Knowledge of Place as a Metaphor for Proficiency in Learning

About a week ago, as I navigated through Norman on my way to an event, I realized that I could move back to Norman after 5 or even 10 years of being away, and I would still be able to get around pretty decently. I might forget some of the smaller roads and stores, but I'd have the structure of the city in my mind.

I'd still remember the major highways, arteries, intersections and landmarks, as well as how all of these components relate to one another to form the skeleton of what we call Norman, Oklahoma. The soccer fields off of Robinson, Highway 9 and 77, Interstate 35, Lake Thunderbird, Lindsay and Flood. I can see them all in my mind's eye, and when I want to get around Norman, I refer to this mental map. This is especially when I'm going somewhere I haven't been to often- frequent haunts wear grooves in our mind and soon we simply show up, having forgotten the act of actually getting there.

By breaking down this example further we can draw some interesting conclusions.

1. I have a mental map of all of these components in my head that I can call upon to navigate to my destination. In other words, I've internalized the most important geographical features of the city of Norman and their relationships to one another to the point where I don't need external references anymore, like a map or gps. At this point, my mental model of the city self-perpetuates itself. I'm able to navigate without maps, and doing so reinforces my ability to do so.
2. This mental map also serves as a frame of reference for communicating our location with others. We may not know exactly where the other is, but we can refer to each other's mental map of Norman. I can say, for example, that I'm at the gas station on Flood and Robinson and anyone decently familiar with Norman will know where exactly I'm talking about. At the very least, they might be able to find Flood and follow it until they get to Robinson. I can adjust the directions based on how detailed their own mental model of the city is.
3. I had to make a conscious effort to acquire this mental map. For years I lived in Norman but was confined to the University. It wasn't until I started exploring the rest of the city and began making a conscious effort to navigate without a map or gps that I began to develop my internalized model of the city.
4. I will probably always have this mental map. Again, I may forget the details (like Tonhawa street, lets say) but there will always be this basic structure that gives a shape and an order to the city that I'll keep with me. I feel like I "know" the city of Norman in part because I understand this structure. It's like a house I've lived in to the point that I can get around it in the dark. I may not be able to see the new decorations or bric-a-brac until I walk across the room to turn the light on, but getting around it is second nature. I've internalized the skeletal structure of the city, the big picture of the city and how the parts relate. Like ripe pears swaying from the tree the details can always be picked and savored as one rediscovers an old home like Norman. 
5. This seems like an apt metaphor for reaching proficiency in any skill or field of knowledge. There are some ideas and concepts, like my memory of Norman, that I'll never forget. Whether it's the history of the Civil War or how to run a lean startup team, I can always reduce these to a few key concepts, heuristics, and mental models that cover the big ideas and relationships that make up that segment of knowledge. I've internalized the skeleton of these packages of knowledge, information, and experience. As a result, I'd say that the previous points all apply here.  I can quickly relearn details and concepts in those fields I may have forgotten. I can very easily explain them to someone else, even if their own personal knowledge of the idea is limited. And I'll probably always remember at least the highest level structure of the knowledge in question.

On the other hand, there are plenty of skills and fields that I remember very little of. Like my physics education at OU, or how to play a harmonica. Perhaps, like with the harmonica, I didn't stick with it long enough to build the internal model. Or, like with physics, I struggled to find a meaningful structure and order in the concepts I was learning.

Now the question I'm asking myself is, how can I reduce a new field, skill, or concept to its highest level structure to facilitate a lasting memory and knowledge of it, such that I can return to it years later and still feel like I "know" it? It's like reaching the point where you speak a foreign language well enough that you no longer need your native tongue. Your knowledge and fluency with the language self-perpetuates itself, you can use a mono-lingual dictionary, and even if you came back to the language 2 or 3 years later you'd probably pick it back up relatively quickly. I know reaching this level requires conscious effort, as I wrote in the third bullet point, but if we're learning and leading lives of constant learning and growth then we may as well learn and grow well.

Besides, who are we without our memory? My 5 years in Norman, Oklahoma are enriched by being able to place the motes of experiences, people, and places in the greater geographical weave of the city and the state.

