When I was two I almost drowned.

Ever since, water and I have had a strained relationship. I learned to swim when I was nine or ten, but have never liked swimming. I always keep my head above water.

Today, I swam my first set of laps. And tomorrow I plan to swim again.

Last night my friend Jason and I were talking about which exercises keep you in shape as you get older. Swimming and running seemed to be about equal. He swims 2-3 times a week. I just started running after noticing that runners seem to maintain their fitness level the most as they age.

But running has its disadvantages. And even if you run, you should cross-train. And while I recently took up biking as well, swimming was looming at me. A weakness I hadn’t tackled yet. The one that would prevent me from ever being in a triathlon, one of the ultimate tests of endurance.

Today I started to tackle that weakness.
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Today I have a question to ask: how do you separate your interests & identities?

Traditionally I’ve separated my life into three identities:

• Personal: Things having nothing to do with work
• Professional: Things having to do with my career, but not necessarily my business
• Corporate: Things directly related to my business

Online these roughly align to:

• Personal: Facebook & an old personal web site
• Professional: LinkedIn, @FastFedora & this web site
• Corporate: @LabEscape & the Lab Escape web site

While a bit complicated, this has been easy to manage.

Lately though I’ve been broadening my professional interests and sharing personal interests that have relevance to my professional life. Continue reading >

Steve Jobs resigned from Apple yesterday. As his era ends, people have been reflecting on key moments in his life. One moment resonated with me: his 2005 Stanford commencement speech. If you haven’t listened to it yet, I urge you to do so.

At the end of the speech, he signs off with the last message from the Whole Earth Catalog: Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish.

I started reflecting on what this truly means.

To me, staying hungry means always having a mountain to climb, an ambition you’re striving toward. As we age, we often achieve our ambitions and forget to set new ones. Once you’ve scaled the mountain and discover the amazing view, you work toward building roads to show others that view or return to the base so you can scale it again.

But while expanding on our successes brings us stability, growth requires that we attempt new challenges. To be always hungry for more, and to never rest on past achievements.

Richard St. John presented an excellent TED Talk on this exact subject: Success is a continuous journey.

Staying foolish means being willing to take chances with crazy ideas. This implies a willingness to fail, as most crazy ideas will fail. But those that succeed, often succeed fantastically.

As others have pointed out, this embodies the ethos of the entrepreneur. To take on new challenges that others think are crazy, and then to succeed doing them. To do the impossible.

What things have you done that were foolish and succeeded, or only would have happened because you had a gut-level hunger to make them happen?

Last Saturday I resolved to learn to be prolific. Key to this was writing a blog post every day. I aimed to only spend 15 minutes on each post, thereby ensuring I could work it into my day.

Saturday I posted Learn To Be Prolific. Sunday I posted Do Micro-Projects.  Monday I posted Exercise Is Not Free Time. Tuesday I posted…nothing.

Failure.

Or rather…stumble. I like that word better. Because failure implies I won’t continue. But I will. Today’s post aims to get me back riding again.

In the end whether I succeed or fail has nothing to do with whether I miss a day here or there. Personal development and learning is not an either/or proposition. It’s a journey.

In fact, percentage-wise, I’ve written a post on 75% of the days I aimed to. In elementary school I’d get a C. Not great, but still a passing grade.

And, the best part is, with every passing day that I write another post, my grade gets higher. If I go an entire month only missing yesterday, I’m suddenly at 97% and looking pretty good.

Woody Allen said “80% of success is showing up”. I venture that 100% of showing up is picking yourself back up when you stumble and getting yourself moving again.

So with this post, I’m off to the races.

I used to schedule my exercise in my free time. Exercise was personal, unrelated to work. I’m learning this was a mistake.

When things got busy, work always trumped free time and exercise fell by the wayside.

The first week this didn’t matter. But day after day subtle changes would happen until I’d reach a point where my energy and focus had noticeably diminished. At which point, it became so much harder to start exercising again and regain that energy.

Exercise has momentum. The more you do it, the easier it becomes to keep doing it, and the more energy it gives you. When you stop, you don’t lose that energy right away, but slowly it seeps out of you. The secret is keeping the momentum going.

