Quick Thought

Never quit a job because you're having too much fun and it doesn't feel like a 'real' job.

I've learned the hard way my whole life so far that life sucks if you try to play by everyone else's rules. The best moments in life are the ones where you are the person walking around with the gorilla suit on.

Even though you'd think this is obvious, it is incredibly hard to keep in this state. I'm working to reboot my life soon, and once I do, I'm setting my default mode to 'if I'm not enjoying it while I'm doing it, it shouldn't be done'.

Philosophizing

So everything is going very well. My job is picking up and changing into new areas that I'm more interested in pursuing. There always seems to be some social event to go to and I feel comfortable with just calling people up and seeing what they are up to (before I always thought I would be interrupting something or bothering them). My extracurricular activities are teaching me new skills and opening up some new opportunities (running, speaking, coaching).

The only thing is that I feel like I'm missing a guiding direction. Like some true passion or calling that should keep me directed in the right direction, doing the right things to accomplish some great big goal for what I want out of life. I'm still not sure what that is or what kind of thing it even should be. It's like I'm playing an open world videogame, and I've been doing all the side quests, but now I want to keep going with the main quest but I don't know what it is.

My only current theory goes along with what I was saying to the kids on my team at our first basketball practice last night. We started with the basics, just shooting, passing, defense. And once you have a good feel for the basics, then you start building on them, give-and-go, back door, trapping, different elements that are more complex, but have greater results. That's my only theory right now as to what to aim for next. Now that I have all the basics, now it's time to build on them. You've got to keep the basics fresh and strong, otherwise the new layers will collapse the whole thing, but that is the best idea for the next direction that I've had as of yet.

What I've been mainly trying to add is a dip into the dating scene. I'm trying to get more comfortable with just meeting new people and talking to them. Forget trying to put together dates, forget deciding if this person is marriage material, I just want to meet someone new and talk to them. I did that on Friday night and it was a good time. I didn't feel like there was anyone new that I should really start trying to see again, but I had fun just chatting with new people. Previously I had a lot of inhibition about doing this because everyone else drank and I didn't and I'd go out by myself and feel like a lonely loser. But I've recently discovered the miracle that is beer and it's made everything a lot more fun with a lot less stress.

Next week I'm flying out to Maine and then I'm flying out to IL for Halloween with my brother. He's a social guy and can have a good time without me feeling like I have to babysit him like some of the people I've been hanging out with. Really, he completes this element I'm missing, which is just having someone else who knows how to have fun to go out and do stuff with. It's funny because he's always kinda been the Ying to my Yang in a sense, so I should have really thought about this before, but he's been out in IL so that's been the limiting factor. It should be a great time so I'm really looking forward to it.

Too Human and Dead Space Review

As of late I haven't had too much time to play the games I've borrowed, so unfortunately these are incomplete reviews.

Too Human is an interesting game built on a good system of game play but it has some clear and crippling flaws. Right off the bat, the plot was entertaining, but there didn't seem to be enough background to know what the main issues are. You are some kind of god character and you are fighting a bunch of robots maybe? I didn't get far enough in to learn more and the new plot elements of the fates was just annoying rather than more interesting.

There are a lot of options for RPG like development for your character. You upgrade weapons, armor and different skills in a tree similar to Diablo. You also choose a character class much like Diablo or Mass Effect. The combat was pretty straight forward as your character would jump from bad guy to bad guy, slaughtering whatever current one you are facing.

The biggest issue I ran into was that some bad guys actually seemed to require a strategy, which was hard to do after being so use to just random button pressing. When you die, you will regenerate at the beginning of the section you were just at after a long unskippable cut scene. This seems completely pointless since you lose your experience but all the bad guys stay dead and you just end up running right back to where you were.

I ended up playing the game for about an hour, got sick of it and had no motivation to play it anymore before I had to return it.


Dead space is awesome. I only played it for about an hour and barely got into the meat of the game, but I can tell you that it is fantastic. The environment the game creates for you will creep you out. After the opening I was sitting, muscles clenched, freaked out at every turn. There is just this overwhelming sense of inability to know what is coming next.

