I recently read two books that have made a huge impact on me in many ways. The first book is Linchpin by Seth Godin and the second book is 4-Hour Workweek, by Tim Ferriss. Both books are amazing and packed with gems of knowledge and inspiration.  Of the many ideas and concepts from these books, there are two ideas that I have combined that directly relate to this concept of being uncomfortable.

First, in Linchpin, Seth Godin introduced me to the concept of Emotional Labor. Emotional Labor is bringing guts, ideas, passion and love to work when you and others don’t feel like it. Godin writes about making your “work” your “art”. Seth Godin proposes that we embrace the fact that the only thing we get paid for is doing Emotional Labor. To become indispensable to your organization and become a “Linchpin”, do Emotional Labor the best and you will keep getting rewarded for it.

Next, in 4-Hour Workweek, Tim Ferriss advocates intentionally embracing discomfort and uncomfortable situations as a method for making positive change in your life. No doubt, Ferriss crafted the idea of purposeful and voluntary discomfort from his admiration of the ancient Roman Stoic philosopher, Seneca. Tim Ferriss quotes Seneca throughout The 4-Hour Workweek. Ferriss wants us to expose ourselves to fear, to potential embarrassment, to risk.  Mentally go to the place of the worst-case possible scenario. Doing this helps us very clearly recognize appropriate courses of action. Tim Ferriss has a great video talking about these principles.

By combining these ideas from Godin and Ferriss, I come up with Uncomfortable Emotional Labor. I have found that during times of discomfort… when we feel most uncomfortable… that the most meaningful, forward progress is achieved. Identifying and attacking an uncomfortable issue, task or situation is Emotional Labor.  Put another way, the most effective Emotional Labor is the type that feels uncomfortable. This Emotional Labor is hard, it takes guts, it fully engages creativity, and ignites passion and love.  And the payoff is amazing!  Think about it, how satisfied are you when you accomplish something routine and safe?  Compare that with the level of satisfaction you feel when accomplish something hard to do, something scary, something possibly embarrassing or risky? Big difference, and not just for your personal satisfaction, but also for results you are driving for your organization.

How do you engage Uncomfortable Emotional Labor? Identify uncomfortable tasks and decisions and put them at the top of your daily action list. Have you been putting-off holding a colleague, employee, a vendor, a relative, or (hardest of all) yourself accountable for something?  Do you see something in your life or business that needs to change, but you postpone action in an effort to not “stir the pot”? Take a look at your task list and decide what is the most uncomfortable thing on your list. Then make that item the top priority. The task list approach is good place to start, but it tends to be very tactical. Also, think more strategically and holistically by forcing yourself to think of Uncomfortable Emotional Labor in the context of quarterly or annual objectives you are driving.

Put yourself out there. Get uncomfortable.

I’d love to hear how you apply Uncomfortable Emotional Labor in your life.  For me, the more I focus on these concepts, ironically, the more comfortable I am engaging Uncomfortable Emotional Labor. Quite an interesting paradox… but, I’ll save that discussion for another time.

[Image credit: Rick C.]

In the process, I searched the new SSD on my laptop (check out my latest blog post on SSDs) and found my old 2009 reading list. I reviewed the list and updated it to include books that I read last year that I didn’t have on my original list. It turns out the final count for 2009 was 33 books! Wow! I was really surprised! Also, it is clear to me that I had better up my 2010 goal to at least match the 2009 number.

What follows below is a list of the books I read in 2009. I wanted to share this with you because I think they address some of the most common business challenges we all face. This collection of books has truly helped me (and Infusionsoft) quite a bit and I hope it will do the same for you.