Exercise is not optional. It must be a critical activity that cannot be rescheduled. Thus my new mantra: exercise is not free time.

Yesterday I wrote how I wanted to learn to be prolific. But this doesn’t just mean writing.

Being prolific for me involves any creative art, whether that be writing, drawing, programming or performing. Even volunteering can generate the sense of accomplishment I want to achieve by being prolific.

To foster this aim, I’ve decided to label my projects based on the time required:

• Mini: 1 week / 5 days / 40 hours
• Micro: 1 day / 8 hours
• Nano: 1 hour

Besides longer term projects and businesses, I want to work on smaller projects, projects that take an hour or a day. Both because my time is limited, and because I like the lessons it teaches. It teaches me to separate effort from value, and focus on accomplishment in a limited timeframe.

August 19th was Whyday, a day dedicated to Why the Lucky Stiff. One of the ideas for celebrating Whyday is to work within a tight constraint. Tight constraints help foster creativity and show us what we can truly achieve.

For me, that tight constraint is time. I believe that learning to be highly productive in short bursts of time can transform my life and help me become prolific.

Three weeks ago a group of us convened for a day to redesign the web site of a local non-profit. While we didn’t get complete everything that day, we got a lot accomplished. Way more accomplished than anyone had thought. And it has become a launchpad for us to quickly finish the design.

Even if I fail at a micro-project, I’ve likely gotten a great start and can finish it in one additional cycle. Defining projects as micro and nano will help me to scope the project so I bite off only what I can chew. And thus, enjoy myself that much more.

What projects have you done in less than a day or an hour? What is your advice in getting these done?

[Written and edited in 15 minutes]

Success in life comes from failure. And failure comes from doing. The more you do, the more you fail at, the more success you have.

Thus, today I’m setting the goal to be prolific, to increase my creative output. I challenge you to do the same. Ironically I decide this at a time when I have almost no free time. But prolificacy doesn’t require as much time as we think; it requires taking more action.

The people I admire constantly create new things. Some of them succeed, some of them fail. But part of how I measure my success in life is through my accomplishments. And creating things (and finishing them) makes my life more successful.

To be prolific on this blog, my guidelines will be:

• Write at least 1 post a day
• Spend no more than 15 minutes
• Aim for 10 minutes writing and 5 minutes editing

As I discover additional best practices, I will write about them as well.

I may fail, but at least I will have tried. Because while I haven’t been, I earnestly believe you can learn to be prolific.

Do you have any other ideas on how I can become prolific?

[Written and edited in 16 minutes. At least I came close.]

Recently I moved into an apartment after owning a house for seven years. Afterwards, a huge sense of relief came over me. I no longer have to mow a lawn, do repairs on the house or worry about asset depreciation.

When I decided to move out, I did a spreadsheet analyzing my return on investment in owning a house. While owning a house makes sense for some people, it doesn’t for me. I don’t enjoy working on a house, nor do I need the extra space a house affords me. By owning a house, I incur an opportunity cost for the other things I want to do in my life, such as starting new businesses and deepening my friendships.

To aid others in my situation, my four reasons to rent, not buy are: Continue reading >

With BarCamp Boston this weekend on April 9th & 10th, and BarCamp Charlotte next weekend on April 16th, I’m wondering what to present. As always, I have tons of ideas running through my head, including:

1. Lifehacking Roundtable
   Moderate a discussion on the tricks & techniques people have used to consciously improve their life by altering their behavior or environment.  In my life, I’ve tried low-expectation resolutions, a tagging system for LinkedIn, a sit/stand desk arrangement, my own version of Getting Things Done for e-mail management, and most recently, Read It Later to manage my reading stream.

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Three weeks ago my friend Jonathan Feldman re-tweeted this article about switching to a standing desk. I became immediately intrigued, cleared off a shelf and undocked my laptop.

The desk I work at is not adjustable, and while I briefly wrestled with the idea of propping it up higher with printer paper or cinder blocks, I didn’t want to completely give up my ability to work while sitting. Plus, while sitting increases the risk of lifestyle diseases, standing while working comes with its own set of health problems. Alternating between standing and sitting seemed to be the best idea. So I improvised.

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