Dillon Dakota Carroll
Oklahoma City

I think crowdfunding campaigns are wonderful. Entrepreneurs, artists and creatives can use a website like Kickstarter to get projects funded that might otherwise have neer seen the light of day, or to take preorders to derisk a new product. The success stories really are astounding: The Coolest Cooler got over $13 million, the Solar Roadways project raised $2.2 million, and the Soma water filter creators published the famous article "Hacking Kickstarter: How to Raise $100,000 in Ten Days".

Still, the chances of success are slim. Of all Kickstarter campaigns launched, about 40% are successful. Of those, 70% raise less than $10,000. Few have the runaway success we've seen in the previous examples I've mentioned.

An unsuccessful campaign is a huge time sink. If your campaign is 30 days long, the Kickstarter can easily turn into the only thing you focus on for those 30 days, plus the several weeks of preparation before the campaign even begins.

That's what happened to us. We ran an unsuccessful 40 day campaign. We were trying for $30,000 and made it just shy of $14,000. With at least three weeks of preparation leading up to it, we easily sank two months trying to make it work. While it wasn't the only thing we worked on in those two months, it was certainly our priority. We also wouldn't call it a complete failure- we made many connections from our initiative that might pan out in ways we don't expect. Regardless, we didn't reach our funding goal, which we really would have liked to do. We did learn a few lessons from our campaign that we want to share.

5 Lessons from our failed Kickstarter Campaign

1. Your Kickstarter will take up most of your workdays before and during the campaign. I can't stress how much this took us off guard. I wish someone had told us this earlier in the process. Plan on planning the campaign to a T, and improvising a whole lot once the campaign actually starts. It will be a lot of time. Get used to it.
2. Kickstarter is not a good fit for early stage projects. The more we looked, the more we saw that successful projects were already finished, and the inventors are just looking for preorders. Humans are creatures of short attention span- we don't want to have to wait a year to see something finished. In our case, I think this drastically limited our chances. Most all who saw our Kickstarter page and the video agreed that it was a great idea, and they'd like to support it, but...
   Trying another Kickstarter with a finished product, I foresee it being MUCH more successful. It's much easier to buy in to a product when you can see it functioning as intended, and you don't have to be convinced that it can and will be built.
3. Expensive products, especially if they're not finished, are a tough sell. This was the second big issue we had going against us. Our product isn't a $50 widget but rather a complex $1,000 piece of machinery. You might make a $50 impulse purchase, you don't make $1,000 impulse purchase. You think about it for a while. And by the time you decide, the Kickstarter may be over. Or, more likely, you'll have decided that you'll spend the $1,000 when the product is ready and you'll feel like the $1,000 was well spent.
   We were hoping to get at least one preorder from our Kickstarter campaign. Looking back, this was very unlikely. It is difficult to imagine someone putting $1,000 down on a preorder for a product that won't exist for at least a year.
4. "Social impact" products or projects benefiting others are a tough sell as well.
   The final issue we had going against us was that as a social business, we were essentially asking visitors to our Kickstarter page to make a charitable contribution. Sure, maybe they were getting some cool (and overpriced) swag in return, but for the most part the visitors to our page weren't wheelchair users. They wouldn't be using the product for themselves or buying it for a friend.
   On the other hand, you can look at something that's very successful like the Coolest, mentioned above. It's easy to see why it garnered so much public support: you can easily imagine yourself and your friends taking one to the beach. It's harder as a visitor to the Kickstarter page to imagine a wheelchair user suddenly being able to sit at a countertop, or see over people's shoulders at a concert.
   Not convinced? Typical projects have a success rate of about 40%, as I mentioned above. But of 18 wheelchair projects in the technology and design categories, only 2 were successful. That's about an 11% success rate, a quarter of the average. And the two that were successful had relatively tiny funding goals- $5,000 and $1,500. 
5. News sources may not pick up your campaign, social media virality may elude you, and you may find yourself unglamorously spending your last campaign days desperately trying last minute strategies to garner contributions.
   We were disillusioned by the low payoff of our news media and social media efforts. Even local media sources didn't seem interested in what we were working on. Strategies including advertisements, live events, and celebrity endorsements just didn't pan out. Probably about 70% of our contributors were friends, family, and connections we already knew. It was frustrating. I do wish we had been more prepared for the ups and downs of the campaign.
   