Books I’ve Read in 2009:

1. Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make Competition Irrelevant After reading this again in 2009, I’m still not sure there is such a thing as true blue ocean.
2. What Got You Here Won’t Get You There: How Successful People Become Even More Successful Turned out to be different than what I initially thought it would be about. Loved it.
3. The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable Patrick Lencioni is one of my favorite authors. This was also a reread.
4. How To Win Friends and Influence People I read this once a year.
5. The Art of War by Sun Tzu Classic.
6. Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die
7. Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies Also a reread. This is mandatory reading at Infusionsoft.
8. Awakening the Entrepreneur Within: How Ordinary People Can Create Extraordinary Companies As an In the Dreaming Room with Michael Gerber alumni, I can fully endorse this book as one of Gerber’s best!
9. The Five Temptations of a CEO: A Leadership Fable Another one from Lencioni.
10. Seven Years in Hanoi: A POW Tells His Story Written by my uncle, retired USAF Lt. Col. Larry Chesley, describing his seven years as a prisoner of war in the infamous Hanoi Hilton POW camp. Amazing story, amazing man and true hero.
11. Death by Meeting: A Leadership Fable…About Solving the Most Painful Problem in Business Another Lencioni book.
12. Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl
13. Silos, Politics and Turf Wars: A Leadership Fable About Destroying the Barriers That Turn Colleagues Into Competitors Also a Lencioni book.
14. Fish! A Remarkable Way to Boost Morale and Improve Results
15. Gung Ho! Turn On the People in Any Organization Gift of the goose!
16. The 48 Laws of Power Sort of creepy, in a Machiavellian kind of way… WaaaHaaHaaaHa (in my best ruthless villain voice).
17. The Warrior Elite: The Forging of SEAL Class 228
18. The Finishing School: Earning the Navy SEAL Trident
19. Down Range: Navy SEALs in the War on Terrorism The Warrior Elite, The Finishing School and Down Range are all written by former Navy SEAL Dick Couch. Each book is a fascinating look into the different stages of training and preparation of a US Navy SEAL. Also, Dick is a super nice guy. I emailed him with a question and he wrote back with a nice response the next day. Classy.
20. Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon
21. Tom Clancy’s EndWar Rods from Gods.
22. Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Conviction Book 4 in the 5 book series! Loved it.
23. Kill Zone: A Sniper Novel By Jack Coughlin.
24. Dead Shot Also by Jack Coughlin. If you like Tom Clancy novels, you will love Jack Coughlin books.
25. Mavericks at Work
26. Mastering the Rockefeller Habits: What You Must Do to Increase the Value of Your Growing Firm Did John D. Rockefeller know about Scrum development???
27. Leadership and Self-Deception: Getting out of the Box Alright already, enough with the box! Great book, but enough with the box…
28. How The Mighty Fall: And Why Some Companies Never Give In One of my favorite reads all year.
29. Agile Software Development with Scrum The best software development methodology ever (when combined with Agile principles).
30. Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity Some good nuggets of organizational wisdom.
31. Now, Discover Your Strengths Explores why you should be strengthening what you are already good at, rather than focusing on weaknesses.
32. Think and Grow Rich!: The Original Version, Restored and Revised Another classic.
33. Blind Man’s Bluff: The Untold Story of American Submarine Espionage Recommended to me by my good friend Dave Lee. Fantastic book!

I’m still working on my list for 2010. Given my tally from 2009, I’d better shoot for at least 35 books in 2010. Got any suggestions? Let me know in the comments!

Happy reading!

–Marc

I love SSDs!

In the spirit of the Geek Week blog entries on our blog, I wanted to go all-out and share details about our recent migration to use faster hard drives in our servers. As such, this info will go in-depth and will be technical in nature. However, you don’t need to be very technical to follow along since I’ll do my best to explain it thoroughly. (Beware of a little bit of occasional all-out geeking, though. )

Most small business owners don’t frequently consider the components they have running inside their computer when they turn it on. Like most, they turn it on and go. And they shouldn’t have to worry about it, either. This is why my team and I do the research, testing and deploy the server upgrades needed to keep our on-demand software performing in tip top shape so you have a good experience when you access it via the Web. We continually strive for better performance so our entrepreneurial users don’t need to.

