“Escaping success is how I stay in a state of wonder”
– Joshua Davis

I just got back from the 99U Conference, which was filled with amazing speakers, but my absolute favorites were the ones who stood out as the scrappiest of the lot. The ones who stood on stage and you wondered briefly if they’d ever presented before as they stood up there so raw and authentic.

At the end of the second day, after hearing from a number of well-known authors and founders, this big, biker looking dude walks out on stage in jeans and a t-shirt, tattoos down his arms, on his neck – starts screaming "HEY!" … "HEY!#@$!" and then laughing with this total little kid’s smile and screaming some more.

And then proceeds to tell us that he’s going to talk to us today about… Escaping Success.

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When I first started writing The Hacker Chick Blog, I was incredibly taken by Kathy Sierra and her Creating Passionate Users blog.

I loved how fun and edgy she was. I was in awe of her fearlessness in advancing her own ideas even when they flew in the face of conventional wisdom. Not only was she unapologetic for this, she clearly reveled in the idea. The mere thought of publicly standing up for my own ideas when they went against what others thought scared the hell out of me. But here she was – not only doing it but thriving from it. She was a huge influence in how I did The Hacker Chick Blog and I really tried to match her in both courage and style.

Later, while watching the early seasons of Criminal Minds, I became captivated by Penelope Garcia’s character. This crazy, edgy, ingenious hacker who was not only a girl (that parts okay) but she was downright flamboyant about it.

As someone who’d been coding and doing all sorts of other primarily male activities my entire life, I’d been a tomboy since I was a kid. I made it a point of pride that I personified J. Random Hacker – right down to my obsession with wearing hiking boots everywhere (you know, in case a mountain should suddenly spring up in the middle of the machine room).

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Elise Kovi from SoftArtisans interviewed me for their Women in Tech series. Reposting here with their permission:

This is the ninth in a series of posts exploring the personal stories of real women in technology. Every woman in tech overcame, at the very least, statistical odds to be here; this blog series aims to find out why, and what they found along the way. This time around we chatted with Abby Fichtner (t|ln), better known as Hacker Chick for her devoted work with Boston startups. Recently named Founding Executive Director of hack/reduce, a non-profit big data hacker space, Abby is in constant search of shaking up conventional wisdom and finding out what lies beyond. If reading her story inspires you to share yours, please feel free to email me.

Hi! I’m Abby Fichtner – although more people probably know me as Hacker Chick. I write The Hacker Chick Blog on how we can push the edge on what’s possible, and I’m about to launch a non-profit hacker space for big data called hack/reduce.

Prior to this, I was Microsoft’s Evangelist for Startups where I had the most incredible experience of working with hundreds of startups. I’ve been alternately called the cheerleader and the guardian angel for Boston startups. I love this community and am super excited to launch hack/reduce to help Boston continue solving the really hard problems and keep our title as the most innovative city in the world.

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Wanted to share my keynote from last week’s A-Ha! Social Media Summit. My marching orders for this were:

So, just to set the stage – this is not going to be about lean startup or agile development how to do some cool hack. It’s just me, tellin’ my story and sharing what I believe: that you should forget what others think of success and instead, do the crazy thing and stray off that path of success in order to follow your own passions. Because I believe that when you do that, you’re gonna rock it.

I started with a TED-style 15 minute talk:

Followed by an exercise to help everyone discover their own path that involved lots of 3×5 cards, a little creativity and – I hope – some awesome connecting with others.

You can find the full slide deck here: Follow Your Own Path.