I have around 15-20K dedicated to investing in myself. I can invest in some form of education that will have a long-term payoff, not just short-term pleasure, something that will significantly enhance my life and career.
Apart from that, there’s no constraints. Anything’s game, from a program at MIT, taking classes at an MBA program, a Tony Robbins seminar, invest it in stocks, real-estate, or private equity, a one-month yoga retreat in India, or just buying time off from paid work to build a company or climb a mountain.
What do you think would have the greatest impact?
What would you do?
Reading David’s response, he reminded me of my love for the works of Jerry Weinberg.
I read a handful of them already a few years back, with some of my favorites being Secrets of Consulting and Becoming a Technical Leader.
After getting the response back from David, I also picked up Weinberg on Writing, which I’m half-way through and which is brilliant, in addition to More Secrets of Consulting, and his classic epos An Introduction to General Systems Thinking.
What I really like about Weinberg is his deep psychological understanding, and what comes through as a deep love of other people. Acknowledging emotions in the field of software engineering is something that resonates deeply with me.
Why? In Myers-Briggs, I’m an INFP. In plain English, I’m better at feeling than thinking. Everything in life, including software engineering, necessarily requires both, but the world of software seems to favor rational thinking and expel emotions from the realm of software entirely. This is something I’d like to change, along with, it seems, Jerry Weinberg, David Heinemeier Hansson, and Kathy Sierra.
Whatever happened to that book?
Here’s a little something to inspire your New Year’s resolutions.
A little while ago I asked David Heinemeier Hansson,
a few questions about how he manages to contribute as much as he does. If you don’t already know David, he’s the author of Ruby on Rails, Basecamp, Backpack, and #34 on Business 2.0’s list of people who matter.
I knew from past conversations that he’s an avid believer in goal-setting, a belief that I share. Though important, goal-setting can be tricky to master. Both the importance and the trickiness can be witnessed by the enormous number of titles on the topic. That’s why I wanted to know more about how David handles it.
It turns out we also share a belief that it’s both possible and desirable to change yourself. This is something that means a lot to me, as I’ve always believed this to be the case, yet it’s also something I’ve been ridiculed for. So it’s good to see that it’s working for someone like David, that’s it’s not just me being silly.
What specifically do I mean by changing yourself? What I mean is that you can rid yourself of patterns in your behavior or emotions that get in your way, you can replace beliefs that hold you back with beliefs that move you forward, and you can acquire new skills in the areas you choose, to give just a few examples. Overall,I mean that not changing, not growing is just a premature form of death.
Following the lead of what makes you happy is where the brilliance lies. That’s how goals and changes get anchored to your emotions, your psyche, your unconscious, your self. That’s how you ensure that your goals are ones that you both can and want to achieve, that they’re right for you, that you’re not “living someone else’s life” in the words of Steve Jobs. If it really makes you happy, you’re onto something.
Overall, I’m fascinated by what makes people do what they do. Especially when they do great things, like David.
Anyway, enough introduction. Enjoy the interview below!
Explain the role that goal setting plays in your life.
Goals are one of my primary tools for self-improvement, for changing
who I am. I’m a strong believer in the adaptable self. Not only that
it’s possible, but that it’s strongly desirable too. I can not stand
the term “that’s just who I am” as a defensive argument to recognized
deficiencies.
So if there’s something I don’t like about myself or my
situation, I try to set a goal to help me change that.
Tell me about how you got started with your approach to managing life.
Was there a specific event, person, or circumstance that got you
hooked?
It usually starts by admiration. I find a product or a person that I
admire and then start thinking about how I could do or be something
something like that. I got into gaming journalism by reading and
admiring the work of Edge, the English magazine on games. I got
involved with 37signals because I admired their design work and
initially wanted to become a designer myself.
So manage is perhaps a big word to use for this as it implies a
little too much conscious effort. Goals is indeed a more precise
term. I set myself a goal, like “I want to be a gaming journalist
with as high standards as Edge”, and then that directs my actions in
a subtle, almost unconscious way.
I wish there was a more scientific explanation. But I think it comes
down to desire. How bad do you really want it? How much are you
willing to change who you are to get it? Despite what most people
say, they are usually not willing to give up what’s known and stable
for something unknown and unstable. It’s hard to prosper if you’re
not willing to be in the game.
What do you do to find out what your goals are?
I recognize both admiration and deficiencies and try to live up to
the former and eliminate the latter. It’s all happening under the
umbrella of What Makes Me Happy?, though.