Today, I wanted to share the great experience we’re having with a new type of hard drive. These drives are a little more expensive, but deliver amazing performance and lower cost in the long-run. If you use your computer for business, I recommend you upgrade the hard drive to a SSD. Here’s why:

SSDs combine the best of high-performance memory and large capacity hard drives in one unit – delivering superior reliability, performance and minimizing maintenance costs.

SSDs are superior to spinning hard disks in almost every way. SSDs have no moving parts so there is nothing mechanical to wear out.  With no moving parts, SSDs are much more durable than the older spinning disks. It is not uncommon that a hard bump (like dropping your laptop) could “crash” your old-style spinning drive. SSDs also use significantly less power, so in most cases they make your laptop battery last more than twice as long. By using less power, SSDs also operate much cooler than the spinning hard disks they replace. Using less power and running cooler is huge in the data center, where power and cooling are premium commodities. Oh, by the way, SSDs are perfectly silent.  Finally, the most amazing thing about a SSD is that they perform orders of magnitude better than the older spinning hard disks!

While I love SSDs today, I haven’t always been so enthusiastic. We first began experimenting with SSDs back in 2008 when we bought six 32GB Super Talent SSDs to prototype in a server. We were completely disappointed. We tried to get them working with several different brands of RAID controllers (storage speak for how hard drives talk with the computer) with no luck. Finally, we tried using them in some of our high-end laptops that had two drive bays, but that effort also fizzled. We somewhat mockingly call these early SSD devices “Super Un-Talented.”

Earlier this year, we tried different vendors of SSD devices – including the OCZ line (OCZ is a brand that has a reputation for high performance computer components) and had observed mixed results. These netted better results than the “Super Un-Talented” devices, but far from what we were hoping to achieve. It’s not easy finding the right hardware that performs and scales to serve over 16,000 small business users, but we tested and tried a handful of drives before we were pleased.

We finally found a winner:

Enter the beautiful and reliable Intel 160GB X25 series of SSDs! Pictured above, you can see it is relatively thin and simple looking. But it’s what’s on the inside that counts. All our production servers have these installed in them now.

[Geek alert] Earlier this year we bought four of the Intel SSDs to prototype them in a new Dell 1950 Poweredge Server in a RAID-0 configuration (striped data for pure performance). We have a multi-tiered slave database architecture so I’m not worried about RAID-level redundancy. The results were amazing! We tasked the Intel SSD prototype server as a database slave in our production environment to safely introduce the new technology into our operations. When we initiated synchronization from the master database server, the SSD server was about 90 minutes behind the master. Typically, when a slave is this far behind the master it would have taken a slave server about 30 minutes to re-sync. Well, with the usage of SSDs, it only took about 100 seconds to re-synchronize with the master database!

We ran a bunch of tests for a few weeks and the prototype SSD server worked flawlessly. Not long after that, we promoted the SSD prototype server to a master database and a few months later, all servers were using SSDs in a RAID-0 configuration. They worked perfectly and now all Infusionsoft users benefit from the speed and reliability of running their application on database servers with SSDs. (And you didn’t even know we did this migration. No downtime, no slowness and no lost data.)

Later, we upgraded all of our developer boxes with the Intel 160GB SSDs. My software engineers’ development projects used to take about 15 minutes to load, and now their projects load in about one minute! I love it – and so do they. They commented all the time on how great their systems run. This helps us be more productive and efficient when our developers make modifications to the software.

We have also upgraded many of the laptops in the company with SSDs. Recently we gave one of our Board of Director members, Pat Sullivan, an early Christmas present and put a SSD in his personal laptop. Just a few hours later, Pat emailed me to let me know how much he liked it.  The email is as follows: “OMG!!!” That said it all!

A few weeks ago, we installed a SSD in the laptop of our CEO, Clate Mask. If you didn’t know, he does a lot of email, a lot of reading and writing to documents and often, a lot of searches on his hard drive for files. Clate’s response was obvious, “Holy Crap… I am seriously in heaven!  I enjoy using my laptop again!”