This article isn't meant to dampen anyone's spirits or enthusiasms for a Kickstarter campaign. Instead, we hope to give you a balanced view and share our experience so that you can make a better decision about whether a crowdfunding campaign is the right strategy for your venture at its current stage.

Feel free to share your thoughts, comments and experience with us!
Dillon Dakota Carroll
Levaté LLC

The New Year is a pretty awesome time of year. It's a natural beginning for new endeavors and goals- perhaps the best beginning of them all. At least, the most celebrated. Yet, the failure of New Years Resolutions are well documented. Perhaps part of the problem is that New Years, by nature, only happen once a year. You only get once a year to fail, then you have to wait till the next New Year. An oversimplification, but bear with me. If a New Year as a beginning is such a wonderful and inspiring time, then how can each week, or each day even, have the effect of a New Year? How can we renew ourselves regularly and feel the spark of inspiration we feel on December 31st, thus giving ourselves that many more chances to succeed?

Whether failing through lack of motivation, strategy, or the failure to adequately form new habits; change is hard. Most people aren't prepared to actually change. Change means doing new things and more importantly not doing what we're already doing. I needn't point fingers further than myself to find the perfect example of this. In the past, my method to implement change has been haphazard: throw lots of things and ideas up in the air and see what survives the fall. I suffer from a lack of a structure that I can stand on to reach my goals.

I want to find a method that works for me. In particular, I'm thinking about how I can combine a consistent routine, a satisfying lifestyle, and Agile sprints to create a satisfying answer to the two issues above.

Daily Routines
I've tried for a while to have a structured routine each day that allows me to accomplish the daily tasks I set before myself. It's been a source of frustration for me to fail so frequently at applying a daily structure. Ultimately, I see using Agile-style experiments as the way to make small adjustments an incremental progress towards this objective. I'll talk about that later. First, I want to talk about why I think having a rejuvenating morning routine can help create a sense of beginning.

Brett McKay, on his blog The Art of Manliness, wrote in an article on the importance of family traditions: "Traditions and rituals often tell a story about a family... [and] add to the rhythm and seasonality of life. Our world and universe are composed of cycles big and small – sunrise and sunset, death and rebirth, winter, spring, summer, and fall. Even the generations move in cycles. A circular conception of time and a desire to follow the natural rhythm of the days and the seasons is embedded deep within us, but has been flattened out in a modern age that creates its own timetable and concentrates only on the present."

He's not talking about routines per se- in fact, he specifically defines why a tradition is different from a routine (writes McKay: "they differ from routines and habits in that they are done with a specific purpose in mind and require thought and intentionality"), but I'd argue that having a fulfilling, regular routine that involves more than just showering and brushing one's teeth still provides many of the benefits he describes traditions conferring. What tells a story about a person more than the activities they make sure to do, every day? What marks the passing of the days and weeks more than the personal rituals one does to renew oneself? 

Through the ritual power of tradition we tap into something timeless and greater than ourselves on holidays like Christmas and New Years. Perhaps having a routine you enjoy and that propels you towards your goals has a similar effect. It becomes a personal ritual that heralds a unit of time (a new day or a new week), creates a transition between cycles of work and rest, and becomes regenerative and recreative in itself. You might start to see each day or week in terms of cycles of work, relaxation, recreation; that is, in the original sense of the word recreate, to re-create oneself.

A routine may not be as memorable as a family-oriented tradition, but I'd say it may provide many of the same benefits.

Routines as Ecotones
The analogy that comes to mind is an ecotone. In ecology, an ecotone is a boundary between two distinct ecosystems. A healthy ecotone is a gradual transition from one ecosystem to the next, and therefore has characteristics of both neighboring ecosystems to varying levels. Ecotones tend to be important habitats and from a landscape perspective are often the most interesting. Think of lowland forests along a riverbank or river deltas that empty into the ocean. What's important is this example is what happens when you remove the ecotone, or the transition: both neighboring ecosystems suffer as a result. The wetlands and lowland forests that form the transitions from land to water not only provide rich and unique habitats, they also stabilize the land against erosion and filter runoff water of impurities. Without these ecotones, water quality plunges, animals lose their habitats, and a destabilizing level of erosion occurs.