If you are into being scared and that thrill of adventure and danger, then you won't be able to put this game down.

Holidays and Changing Times

I've put my business goals on hold for the time being as I shift focus on to some important changes I need to make in 2008. I'm turning 24 this year and will need a car and a new place to live, and potentially a new job as well. So while I do the leg work behind these ventures, I'm going to do some entertainment features on this blog.

First up is the Game Trailers pick for Game of the Year. While I haven't actually player through their pick, their choices for which games were the best this year were dead on. I'll let you watch it for yourself, but these guys do a great job talking about all the best games of 2007.

Toastmaster's Club

I attended my first Toastmaster's Club meeting yesterday. I had been on the fence of whether to go or not, and I even blew it off two weeks ago, but this week I decided to go. It's not too far from where I work, so I opted to just stay late and then head on over.

The club is built like almost all the clubs I've ever been to before. You basically have some people who have been there for a long time who are the club leaders, then you have tiers below that. Each person is assigned a mentor to help guide them to becoming better and better. If you join, you get a packet with information about the elements that make up a good speech, how to frame your speech, how to incorporate your body movements and make eye contact with the audience. Also, there are apparently different packet levels and types for specific skills or development paths.

The meeting itself is run by a member who is deemed the meeting leader for that session. They are in charge of keeping the meeting moving, introducing speakers, and doing all the transition work between the coordinated events. Also, they develop the schedule and coordinate who will speak. There are three main sections, the planned speeches, the table topics (improvisational speeches) and then evaluations. In between there is some club news and then it concludes with an evaluation of the meeting itself. As a person goes up to speek, they shake hands with the person already there in an effort to make sure that the focal point is never left empty.

For the planned speeches, there is a timer, an ah/uh counter and the vote collector. Each person there will rate the speaker compared to the other ones in that group and a winner is determined at the end of the meeting. The speeches are given by people at different levels who are primarily focused on specific parts of a presentation. The goal is to talk from 5-7 minutes, there is a stop light device that goes on when you hit the 5, 6 and 7 minute marks.

Anyone can volunteer for the Table Topics portion. The goal is to talk from 1-2 minutes, with the lights going on at the 1, 1.5 and 2 minute marks. Since I wanted to give it a shot, I volunteered for the first topic. I improvised on the spot and talked for a minute and sixteen seconds about the topic of what is something you do every year at this time that you can only do during the winter.

The final big section, evaluations, are focused on the planned speeches. The evaluators are actually giving speeches about the speeches they evaluated and what was good and bad about them. After they finish, the group votes on who was the best evaluator as well. I don't think there is a time limit for the evaluations. The idea of the evaluation is to talk about what the person did well and then a few areas that they could improve, but the group is mainly focused on positive support and encouragement, esp since it is entirely volunteer based. Each individual can write up a little evaluation of the people who spoke during the meeting and give it to them afterward.

In the end, they give out the ribbons for best planned speech, table topic and evaluator. I got the ribbon for best Table Topics for my speech, so that was encouraging.

Overall it seems like a great way to get some practice speaking in public. There is a quote that goes something like, "I'd rather die than speak in public", so clearly there is a lot of trepidation about it. Toastmasters seems like a great place, with a lot of good structure and foundation to move past any fears as well as learn a new skill that can be useful in your career. Worst case you become more comfortable organizing your thoughts and discussing a topic and you gain confidence from knowing you can do something that others may shy away from.

Weak Week

Courthouse

So I bailed on the second county today. I know, it's lame and I should have found a way to go. But I'm going to make some excuses instead.

I stayed up later than normal again last night. World Without End just has this power of sucking me in so that I keep reading, chapter after chapter, until it's late. I can't say I regret it because I'm too fascinated about what will happen next to care a lot about what's going on in my own life right now. Probably also because there isn't much going on in my actual life.