There are many in-depth SSD reviews published across the Web, but I thought it would still be interesting to provide before and after results on how dramatically SSDs improve disk I/O performance for us at Infusionsoft. These aren’t theoretical – they are actual results achieved between a traditional SATA three-drive RAID-5 array and one single SSD.

The following comparisons were done by Sr. System Administrator, Eric Larson. Eric first measured a single 160GB Intel SSD. Note the 0.1ms random access seek time (which means the time it takes to access a file on the drive) and the average drive read throughput of 238.1MB per second (which means how fast it can transfer files).

Intel X25 SSD Performance Benchmark via HDTach (Actual)

Now compare the above with the following test of old-style spinning hard disk drives – 3 drives in a RAID-5 configuration.  Note the 12.4ms random access time and the avg. drive read throughput of 121.3MB per second:

SATA RAID-5 Performance Benchmark via HDTach (Actual)

Performance benchmarks acquired by industry-accepted hard drive performance utility, HD-Tach. You can see how fast your hard drive is with it, too!

A single SSD crushes three older spinning hard drives configured in a RAID array!  Even though we had a bumpy start with SSDs, needless to say we now love SSDs here at Infusionsoft and vicariously, so do our users. They receive better performance, more reliability, and they are using the latest in technology to know their data is safe and secure. In the world of business, that’s what counts.

I’m very proud of the steps we’ve done to scale and exceed the needs of over 16,000 entrepreneurs and small businesses. Our team loves to try out new hardware that delivers results. For a sneak peek into our next-gen storage technology, Fusion-io. I can’t wait to try out these new devices!

–Marc

The biggest thing we did this year was to strengthen the Infusionsoft application infrastructure by deploying what we internally called the “17” release. In 17, we refactored significant areas of the underlying code to become a true “multi-tenant” architecture.

Multi-tenancy refers to a principle in software architecture where a single instance of the software runs on a server, serving multiple applications (tenants). Contrast this approach with our old “multi-instance” architecture where separate software instances were set up for each running application.

Another way to describe multi-tenancy is to think of a large, high-rise apartment building with hundreds, if not thousands of tenants living inside. This is analogous to a single instance (one building) with multiple tenants (many apartments and people), in which all the tenants share the same building and infrastructure. Now imagine a suburban subdivision with row after row of single-tenant, single-family homes. This latter example is analogous to the multi-instance architecture where all of the homes are set up separately and don’t share any infrastructure.

Why does this matter?

Well, there are few important advantages in being a multi-tenant software application. Just like an apartment building can comfortably house many, many more people for the same square foot of real estate than a single-family home, multi-tenant software applications can host many, many more applications per server than a single-instance software application can.  This translates into much higher application density on our servers.  This lowers costs by allowing us to utilize our existing server infrastructure more efficiently. In addition, it reduces the overall number of servers that we have to maintain and manage. Think mega-scalability! It virtually eliminates application crashes due to running out of memory. Also, and perhaps most significantly, it increases application performance… a lot!

Geek Warning – The following section describes our testing of performance with these changes. We wanted to cash our proverbial check and measure the results of our recent enhancements. You’ve been warned.

To do the before and after testing, we set up our load-testing environment with the following parameters:

- We simulated 4 users per application;

- We start with 30 applications per block (our old production configuration);

- We added increments of 15 applications per block until the performance degraded;

- We measured memory usage and application response times at each interval.

You can see that in our pre-17 code, 30 applications with 4 users each used almost 400MB of memory. It wasn’t bad, but wasn’t nearly as efficient as we desired. After the 17 release, the same 30 applications with 4 users each used a mere 81MB of memory!  Better yet, as we increase the number of applications, the memory usage stays roughly the same. Scalability, anyone?

The application response times are even more impressive:

Even with tripling our application density from 30 to 90 apps, we still maintain acceptable sub-second response times. As you can see, there are substantial benefits for performance as well as efficiency by using a multi-tenancy environment.

