Reframing Chores as Ship Operations

⊕ show captionABOUT THE PHOTO // I enjoy seeing how operations deliver a high level of service. This photo is from a large hotel in Taiwan serving dozens of international and local dishes; my dad says they are popular.

I have been thinking of how to turn boring work into something I actually want to do. I had noted that my procrastination took the form of making small website improvements and researching online communities. While these activities are approved under this year’s Groundhog Day Resolutions (GHDR) goals, I was actually using them to avoid doing the icky work that would generate income. Curious. Also alarming.

I called myself out on this in the April Progress Report in the section April Complications, and did a bit of soul searching. I came up with two new motivational anchors that were more aligned with my personal values: hospitality and ship operations and a love for narrative-driven thinkingI’m drawing from narrative-driven design, a technique I use to turn extremely boring tasks into a literal story..

In this report followup, I want to further define what that actually looks like. I’ll start first by describing what I mean by “hospitality” and “ship operations”. This will be a good starting point.

What is Hospitality?

The Hospitality Industry brings to mind hotels, small inns, theme parks, visitor centers, department stores, concierge services, and other situations where there is an organization that has made it their mission to provide for their guests to make them feel welcome. It of course draws from the idea of hospitality as a cultural value, the act of welcoming people into your home and forming bonds over good food and shared celebration. These ideas are very close to my heart, which makes them good candidates for a motivational anchor.

As a first pass, I’ll define “Hospitality” and its operations as:

• Being prepared to receive guests into my space so they feel welcome. The space is designed to be welcoming, and as host I am representing the space.

• Being prepared to provide a space where the highest level of support meets guest expectations. Beyond facilities, this requires consistency in training, clear standards, and excellent logistics.

• Consistently practicing attention to detail with excellence in mind, as this is the salient aspect of the guest experience; when guests reciprocate positively (e.g. through action or payment), we’re on the right track.

What is a Ship?

I like stories about ships and travel, particularly space ships though I also love the age of oceanliners before jet transportation took over. I am enthralled by the idea of a lone ship plying deep oceans or the dark void of space, traveling from port to port carrying passengers and cargo. I also am fascinated by ship’s systems, crew operations, and logistics. They all serve a quantifiable purpose. Competence and self-sufficiency are necessary to ensure success.

My first-pass definition of “Ship” and “Ship Operations” includes:

• Maintaining the Ship as a “moving space” with one or more autonomous charters. The charter sets the Ship’s priorities, and these provide guidance for all Ship operations.

• Applying Hospitality aboard the Ship as a diplomatic function for guests, as it is in the Ship’s best interest to have good relationships with everyone.

• Having a Crew that takes pride in their service and training, demonstrating that superlative experience with an attention to detail ensures excellence in outcome. Crew are not guest servants. They are expert facilitators and educators, to both guests and to each other.

• Being the Owner/Director that chooses Expeditions to suit the Ship’s mission is the highest responsibility, and it serves the Mission. Interested people are invited to join each time-limited expedition. Some may decide to find a Role to fulfill, becoming Crew for a time. Others simply are passengers that want to experience how the Ship operates.

With working definitions established, let me try to squeeze my business objectives into them. There are two current business strategies, “Creative Independence” and the recently-added “Independent Maker”.

Old Business Strategy: Creative Independence

From 2007-2025 my goal was to have a financially sustainable boutique business. I called this Creative Independence, which had these key goals:

1. To be my own boss: mastering process, making money directly from work I produce under my own name.
2. To have the time, freedom, and money to operate my business without anxiety.

There were additional personal goals that described how I wanted to conduct myself as a business operator:

3. To act according to my values as a human being, friend, and maker in the pursuit of mastery and success.
4. To live according to my values with a community of like-minded self-empowered, positive-minded, conscientious and competent people.
5. To be respectful and mindful of others, while not being swayed from my path by their expectations.
6. To document the process so the path can be followed by others.

Current Business Strategy: Independent Maker

I became interested in the rebirth of online communities outside of the control of Big Tech. Community is an aspect of creative independence that I had never really resolved, but I know now how critical it is to my sense of well being. I liked the idea of being an independent maker as there are many solo creatives that I respect practicing their own forms of creative independence, but the shared definition of what that meant is only loosely covered by a collection of overlapping hashtags#openweb, #indieweb, #indie, #socialweb, #webrevival, #cozyweb, and #smolweb are the primary hashtags I’ve been researching..