What do you do to strengthen your belief and resolve? Do you
visualize? Do you have sentences you read aloud? What else?
Actually, I often use a sense of entitlement to drive me. As in, “if
that guy can do it, why the hell shouldn’t I be able to?”. It’s
inspiring to look at other people and see how they’ve made it to
success. Especially if you recognize that most of them are indeed
just normal people who had some trigger that gave them the drive to
excel.
That certainly requires some level of self-confidence. If you start
out thinking “there’s no way I could do that”, of course there will
be no way you can. That’s where goals help, it’s an intent on your
part that says “yeah, I could do that”.
Who are your heros, and what role do they play in your life? What have
you done to learn from them?
Heroes are the human part of admiration. Jerry Weinberg is probably
one of my biggest heroes. His writing is fantastic and his abilities
as a human being capable of recognizing and dealing with his and
others emotions and desires is astonishing. I highly recommend
looking into his vast authorship.
Professionally, I work with a few people I consider personal heroes,
which is fortunate. But I’ve also looked up to and enjoyed the work
of Martin Fowler, Kent Beck, and Kathy Sierra among others. I’ve
learned a tremendous amount from all.
So what will your goals for the new year be?
Post follow-up questions in the comments and I’ll take the to David if he doesn’t pop his head in here to respond.
Say you have two lamps that you want to hang over a rectangular table. What should the distance be between them?
My intuition was to hang them at either a quarter of the length in from either side, with 1/2 the length of the table between them, the logic being that they’d then be centered over each their own half, thus giving roughly equal amounts of light to across the table.
Another attempt was to hang them 1/3rd in from each end, with another 1/3rd between them, the logic being that it’s equal distance.
As it turns out, the correct answer is neither. The correct answer is to hang it 3/10ths in from each end, with 4/10ths between them. So if your table is 2 meters or 200cm long, you would hang it with 60cm from edge to each lamp, and 80cm between the lamps (measuring from the center of the lamp, or the wire, not the rim). Similarly if your table, as ours, is 180cm, it’d be 56cm from each end, and 72cm between lamps.
How did I find this out? I asked my in-laws. Seriously, my mother-in-law recently got a pair of lamps hung over a rectangular table by a professional, and he used some formula, which she didn’t catch. So she offered to measure the distances. Her table was 2 meters. You get the picture.
This is all a matter of taste and subjectivity, of course, but we like the result.
Quitting smoking has been one of the best things I’ve done for myself. I quit on January 1st 2005, almost 2 years ago now, and haven’t had a puff since.
It wasn’t a New Year’s resolution, actually; it was an accident. I was planning on quitting, but I was planning on doing it late January, on the 27th if I’m not mistaken. But then I just didn’t feel like smoking on the 1st, didn’t smoke on the 2nd, either, and then I knew I was almost home free. 3-4 days without smoking is really all it takes to be free of the physical dependency. Then remains the social and psychological house-keeping.
Before that, I’d quit once before, for 4 months, but the ease of quitting led me to think I could take a whiff at a friend’s wedding. I could, but it started me down a slippery slope that within a few months had me smoking full-time again, and then I was a smoker for another 2 and a half years, till I finally quit again.
It’s been a strong reminder to me to not even try it this time. I don’t especially mind other people smoking, and I don’t especially mind being in smoky bars. That is to say, it’s awful and I’m looking forward to the April 1st ban on smoking in public places here in Denmark, but it doesn’t make it any harder for me to not smoke. Every time I see other people smoke, I smile inside from knowing that I don’t anymore.
The one thing that can truly upset me is when I see advertisements for quitting with nicotine gum or patch. It’s such a scam. It’s not about the physical dependency. It’s all about the emotional, psychological, social dependency.
It’s the trigger that you have to have a cigarette with coffee or alcohol or after a meal. It’s the belief that you need a fag when you’re stressed or down. It’s the story you tell yourself that the 5-minute break is good for you, or that you need it to look cool. There’s usually at least 15 different triggers of this sort, and they’re all there to lure you into lighting another one, so you can get back on the physical addiction track.
Limiting the nicotine intake is addressing the wrong problem, while raking in giant profits for the makers of these things, complete with the sanction of the established medical community who still don’t seem to have a clue, overall. The recommendation was more along the lines of will-power and “eat a carrot each time you want a cigarette”, rather than addressing the core issue.