Something to note in the graph above — don’t be fooled by the third bar showing the pre-17 code with 60 applications that appear to decrease in response time over the same code with 45 applications. With a load of 60 applications in the pre-17 code we had multiple crashes that skewed our numbers for the reporting.

Eric Martineau, one of the Infusionsoft founders and our Chief Software Architect, started this initiative back in 2008.  He enlisted the skills of one of Infusionsoft’s first employees, Sr. Engineer Jeremy Gurr.  Jeremy branched our codebase and did the lion’s share of the refactoring work for more than six months in early 2009.  “In July 2009, we dedicated our entire engineering group to polishing up the work Jeremy did and to testing the software like crazy to make sure we were rock solid in our work

We began a four-phased deployment of the 17 release starting on August 18^th and completed the last phase of the roll-out on September 1^st.  Since then, all Infusionsoft users have have benefited from the new multi-tenant architecture! We’ve more than tripled the application per server density while maintaining (improving) sub-second response times.

Another benefit is our systems team is able to deploy application releases 33 percent faster than before. The new multi-tenancy architecture has reduced overhead memory by at least 500 percent! Finally, we’ve had virtually no memory crashes since the 17 release!

Bottom line: we’ve been able to achieve better scalability, better performance and better reliability.

Here is the band: piano, saxophone, clarinet, trombone, trumpet, drummer, electric bass and me on electric guitar. (Not quite the line-up for ‘80s rock, I know.)  Last Saturday, we had our first rehearsal and here is where the story gets interesting.  I showed up and immediately recognized that I was in a different musical league than I’m used to. These people are real musicians. I’m more of an arm-chair musician.

Well, everyone setup and all of the sudden… BAM! The music started and I was doing everything I could to keep up in order to not look like I didn’t know what I was doing. To put it mildly, I was humbled by these amazing musicians and it stung my ego a little. You see, I have a certain level of confidence in my skill as a guitarist. I have played for many years, given lessons to guitar students and been in my share of bands. Well, as I tried to keep up with the members of my new band, I realized a few things … some good lessons that I remind myself of.

The first lesson is that I absolutely love to play the guitar! Even though I was barely keeping up, I was having a TON of fun. Playing live music is so exhilarating. I also love to watch live music of any type; jazz, country, metal, rock, pop, I love it all. The real lesson here is that I reconnected with a passion of mine and it felt good. Music is totally outside of my daily responsibilities of leadership, technology and the law. However, in a very cool way my experience of getting back into a band has seemed to sneak into my daily routine in the discussions I have with others and the way I approach solving problems. In short, reconnecting with my passion for the guitar has sparked my creativity fire in a big way.

The second big lesson I learned and continue to learn is the importance of being teachable and humble. A wise prophet once said, “Either we can choose to be humble or we can be compelled to be humble.” As the band started playing, I was compelled to be humble. That was uncomfortable. Fortunately, I recognized that my ego became bruised and I caught myself in time to make the rehearsal a learning experience. I recognized that little jazz band that I was asked to join represented an opportunity to learn a new style of music. Sometimes when you are uncomfortable, you are at that moment facing a teaching opportunity for self-improvement. The lesson of keeping my pride in check and staying humble and teachable is important to me so I’m not “compelled” to be humble so much.

Finally, since that first rehearsal, I have been in the proverbial woodshed; practicing unit my fingers hurt. This final lesson from that band practice is the importance of practicing skills to improve and stay proficient. Practice does make prefect. Practicing to stay sharp is good advice not just for musicians, but for everyone in whatever capacity or career path you happen to be on. Practicing is itself a humbling exercise. While practicing, you are acknowledging that you need to improve or stay current and imposing self-discipline in the process.

I was humbled at the first band practice, but I’m practicing hard and I will play my parts much differently at our two remaining rehearsals and then at our gig. I’m having fun with this more jazzy style of guitar playing and I’m learning a ton from the experience. I can’t wait for our performance!