So let me draft a description of “independent maker” as a working foundation. I’m using “I” here, but this could easily apply to a small team:

Ideals

• My consumer relationships are personal and direct, authentic and genuine, with clear boundaries
• I establish clear expectations to scaffold mutual respect in all transactions
• I maintain creative autonomy over what goods are made
• I accept the realities of unexpected consumer response to what I make
• I own and control supply, fulfillment, and sales channels
• I scale production within my capabilities and those of partnered collaborators
• I seek economies of scale through collaboration of like-minded people

Ethos

• Both makers and consumers are agents seeking mutual benefit with authenticity and transparency
• Do the least harm in the pursuit of our desired benefits
• Believe that sustained success comes from diligence in craft delivering excellent experience
• Believe that fair pricing and living wages are the foundation for genuine good faith negotiation

Considerations

• Minimal dependence on capitalist gatekeepers
• Minimal use of specious credibility indicators such as “hype” and “scale”
• Acknowledge that our ethos is not shared with the majority of mainstream consumers

The Shift Away from Marketing

The descriptions of Creative Independence and The Independent Maker are defined in terms of values and operational rigor, but leave out an important detail: they are all built on the idea that my unique goods and tools are the direct creator of revenue. Making goods and tools is not a problem, but the marketing operations are.

The below is a list of marketing steps, written in the spirit of my previous lists:

1. I make it easy for people to find and try my stuff. That creates the contact opportunity which can lead to them becoming customers.
2. The growth strategy is spreading the word so people can find out about them.
3. When I make it easy to relate to the value proposition, my call to action becomes more compelling.
4. By capturing personal data or subscribers, I can maintain regular contact with previous consumers of my work. Growing a pool of satisfied customers for repeat business creates a foundation for stable growth.
5. The more consistently I produce material that meets any of the above criteria, the more the customer base will increase, creating a virtuous circle of production and consumption.

Operationally speaking, the necessary tasks fall under categories like this:

• increasing online commerce options for customer engagement
• providing enticing product descriptions and listings
• writing instructional guides
• writing promotional material
• running workshops and classes
• seeking collaboration with others in the space

These are all very logical and reasonable steps that are easily evaluated. This is Marketing 101. These are battle-tested strategies for running a successful product company.

It also makes me feel a little sick.I don’t want to diminish how important and difficult it is to do these marketing steps well, especially for more than 5 years. It requires incredible talent and stamina to run this kind of operation.

When product is the focus—even my OWN product—my brain doesn’t engage at all. It’s only now that I’m starting to understand why:

Performing marketing operations to move product—even product that I design and make myself with the intention to provide genuine utility—feels like a step away from that. It also feels like a step away from my GHDR 2025 goals to lead with my values of authenticity, transparency, and curiosity.

The Innovative Experiment: Focusing on Hospitality

In the early 2000s I worked for tiny digital web agencies in a senior design role. I liked the technical stuff of the Internet, but eventually realized that our job was to help companies convince other companies that they were polished and professional when they were not. After a few bad months of living with this, I developed an allergy to marketing and started freelancing. I chose the uncertain path to find out what I really wanted to do.

I had completely forgotten about my allergy to marketing. Apparently, even practicing it for myself triggers a strong reaction! I’m hoping that by refocusing on hospitality and ship operations, I can reframe marketing activities into something that is aligned with what I actually love.

For me, marketing works when it is based on establishing trust, and I believe there is no better way to establish trust than by being consistently authentic, transparent, and curious with the people you meet. This is the approach that Independent Makers and Creators take today. While it’s not a foolproof 100% success strategy, over the long term I’ve seen it become the foundation of so many wonderful things that I enjoy. It’s a far cry from what Big Social Media tries to bully you into with their algorithmic feeds designed for their business goals over yours.

My genuine desire is to help people have a good day. This is hospitality.

I delight in seeing experience, knowledge and resources applied by people to get to where they want to go, fully provisioned and supported in their own mission by their peers. That is not unlike the purpose of a ship and its operations.

Both these ideas combine together in my head to create a narrative contextAgain drawing from narrative-driven design. Why not use it all the time instead of just when I’m really bored? that seems well-suited to me, which hopefully has the following benefits:

• The emphasis shifts from “products and services marketed and sold” (yuck) to expeditions of discovery shared, which is something I already like to do through blogging.
• The cycle of discovery and sharing, expressed with authenticity, transparency, and curiosity, appeals to other positive-minded, self-empowered, conscientious, curious, generous, and kind people.
• The natural byproduct of discovery can be repackaged as product, but it is the experience of following the process that is the REAL reason that people want to engage.