Heard of the giant "dead spots" in the Gulf of Mexico where nothing grows or lives? That's caused by the fertilizer from all the land that eventually drains to the Mississippi River, which if I remember correctly is about a third of the continental United States. The nutrients in the fertilizer causes algal blooms, which consumes all the oxygen in the water, oxygen that everything else in the ocean needs to survive.

What's funny is that the fertilizer in the runoff wouldn't ordinarily arrive all the way to the Gulf of Mexico if we hadn't destroyed the natural ecotones all along the shores of our water bodies. Centuries of environmental exploitation has meant that we've drained the wetlands and clear-cut the lowland forests, the very ecotones, or transitions, that protected the rivers, lakes, and oceans from pollutants.

All this to say, that a consistent routine may provide the ecotones in our daily and weekly life, creating a purifying and unifying transition between two discrete units, as in nature.

Weekly Recreation
What do I do on a weekly basis to renew myself, to create weekly new beginnings?

There are two facets to the answer I have so far: creating psycological space where a beginning can incubate, and creating the structure to take advantage of it.

The first, easy to say but hard to implement: develop a life outside of work. No one can effectively work all the time. Having fun and working on other projects, hanging with friends, relaxation and recreation create the psychological space we need to see our lives and our work from a fresh perspective. Besides, they usually create more motivation to actually get the important things done while we're working. 

The authors of Rework, Jason Fried and David Hansson, say it well: "[workaholism] leads to an ass-in-seat mentality—people stay late out of obligation, even if they aren’t really being productive. If all you do is work, you’re unlikely to have sound judgments. Your values and decision making wind up skewed. You stop being able to decide what’s worth extra effort and what’s not. And you wind up just plain tired. No one makes sharp decisions when tired. In the end, workaholics don’t actually accomplish more than nonworkaholics. They may claim to be perfectionists, but that just means they’re wasting time fixating on inconsequential details instead of moving on to the next task."

I've been MUCH better about this since striking out on my own and quitting my job at OU in August. If I wasn't working on weekends, I'd spend the time vegging out in front of a TV or computer, while silently panicking to myself that I wasn't doing enough. While this probably had more to do with it being my first job straight out of college (so I took it way too seriously), it definitely wasn't healthy.

Some of the best advice on this topic came from a book called The Now Habit by Neil Fiore. He advises planning recreation, social activities, fun and relaxation before planning any work activities. The cool thing about this is 1) I'm my own boss so I don't have to stick to a traditional 9-5, 5 days a week work schedule; and 2) This kicks Parkinson's law into effect: the amount of time you have available for a given task is how long it will take you to finish it. Knowing what I need to get done each week to stay on track with my business, all the better if I can get it done in, say, 10 hours instead of 40.

That leaves the structure. 

Agile Experiments
For that, I've turned to the Agile methodologies I apply in my work. In other words, I'm going to try and think of the year in terms of week long sprints. At the end of each sprint, I can evaluate my progress and iterate to improve myself in the next sprint.

The part I'm excited about is running personal, Lean Startup style experiments in each sprint. In other words, each sprint I have one or more Yes/No questions I want to test. I have metrics to determine if I've "answered" the question yes or no, and I decide in advance how I change my behavior based on the answer to that question. The point is to learn quickly and inexpensively what works (so you can double down on that) or what doesn't work (so you can find a different way to do it, or decide to do something completely different instead- a pivot, using the entrepreneurship buzz-word). If your sprints are a week long, then that means that every week you're improving what you're testing. Plus, you're making decisions based on objective metrics and real data.

For example. Let's say the first hypothesis I have is, "I can wake up at 7am to begin my morning routine". The test I might decide on in advance is that I have to do so all 7 days of the week to answer "yes".

If the answer to the question is yes, I might stick with that routine and wakeup time and continue forming it as a habit. Or I might try waking up even earlier.

If the answer is no, in the next iteration I'd try waking up at 8am.