What is the core issue? The core issue is the belief that a cigarette will give you something you want, when the truth, obvious to any child and sane person out there, is that it doesn’t. Simple as that. Cigarettes give you nothing you could possibly want, and plenty you don’t. Once that fact sinks in, quitting is easy as pie.
I used two books to help me through this, and I took quite some warm-up time before I managed. The first was You Can Stop Smoking by Jacquelyn Rogers, and while it had the right approach and did help me quit the first time, I liked The Easy Way to Stop Smoking by Alan Carr better, because of its clarity, even though, technically, it didn’t help me stop, as I didn’t read it until a few days after I’d already quit. It did help me stay quit, though, which is, as you could imagine, mighty important.
If you happen to get a copy of this book from me, it’s because I believe you want to quit, but you don’t know how. The fact is, it’s super-easy when you know how. So I hope you’ll set aside some time and do yourself this favor, and I know you’ll be grateful you did. Good luck, and Happy New Year!
December 24, 2006 · 1 comment
The Toyota Prius hybrid car starts at USD 75,900 in Denmark. With navigation, it runs at a whopping USD 89,064. Oh, but you can get a 2 year+ used model for only USD 67,191. Let’s go shopping! :)
(Carsdirect.com charges USD 23,314)
I’ve gotten Windows installed on my MacBook Pro, and running it in Coherence mode, which basically means the Windows windows blend right in with the OS X ones. This is a brilliant way to be able to test on IE and access the few stupid sites that don’t work well with other browsers, while only having to suffer minimally from Windows.
The only problem I have with this setup is that Command-Tab doesn’t invoke the OS X app switcher, but rather, Command acts as the Windows key. That is so frustrating. I’m using to making a change in TextMate, then Command-Tab’ing to a browser, reload, then back to make another change. Now I have to grab the mouse and click somewhere to get focus back to OS X and make Command-Tab work. It’s killing me, and just about a million other people. Still, it’s so much better than having to use a PC.
Now I just need to lay my hands on a legit copy of Vista somewhere, I hope they carry it in the store down the corner. It’s weird how bothersome it is to purchase a copy of Windows. Ideally I’d just visit microsoft.com, pay with my creditcard, and download an ISO file that I can then mount and install straight into Parallels from. But of course, that’s not how it works. I know they have their whole dealer setup to work with, but it still feels so wasteful and old-sk00l.
Se Carson’s details on the setup.
Alexander’s book gets endorsed by David Maister himself. Congratulations!
The Lazy Way: “I definitely hate to be between dreams.”
I can absolutely relate to that. The dreams, the vision, the tale of creation, is what keeps me alive, and being between dreams is draining. I tend to even get sick when that happens.
(Via Alexander, found the link on one of his posts)
Der er noget ved weekends hændelser på Nørrebro der minder mig om den gamle børnehistorie om solen og skyerne der kæmper om at få manden til at smide sin frakke.
dr.dk: “30.000 holder jul i sol og varme”
Og hvis de bliver ved med det, vil vi snart have udledt så meget CO2 at man ikke behøver at rejse for at få sol og varme om vinteren.
Ja, jeg har lige set An Inconvenient Truth, se den, og gør så noget.
It just occurred to me that probably 90% of the writing I’ve done in the past 7 years, since moving to the US in 1999, has been in English.
What do I write in Danish these days? Shopping lists; emails to friends and family here, when there’s only Danish-speakers on the recipients list; sometimes notes to myself, though most of those tend to be in English as well.
Almost all my reading is in English, both on the web, in magazines, and in books. When I write, it’s either on my blog, in email, most of which is in English, chat, IM, and other business-related notes and papers, in English.
It’s at the point where writing in Danish feels a bit awkward. If I have to write something just for myself, English is my first choice, Danish makes me more self-conscious, makes me think harder about the choice of words and phrases, how they sound, and what connotations there might be.
I’m a very audio-oriented person, too, so I can’t write something without hearing it out loud, and Danish has always had this tension between the written and the spoken form of Danish, a tension that Dan Turell is the only person I know of to have resolved.
With speaking, I’m still comfortable in both languages, and slightly more so in Danish, though people tell me I sound a lot nicer in English.
Have you experienced the same, that reading and writing flips before speaking does, or that reading and writing so much English makes reading and writing in Danish fall behind?
En lille underrapporteret anekdote omkring DR-byggeriet er, at man har valgt at lade medarbejderne finansiere en del af underskuddet med 24 kroner om dagen.
