Sep 17

Thoughts on Berlin and Lollapalooza

Remote Year, Travels 1 Comment »

One of my best friends Benny.com happened to be in Berlin, Germany traveling on an 8wk Europe adventure and invited me to visit him for Lollapalooza. I had never been to Berlin before (nor any part of Germany for that matter) so I said yes and booked a cheap flight to meet him. Her are some quick thoughts on the city and the concert experience while they’re still fresh…

The Negatives

  • no-uberPreconceptions about cities: crazy how far off some of my preconceptions have been about the places we’ve visited (Belgrade and Germany erring in opposite directions). I had envisioned Berlin, the capital of the country which is the financial powerhouse of Europe, to be this spotless mecca of German engineering and perfection. The streets there were the dirtiest of the places I’ve been thus far out of Prague, Vienna, Belgrade, Split, London and Portugal.
  • Internet performance was 3rd-world quality in terms of speed and reliability. It wasn’t just cellular data service but the Internet itself seemed to be fundamentally broken there. Benny was explaining how a monopoly on the “last mile” of cable there by Telekom.de created a dearth of competition and set the stage for this problem. Whatever the cause, it was shocking to me how poor the connectivity was. It was to the level where I believe that factor alone would have precluded our Remote Year group planting there for a month with 70 knowledge workers reliant upon sketchy connectivity.
  • Uber isn’t there yet: How is Uber not in Berlin yet

The Positives

  • Vibrant creative feel: it has a young, vibrant aura to it. The people all look super healthy and fit and holy cow 6′ blonde German women… zastavit. Street art was abundant and there’s a skate store on every corner (which is confusing because all the streets are cobblestoned so I’m not sure where anyone skates). But mad respect for the plethora of skate shops and vinyl record stores.
  • steps-berlinYou walk everywhere. In all we did just under 68k steps and just over 17mi in 3 days. The concert venue for Lollapalooza wasn’t that big so most of that walking was wandering around the city.
  • The food was solid: all the places we ate at were great. I had probably the best burger of my time in Europe the first night and the food every meal thereafter was on point.
  • Benny and I still have game in foosball after all these years since iTOOL.

tree-lined-venueLollapalooza was a blast. Radiohead destroyed it and that was my first exposure to a Major Lazer show (which was bananas). Odesza was a cool new find- I had never heard of them before. We got there late on Sunday so just caught the tail end of Milky Chance and all the other bands we saw just blended together. It was a really cool venue for it in a big park with massive trees and concert infrastructure was fairly solid. The one thing that was a real detractor was the level of dust kicked up by the 70,000 concert goers. I don’t know how they mitigate that short of constantly spraying down the field (but then it becomes a mud pit). But all in all very well-handled event.

This photo and video album below gives a good flavor of the weekend. I’m back in Lisbon now and just kicked off Startup Weekend Lisbon earlier tonight. I pitched an idea for an app I want to build called DiscoverPath and we have a killer team to execute this weekend. More on that soon…

Aug 30

Farewell London, Hello Lisbon!

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Here’s a summary of our month in London told in photographs:


We’re now in Lisbon, Portugal and I’m thrilled for our new home this month.
BTW if you’re not yet following RemoteYearBlogs.com you’re doing it wrong. This is an aggregator site I setup that pulls in posts from all bloggers across all Remote Year cohorts in near real-time. Check it out and see where everyone is at. More soon from Lisbon…

UPDATE 9/14/16: as usual Chris Peloquin killing it with a video short he made from his time in London. This is legitimately good enough to be entered into a film contest. Solid video Chris.

Aug 24

A look at where we live and work in London

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Hard to believe we’re nearly done with London and a quarter of the way through our whole Remote Year program… In keeping with my tradition from Prague and Belgrade I’ve put together a short video to give you a flavor for our living and work situation here:

One of the better networking events we’ve had so far was the opportunity to chat with Food Busker John Quilter – what an inspiring dude. This is a guy who quit a hugely successful restaurant business because he felt unfulfilled. He sold everything he owned and did a year of cooking meals for strangers on the street and allowing them to pay whatever price they felt it was worth. He became almost like the Gary Vaynerchuck of street food and has since parlayed it into a media property and a retail product for biodegradable Nespresso pods. Super inspiring.

john-quilter-food-busker
The blonde lady sitting in front in the picture above is Heleri, our city manager here in London. In each locale we’re paired up with a local who is well-connected and knows the city. Heleri helped to organize events like the Community Connect with John but she also is there to help us with any local connections we need. I get periodic back issues when working prolonged hours hunched over my laptop and last week was just bananas. Heleri connected me with this 7′ Nordic osteopath named Dr. Marius who is like Zakk Wylde meets Mr. Miyage. He gave me a chiro adjustment, explained the root cause and then taught me a set of nine exercises I need to do to start strengthening my core. Shoutout to Heleri for hooking me up with this guy on a day’s notice when back pain was unbearable. I’ve been doing TRX weekly under Chris Peloquin‘s leadership but never realized how little emphasis I’ve devoted to strengthening core stabilizer muscles (which are so critical especially for us knowledge workers who spend long periods on a laptop). I’m now incorporating Marius’ exercises in my TRX routine and if they work for immunizing me against these recurrent back problems I’ll post a video and share how they work.