If you're familiar with the idea of 21 day or 30 day experiments, then this is similar. I've tried numerous 30 day experiments in the past, unfortunately, with little success. My attention span just doesn't last that long, and I don't naturally think in terms of months. It's too long a unit of time. Weeks are more tangible, and the built in weekly "retrospectives" means you can learn, adapt, and iterate on a weekly basis instead of a month long basis.

The goal of an agile methodology is to increase a person's, a team's, or an organization's ability to adapt to change. From that perspective, I'm learning and adapting four times faster with week-long experiments versus month-long experiments. That's 52 possible experiments in a year, at least. Once I feel comfortable running one personal experiment a week, I might try doing more than one experiment at once.

I also developed some simple yes/no questions that serve as litmus tests for how well I'm balancing each component of my lifestyle on a weekly basis. I like the idea of these because they're simple, fast, and you can easily change the yes/no question to reflect how big of a priority that component is at that time in your life.

For example, these are some of the questions I developed:
Health: Did I do my morning routine each day?
Learning: Did I finish a book in the last week?
Writing: Did I publish a blog article?
Adventure: Did I spend at least 1 night away from home?

If the answer to any of the questions are "no", then the follow up question is, why? And what can I do differently in the next sprint to correct it?

The tricky part is figuring out the metrics that determine whether you answer yes or no. They have to be simple, or it defeats the purpose of this exercise, but it also has to encapsulate the most important output or result of that aspect of you lifestyle.

In my case, I know that if I spent a night away from home, then I was likely out camping or getting into trouble. That's in line with the type of experiences I want to have more of in 2015.

With my writing, the metric is simple: I can judge it by the number of blog posts I'm outputting each week.

Of course, I will be iterating this system and working out it's kinks over the course of the next couple weeks. We'll see how it goes!

Wishing you the best for 2015,
Dillon Dakota Carroll
Prague, Oklahoma

We've made it to 2015. What a year it will be! Surely filled with adventure, exhilaration, ups and downs shared with good friends, travel, financial success, new ideas and great books.

The beginning of the rest of our lives. Ah, I love beginnings! They're the sweetest moments. For a cool, finite slice of time, inspiration dominates. Beginnings are beauty, you see, the beauty of possibility. It's like seeing someone across a room, a pretty girl perhaps, and you can't help but daydream about what you might say to her and how your lives might intersect for even a brief wink of time.

Everything is possible because each past action, experience, coincidence, failure, and hard knock has led up to it. Like a chapter in a book, the previous chapters having omitted nothing that wasn't critical to the story. We accept the totality of our past but see it in its best possible permutation: that without our unique history, we couldn't be the person capable of reaching all that we see before us. Our gravest failures weave a personal story that only reveals its meaning at a new beginning. Like standing on a mountain pass, not yet at the summit but able to see our paths trod and our paths to come.

New beginnings are poetry, where we see our time here on this wondrously confusing earth (and who would have it any other way, at such a beautiful beginning?) in one long narrative. At a beginning, we feel powerful, author and actor all at once.

Beginnings are a convenient fiction, a storytelling device; so we may as well write them ourselves. Beginnings are one of the prettiest lies we tell ourselves. Would we want to hear the true beginning of Hamlet, starting with his birth? The birth of the Kingdom of Denmark? Go back to a beginning, and you'll always find older and more ancient beginnings. Trace them back to the Big Bang, mythic and looming in our consciousness, itself a wonderful metaphor: a finite moment in time, pent-up creative energy seeking release, and of course the great explosion of energy that set in motion every human event we have conceived and plenty yet to come. Can our journey, our endeavors begin in any other way? By our efforts, we tap into a tradition of beginnings that runs deep and wide in the human consciousness. Dante upon scaling a hill was assaulted by a leopard, a lion, and a she-wolf, chased into the depths of Hell. His journey ends in Paradise.

We stand on the shoulders of giants, as Newton said. And the weariest, strongest shoulders that we rest on are our own, of our past selves and past lives. Our own history from years past. We were different people then, that led our present selves, like children, on our particular voyage through time, recounting the narrative of what is and what would be. Now we're spinning the yarn, and we must accept nothing less than an epic narrative.

