When passion turns into work and then to pleasure (and then some).

Image courtesy of acquisitietraining.org

If you’ve been following Project ZooLoo for long enough, you would have heard me mention the whole idea of chasing your passions quite often. So let’s say that you’ve done this and have managed to start your own business revolving around this passion. You then set-up a workspace at home and start realizing this vision/dream that you have. The only way that this dream can be actualized is through some hard work and determination. Yes, work.

That’s the place I found myself in not so long ago. I had found out what I was very passionate about and I had drawn up a plan- a comprehensive plan– that I was to follow in order to achieve all that I had set out to achieve. Now, I had to put that plan into action- that required Work. For those of you who are anything like myself, the concept of Work has always been one that is preceded by a long sigh of discontent. This feeling is formed through habit and experience. All our lives, we are being told to work on this and that and as we all know:  doing something merely because you have no other reasonable alternative- sucks! This spawns from all those meaningless school lessons that basically equipped us with the knowledge and skills to become great employees. I never liked this about school. As a result, I associated “Work” with monotony, tediousness, fatigue and boredom. In order for me to get things done, This had to change.

I decided to then alter my work experience and tailor make this concept of “work” to suit my personality and my idiosyncrasies alike. I’m a vegetarian health and fitness fanatic, I love moving, I love feeling great and I enjoy exercise. All it took for me to modify my experience: was setting-up my Standing Desk; pumping up the volume and feeling joyful as I move energetically whilst typing away at the laptop- a task which, before this decision, grew mundane overtime and sometimes even sparked up some unwanted/unwarranted fatigue.

This “modification” has been keeping me alive throughout my work experience. Work has taken a turn from being tedious or “an effort” to just a series of effortless actions made to keep me energised and keep me on the path to my success.

Maybe you should try it too? Modify your work-experience to better suit your definition of pleasure.

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Standing Up to Productivity

In Ernest’s room there was a large desk covered with stacks of letters, magazines, and newspaper clippings, a small sack of carnivores’ teeth, two unwound clocks, shoehorns, an unfilled pen in an onyx holder, a wood carved zebra, wart hog, rhino and lion in single file, and a wide-assortment of souvenirs, mementos and good luck charms. He never worked at the desk. Instead, he used a stand up work place he had fashioned out of a bookcase near his bed.His portable typewriter was snugged in there and papers were spread along the top of the bookcase on either side of it. He used a reading board for longhand writing – Extract from Papa Hemingway: A Personal Memoir, AE Hotchner

For the past couple of weeks, I had been reading and posting up a lot about the whole standing workspace movement and all its benefits (which I’ll list shortly). So I decided to stop being the preacher who doesn’t practice what he preaches- and I tried it last night.

I elevated my tiny chair onto my evenly tiny desk and laid my netbook on it coupled with my journal and some stationary. My workspace is usually tied-down in that the speakers, mouse and power cables are duck-taped onto the desk so as to decrease clutter and to make things… a bit less movable? Overall, I was still able to play some tunes out of my tiny speakers beneath the chair- this was great.

The experience kind of seemed a bit intense at the beginning because from what I had read;I was in for some excruciating foot torture. But my experience was totally contrary to this. It felt as though I was at the gym but my body wasn’t complaining too much and my mind just felt intensely engaged. I felt so ALIVE!
Before last night, I never could make it past the 2-hour sitting mark without falling off to sleep. Last night, I was up from 19h30 till 23h30!!! That’s 4-hours of standing and moving around being uber, sipping on some coffee while typing away at the venomous keys and conjuring up major creativity! It felt amazing.

This “way of working” is actually a much healthier way of getting things done as oppose to the traditional desk and chair workspace. It improves your posture, keeps you awake and it increases your heart rate which will help you burn more calories. Yes, working this way could help you lose all that extra flab.