In other words, the point isn’t the delivery of goods or expertise. Instead, it’s to create the conditions where:

Or in other OTHER words, living out the story of trying to do the best I can.

The Leap of Faith

Getting down to nuts and bolts of financial sustainability, here’s my logic:

When people encounter me and my work, a certain percentage of people (“fans”) will want to reciprocate the caring that they receive. This is a virtuous cycle of good will that circulates between creator and fans, which is the proven foundation of Creator EconomySpecific examples: Freddy Wong of RocketJump, Jack and Natalie of Pomplamoose, Gabe and Tycho of Penny Arcade, Scott Kurtz of Player vs Player, John Allison of Bad Machinery, Dan Shive of El Goonish Shive and Non-Profit Organizations alike.

If I can create economic exchange as one way for fans to return my acts of caring, then I will have a sustainable system. And because the exchange is based on caring by both parties, this could be increasingly motivating!

Reframing Everything

Okay, that was a lot of preparatory discovery work! Let me propose a set of new directives to follow. I think it will take a month to see if all the above blathering has any substance to it.

Motivation, Reframed

There are two aspects here:

• I like doing acts of hospitality and logistics because I like imagining how future guests and crew will be delighted. I’m someone who inexplicably delights in delight, enjoys joy, and loves love.
• I have an allergy to marketing, so let me not do marketing. I want to have fun running a ship that welcomes people to come aboard and go to interesting places.

The Hypothesis: by connecting this imagination directly to the delighted/joyful/loving narrative of operationalizing it into an actual ship that hosts people, I may be able to reduce the friction I feel when doing “boring marketing tasks”This is also an attempted dodge around Pathological Demand Avoidance (PDA), which I talked about in March 3rd Report. The other name for PDA is Persistent Demand for Autonomy, which my motivational hypothesis is operationalizing into the form of an independent vessel..

Metrics, Reframed

The metric changes from “tangible goods produced that leads to connection” to “acts of depicting care and caring”. This is human connection PERFORMED. The desired benefit is trust earned over time, which can take many forms.

Skills, Reframed

My desire to share is expressed through explanation and sharing what I make in an open iterative process. This is the heart of what I called Explore • Learn • Build • Share (ELBS), which has a strong teaching component. This is a process I know well, and I have passable media production skills to do this by myself.

The results of an ELBS cycleExplore•Learn•Build•Share is my iterative creative process that emphasizes learning over production efficiency. Works well when you are learning how to do something at the same time you’re trying to build it. is often something that can be packaged, and this can be framed as something with trade value. A responsible ship operator will ensure that whatever is packaged is added to the ship’s inventory for use in future mission/trading opportunities.

Personal Goals, Reframed

I think the magical insight is about the flow, which makes sense because I like the idea of swirling and flowing. That means motion and being in the moment!

Simply “producing goods” is NOT swirling OR flowing!

Swirling and Flowing are live acts of caring.

• This is the nature of hospitality. It is only experienced in the moment of interaction.
• This is the nature of a ship. It is truly alive when it’s on the move and fulfilling its mission through its many operations and crew members pulling together.

Mission, Reframed

Instead of waiting for people to want to swirl with me, I can simply swirl as I have in the past. Through blog posts. Through commentary. Through livestreaming. Each of them explaining, building, and sharing the best things.

The Practice, Reframed

I think this simply means sharing through as many channels as possible. Here’s my thinking:

• My relative strengths are sharing process and the results.
• The mission is independent making, and collaborating to build uplifting structures.
• The culture I want is that “all the animals are happy productive friends working and playing together”. This is the broad mission.
• My interest in hospitality and ship operations serve the mission.
• The mission and its cultural guidelines are the driving context for expeditions, cruises, short runs…whatever brings about the culture I want to see.

In operational terms:

• The ship’s mission consists both of the overall strategic goals and the shorter expeditions that have smaller focused goals.
• Expeditions themselves consist of smaller strategic campaigns and task-level daily sorties.

In community terms:

My most childlike self wants to see a silly dream become reality, where all the animals became happy productive friends. They work and play together, growing and exploring and sharing their experiences in delighted mutual support. They thrive and prosper. The world becomes a better place.

This is the Way of Sri. This is what I want to operationalize and share with everyone. I believe I have knowledge, skills, and expertise to make this reality for at least a few people, and that seems worthwhile to me.

The Challenge Ahead

Will I be able to operationalize this version of GHDR? That’s the open question for 2026. This is a restart. Stay tuned. Wish me luck.