At a beginning, we have yet to sully our thoughts with action. Pure thought and will is all we have at that moment. Dreams, but dreams we dream to make true by our effort. This euphoric state must end, or rather, must become at least an attempt before it can end, or else it never really was a beginning. In this way a beginning taps into the timeless: pure thought and reflexion that presupposes action, presupposes an end of some kind. Regardless of how difficult it may be, we must take action and make the attempt, doing what we fear the most to make true our dreams. For the beauty of a beginning is that it is transitory, giving birth to new life as the last snow of Spring. 

A New Year can be the best beginning of them all. Let's set our feet out the door and walk resolutely towards our dreams; let's pick up our imperfect tools and begin shaping the ugliest simulacrum we can of our Muses. We'll release our own creative explosions, and releasing possibilities upon the world in ways we've yet to imagine.

Dillon Dakota Carroll
Prague, Oklahoma

Happy new year, everyone! 2015 is officially here. What a year it'll be.

Here's some of my personal highlights from the year:

Big Milestones and Successes:

• Launched the Agile Product Design program at CCEW, and led the first team of interns (Levate was the product we invented, in case you're curious).
• Planned and organized the 2014 Social Entrepreneurship Symposium at OU, and hosted Paul Polak, a personal hero of mine
• Finished the OKC Marathon, as well the the July 4th OKC GoRuck Challenge 
• Graduated from the OU Summer Accelerator with Levate
• Quit my job to work full time on Levate
• Became a certified Black Belt in Extreme Manufacturing in a workshop with Joe Justice in Seattle. Met Steve Pavlina (another personal hero of mine) at his Lifestyle Design workshop in Las Vegas.
• One sister got married and another got engaged
• Did a 5 day hike on Inca Trails to Machu Picchu with the family. Special shout-out to my Dad for organizing the trip!
• Ran two workshops abroad, in Lima, Peru, and thus made my first income as an entrepreneur.

Biggest failures:

• Levate still has no funding. We did not anticipate it would take this long, and the frustrating part for us is that a lot of what we're doing right now is waiting on other people.
• The Levate Kickstarter was unsuccessful.
• Injured myself in the Marathon. Will probably have to have a minor surgery on my knee to fix part of the damage.
• My friend Eric Morrow and I tried, and nearly succeeded, to get a pilot language immersion dorm up and running at OU. We got shut down for not getting permission first.
• I tried to design my first "muse" (low input income generating business that frees you up to focus on non-income generating activities) and failed. Looking forward to trying a new idea though!

Favorite Moments:

• Spending both Solstices around bonfires with the family in Prague, Oklahoma
• Hanging out with my sister, her fiancee, and my Dad in the Lima airport before they headed home
• Reconnecting with old friends and making new ones
• Right after we made our first successful funding pitch. Ethan and I were in Tulsa, and were stunned and excited. It was like a jolt of electricity in our nerves. While Ethan drove us home from Tulsa, I sat in the passenger seat and typed out the letter of intent we would send to our investor, reading out loud to get feedback from Ethan.
• 1 Million Cups presentation with Ethan in Tulsa. We work well together, and presentations are no exception. The people at 1MC are wonderful and very helpful and we had a great time giving the talk.
• Getting up at 4am on a clear, crisp night to watch a lunar eclipse
• Camping in Turner Falls and getting righteously drunk around a campfire with my friend Michael
• Seeing the awesome response from students to our the immersion dorm Eric and I tried to set up.
• Starting this blog. My favorite article? This one.
• Exploring Las Vegas with new friends at the Lifestyle Design Workshop
• Dancing with the family and DJ'ing at my sister's wedding
• Auditing the class on Italian Literature. In particular, the class on Dante's Inferno was spectacular. Restored my faith in Universities.
• Friday morning breakfasts every other week with the accelerator crew.
• When the Cadre of my Goruck challenge gave us our patches for finishing.
• Spending 2 days camping in the woods by myself from December 29th-31st. It was a great way to reflect and prepare for the new year!

