Joe Homs

Remember learning to ride a bike or drive a car? It was hard at first, with all of those things to remember and do at once. Put your foot here, your hands there, look straight, now look in your mirrors, gas, brake, turn signals, WATCH OUT FOR THAT TREE!

Driving that car or riding that bike seemed like a very complex activity. You didn’t know the simple steps to take and they weren’t natural for you yet.

What we didn’t realize then was that those things were sophisticated, not complex. They only seemed complex because we were trying to learn and remember and do things all at once.

Breaking something down into smaller, easier to understand parts allowed us to master those things. We had training wheels for a bike, someone to hold us and push us when we needed it. Learning how much pressure to put on the brakes of a car while going straight in a parking lot.

We could then put those things together into a sophisticated process that became more than the sum of its parts. It just looks complex to those who don’t know.

The next time you are learning something complex, remember it is probably just sophisticated and you need to break it down into smaller parts and master those things before trying to do the rest. Agile adoption is a good candidate for that breakdown.

So if you are learning something new like Agile, find out where you can break it down and learn small things at first. If you are being taught or coached by someone else, make sure they teach you this way. It is much easier. If they disagree, ask them why.

I’m always trying to find new ways to use technology to keep track of what’s being said out there.  Be it websites, RSS, mailing lists, twitter, etc. I try to know what’s going on for myself, my clients, and my colleagues.  As with most other things in life though, I always find someone who is doing it better than I am.

I created a twitter account using my name and not more than 24 hours later, Jason Calacanis followed me.  While this is not huge news (Jason has 62k+ people he follows), it was to me.  It means that Jason or a script is parsing his mailing list subscribers and finding them at places like twitter.  He can hear the train coming from miles away.  Can you?

I’ve spent a good chunk of my life building houses with my family and also Habitat for Humanity.  Most people know the cliche that having a strong foundation is key to building a house.  That doesn’t make it any less important.  Today, Seth talks about the five pillars of success.

The five pillars of success

1. See (really see) what’s possible

2. Know specifically what you want to achieve

3. Make good decisions

4. Understand the tactics to get things done and to change minds

5. Earn the trust and respect of the people around you

It sure seems like we spend all our time on #4.

Seth doesn’t answer the question of why we spend so much time on #4.  The same reason we spend so much time on #4 and so little time on the others is fear.  Fear that we’re not good enough, fear that our dreams are too small, fear that we’ll make the wrong decisions, fear, fear, and more fear.  That fear brings all of the pillars crashing down.

For people who have never felt they could lead, I say take the first step.  Spend your time on something you find worthwhile and just start doing it.  Here’s the secret: you’ll make mistakes.  Probably a lot of them at first, but that’s often the best way to learn.  Learning to be alright with and recover from failure will help you get over your fear.  It will certainly help you with #5.

via Seth’s Blog: The five pillars of success.

I had a conversation with a colleague about doing consulting and that there’s really no such thing as an “organization.”  There really is just a bunch of people who need their minds changed.  The CxO’s I work with usually only need a minimum of technical help, mostly they need an outside change agent to help get their people in the mood to do their best work, so they hire me.

You already know how to deliver excellent service that blows people away. You just don’t feel like it. Your organization has the resources to buy that machine or enter that market or change that policy. They’re just not in the mood.

If I accomplish anything on a good day, it’s helping you change attitudes. I’m working hard at getting you in the mood to do the things you already know how to do. I think that’s what your boss/the market wants you to do as well.

via Seth’s Blog: In the mood.

As we begin our latest downward slide in the economy, people are starting to lose their jobs at an alarming rate.

Instead of looking for some other job, why not create one for yourself? It is easier than most people think if they simply choose what’s right for them.

“What is the right company to start?” I can hear you asking. Something you know and that can be tested easily with minimal costs. I don’t know what that is for you, but you do.

It’s old advice, but worth repeating. Look for something that comes easily or happily to you. Something you are an expert in that you can turn into something to sell to others. If it is hard to replicate, even better.

