Tien Chiu

You are here: Home / Archives for All blog posts / musings

by

Visioning

Like many other entrepreneurs, I belong to a “mastermind” – a small group of small-business-launchers who support each other. While I’ve never met any of the other three women in my mastermind in person (we live in three different countries!), we’ve become great friends and we chat a lot in our little Facebook group. We help each other solve our problems, hold each other accountable for our commitments, and laugh a lot along the way.

One of them asked if we’d done a vision board recently – a deep dive, looking out 10-20 years. What do you want your life to look like? Where do you want to live? How much time until you want to stop working? What income model will get you there? And then think how to match the income model with a business that will get you there.

(Can you tell that what she teaches is financial planning?)

I have to admit that I was a bit taken aback. Mostly because I hadn’t thought anywhere near that far in advance when I got started down this teaching path.

I thought about it for awhile, then wrote:

The vision board is a really interesting and really good idea! I didn’t think that far ahead at all – I just thought, “What could I do that might make enough to pay the bills, that doesn’t involve working in high tech or some other job I would hate?” and teaching weaving online was the only thing that came up.

However, I’m happy with my choice, because frankly I love teaching this stuff – so much that I don’t really see retiring, because I’d do this for free! (Maybe not as much, but yes, I would teach for the fun of it. I love connecting to students, and seeing understanding light up in their eyes!)

But yes, I should do a visioning board…


Speaking of teaching, I’m now six weeks into teaching my Color Courage for Weavers Workshop course. This is the twelve-week, instructor-led online workshop course I was selling in December. It’s been a grueling pace for me – I started with a solid course outline, but have made some major revisions, and added a LOT more material, in the process of teaching the course.

I’ve been delighted with my students – they’ve been thirstily soaking up everything I’ve been showing them. And so far, they seem to be delighted with the course. Many of them have said that this was exactly the course they had been searching for but not been able to find, and that they feel they finally “get” color now!

Which is, of course, exactly why I created the course, and why I love teaching!

I have six more weeks of the course to go, but more importantly I have two more modules of the course to create. Each module is 3-7 lessons plus 3-4 student exercises – so between creating the lessons and returning feedback on the exercises, I’ve had very little time to do anything else! That’s one of the reasons there have been very few blog posts lately.

But in another four weeks, I will be done writing lessons…and then watch out world! I am dreaming of velvets again….

So about those visioning boards: I probably should do one, but I’m not sure I need to. This is my vision of the perfect life.

Almost as perfect as a cat’s life. Here’s Fritz, getting a belly rub.

Fritz, getting a belly rub
Fritz, getting a belly rub

by

Smashing the 1,000-weasel barrier – and still climbing

My trainer had me test my 1-rep max for squats the first time today – the maximum weight I could lift, just once, for that exercise.

Unfortunately we didn’t get quite all the way to my max – when we finished, I still felt like I could have done more weight. But we smashed through the 1000-weasel mark like it never existed. I squatted 1,060 weasels and felt like I could have done at least another 40-80 weasels!

By Keven Law (originally posted to Flickr as On the lookout...) [CC BY-SA 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
By Keven Law (originally posted to Flickr as On the lookout…) [CC BY-SA 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

(For those of you not familiar with the weasel unit of measurement, there are 4 standard English weasels to the pound, so I was squatting 265 pounds and felt like I could have done 10-20 pounds more at least. And if you’re wondering why I’m measuring progress in weasels, check out this blog post about why weasels are way better than self-discipline!)

To put this in perspective, at the USA Powerlifting California competition a month ago, I would have placed fourth in women’s squats despite being 17 years older than the next oldest competitor (she was 31). Okay, the field was small (9 women). In the NorCal Powerlifting California state competition in July 2018 (the biggest competition that year), I would have placed third among all the women of any age or weight class in squats.

And I wasn’t even at my true maximum. And I’m 48. And I’ve been training for exactly 6.5 months as of today. Before that, I was a couch potato.

Dang. I got into this to lower my blood sugar, but you know, I think I might actually be a contender?

That said, I have a long way to go before I start winning powerlifting competitions. Powerlifting consists of three lifts: squat, deadlift, and bench press. My deadlift and bench press are quite weak, so I need to work on those areas before I’m ready to enter competitions (if I decide to do that).