My friend Beth from Arizona arrived yesterday and is visiting for the next week. She just published this article on lessons from working remotely for Inc.com in which she interviewed me about the prep for Remote Year and how it’s been going. Thanks Beth for the opp. If you need a solid PR firm she runs Wired PR and the Success Lab podcast and clearly has pull with big publications like Inc.

So I had a crazy experience last week coming back from downtown London on the Central Line. We got to the stop just before Shepherd’s Bush and they said they needed to hold the train for a minute. I didn’t think anything of it. There has been a couple times they did this and it was just a matter of getting the schedule back in sync. This time however we proceeded to the Shepherd’s Bush station and they announced calmly that nobody would be allowed off and that we needed to take on evacuees from a fire. Holy crap. They opened the doors and a few people jumped on. Smoke was in the air and when we got up to the surface and regained cell reception I pulled up a search on Google news to see what had actually happened. We were directly under a massive structure fire and they were evacuating people down instead of up. Crazy.

london-junction-sean-tierneyAline invited me to speak to the group this past week and I gave this talk at the Junction event. I think it resonated with many people as more than a few reached out and wanted to talk about it. My whole premise is that we’re operating as a tribe on this work arrangement so how can we become a better tribe? When you look at Remote Year through this tribal lens it’s interesting to think about the importance of tribal rituals like birthdays here as a bonding thing.  On Remote Year everyone will celebrate exactly one birthday. I always try to make it to every person’s b-day festivities thus far and have missed only a few. Birthdays prior to RY didn’t carry the same weight but here they are important- like the only opportunity we have together to celebrate a tribe member. At the risk of over-emphasizing the tribe thing, it really lends a different perspective on this experience when you view RY through that lens and I believe we’d all do well to entertain (if not embrace) that perspective more.

Aside from my work for Pagely I’ve been putting in some time to organize external speakers and workshops that I think will benefit our group as a whole. I’ll talk about them once they’re real but suffice it to say I’m assembling my dream lineup of speakers and workshops for our crew. The idea is “how do we not just sight-see while working abroad for a year? How do we take it up a notch and juice the marrow out of this experience by attracting and gaining access to people who are at the top of their game who would never talk with us otherwise?”

Gear I’m liking lately

pant-shortsFashion-wise these aren’t going to win me any awards but I really dig these pants that become shorts with zippers around the knees. The weather (especially in London) is so fickle and it’s great to be somewhere and be able to have what amounts to a soft-top convertible for your legs.

Other things that I’ve found useful while on the Tubes (which mostly run underground and therefore are places with no connectivity for 20min at a time):

  • Pocket App, free. get it- useful way to clip articles in a browser and have them immediately sync’d and stored on your phone for offline reading.
  • Kindle – love the whispersync technology that sync’s all your devices. Again great for when you’re reading a book at home on your kindle but you’re stuck with nothing to do on the tube
  • Memphis chess– if you play chess at all this is a fun app and it costs a whopping $.99. Someone took the chess notation for all the grandmaster championship games ever recorded and threw them in one app so you can play the ending moves against grandmasters. It’s fascinating – more like solving a puzzle than playing chess but a fun mental exercise. The “mate in 4 moves” ones are really challenging.

I’ll do one more post before we leave with all the various photos I’ve taken around London.  My photos are 3rd-rate relative to some of the brilliant photographers we have in our group. If you want to see some truly stunning photos, follow these people on Instagram Jason, Ben, Chris, Molly, Nancy, Cara, Angela, Maggie, Nick, Chase, Nicole and of course the Remote Year account itself. Lastly…

Music I’m feeling lately:

Hat tip to Chris Peloquin on the Spotify embed widget idea. Spotify didn’t have this song so I’m posting a youtube vid for it instead:

Aug 21

Happy Birthday Dad

Kudos No Comments »

This is a cross-post of a guest post I just did on my Dad’s blog for his b-day. Cheesy perhaps but a formative moment from my youth…

This is an unsolicited guest post from son #1, Sean Tierney. Dad, sorry to hijack your blog like this but having created it I still have the login credentials. I figured given the circumstances of it being your birthday this is a valid birthday surprise. I’m writing this from London, UK on the morning of 8/19/16 but technically it’s still your bday in Phoenix, AZ…  

I wanted to share a quick story of a formative moment from my younger years that shows what makes my Dad, my Dad. The motivation here is partly that I forgot to send a b-day present this year and this is the only thing I could think of that would arrive in time from across the pond. But also I’m hoping this may motivate the big guy to resume his blogging effort again after more than a year’s hiatus.

Lego trauma and learning to color outside the lines

When you’re a five-year-old aspiring engineer obsessed with building space legos, it’s important that you get it right. Millions of lives depend on your legos having flawless structural integrity, built to spec and that they match the model shown in the instructions precisely… or at least that’s the way it feels ;-) Growing up I had no less than 16sqft of my room devoted to lego bases. That was my thing. I’d get a new kit from the toy store at Colonnade Mall, go home and spend the entire afternoon assembling it to perfection and then proudly add it to my space empire colonizing the corner of my room.