Once you know what it is, start small and test out the results, but start today. That is the key. Your business model is only going to be perfect by accident. Be willing and able to change.

How does this help the economy? By creating jobs, tax revenue, etc.

If you’ve gotten this far, let me know. There are so many people out there that are willing and able to get you even further.

Joey at 7 Years By Ruth

Last night, as I sat with my grandsons reviewing their five and seven year old accomplishments, I was drawn again to memories of my own childhood experiences. Joey, my seven year old, proudly displayed his ability to write in handwriting, which had mostly been learned through self teaching, some of his capital letters. This, despite the fact that his mother was repeatedly requesting that they say goodnight and get ready for bed. “Let me show you a capital T, Gramma”, he said, laboriously outlining his project. “Oops!” I remarked, “You shouldn’t have crossed the T, honey, that makes it an F.” There was a stricken look on his face, and with an “Oh no!” he left the room. He returned shortly with his specially wrapped gift for his parents which had a large beautifully made capital F in “Fo Mom & Pop.” I whispered to get an eraser and we would fix it and he went and desperately began searching the drawer where such things were kept. Mom, by this time, and not knowing what was going in, demanded that bed time was now! And she forcefully directed him toward the stairs. The enormity, to him, of his predicament, started a totally frustrated cry, but he went upstairs. When she returned I briefly told her what was happening and went to call the sobbing child for just one minute. I explained to him that if he added a small “r” to the “Fo” it would change the word. With brimming eyes, and a moment’s thought, he realized it would say “For” which was perfectly acceptable. Tears stopped, the correction was made, and a true weight had been lifted in his young mind.

It is the tendency of busy adults to forget the importance of the little tragedies that are as monumental to a small store of experiences in children as larger ones are to adults. Showing them how to deal with and minimize error is one of the best and kindest tools to give them. The humiliation and lack of self esteem that comes from not doing what is acceptably correct can leave a scar no different than the scar an adult gets from the same type of things. The child has within him the adult he will be. Treat him with the respect you would afford, and the kindness you should use, in your dealings with all people.

The enormity of unresolved calamities of my own childhood, though they are small by adult standards, still come back to haunt me. Not that adults were uncaring, but there was an opinion that because children were small, their feelings were relative to their size. Not so! The adult is wrapped in a small confining package, straining to find answers to enormous complexities in the child’s body.

I miss you Grandma.

When you have to evaluate someone, it is easy to err on the side of being nice. When you really like the person outside of work or they are your friend, it becomes doubly hard. It is still important to be honest with feedback for someone so that they can improve and important for future teams so that they can make sure the person is the right fit.

I tend to use a lesson learned long ago to escalate problems I’m having with people.

First, talking to the person is often the earliest and easiest way to give someone feedback. Often people will not know something is wrong and are more than willing to fix it.

Second, if the person doesn’t respond, let them know you will take your feedback to their boss if needed. Give them a timeframe to improve and tell them what you will do if they don’t.

Third, evaluate how the person is doing and possibly even get a second opinion.

Finally, putting honest feedback into a review will help teams evaluate the person’s strengths and weaknesses for the future. Even bad feedback with a good outcome can help someone’s review for the future. Who doesn’t like to see someone improve?

When you sugarcoat a review, you hurt the person by not letting them improve and future teams they will work with by not letting them see where they need to cover or help someone.

I normally love the Mac’s design decisions, but one thing that’s always maddened me is that by default you can’t tab between all controls on webpages, etc. I finally got that fixed today with an article from lifehacker.

Click the “All Controls” radio button at the bottom of the Keyboard & Mouse pane in System Preferences to right this wrong.

Bliss.

