My wife and I were out walking our puppies today, which is always an interesting experience because probably 50% of the people we pass want to stop and pet them and ask where we got them, etc. It’s generally an interesting experience, and a good opportunity for the dogs to get out and socialize with new people and other dogs.

Anyway, we were walking down the street and we happened upon a dapper-looking elderly gentleman standing on the steps of his Victorian home. He was sharply dressed in a yellow cardigan and appeared ready to enjoy an evening out. He remarked on the puppies and we struck up a conversation. Turns out, it was his 80th birthday today and he was off to a birthday celebration. I was a little surprised, as I would have pegged his age at something like 65 - 70. I wished him a happy birthday, to which he responded with a thank-you and a “perhaps you’ll get there someday, old boy.” Classic. He also urged me to ensure that I drank plenty of gin. We wished him farewell and continued down the street. Farther down the block, I turned around to watch him and he was just standing on the step, enjoying the cool breeze and the fading sunlight of the evening. He had about him the air of a man who has lived a full life and who is still enjoying every bit of it.

I generally don’t particularly enjoy being around the elderly, partly because I feel like I have little in common with them, but mostly because their lives just seem so depressing to me. But this gentleman seemed different. Even though I only met him for a brief moment, he made an impression on me. I hope that when I’m 80 years old, I’ll be as content and happy enjoying my life as he seemed to be.

Happy birthday, sir. Now I’m off to see about that gin.

If I can do it, anyone can. As most people who know me will attest, I’ve always had trouble getting up in the morning. I blame my family, which is packed with night owls.

In high school, I got suspended on more than one occasion for missing my first class of the day. You’d think that the Navy would have changed me, and it did, for awhile. I only got in trouble once or twice in the Navy for being late as a result of oversleeping. And in spite of my lack of discipline in this area, after I got out of the Navy, I managed to crank through three years of school in 18 months and maintain a 3.9 GPA. But I remember sitting in class on numerous occasions having been in bed sound asleep less than 20 minutes before that. After college, I managed to hold down a job in San Francisco for a year before I quit to start consulting and pursuing my own entrepreneurial pursuits.

You’d think that the unstructured life of a freelancer would be bad for someone who already has trouble getting up in the morning. Well, you’d be right. For a long time, I would work late, late into the night (like 2 - 4am) and then drag myself out of bed around noon. Super lame. The thing was, I hated doing it, but I always felt like I had more to do than I could afford to put off until the next day, so I had to do it before I went to bed.

For awhile, I was afraid I had some kind of sleeping disorder. But over the last four or five months, I’ve had a real breakthrough. The last few weeks notwithstanding (more on that later), I now get up regularly around 4:30am, and am often at my office by 5am. What’s more, I *love* this and don’t consider it to be much of a struggle. If you’re looking to make a similar change, here’s what I would recommend:

1. Practice getting up

Yes, you will feel stupid. But give Steve Pavlina’s awesome technique a try. It really helped me, especially in the beginning.

2. Consider your productivity curve

One of the biggest things I discovered is that I get 3-4x as much done between 5am and 9am as I do between 9pm and 1am. They’re both four hours, but my productivity is drastically different. For some people, it may make more sense to stay up late, as they’ll get more done. In that case, my recommendation would be to just embrace it. Michael Arrington of TechCrunch reportedly sleeps from like 4am to 10am and he’s gotten quite a bit done over the last few years. Figure out what works for you.

3. Go to bed

You’d think this would be basic, right? Took me 25 years to figure it out, though. The thing is, when I started going to bed at 9pm or 10pm, I had to really force myself, because I had *so much* that needed to get done. But I knew that I would get more done the next morning than I would if I stayed up late working. And I did. And over time, I gradually managed to catch up, until I wasn’t so far behind and going to bed was a lot easier.

4. Have something to do with your time in the morning

Exercise, read, write, work, email, whatever. But don’t get up and sit around wondering why you’re up. It’ll just be harder to get up next time.