The courthouse I normally visit had about 10 leads today. I brought my new (old) laptop and used it. It was struggling because the battery doesn't hold charge very long, so I had to hunt around for an outlet. Also, the processor is pretty weak so Open Office did not open. I ended up typing the leads in notepad and then moving them to my Master Lead Log later.

I figure, since I'm not supremely confident in my investor right now and I don't have any others lined up, getting a lower amount of leads this week is not that big of a deal. Also, if he does get my emails, maybe he'll notice the lower amount and contact me back. That would be nice, since then I would know he's actually doing something still. I'm planning on going to the REI meeting I mentioned previously next Saturday regardless of his status. At this point I need to really focus on actually creating something out of this.

November

For some reason I'm really looking forward to the beginning of November. I can't put my finger on why, but I almost feel like something is going to change. It might end up being as little as me flipping the page in my calendar, but any change would be nice at this point.

I go to a chiropractor 3 days a week. My medical insurance covers the whole bill and back in July I figured, why not? I had been having some back pain and people had recommended it. The pain is gone at this point, but this process called "traction" that I do to correct the angle of my spine leaves me aching. I think that's part of the reason why I'm so tired. In November we'll be done the second stage of the treatment process and maybe I won't have to go as frequently. Going three times a week forces me into a pretty tight routine, esp with when I get to and leave work.

I'm thinking about getting season tickets for my local NBA team this year. It's $600 per seat for the season, which isn't bad considering the high part of the range is $32,000 a seat. My thinking is that when you have something other people don't, it can be used as an asset. If I get two seats, I can always try to sell the second one or both if I don't want to go to the game. If I do want to go, I can call up a friend and ask them if they want to go, so it's a way to reconnect. The final benefit is that I can give the second seat ticket away as a gift for different occasions, like birthdays or graduations. My brother-in-law has the local NFL team's season tickets and he does essentially that. Every year he seems to get his money worth, so I think it'll be worth it. I've built up all the money I need to purchase a car outright, so I feel like this is a good way to reward myself and make my life a little more enjoyable.

That's all I've got for today.

Dinner

A special late night post.

I'm posting mainly because I can't stop thinking about what I'm going to write. I can't sleep because of it, so I'm hoping writing about it will free my mind.

So Tuesdays I go out to dinner with a bunch of my friends from college. I like it because I can talk about some ideas, share stuff I've learned and get different perspectives from people my age rather than the usual that I'm use to. A couple of the guys are business savvy and I really enjoy conversing with them because they bring a lot of new information to the table. Tonight was the first time a discussion of stocks came up with this one guy there who is a finance major.

He broke down his portfolio, the stats so far for the year as well as the reasoning behind each stock choice. It was impressive. He accurately made plays based off of expectations of interest rates going down, the weakness of the dollar and different product releases across various sectors. He knew all the right words and put them in the correct order.

Then he asked me about my investments.

I went through my investments in a previous blog as well as the source of my picks being mainly the formula from "The Little Book that beats the Market". Trying to explain this and the reasoning behind it to someone who actually does financial analysis on their own, a lot tougher task.

At this point I don't even remember a lot of what I said. But I basically stumbled through an explanation and must have sounded like a dumb ass to this guy who actually knows how to do research. I felt like a total fraud.

There are very few moments in my life so far where I've felt like I did tonight. The most recent was when I applied for my current job. My now boss asked me about relational databases and how you would design a database to incorporate a person who can have multiple addresses. I told him about this idea I had when I put together a database for my previous company, which of course turned out to be a terrible way to do it and completely wrong. Some how I got the job anyway, but I felt like I knew nothing.

So anyway, from his facial expression I could tell that his mind must have gone into "this guy knows nothing" mode. He was really nice about it considering, and gave me some pointers about maybe using a more involved brokerage that has tools that will help me learn more. It was basically a nice way of saying, nice try buddy, maybe if you have someone hold your hand for a while you'll learn something and then I can discuss this intelligently with you.