[via]

Science Daily is reporting today on new research from scientists at the University of Portsmouth says that says smiling affects how we speak, to the point that listeners can identify the type of smile based on sound alone. Here is the abstract for the paper:

The present study investigated the vocal communication of naturally occurring smiles. Verbal variation was controlled in the speech of 8 speakers by asking them to repeat the same sentence in response to a set sequence of 17 questions, intended to provoke reactions such as amusement, mild embarrassment, or just a neutral response. After coding for facial expressions, a sample of 64 utterances was chosen to represent Duchenne smiles, non-Duchenne smiles, suppressed smiles and non-smiles. These audio clips were used to test the discrimination skills of 11 listeners, who had to rely on vocal indicators to identify different types of smiles in speech. The study established that listeners can discriminate different smile types and further indicated that listeners utilize prototypical ideals to discern whether a person is smiling. Some acoustical cues appear to be taken by listeners as strong indicators of a smile, regardless of whether the speaker is actually smiling. Further investigations into listeners’ prototypical ideals of vocal expressivity could prove worthwhile for voice synthesizing technology endeavoring to make computer-simulations more naturalistic.

This is real science folks. Remember all those times you had to cold call and you heard “smile and dial” from your biz dev manager? Well, it turns out she was right. Your customer sub-consciously heard, not only that you weren’t smiling, but that you were gritting your teeth in anger.

Someone I know recently took over a housing community board by getting organized against the old board and running an effective campaign. The strategies used to do this can apply in many areas of life. Here’s how they told me they did it.

*Know What You Want To Accomplish*
The old board was being run by 5 residents of the community and they had contracted with a management company that wasn’t doing an effective job. On top of ineffective management, the board was illegally charging landlords an extra fee for being non-residents. This was strike one for this person and was the whole reason that a group of people decided that the board needed to be replaced. This single goal united 3 people to run for the board.

*Make Sure You Are In The Right*
In cases of legal judgement, it is best to get a lawyer’s advice. The more specific the lawyer’s experience, the better. In this case, one of the landlords was a lawyer and confirmed that the fees were illegal and even sent letters to the board requesting that they discontinue the fee and refund the landlords in the form of a credit on their association dues. When the board ignored the letters, this was further cause for action. Strike two.

*Plan Your Campaign*
Now that there was no choice but to take over the board to effect change, the leader of the 3 did some research on past elections to the board and found that the largest vote count for any one member was around 90 votes. Each resident gets 5 votes, so each of the 3 needed to get around 20 people to vote for them and they would pretty much be guaranteed a seat on the board.

*Know Your Audience*
The people that were being affected by the extra fee were non-residents, so the 3 needed a strategy to communicate with them and explain what needed to be done. The 3 printed up fliers about the problem and mailed them to all of the landlords of the units in the community. They also went around to each of the units and knocked on doors telling people about the problem and to come and vote on the day of the election.

*Stand Your Ground*
On the night of the election, the ballot box was filled with a large percentage of the votes going to the 3 wanting to take over the board. The old board members had set a deadline of 6pm for all of the ballots to be in. They decided to change their minds and open the ballots to anyone who was at the meeting. The old board members went around the community and asked people to vote on the issue. This nearly doubled the amount of votes cast in the election. The 3 were still confident that they would be able to get a majority on the board. Strike three for the old board.

*Move Quickly*
Once all of the ballots were counted, the results were read and the winners announced. The 3 were on the top of the vote count and each got a seat. One of the old board members and a newcomer got the other two seats. Immediately, the management company, seeing the writing on the wall, resigned. The new board members immediately put the extra fees to a vote and the fees were immediately reversed and all past payments were credited back on the association fees.

*Plan Ahead*
Knowing that they would win, the leader of the 3 had already gotten bids several weeks before from several management companies to replace the one that had just left. In my state, you’re required to have a new management company within 30 days. Having these bids in place would speed up the process and allow the board more decision time to choose the best management company.

*Don’t Burn Bridges*
The 2 board members left on the board were upset that they no longer had a majority and couldn’t make decisions the way that they wanted anymore. Being gracious, the 3 board members included them in the process of managing the community, but made it clear that any illegal activity would not be tolerated and that they would need to decide on issues as a board. The 3 knew that it was important not to alienate the community and make sure to listen to their concerns and manage fairly.