5. Stick with it

That first week or two was kind of rough, but as I kept getting up, it got easier and easier. Once you get into the routine and your body adjusts, you’ll find getting up much easier to do. Just don’t give up.

Where I am today

My wife and I got two puppies about a month ago, and they’ve completely ruined my routine I can only imagine what an infant would be like…kudos to you parents out there. Anyway, we’ve started to get back into a routine, and we’re trading off days so that I can get up early a few days a week and head into the office. It’s not quite the same level of productivity that I had before, but it’ll continue to get better.

For more on this topic, here’s a few posts from other blogs:

Steve Pavlina - How to Become an Early Riser

Steve Pavlina - How to Become an Early Riser - Part II

Zen Habits - How I Became an Early Riser

I want to be rich. There, I said it. Ever since I was a kid, I always knew that I would be wealthy one day, and I’ve been steadily moving in that direction ever since. I’ve made a lot of mistakes along the way, learned a lot about myself, and spent a lot of time thinking about why I want to be wealthy. In particular, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about being rich in the context of my faith (I’m a Christian), and in the context of being a good steward of what I’m entrusted with. My good buddy Ben Rasmusen pointed me today to a blog post by John Reel about the lessons learned by getting rich and then losing it all. It got me thinking about this subject, so I’d thought I’d share eight reasons I want to be rich:

Support worthy causes

The way I see it, the more I have, the more I can give away. There are so many organizations and efforts in the world today that need money, and I’m excited to have the opportunity to contribute. I guess when I analyze the rest of the items on this list, many of them are more specific examples of this point.

Give my kids great opportunities

I have been blessed with two wonderful parents who taught me everything I need to know about the things that matter most in life: faith, family, marriage, integrity, etc. However, I don’t come from a wealthy family. My parents are smart people, but neither had the opportunity to go to college, nor did they have the resources to pay my way through college. Thanks to the Navy, I was able to attend a decent school, but I sometimes wonder how things might have turned out differently had I gone to MIT or Stanford out of high school, instead of enlisting in the Navy. I would have had trouble paying for it, and perhaps that’s part of the reason why I didn’t consider those schools to be options. I want my kids to have great opportunities without finances being what’s holding them back. I want to help them pay for school, buy a house, start a business, etc. There’s no guarantee that they’ll have success later, but the least I can do help them take the first step.

Give the underdog a chance

One of my friends just got a job at a company out here in San Francisco and he blogged about their values as a company. One of them is to “help outsiders and underdogs win”, and I can’t stress enough how much I believe in this. I have observed over the last few years that the maxim of “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know” is very true, at least out here. I’m incredibly grateful that someone at CNET saw my resume on Craigslist and emailed me to offer me a job as a product manager. I was just out of college, had pretty much no experience, no connections, nothing. They took a chance on me, and I hope they would say it was a good choice in the end. Money opens doors, and I hope to use any influence I have to hold the door open for other people who may not have the right background or connections. Someone gave me a chance, and it made all the difference.

Own my time

The most valuable resource that any of us have is time. We only get so much of it (and we don’t even know how much), and there’s only so much you can do to maximize the amount that you get. Even if you eat healthy, exercise, be careful, etc., you’re unlikely to live much longer than a century, at least under current life expectancy (this could change, though). The point is, I hate selling my time. I hate that there are things in life that I need and currently, the only way I can get them is by selling my time in exchange for money. Granted, since I’ve started freelancing, I sell my time for a lot more. And I’ve read about people who sell their time for hundreds or thousands of dollars per hour. But in my mind, that’s still slavery. It’s a much more palatable form of slavery, but slavery nonetheless.

My goal is to reach a point where I can live a comfortable life through passive income sources. I will never have to get a job, take a client, or borrow money unless I want to. I can spend my time pursuing the things in life that matter to me. And as a side note, I’m not entirely sure that kind of financial security can’t be considered happiness that money can buy. John agrees with me.