Now I feel like crap at this point. It's one of those situations where your self esteem plummets and you lose all confidence in everything you say and do at all related to the subject. Your credibility is gone and essentially you forfeit any standing you once had to the new champion. All that pride you built up to the point where you think that you have a grasp over different subjects has now been shaken and now I'm left with a feeling of being lost.

I'll pick myself up, dust myself off and start hammering away at learning more in the near future I'm sure. Right now though I feel like a total jackass. It just makes me think, how long do you have to study to get to the point where you actually know something? When do you get to the point where what you know is actually valuable and considered a skill? What is a credible source to learn from?

Weekend Escapade

So I managed to go to the courthouse again on Friday. It was a good thing I did since there were four more leads, which was double the previous total for the week. Six isn't really that much since before I was getting around 15, but according to articles I've been reading about foreclosures, the stream should be picking up for a while to come. I didn't get a chance to go into another county this week since I had to spend time packing, but I'll try to work something out for next week. Monday is Columbus day, so I'll see if the courthouses are closed or not and then plan a trip based on my findings.

My weekend trip went well. It wasn't a business trip, but rather more of a vacation so it was successful in giving me some time off to relax. I went out to visit my brother so I got to see his setup and meet some of his friends. He's got a good core group and a nice place. It's a good thing because the senior year of college is something you should really enjoy. I don't mean by drinking it all away or by blowing off class and work, but more just having a good group of people to spend time with as well as getting a real taste for living on your own before 40 hour work week grind sets in. The communal setting of living in an apartment is a lot nicer than living in the middle of the burbs miles away from your friends. Just the fact that you can pop in and out of people's places and just hang out for a little while or even for hours, kinda feels right. Either that or I watch too much Seinfeld.

I did make some interesting observations over the weekend.

Your environment is a simple, but accurate gauge of how productive you are. I don't mean that everything has to be spotless, but organization is key. That's why libraries are successful places to study. Information is accessible and all around you. You feel like anything that comes up you'll be able to find a resource for and it's motivating. If an idea comes to you, or you have a project to work on, being surrounded by multitudes of unfinished tasks is just going to overwhelm you. If you have a clear space to work and the tools you need to work on the problem you'll jump right in. As they say, action is the cure for procrastination. If it takes you 15-30 minutes to clear off a space and get together everything you need, the task it going to feel even more overwhelming.

I run into this problem a lot with my current living space. All of my stuff is crammed into spaces that are not large enough. Therefore, when I sit down and want to work on something, I almost feel like I'm trapped in too small a space. So I end up blowing it off. The ideal setting would be a place where I could partition off my different projects. If I want to work on my Jobber business, I sit down where all my files are and plug away. If I want to read some information about setting up vending machine locations, this should be somewhere else, and so on. Unfortunately, that is not a current option, but now that I know what would work and have a picture in mind, I can start working towards making it so.

Goal setting is very valuable. Almost every "Self Improvement" book I've ever read talks about goal setting. The best example I've seen was in The Science of Getting Rich, which discusses getting a clear vision of what you want and then focusing on it. By keeping that vision, your conscious and subconscious thoughts will start seeing ways for you to make it so. When you are that focused, you start to use your brain's natural pattern matching ability to filter out things that would distract you or become stumbling blocks and focus only on things that will lead to what you want.

Another observation I made is that illness always settles in when you relax. I've read things that discuss this before in a variety of places. I imagine it's because your body is always toggling between fight or flight mode and passive mode. Once you remove the daily stress and switch to passive, things jump up on you while you are trying to recover with your defenses down. Luckily I have some illness fighting tools. I usually take a multivitamin each day, and I have a neti pot that I use every other day as well as days when I start feeling pretty bad. Here is more information on what a neti pot is and how it works for those who are interested: http://www.healingdaily.com/exercise/neti-pot.htm

Finally, I was reading Genius Types ( a great blog about passive income as well as a good perspective ). The author mentions blogging as "Your Brand" which I completely agree with. I'm curious if he's read Never Eat Alone, but what he is saying is very much inline with what Keith Ferrazzi wrote about. In The World is Flat, they discuss how times have moved from corporations being able to do what only countries could before to the individual being able to do what corporations can do. So now each person is their own brand, has their own image and their own skills that they have to market to a global world. By having a blog you are able to do this. It takes a while to develop your ideas and methodologies, as well as how you are going to express them, but it is a more accurate depiction of the individual.