*Recap*
So the lessons I took away from this are that in order to get something done, you need to have a clear goal, a flexible plan for getting there, research to back up your claims, and organization to pull it all together. Once you’ve gotten what you want, it’s important to make sure that you make good on your stated goals quickly and work with the former group to keep things running smoothly in the future.

at&t just announced the pricing for the iPhone plans.

The pricing is inflated from the normal plans.

*iPhone Pricing*
| *Price* | *Talk Time* |
|$60/mo | 450 min|
|$80/mo | 900 min|
|$100/mo | 1,350 min|

*Regular Pricing* (Cingular)
| *Price* | *Talk Time* |
|$40/mo | 450 min|
|$60/mo | 900 min|
|$80/mo | 1,350 min|

The regular pricing includes rollover, unlimited nights/weekends, and unlimited mobile-to-mobile minutes. I’m not sure if you get those with the iPhone plan. You do get unlimited data access which normally costs around $20/mo.

And that is the whole point of calling this out. The iPhone plan comes with unlimited data access. So the first company that comes up with a VOIP web app for the iPhone is going to make a killing. I’ll bet it’s already in development.

I was going through a backlog of feeds today and noticed a number that I could call that would allow me to opt-out of getting credit card junk mail from the big credit bureaus. I thought to myself, “Great, I really hate those things and they go directly to the trash. Let’s see if I can stop it for a while.”

For those outside the US that don’t know, we Americans get a ton of junk mail from a bunch of credit card companies and other companies we could care less about because these credit bureaus keep a mailing list with our names on them and then they sell the list to direct marketers. It’s a great business for them and they can even qualify you as a good lead because they know your credit score. What turns out to be good business for them is really annoying to those of us who have to receive this mail.

So, I call the number and I get a computerized greeting. The nice computerized voice tells me that there are no operators to take my call, but that I can still opt-out. She asks me if my phone number is the one that I’m calling from (I’m assuming they have caller ID, but that can be blocked or I could call from a pay-phone) and I say no. The computer then asks me to say the phone number for the residence I want to opt-out for. I give them the number to my house and the computer starts reading back my home address to ask me if it is correct. _Wait, what?_ A little concerned, I say yes because it was my address. It then proceeds to say my full name and asks me to confirm. I say yes because that’s correct too.

Thankfully, that’s all the information that it decided to give to me without asking for any sort of verification, only a phone number which I could have picked out randomly, or worse yet, given to someone who now wants to find out where I live.

The rest of the call asked me to enter in my social security number and date of birth to confirm that I was who I said I was.

This seems backwards to me. Shouldn’t I have to tell you who I am with some information that I don’t just readily give away? I don’t go around printing my social security number on business cards, but I do print my phone number on business cards. My information is in their systems if they are using what I enter to verify the transaction. Ask me this information first before you disclose my name and home address to anyone I’ve given my phone number to.

Here’s the number for those interested: 1-888-5-OPTOUT

For those who are going to say that this number was fake and that I just got my identity stolen, I used the web browser on my phone and checked this number out before I called. That is also where my feed reader is. The number is listed on the Federal Trade Commission’s website along with a link to a free website where you can enter in your information to opt out. I was going to use the form, but typing in a whole bunch of data using your phone is not ideal with a simple 12 button keypad, so I decided to use the number. The website gets things right. I have to enter in tons of information about myself including my address. The phone number just gives it up willingly.

I was reading an article by Robert X. Cringely today called Lean and Mean noting that IBM Global Services is laying off thousands of workers and possibly up to 150,000 in the US.

Go ahead and read the article. It makes me really glad that I work for a company that extols virtue and taking care of their people before making money. At ThoughtWorks, we don’t have this level of employee count, so I can’t say what would happen if we did.

We’re also trying to become more lean, but we are doing it in a different way. We’ve already adopted agile as core to the way we work a long time ago. This time, we’re applying lean to our processes and tools, not to our people. That’s the important point. When you treat your employees like family, you do things differently.

Hundreds of thousands is a big family and I’m sure that the execs at IBM GS don’t know the large majority of them. I guess that makes it easy to cast them aside in the name of pleasing Wall Street.