But…I’m a LOT stronger than I ever thought I’d be.

Wow.

Onwards!

by

A huge “THANK YOU!!” to the weaving community!!

The first launch of my online courses is over. And it went really well.

Here’s a copy of the email I sent out to my Warp & Weave subscriber list yesterday morning. It pretty much says it all.

Dear ____,

Absolutely no sales stuff today. Instead, I want to say a huge, heartfelt THANK YOU to you and the rest of the weaving community.

When I quit my job at Google three years ago to pursue my dream of making a living as a weaver and a weaving teacher, I wasn’t sure I could do it. As we all know, it’s really, really hard to make a living in the fiber arts. I didn’t want to live my life on a plane, so I decided to focus on teaching online. It was a leap of faith.

I wasn’t sure I could do it. Neither was anyone else.

Some friends were supportive. Others, less so. One weaving “friend,” when I told her my plans, said, “Good luck. I hope you like being poor.”

The last few years have had ups and downs, but I kept going because so many people told me my blog posts about color in weaving were useful and enlightening. Both of my parents are scientific researchers. I believe that one of the greatest gifts one person can give another is the gift of understanding, and one of the highest callings a person can have is figuring out how things work and then teaching that to others. Knowing my posts were teaching and helping others gave me the courage to keep going.

The response to my course launch has been phenomenal, and has given me confidence that my “friend” was wrong, and that I can – in time – make a full living as a weaving teacher.

When I was an undergraduate at Caltech, renowned science fiction writer David Brin came to speak at SPECTRE, our science fiction book club. At the end of his talk, he told us about a nightmare he’d had.

“I was at work in the astrophysics department, as usual, and my boss came up behind me. He said, ‘We’ve figured it out! You’d do this for free! In fact, you’d pay US to do this!’”

“I woke up in a cold sweat,” said Brin. “And now, I lay the David Brin Curse on all of you….that someday, you too will wake up from the same nightmare.”

Thank you, all of you, for making my David Brin Curse come true.

Tien

Color Courage for Weavers
Color Courage for Weavers

by

Remove before launch

I’ve been pretty silent here for the last few weeks because I’ve been working like crazy on prepping my online course Color Courage for Weavers for its launch. (Coming up fast. Really fast.)

And I’m not going to say much right now because I’m still working like crazy trying to get the launch ready. You have no idea how many moving parts are involved!

But I did want to share one thing with you.

You may recall that, long ago and far away, I worked for a company called Skybox Imaging….which made, launched, and operated state-of-the-art, seriously bleeding-edge imaging satellites.

Well, when satellites are constructed, there are typically protective parts that are kept in the satellite while it’s being stored on Earth, but are removed just before it leaves the planet and goes into orbit.

So people don’t forget to remove those parts, they are typically tagged with big red labels that look like this:

So shortly after I joined Skybox, I got a “Remove before launch” keychain fob to commemorate the launch of our second satellite. The one that convinced Google to buy us.

After I left Google, I thought, “Remove before launch. Hey, that’s cool. I’ll just leave it on until I’m ready to launch my new business. That’ll be another six months or so.”

Then Life Happened. It’s now been on my keychain for over three years post-Google.

But…it’s coming off.

Within the next week.

Stay tuned….

by

Book review: Figuring Fibers

Figuring Fibers
Figuring Fibers

I have long wondered whether it was possible to create Art that expressed the beauty of science at a deep level. Most of the Art I’ve seen celebrating science has lain strictly at the surface – mostly, images of scientific concepts that happen to have aesthetically attractive representations. Fractals, various spirals based on the Golden Mean, microscopic images of cells, and so on. These are OK, I guess; they help make science more approachable, and they definitely demonstrate that science-y things can also be pretty things. But they don’t get at the true beauty of science, which for me is conceptual beauty, the sheer elegance of the rules underpinning the way the world is put together. I have never, for example, seen a work of Art that really expressed how elegant Maxwell’s equations, or the Pythagorean theorem, really are. Not their truth, or their usefulness, but their elegance: The simplicity and power with which they express their underlying truth.