One day I came home with a set called “The Galaxy Explorer” – it was the biggest and most complex lego set I had worked with at that point and it was to be the linchpin of my space colony for the obvious reason that it had to get me around the galaxy.

galaxy-explorer

When I arrived home from the toy store I set about the most important mission of my life up to that point assembling this thing. As you might imagine the instructions for putting this together were intense. There was this 3×5″ glossy color pamphlet that unfolded into a sprawling blueprint that was too big for the dining room table and looked like one of those language-less instruction sheets for Danish furniture- just a huge set of pictures with arrows and numbers. I dutifully began my mission.

Some four hours later nearing completion of this beast I came to an impasse. The plastic lego pieces that were left simply did not match up with the ones in the pictures. Occasionally you make errors as a 5yr-old engineer so I checked and rechecked my work thus far but it became gradually clear that this was an unsolvable engineering project given the materials at hand.  3-D printers were still 30 years in the future and they didn’t sell the pieces I needed a la carte at Kay-Be Toys. Was it just pieces in this box that were missing or were the blueprints for the entire design of the Galaxy Explorer just fundamentally broken? If the latter, how many other space travelers were impacted by this omission  I wrestled with the biggest crisis of my life to date. This was the first time I had followed instructions to a T only to hit an insurmountable wall and fail at something. All my honed lego-building skills were useless in the face of missing the key pieces necessary to complete the ship.

At some point my Dad walked in to find me at the dining room table sobbing over the nearly completed model. I was emotionally knotted and wrapped around the axle with my first experience of failure and the impossibility of making something work.  LEGO was teasing me with a picture of what it should be but an impossible task of actuating it.

The next thing my Dad did fundamentally changed my worldview not just with lego-building but everything. It was one of those epiphany cross-roads moments that evolves you as a human and opens your head to a new way of thinking. He said, “My man, these instructions aren’t the only way to build this. It’s just one suggestion for how THEY think it should be put together but you’re a smart guy. You can build an even better version of your own.” In that moment he installed a license to “color outside the lines” in my 5yr-old operating system.  But not just that- he installed also the encouragement to question and challenge instructions when they were clearly flawed along with the confidence that indeed I had it in me to come up with a better approach.

The notion that I might be able to invent a better version than LEGO and that “the authoritative instructions” were merely a suggestion for one potential way to do it blew my mind.  I immediately began cannibalizing my other space legos, pooling pieces and building out my own designs. In place of a sometimes-unworkable spec to follow, I saw ways to improve and freedom to create. Probably to the dismay of many subsequent grade school teachers I challenged instructions when they didn’t make sense. And years later this seed of thinking would eventually lead to me co-founding JumpBox, a company that fundamentally rethought the way in which software could be distributed as a virtual machine and not an installer. We used that to democratize a whole class of software known as “open source” and make it accessible to non-techies. The now-ingrained personality trait of questioning instructions and recognizing true vs. false boundaries has taken me places I would have never gone otherwise.

This is what makes my Dad, my Dad. He’s the guy who risked his life in the 60’s smuggling voter training materials to would-be black voters in Mississippi to help them gain voting status- working, not just talking, to fix a system when he recognized the instructions were simply wrong. And by his actions, showing others that it could and should be done.

Dad, happiest of birthdays to you. Thanks for this and other lessons you and mom gave Connor and I growing up.  Now please get back to blogging again so we can all hear what happened after the Peace Corps ;-)

dad-and-sean

Aug 17

My talk for the Remote Year London Junction event

Remote Year, Speaking 1 Comment »

“What would it take for us to become the most effective tribe on the planet?” That was the question I posed to our group at the Junction event last night for Remote Year. Below is the full 30min talk in which I propose the two most high-leverage activities I believe we can perform and the six topics I would love for our group to cover via in-person seminars during the remaining travels abroad.

And here are the slides from the talk:

Thanks Aline for the opportunity to speak and Tyler for livestreaming it on FB. Blown away that had 3000+ views in the first night.

Jul 29

A look at where we live and work in Belgrade

Remote Year 2 Comments »

We’ve been living in Belgrade, Serbia for the past month. Tomorrow we leave for London so I took the morning off and threw this video walking tour to share a look at our living and working accommodations here:

Here is the previous writing I mentioned about the concept of parallax as it relates to travel. This is the wikipedia page that has info on the bombed out Radio TV Serbia building right near where I live. Lastly, here is a map of the 96 locations that serve ice cream in the city. We walked by nine of them in this video. Solid ice cream game – well played Belgrade.

Will miss you Belgrade. It’s been a good past month and I’m sorry myself and many others pre-judged you before getting here. We couldn’t have been more wrong about you.

UPDATE 8/18/16: Eddie nails it again with an incredible vlog episode showcasing highlights of our time in Belgrade. Subscribe to Eddie’s YouTube channel here.

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