I took a kayaking trip this weekend on a lake near my house and an old lesson popped into my head. While I was working at NeoTactix, we had little firemen bobble-heads with our pictures on them. It was an allusion to the fact that we were always fighting fires in our client companies. I remember asking for a new bobble-head in addition to my fireman. I asked for a lifeguard.

I was a lifeguard when I was younger and the lessons that I learned training there were unforgettable. As a lifeguard, you don’t just react to problems, you scan your water and look for potential problems. You are taught all sorts of strategies to minimize mistakes and keep everyone safe. While at work, I applied the skills I learned as a lifeguard to protect our clients from things I could see on the horizon.

Lifeguards overlap the areas they are watching so that there’s always a second pair of eyes on any given situation. This worked very well for us when we adopted this strategy. For example, if I had a press release I was working on, I made sure to always run it by the managing partners to ensure I got everything right before publishing it. Another example was to watch companies in our portfolio that could indicate problems for the other companies that were our clients. Because each of our clients were minding their daily business like they were supposed to, they couldn’t always look up and see trends that could affect them. Part of our job was to see these things coming and warn (or save) them if needed.

Lifeguards constantly scan the waters without focusing on one particular area. When you are sitting up in the tower, it can be easy to focus on just one person or a group of people. It’s called tunnel vision. The safest thing to do is to look for typical problem signs, make a quick head count, and move on to the next group of people. This lesson translates to business really well. As a CEO, you have a bunch of things you have to worry about. Payroll, internal initiatives, investors, competition, and growing the company are just some of the huge tasks you have to take on. Making sure you give each their due attention is important or you become reactionary and will never get to focus on looking forward for your business.

Lifeguards ignore unneeded distractions and maintain constant focus. If you’ve ever seen a lifeguard at the beach, they always have their eyes on the water. They will walk up their towers backwards to stay facing the water. People will come up to talk to them and they’ll rarely look at them, instead focusing on watching the water. It’s not that they are trying to be rude, but that they are focusing on their job, not someone who just wants to chat about Baywatch. In business life, there is plenty to keep you distracted from doing your real job. Surfing the internet can waste whole days of productivity. Worse yet, spending your whole day on something that _seems_ productive like rearranging the office furniture can make you feel like you are doing something good, but is usually just a way to procrastinate on something more important that could be done. When you learn to control the time you spend on unneeded activities, all sorts of time opens up and you’ll find much more time to run your business.

Lifeguards cover each other’s water when an emergency comes up. Emergencies happen; it’s a fact of lifeguarding as well as business. This is a hard lesson for some businesses to learn, especially in cyclical situations like cashflow or business development. Lifeguards typically have a phone they pick up or button they push to signal the other lifeguards that an emergency is happening in their water and they are taking care of it. The other lifeguards immediately respond by calling for backup and covering the lifeguard’s water while they are making a save. Some businesses will see emergency situations and rally their employees to help fight the fire. While this is good, they often leave other parts of the business unattended. That’s a quick way to becoming a firefighter and only reacting to your business instead of acting to control your business.

Lifeguards and firefighters have their place in business. Both serve useful functions, but if you have more lifeguards, hopefully you won’t need so many firefighers.

I have been doing a bunch of interviews lately. My second one this week (thanks recruiting!) was tonight and it didn’t go as well as it should have.

Here’s my typical interview strategy for when I am interviewing Business Analysts for ThoughtWorks and some tips to help you if I ever get picked to interview you.

1. Show Up On Time And Be Ready

I know that you are busy, but this isn’t college. You’re such a hot shot Analyst that you could land a job anywhere, right? Well, first you are going to have to show me that you want _this_ job. Our recruiting department sends out a confirmation to you usually 3 days in advance of my call. I also get a confirmation sent to me. If I can’t reach you on the phone number you give on the day of the call, I’ll usually try again about 15 minutes later. If I can’t reach you, I’ll send a note back to recruiting to reschedule the call. However, if I reach you and you are not ready to take my call and don’t have a good explanation (I’ll understand if the house is on fire or something), that’s an automatic *No Hire*. My reasoning for this is simple: it takes nearly an hour to do an interview with you and you know about it in advance, so you should have that time blocked off. If you don’t treat that time as important, it means you won’t treat our clients that way.