It may sound odd to non-mathematicians or non-scientists to talk about beauty in a profession that is supposedly dedicated to truth, but the beauty of the truth, of the rules underpinning how the world works, is what gets most of us into the game. Particularly, it’s what gets mathematicians into the game. Because mathematicians work with abstractions rather than messy data, and because much of mathematics has no obvious application to the real world, mathematicians are in some sense the poets of the scientific world, seeking truth and elegance for their own sake rather than for any specific application. (This is, like most sweeping statements, an overgeneralization, but one with a reasonable degree of truth to it.)

The great mathematician G.H. Hardy, in his book A Mathematician’s Apology (one of my favorite books about the philosophy of mathematics), said this about mathematics, Art, and beauty:

A mathematician, like a painter or a poet, is a maker of patterns. If his patterns are more permanent than theirs, it is because they are made with ideas. A painter makes patterns with shapes and colours, a poet with words…The mathematician’s patterns, like the painter’s or the poet’s must be beautiful; the ideas like the colours or the words, must fit together in a harmonious way. Beauty is the first test: there is no permanent place in the world for ugly mathematics….

It would be quite difficult now to find an educated man quite insensitive to the aesthetic appeal of mathematics. It may be very hard to define mathematical beauty, but that is just as true of beauty of any kind—we may not know quite what we mean by a beautiful poem, but that does not prevent us from recognizing one when we read it.

I’m not going to try to give a rigorous definition of mathematical beauty – it would be an interesting exercise, and Wikipedia takes a stab at it, but it would be kind of like trying to explain being in love to someone who’s never experienced it. Louis Armstrong once said, “If you have to ask what jazz is, you’ll never know.” Mathematical beauty is somewhat similar.

Nonetheless, it exists, but it’s a conceptual beauty, and trying to render it in physical form is hard. Really hard. In fact, I wasn’t even sure it was possible. It’s something I’ve always wanted to do, but couldn’t figure out how because I’d never seen it done.

Until someone told me about Figuring Fibers. Figuring Fibers is a compilation of articles that demonstrate mathematical principles using fiber arts in a deep, thoughtful manner. It’s unique in that it’s written with mathematical rigor, yet is readable by the sufficiently bold layperson, and each article covers a deep, interesting mathematical idea and then demonstrates it/extends the idea using a fiber art technique. Crochet, knitting, quilting, sewing, and beading/embroidery are all used in the book. (No weaving, alas, but perhaps a future volume?). This is no mere crocheting of a Moebius strip or knitting a 3D rendition of a Klein bottle; this is creating fractals, extending the Chinese Remainder Theorem to knitting contexts, and proving hyperbolic geometrical theorems through quilting. I mean, this stuff is cool. Way cool. As in, I had continuous nerdgasms for three days cool. (Okay, okay, TMI, but you know what I mean. 🙂 )

Figuring Fibers is definitely not your “Quilt in a Weekend” type fiber book, and it is not for those easily intimidated by mathematical notation. In fact, I opened it, looked inside, saw subscripts and superscripts and phrases like “Triply periodic polyhedra in Euclidean Three-Dimensional Space” and nearly shut it again. But I didn’t, and I’m very glad I didn’t. If you are mathematically educated enough to read Scientific American, and if you are willing to put some time and effort into understanding the concepts, you can skip over the more technical bits and still get 90% of what the authors are saying. There are definitely places where you’re going to get lost – at least, for awhile. And there are places where you’re going to have to go back and forth until you get it. But it is possible to skim over those parts and still appreciate how devastatingly cool (did I mention devastatingly cool?) the concepts and the art are. Yes, I was a math major, but I haven’t cracked a math text in 25 years, and I still think this was an amazingly enlightening read, both for the mathematical beauty and the knowledge that it is possible to combine Art and mathematics in a deep, beautiful way. (Plus, I now have a new favorite phrase: “The Borromean Rings are Hyperbolic: Proof by Quilt”! OMG, I’m in love.)

Figuring Fibers is edited by Carolyn Yackel and Sarah-Marie Belcastro and published by the American Mathematical Society; it is available through Amazon but is (at least for now) available much more cheaply on the American Mathematical Society website. It is the third book in a series; I haven’t yet read Making Mathematics with Needlework or Crafting by Concepts, but you can bet they’re on my reading list now!