Explore the world

You know that saying about how the things you own end up owning you? Well, it’s true. If you want proof, just try moving frequently, ideally into gradually smaller and smaller places so you have to get rid of stuff. It’s so liberating to get rid of junk that you don’t need or even want anymore. My wife and I sold both our cars when we moved to San Francisco, and I’m so glad. Is it a pain sometimes? Yes. But aside from the financial benefits (which are huge), just the peace of mind of not having to worry about a car is amazing.

I say all that to say that what I’ve come to value more than stuff are experiences. Stuff doesn’t make you happy. My wife and I were blessed to be able to spend eleven weeks trekking around Asia earlier this year, and it was one of the most amazing, enriching experiences of my life. I think travel is one of those things that just fundamentally shifts your perception of the world the more you do it. I want the opportunity to live in some of the world’s greatest cities, explore the world’s cultures, and broaden my horizons by getting out there and seeing how the other six billion people live.

Create wealth for others

I read this fantastic essay about wealth the other day by Paul Graham, a noted angel investor who has funded dozens (or hundreds) of startups, mostly in the technology space. In the essay, he talks about how many people view the world’s wealth as something that’s fixed, and they accordingly view wealthy people as having taken more than their fair share. But entrepreneurs are not working in a zero-sum world. Entrepreneurs actually create wealth, and when they do, lots of other people get wealthy along the way, from the investors, to the employees, to even the customers. Think about how much richer our lives are thanks to the work of Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and the Google guys. They’ve been rewarded with billions for the work they’ve done, but they’ve given the world a lot of wealth, too, both monetary and in terms of technological advances. I want to create wealth for others and help make their dreams come true.

Change the world

This brings me to the next point: entrepreneurs change the world. The innovations that they create make our lives richer in countless ways. I believe that the next few decades will foster in so much innovation that the last couple centuries will pale in comparison. In particular, I believe that advances in artificial intelligence / robotics, genetics, and nanotechnology will change the face of the world beyond recognition. I want to be a part of these paradigm shifts and wealth will give me the opportunity to fund great startups in these and other spaces, as well as start companies of my own.

Master myself

Finally, one of the best things about getting rich, I’ve heard, is not the destination, but the journey. Becoming a millionaire is something that most people can technically do, but statistically, few of them will. It’s just too hard. Controlling your finances, investing, starting a company, and other paths to wealth are all difficult and require a lot of personal growth and development for most people. One of the best lessons in John’s blog post is the first one: “I can get rich.” Once you’ve done it, it’s much easier to do it again, because you believe in yourself, and because you’ve mastered yourself, at least to some degree.

Conclusion

I’m not waiting until I’m “rich” to do any of these things. I believe that building wealth is a process. There aren’t shortcuts, per se, though there are methods to get there faster and smarter, but they usually require more risk, more dedication, and more time. Regardless of how I get there, I hope that if and when I do, I’m able to keep these things in perspective and be a good steward of what I’ve been blessed with. I’d love to hear your comments on the subject.

For the last week or so, I’ve been working on reviewing, streamlining, and unifying my goals across different areas of my life. I’m building a comprehensive goal plan for the next ten years, and I’m calling this effort Project Goalpost (cheesy, I know). One of my guiding principles that I’m employing while working through all these goals is to ensure that each goal is SMART, which is a useful mnemonic that says goals should be:

• Specific
• Measurable
• Achievable
• Realistic
• Time-bound

I have found this device to be a useful one when devising my goal plans, as it helps avoid nebulous and ill-defined goals like “get into better shape” or “prepare for the future”. How would you have any idea when those things have been accomplished?

Currently, I’m dividing my goals into these different life areas:

• Personal
• Physical
• Financial
• Entrepreneurial
• Real Estate
• Spiritual

I’m doing pretty well with most of these, but it’s the Spiritual category that’s giving me the most trouble. I’m just not sure how to write specific, measurable goals for matters of the heart, especially for several years out.