2. Prepare

Do your homework on ThoughtWorks. Find out how we like to work; our company culture. Read our website, learn about agile, visit some blogs, talk to us at conferences. I’m going to ask you some questions about what you know about the company, so show me that you did a little bit of work and I’ll be happy.

On the flip side, I do almost no preparation for my interview with you. All I know is your name, phone number, and what position we are hiring you for (that determines my questions, more on that later). I get all of your information like your resume and notes from other interviews you’ve had with us, but I don’t look at a single bit of it before the interview. This is by design. I don’t want to know anything about you that will influence my decision to hire you.

3. The Interview

I have a pretty consistent interviewing style that helps me be more objective about your skills. ThoughtWorks has a set of questions that they like me to ask and I also mix in some of my own. Here’s how the interview typically goes:

1. Ice Breaker
2. ThoughtWorks Questions
3. Domain Question From Your Most Recent Position
4. Random Domain Question
5. Questions For Me
6. Wrap Up

Ice Breaker
I start off by letting you know how the interview is going to go. I care more about your thinking process than you getting everything 100% right on my questions. By this time, I still haven’t looked at anything about you.

ThoughtWorks Questions
The ThoughtWorks questions are mostly softball questions so that I can go over some logistical things about the job. Are you alright with lots (and lots) of travel? Have you worked with Agile professionally? Why do you want to be a BA? There are a bunch of questions, but they give me an idea of what to ask you further. I’ll go into something in detail if I get the sense that you are stretching the truth. While you are answering my questions, I’ll pop open your resume and look at your most recent job and title.

Domain Question From Your Most Recent Position
By now, you should be warmed up and I have a good sense of what I am going to ask you. From your most recent position, I’ll ask you something about the business domain. This way, I get a sense of how well you can understand what a business does. If you’re a TWU candidate, meaning you are just out of college, this question changes to ask about some of your classes. I’m looking for a deep understanding of what you are talking about. I’ll dive into small details to make sure you really know your stuff.

I may also ask you about some things you have done for your previous job (or school). Special projects, clubs, whatever. I want to see that you haven’t simply gone to work or school and taken the minimum to get by. It’s for your own good because you’ll get burned out quickly at ThoughtWorks if you aren’t into the work.

Random Domain Question
This is my favorite part of the interview. I’ll ask you about a domain that has nothing to do with business and run through a few exercises with you to see how well you can understand what I am talking about. It’s always something off the wall and will have nothing to do with what you have done before, but that is the point. I’m looking to see how well you can adapt to a new situation and think on your feet. I’ll play customer roles and ask you to elicit questions about things I want to do. I’ll try to trip you up and see how you recover. This way, I can get an idea of how you will do with our clients.

Questions For Me
This is the part of the interview where you get to ask me anything you want about ThoughtWorks. Some people trip up here because they think the interview is over. If you are really serious, you will have some questions about how we do our work, what our people are like to work with, etc. I also get to sell you a little bit on what it’s like to work here.

Wrap Up
The whole process takes 45 minutes to an hour. I let you know about the next phase in the interview process and that our recruiting department will be getting back to you within a week or so. After that, I hang up and write the last of my notes about you and read them over again. I make them readable by someone other than myself and then I make a decision about whether or not to pass or pursue.

4. Pass Or Pursue?

After the interview, I have a pretty good idea of how I am going to recommend you. I ask myself lots of questions like: Is this person smart and do they get things done? Would I want to work with them? If the answer is no, it’s a pass. If I wouldn’t work with you, then I wouldn’t expect anyone else at ThoughtWorks to. If I feel like you aren’t smart enough to walk into a client and immediately start to figure out what is going on, that’s also a pass. If I have a good feeling about you, I’ll mark you as a pursue and send you on up the chain for our intense face-to-face interview process.