I had a conversation a few months back with my brother where I was telling him that perhaps he should divide his resume up by skills rather than by work experience. Focus on things like leadership, organization, persistence, and then list the jobs and activities at those jobs that developed those skills or showcased his use of them. It was a more human approach to a resume, rather than just a list of technical jargon to set off keyword searches. While it probably isn't the best approach for applying for a job, since so many companies focus on keyword searches, I feel like that is what blogging is becoming. It's a living document that shows the deeper aspects of the person rather than a list of time sensitive buzz words that show little about who you are or what value you will bring. I imagine in the future social networking profiles and resumes will merge to be a larger, more accurate viewpoint of an individual. I know employers already look at people's profiles before making hiring decisions, so I doubt this merge will be too far off. I'm not a member of linked-in, but since it's suppose to be social networking for professionals, this may have already happened.

Overall, it was a relaxing and thought provoking weekend. I hope to repeat it sometime in the near future.

Finishing the Fight

I have a whole bunch of things to talk about today. I'm trying to keep them all in mind so that I don't miss any.

First off, Halo 3 is awesome. The beauty of Halo is that they've always allowed you to be the guy who does the crazy, amazingly fun stuff that everyone wants to do but doesn't have the opportunity to do in their real life. You are literally the guy who is single handedly making stuff happen to help your cause and succeed.

The other thing I find amazing about the Halo series is the spectacular timing of the great music. Usually a mission starts out with some big task that you're setting out to do. You head in, break through some initial defenses and then you're getting into the mix where the fan is warming up for stuff to start hitting it. That's when this music starts. At first its small, but then builds along with your excitement until you're moving in with this euphoria the size of the skill and determination you possess and are going to use to crush anything in your way.

Everything about the game just makes you feel good inside. That's what sells a game to people.

Alright, so I started reading "The Pathfinder" today. Different reviews said that this is THE book to read when you want to determine what to do with the rest of your life. This is what to use to build the career you want from the bottom up and stop just passing through life instead of living.

So far it's pretty interesting. It asks you the basic questions that all these books ask. Essentially they boil down to, are you happy and is what you are doing adding to your happiness in every aspect of your day from start to finish. If not, then you are not doing what you should be doing.

At this point in my intellectual pursuit of happiness and life purpose, I think I've read all this stuff before. All these people who don't have an idea what they want probably benefit from it. I know what I want, I want to start my own business with a team of people around me who I care about and trust. I want to put my core values into the business because I believe the system that I've setup that is my life is one that everyone can benefit from and make their own. I guess that should be my mission statement.

I have a long way to go before I'm finished the book and it seems like there will be a lot of good exercises in it. I'm not writing it off yet because I feel like I'll be able to take some value from it, but I do get this sense of I've read all this before. At this point I'm already taking action, it just takes time to get what you want to do to the point that it can replace what you're already doing and give you freedom from the routine without a loss of everything you've built so far and are building towards. You shouldn't have to gamble everything in order to be happy, you just have to build something and stick with it until it grows large enough.

I guess what I should do is start planning land marks. Start figuring out when I will have reached a level of success that I'm comfortable enough to start pulling other people in. That way I won't feel like they are losing what they are working towards because I siren song them into my vision. I feel like I could sell my ideas and passions to people but I also want to believe it is the best thing for them before they dive in. My brother always says he's watching my stock and he'll buy in when he's confident enough. I feel like his approach really makes a lot of sense, since I'd feel like a scam artist if I didn't actually bring value and improvement to the people I get involved.