Favorite Books from 2014:

• A Pattern Language and A Timeless Way of Building. Changed the way I thought, and about much more than architecture and design.
• The Alabaster Girl. I will forever divide my life into before, and after reading this book.
• Four Hour Work Week and Four Hour Chef. In the words of my friend Eric, "it's a game-changer". Read it. Let it change your life.
• Microadventures and Access all Areas. Life on your own terms.
• The Art of Possibility: Very inspiring. Parts of it made me cry. Shout-out to Helene Hipp, who gifted it to me!
• Little Bets. I debated on putting this on the list versus Nail it Then Scale it. In the end, I went with Little Bets because it shows how to take the agile entrepreneurial mind-set and apply it across fields as diverse as architecture, comedy, animated films, and of course business.
• Secrets of Power Negotiators. This book tells you why to negotiate, and how to do it well. So do yourself a favor and learn how to ask for what you want in life!
• Log From the Sea of Cortes. Renewed my desire to visit Baja California, and Steinbeck's portrait of Ed Ricketts is moving.

Favorite Movies I saw in 2014 (not necessarily released in 2014... I'm waaay behind on most things popular culture)

• Interstellar
• The Secret life of Walter Mitty
• The Grand Budapest hotel
• Amelie
• Cloud Atlas
• Django Unchained
• The Watchmen

Here's to an awesome 2015!

This is a follow up to the article I wrote titled, The Art of Being a Guest. The idea is to use this guide to understand your host better from the beginning so you can be the best possible guest. Feel free to adapt it to your own needs if you like.

Hi! I'm really happy to be staying with you. Thanks so much for letting me!
I really try my best to be an awesome guest. For that reason, I want to ask a few quick questions that will help set expectations for me from house orderliness to what you like. And please, give me feedback! If I do something that you don't like, let me know. Most likely I don't even know I'm doing it. I've been accused of being clueless before- consider yourself warned ;)

Just a note about what expectations you can have of me- unless you tell me otherwise, I won't invite myself to meals, or use your food or supplies, for example, if I'm cooking. In the latter case, I'll ask first.

• What are the main rules of the house?
  
• When do you normally go to bed and get up in the morning? When do you leave for work or school? How late would you want me returning? Is it OK to quietly let myself in?
  
• What is your biggest pet peeve about house cleanliness and orderliness? What have previous guests done that has really annoyed you?
  
• On the other hand, describe your favorite guests to me and what they did that made them so awesome.
  
• What do you like to drink, if you drink? What's your favorite cuisine or meal? What's a good day for you to go out to eat, my treat?
  
• Do you want to join me on any sightseeing or adventures, and if so, when? This is just so that we can both be on the same page- any answer is fine! I'd love to do things with you, but I also understand that you have your normal routine going on!
  
• What is your favorite thing in the whole world?
  

This is the interview guide I've developed to try out at the next coworking space I visit.

Hi! I'm Dillon Carroll. I'm a traveling entrepreneur. I run my startup remotely, and I work with coworking spaces around the world to give workshops on skills for startups- agile methods, lean startup, and digital marketing.

One of my other projects is to write about each coworking space I visit. I try and understand the culture of coworking spaces, and see how the space affects the community and vice versa. Would you mind if I asked you a few questions?

Employees/Founders

• How did the space get it's start? When? What made you want to build it?
• What is your role in the coworking? What else do you do with your time?
• Did you do any benchmarking, and what did you learn?
• What do you think sets you apart from other coworking spaces?
• Do you have a typical client or tenant? How do you reach them?
• How would you describe your community's culture? How do you try and foster that culture?
• How do you set your tenants up for success? What resources do you provide?
• Describe how you built the community here. 
• Who designed the space, and how did they design it? Could I talk to them?
• What's next for the coworking? What do you think you could improve?
• Looking back, what do you wish you had done when you were building your coworking space?

Tenants

• Tell me about yourself, and what you do.
• How long have you been here, and what made you choose a coworking? Why this coworking?
• How much time a week do you spend here? Do you work elsewhere? What kind of work do you do in each place?
• What is your favorite part about the space? The community?
• What do you think could be improved about the coworking space? What do you wish there was more of?
• What is the biggest problem you have in your business right now?
• Do you go to events and workshops put on by the space? Why? What if it were solving the problem you identified?