The value of this practice has been apparent to many great men of the past:

Thomas Jefferson is one of the most famous users of the standing desk workspace. His six-legged “tall desk” had an adjustable slanted top that was big enough to place a folio. On this desk, Thomas Jefferson drew up brilliant architectural blueprints for buildings like the Virginia State Capitol.

Image courtesy of http://www.artofmanliness.com

Winston Churchill also an avid user of the standing-desk. He often laid out the gallery proofs of is next book on a standing desk studied them carefully, looking around to make corrections.

As an entrepreneur or anyone else trying to strive towards a progressive goal amidst a cloud of doubt and old habits, the last thing you need is yet another reason to not do any work today. The chair was that, for me. I became lazy after some time spent sitting down and that allowed for my mind to space out into the unknown (NSFW blogs and funny YouTube videos) no matter how much work I had to do. This mundane element of my working regime was causing me to even create false measures of productivity, like overconsuming knowledge as opposed to putting it into practice (all those “How to…” articles).

Tonight is my second night on my feet.

I’ll give an update after I’ve completed a month working this way

So Far, Sooo Goood.

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Check out the article that inspired my change Art of Manliness

Office Utopia: Benefits of Working from Home

Courtesy of Kristen Rivoli Interior Designs

Wake up. You take that seemingly long awaited yawn and feel your whole face expand. Tiredly reaching out for your door handle, you manage to open it. You start brewing a replenishing cup of coffee. Still with your eyes half closed, you sluggishly manage to drag your feet about 6-more-feet and eventually sit on your chair. You reach for the power button and… you’re at work.

This is my Utopia. I have always wanted to work from home, since childhood. I could imagine the pleasures of walking around half naked while attending to a business call; or reading up an “important”office document while taking a dump…
These were the thoughts of my curious and insanely ambitious teenage-self. In 2012, I managed to get a job (part-time) as a project manager for a property company wishing to expand- digitally. The projects were not very difficult, this allowed me to work from home; live my dream- it was amazing. That experience became part of the reason why we plan to run ZooLoo Concepts from home like we always have… except this time we plan to make it more official. Yep, soon we’ll be calling on to Bob the Builder for some advice on… hammering nails?

A survey summarized in the Microsoft whitepaper, Work without Walls, puts to light the advantages of working from home from the employee point of view:

10) Environmentally friendly (23%)
9) More time with family (29%)
8) Less stressful environment (38%)
7) Quieter atmosphere (43%)
6) Eliminate long commute (44%)
5) Less distractions (44%)
4) More productive (45%)
3) Avoid traffic (47%)
2) Save gas (55%)
1) Work/home balance (60%)

List adopted from Forbes

The above benefits can also apply to you, as an entrepreneur. The parental factor of improvement in the above list seems to be costs. People would be spending less on time, gas and stress and spend more on family, productivity and feeling good.

Could explain how the late Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak were so productive…

Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak in the first Apple “office”

Build Your Own 6 watts Home Server using a Raspberry Pi

We were actually considering having a whole page on the Blog dedicated to the developments of the Raspberry Pi Team and its ever expansive community.

What do you guys think?

Ruberg's blog

In the picture besides you see my new home server built around a raspberry pi. The parts in detail:

• raspberry pi model b Rev.2 inside a transparent casing
• D-Link DUB-H7 7-Port USB 2.0 Hub (confirmed working with the raspberry pi)
• 2.5 inch 500 GB usb harddisk from toshiba (an older one I had)
• Hauppauge Nova-T Stick for DVB-T (confirmed working with the raspberry pi IF you have a powered usb hub!)

The pi is connected to a fritzbox 7270 via ethernet and is running raspian (Debian Wheezy). The CPU is overclocked a little at 800 MHz.

Currently this small computer is running the following services for me:

• full webserver consisting of nginx, php and mysql (follow standard tutorials for debian)
• web rss reader using tiny rss 1.7.4
• streaming tv from the tv stick to all computers in the network using vdr and streamdev-plugin
• streaming requested music via the upnp…

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