I've made some observations recently. I read a lot of blogs and various feeds at work since I have plenty of time and nothing to fill the void. It seems like the news for the day slowly moves from one source to all the others. Each blogger will comment on it with their take, or reference it in how it plays into what their blog is focused on. I'm not really complaining about it really, I just think it's funny how that happens, but it's also kinda dull that people are all just bouncing off the same things.

The other observation I've had was in the common phrasing people use. In different public speaking training things they talk about listening to what you say. You count the number of times you use "like" or "uh" while you're going through what you want to say as a way of measuring your comfort with the concept as well as how rehearsed you are. Recently I've noticed almost everywhere I go that people use the phrase "You know" constantly when trying to convince someone to agree with them. Sometimes they use it in a rapid fire manner until the person shows some kind of gesture or speaks in a way to show acknowledgment and agreement. I just point it out so that other people will be aware of it as well.

So I haven't actually done anything towards my business in the past few days. I'm planning on doing my weekly courthouse trip tomorrow morning rather than Friday since I'm going out of town for the weekend. I talked some business with my friends last night and the possibility of moving to CA next August came up. I may jump on that when the time comes since I do want to change my environment to be surrounded by people with the entrepreneurial mindset. I guess we'll just have to see how things progress till then. Right now I want to keep my weekly courthouse visits going, potentially start adding other counties into the loop. Eventually I'll attend an REI meeting and start collecting more investors cards. Once I get my first monetary input I'll setup a website and then create a service where I supply new foreclosures to investors on a weekly basis for a subscription fee.

I might start writing out a business plan with my new mission statement. Then potentially drum up some investor capital for a laptop and website fees and even potentially a business car and office space. Then I could start pulling in some other people. It's just an idea for now but that's how everything starts anyway.

Halo Day

Halo 3 comes out today and my copy is currently sitting on my desk. Does this make me a geek? Probably. But the truth of it is, this is the kind of thing we work for. Sure you want a house, something to drive, food to eat and all that good stuff, but in the end we make money to have fun. Halo represents that for me.

A few years back when Halo 2 came out I would play online a lot with friends and siblings. While it was frustrating at times, the sense of comradery and fun of sharing an experience with those around you is what it was all about. Just that feeling of being part of something bigger than yourself, with set goals and missions and the ability to track your progress, use your skills, help others and reach success or failure based on your combined efforts.

In a lot of ways it parallels business. A business, at heart, is the people. Every day they are performing, making incremental steps towards a common goal. In this day of mercenary tactics, a lot of businesses have lost that perspective that the people make it what it is, trying to instead make everyone as interchangeable as possible. You negotiate a salary, get a title and a work flow and are set loose. Sometimes they give you some mentoring, but for the most part you are on your own. If you fail to perform, you get replaced. If you perform well, they give you more work for as little compensation as they can. All in all, the person is more of an anonymous face than really an individual.

I actually hope to be different. My 3 year goal is to start my own business. I want to change the culture some. Sure a majority of the system will remain the same because you need a lot of those elements. But I hope to provide better incentives for my employees to be a part of the company. I want to focus on health and growth rather than focusing on a certain number of hours of being at a location. Here are some of the ideas I've come up with:

- Option of spending an hour during each day exercising that will count towards work time.
- Discounts on health supplies like vitamins as well as other health tools
- Flexible schedule based on performance more than time at the office. Features like being able to work at home or out of the office as long as production level is maintained or increased.
- Programs to discount meals for people who eat with their coworkers.
- Reimbursement for cost of taking community college classes as well as degree programs.
- Support of extra curricular activities that will boost work performance or expand abilities by extra time off or financial backing.

I've always believed the saying "healthy body, healthy mind" is correct. I think programs like these would help to promote a culture of health. Usually when people feel good they are productive, amiable and more willing to compromise. Also, there is no law governing how fast or slow someone can develop. Why not help people keep growing in their knowledge and experiences instead of expecting them to sit at a position doing the same tasks repeatedly. In the computer age, mindless repetitive tasks can be done by machines, let people use their ideas and originality.

So while I'll be finishing the fight with the Chief in Halo 3, my fight to see my vision come true will battle on.