Rygtet vil nemlig vide, at der var en plan om at maden skulle være gratis i den nye kantine i DR-byen, men efter at underskuddet voksede så voldsomt, blev den plan skrinlagt.
Hvis man lige twister den lidt, betyder det at medarbejderne skal finansiere underskuddet med deres egne (beskattede) penge.
Hvis vi antager at 2.000 medarbejdere om dagen spiser i kantinen, til 24 kr pr. måltid, bliver det til 48.000 kr om dagen. Med 230 arbejdsdage på et år bliver det til 1.1 million om året. Med den hast kan hullet lukkes på knap 550 år.
Men nu er kantinen blevet lukket, og så tager det jo nok lidt længere ;)
December 15, 2006 · 1 comment
On a related note, The Architechture of Happiness looks really fun and interesting, too.
I wonder why the UK version has a much more appealing cover than the US version. I ask because I normally buy the US versions of books, but this one has me confused. I can see that the author is London-based, so the UK version is likely to be most true to the author, but why would the US publisher (Pantheon) choose this cover, still? It reminds me of Christopher Alexander’s book
(Via Joel Spolsky)
My friend Alexander Kjerulf just released his book about happiness at work, Happy Hours is 9 to 5. I just purchased my copy, and it’s looking really good.
The book isn’t about putting up a face, about pretending to be happy when you aren’t, or about pushing or intimidating others into being happy.
Rather, it starts with the assumption that all normal humans actually have the capacity to find happiness in work (and conversely that normal humans won’t find happiness in being idle), and that you can use your level of joy and happiness in your work as a measure of how close you are to doing what you love, sort of the children’s game Hotter/Colder.
From my conversations with Alexander about the book, and from what I’ve managed to read of it so far this morning, I highly recommend the book. It’s easily worth the $19 price tag for the PDF version, and for only $29 you get a copy on dead trees, thanks to the magic of Lulu. Oh, and you can read the whole thing for free as well.
Go get the book now.
Watched the first episode (the pilot) of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip tonight, and it’s awesome. Classic Sorkin dialog, beatifully filmed, and an awesome performance by Matthew Perry. How refreshing to see him in different, more serious role.
I’m looking forward to watching the rest of the series. It’s great to be reunited with parts of the cast from The West Wing.
I really like the thinking behind the the WYSIWYM editor by Peter Krantz. People really like the WYSIWYG editors, but they almost certainly create problems for themselves down the road when they’re used in a web context. What happens, for example, when you want a new design for your site? How do you make all the old content look consistent if you’ve used inline styles? This is a very real problem.
What publications should do is decide on a common set of styles that they want to use consistently across all content, and which are communicated clearly in a style guide, so that you know how and where and what to go in and change later when you want to change the look of the site.
It should still be possible to break out of that when you absolutely need something — for example to demonstrate HTML techniques, or when you need to show something that is all about presentation — but that is the exception, not the rule, and that should be clear in the interface.
So far our solution has indeed been Textile, which is equivalent in this context to Markdown, but it is clearly inadequate in the context of a pubishing tool like PublicSquare, where you actually do care about what the final result looks like, not just the words or the substance in it. Even I, as an engineer that’s been using Textile for a couple years, and who understand the mechanics of how it’s turned into HTML, and what that HTML looks like, and what consequences that has, needs to turn to the preview every once in a while to make sure I got it right.
Something can clearly be improved here, and I like the intent behind the WYSIWYM.
(Via 456)
We’re doing a little improvised, piggy-backed launch party for PublicSquare tonight at the Chelsea Art Museum at 9pm. Come and share the moment with us. Free, open bar.
PublicSquare is live and open for signups. Finally. This has taken us a while, including 7 months off doing other projects to make a buck, but it’s finally happened now, and I’m thrilled and excited and a little bit scared.
Go sign up and play and put it to good use.
http://publicsquarehq.com/
I’m in the market for a cheap hotel for Christina in January, and figured I’d share my list of options, in case it might be of use to someone else, or in case you my dear reader know of a place I don’t.
In order of ascending price, what I’ve found are:
- Hotel Sct. Thomas. DKK 495 for a single, or as low as 395 if you can do shared toilet (oddly, it looks like bath is private).
- Danhostel. DKK 520 – 600 per person. It’s supposed to be a designer hostel. Oooh, fancy!
Looks like Sct. Thomas is the best offer out there.
Does anyone know of any cheaper options? Perhaps some of the ones around the central station where competition might be stiffer.
What’s the best way to get a better price than the advertised rate?