I hope this was helpful to future candidates. I’m looking for aptitude and attitude in the way that you present yourself to me. If you’ve got both, you’ll have no problem being a ThoughtWorker. Good luck.

UPDATE: If you are looking for a referral, please email me at jhoms at thoughtworks dot com and I’ll point you to the right people.

I bought some RAM today for my laptop and had a great experience with crucial.com.

First, there was a program that they allowed me to download (if you use IE, it just runs right in the browser) that showed me exactly how much RAM I had and more importantly, _where_ it was installed. It showed me that I had 1GB of RAM in a single slot.

Then I got a recommendation for which RAM I needed based on Crucial knowing exactly what computer I had. Their suggestion was exactly what I needed.

Purchasing the RAM was my favorite part of the experience. In my opinion, this is where Crucial gets things _really_ right. I didn’t have to log in, sign up, or otherwise register for anything on their site. I just put in my shipping and billing information and I was done.

The last nice touch was this little gem that appeared in the middle of my order confirmation.

Nothing to fill out if I didn’t want to, but a genuine attempt at making my life easier if I was going to have multiple orders.

Thanks Crucial, it was a great buying experience.

This is an article that I have seen go past in my RSS reader a few times lately: Meeting Tip: Learning Names. It is something that I have used for years, but this is a great writeup of what to do. Simply stated, make a little “map” of the meeting table you are at and write everyone’s name along with any other information you might need next to them.

I’ve taken it further a few times and actually written notes under each person’s name so that I knew who came up with the idea. It was a common practice for me at NeoTactix where we would meet a ton of new companies all the time and I could _never_ keep their names straight in my head. I find it equally important in my consulting life at ThoughtWorks, but rely on it less when I see the people that I meet every day and their name eventually starts to stick in my head.

I got into a debate with some friends lately about the work/life balance. This seems to be a perennial topic for me as I get older. There’s something in me that is driven to succeed, to build a life for myself. I’ve seen previews of what it will be like. I know it’s there for the taking. There is also another part of me that knows I need that balance. Like I said to Nick, I burned out a few years ago and reevaluated what I really wanted in life. It came down to family and friends being the most important thing to me. So far for me, I’ve been lucky in that work has supported both of those things as I’ve worked with both family and friends much of my life. ThoughtWorks has just brought more friends like Clint, Eric, and Cliff. I’d do anything for those guys. They are like family to me too, which might be why this line is so blurry for me.

The illustrious Brad Feld came up in our conversation about his work/life balance. I’ve always looked up to smart people like Brad and tried to learn from their mistakes. I learned a long time ago that it is the best to learn this way, but there are unfortunately some things that you need to go through yourself to make the lesson really stick.

I’m trying to strike the right balance in my own life. I’m willing to give up a little personal time to get a strong foothold on a career, but I won’t do it forever. My life outside of work is too important to spend it in an office building all day. I love my work. I especially loved it when I was at NeoTactix. I would get into these very focused times and work more than 80 hours in a week without noticing. Now, I rely on my family and friends to reel me back in when I’ve gone too far. I don’t listen to people who can’t handle the pressure, don’t really care about me. I listen to those most important to me because they sometimes see things that I don’t.

So, I’m still not sure if I work too much. I know that I am enjoying what I do right now and that family and friends still come first. Like Nick said, I’m practicing for something bigger. Hardships? Setbacks? Things I’ve never done before? Bring ‘em on, but somebody remind me about dinner…

To preface this, I will say that I love my 12″ PowerBook. I have never had a better computer. I have not had a single problem with it since the day that I got it. I do all sorts of work on it and it is like a part of me. I’ve never been able to say that about something that I owned, especially a computer. That is why it was so painful to go into an Apple store and be treated like I didn’t matter. More after the jump and the surprising twist at the end.

Prosper: Thanks to the magic of the internet, you can now lend money or request money in the form of a loan. You set the interest rate, you take the benefits. I think of it as P2P banking. I wish I had thought of it. I’ll be watching these guys with interest to see how they do. Makes me wonder what other “old” things can be made new again with P2P in front of it.