For one thing, faith is about the journey, not really the destination, and much of that journey occurs in ways that don’t lend themselves to metrics. For example, it doesn’t really make sense to say that you want to be 35% closer to God, or have your prayer life be twice as good. The destination doesn’t really exist, either, as I don’t believe that Christians can ever really say that they’ve accomplished their mission as a Christian, at least not in this life.

Second, I’m not entirely sure that our faith is something that should get a category of its own. Shouldn’t our faith undergird all that we do, rather than being put into its own bullet-point list of todo items?

And why does this bother me at all? I guess because my goals should reflect a lot about who I am, but when you look at my list, it seems so shallow and materialistic, because a lot of my goals revolve around financial gain, real estate, and other items in that vein. Those things just lend themselves to measurement. But they aren’t what matter most in life, and I know that. What matters most in life are things like relationships, contentment, and faith, but can you really create SMART goals for those things? I have a few ideas I’ll explore in a future post, but I would love to know what you think.

In March 2007, I undertook an experiment where I chose five daily habits and did them every day for the entire month. My goal was to see what kind of impact they would have on my life. I got the idea from Steve Pavlina’s post about 30-day trials. My five goals were:

• Wake up at 5:30am
• Exercise for at least 25 mins
• Get all my inboxes to zero
• Clean up for 15 mins
• Pack lunch and prepare clothes before bed

I pushed very hard to accomplish these each day, and my track record was close to perfect by the end of the month. The result was incredible. Even though that was almost a year and a half ago, I can still remember it being one of the most productive, energetic, and positive periods of the last few years. And though I didn’t continue to do those five goals quite as religiously, the effects continued for several months. However, over the last year or so, I’ve let my daily habits slip. Around the beginning of this year, I put together another list of twelve daily habits, and I had some success with those, but it was just too much, especially all at once. So now I’ve got a new strategy. I’ve whittled my list down to just seven goals, which are:

• Read my Bible
• Morning pages
• Do a goal review
• Blog on one of the sites that I’m involved in
• Exercise
• Clean up for 15 mins
• Inboxes to zero

Is seven a lot? Yep. However, I’m more organized and disciplined now than I was back then, and I have three strategies that I’m using to ensure I stick to these:

1. Measure It - I’m a big fan of the saying that “what gets measured gets managed.” I believe strongly that you need to know how you’re doing to understand how you can improve. To that end, I’m using a program for the iPhone called GoalKeep. It’s based on an old trick that Jerry Seinfeld used to use where you get a big calendar and every day you accomplish your daily goal (writing jokes for him), you put a big checkmark there. After a few days, you’ve got a chain going, and you don’t want to break the chain. GoalKeep lets you simulate that same effect and keeps track of the length of your “chain.”
2. Ease into it - I’m not starting with all seven habits out of the box. Rather, I’m taking 2-3 weeks and gradually introducing them one by one. The only rule is that once I start the chain for a daily habit, I can’t stop it. Right now, I’m only doing two: blogging and exercise. I’ll add a couple more over the next week.
3. Stay accountable - Finally, I’m posting this here, and I’ll be asking a few people to keep me accountable in these areas.

Bonus daily habit: Getting up early. I used to get up every day at 9am or 10am (and occasionally I still do). I felt like I would never be one of those early morning people who get up at 5am or 6am every day, of their own accord. Keep in mind that I was in the Navy, so getting up at the butt-crack of dawn is nothing new, but I have always struggled to do it when no one was forcing me. However, over the last few months, something has changed. Until we got our puppies, I would get up every morning at 4:15am and be in my office working by 5am. Healthy? Well, that’s a topic for another day, but I *love* it. Now that we’ve had the puppies for a couple weeks and we’re starting to get into a routine, I’m working on getting back to that schedule, and I’m really excited. There is nothing like knocking out four or five hours of solid work before most people even get to their desk. I’ll write more about my transition from night owl to early riser later. My point is that this is a habit that used to be on every list, but it’s one that I feel like I have control over now, so I’m focusing on other things.

