What are you passionate about?

It must be the time of year when people start asking the question, what am I supposed to be doing? My answer is along the lines of – well, what are you passionate about? Often the answer is, I’m not sure. You can like your job, like your friends, like your city – but still have that nagging feeling that time is wasting away and you’re not doing what it is you’re supposed to be doing.

So – here’s a challenge. Pick a conference, any conference – and go to it.

The catch is, conferences are expensive. Usually thousands of dollars for the ticket, plus travel, plus accomodation. Find a conference anywhere in the world that you’d really love to go to. It might cost you $5k or $10k to get there and its your own money you’re spending. There are hundreds of conferences happening all the time, so anyone can find one that they’d pay their hard earned money to go to. Conferences aren’t just about learning some new skills, or hearing about the latest technology – they’re also about mixing with like-minded people and walking away with some new friends, some ideas and plenty of inspiration.

By answering the question, what conference would I take a week off work for and spend my own money to go to – you’re probably also answering the question, what am I passionate about.

Now go. Its your life so you can’t sit around waiting for other people to look out for you if you’re not prepared to look out for yourself. Its going to cost a lot – but why wouldn’t you invest that in yourself to discover or simply fuel your passion. Set a goal, maybe for this year or for three years away to get to that conference, then make it happen.

One parting comment, if you don’t ask  – you don’t get.  In 2002, I was working as a java developer in London and planning to move back to New Zealand to start a business.  I wanted to move into .NET to build smart client applications and there was a great conference in London that I wanted to go to.  It wasn’t relevant to my job, but I asked and my boss let me take a week off to go the the conference.  The cost was 2,500 pounds – but it was worth it.  On the spur of the moment, I emailed the conference organiser explaining why I wanted to go and asked for a free ticket.  They said yes.  If you don’t ask, you don’t get.  Last year, I decided I wanted to go to Business of Software in Boston.  This time I paid my own way completely and took annual leave.  Both conferences were fundamental in setting the direction my career is going and I’d do both again.

Hi, I’m Andrew

I thought I should introduce myself again – its been over three months since I last posted on this blog.  A lot has been happening – the highlight of which was a 5 week trip to the UK to visit friends and spend some time with my wife and two boys.

Since March, we’ve also been flat out at Xero working on one of our biggest releases ever: multi-currency.  There were a few ways we could have done this and, of course, we opted for the hardest – but the most powerful option.  For the first time – small businesses can now track their FX exposure (realised and unrealised) automatically and have their foreign currency invoices & bank accounts revalued live.  There’s no reason to be looking at out of date numbers and there’s no need to spend hours making adjustments to your accounting system.  To make multi-currency seamless in Xero, we built FX support deep into the transaction engine and general ledger and updated our report framework to natively support foreign currency reporting with automated rates, footnotes and currency codes.

Here’s a short interview I did with Stephen Nicholas from Openside.  Yes, I’m nervous.  No, I’m not being held hostage.

http://www.viddler.com/explore/teamxero/videos/148/