would allow me to sustain my joblessness indefinitely—that was really a failure. In fact, I probably learned more about what not to do than what to do, so I guess there’s a silver lining in that.
Hunter Nuttall attempted Polyphasic Sleep before Steve Pavlina had even heard of it. If that’s not enough to pique your interest, he also wrote a little eBook called The Zen of Blogging. If you’re thinking about starting a blog, stop what you’re doing right now and go read it. If you like that one, check out his other eBooks. Hunter blogs at hunternuttall.com and Pick the Brain. Follow him on Twitter.
Published Monday, August, 17, 2009