I’ll try and post progress updates on occasion for these goals if anyone is interested. Hey, I have to blog every day, so what else am I going to write about?

I’m trying to blog a fair amount these days, on RyanWaggoner.com, Bounteo.com, MightyBrand.com, and Appseta.com. When I first starting blogging seriously back in January or February of 2007, I wondered if I would run out of things to write about. At first, it was difficult. I would sit and write the first sentence or two of a post, erase it, try again, erase it, and repeat until I got bored and starting rummaging around digg. But as I stuck with it and blogged, I found that I had more and more ideas, and my posts flowed a lot easier. However, I’ve gotten rusty and fallen out of the blogging habit. Now that I’m trying to blog more, I’m finding it difficult to come up with things to write about. So to get things rolling again, I’m going to follow a three-part strategy that I find always helps me get going:

1. Feeds - Reading other bloggers and content sites out there is always good inspiration and a good way to keep your pulse on what’s happening on the Internet. Additionally, it gives you cool stuff to link to and tell your readers about. I’ve fallen a bit behind on my feeds lately, so I’m digging back in with gusto, searching for new blogs to read, and ditching the ones that aren’t inspiring me anymore.
2. Running - I used to run in the mornings, but lately I just haven’t been making time. When I run, I listen to music, but I also think a lot about the topics that I blog about. There’s something about just hitting the street and taking off on a 3 mile run up to the edge of the Bay and stopping to take in the view that gets my creative juices flowing. Pretty soon, I’m trying to remember all the awesome ideas I have until I can get back and write them down. Now that I have my iPhone, I can run with it and record my ideas on the go.
3. Blogging - Nothing helps grease the writing gears like actually writing. The best cure for writer’s block is to write anyway. It may not be good, but at least you’ll have written something. Over time, you’ll find that writer’s block happens less frequently, as your mind is prepared to write regardless of how you feel.

So there you have it. If you see that I’m not blogging much, please ask me why…I need the kick in the butt.

Geez…I have to get on here more often. The last few months have been crazy, and as usual, I’m juggling a lot of projects and ambitions. My latest projects are two eight-week-old beagle puppies that my wife and I recently acquired. They’re a handful, and the last two weeks have blurred by, but I think we’re finally starting to get into a routine with them, which is a relief. Hopefully I’ll be able to start getting up at 415am again and knocking stuff out.

One of the things that I’ve been meaning to do for the last six months or so is come up with a unified goal plan for my life. I’m a pretty ambitious person, sometimes too ambitious, and I’m an optimistic perfectionist with procrastination tendencies, which is to say that I have good ideas, turn them into HUGE ideas, decide they have to be perfect, put them off, and then get depressed because I’m not meeting my goals. That’s a bit of an exaggeration, but you get the idea. Anyway, over the last few years, I’ve learned a lot about myself and my own shortcomings and I’ve come up with a few systems that work well for me, when I’m disciplined enough to use them.

1. Goals - Having a solid path is crucial for me
2. GTD - Managing my time
3. Involving other people in my goals

Over the last year, I’ve adjusted to freelance work, but there’s a lot of things that have slipped a little over the past twelve months. It finally really hit me a couple weeks ago that it’s time to stop messing around. It’s time for me to get those things under control, and Project Goalpost is my code-named attempt to do that.

Project Goalpost is an effort to unify my goals from all different areas of my life, streamline them, align them with my current projects, devise a plan for goal review and habit building on a regular basis, request accountability, and incorporate a GTD workflow that includes these higher priorities.

Every six months or so, I put together a new list of goals, based on what’s going on in my life. This means that I have lots of lists of goals and priorities, spread throughout my life…in notebooks, on Google Docs, on my hard drive, in my email, etc. These goals are often in conflict, are rarely reviewed, and many are not SMART.

On top of that, my use of GTD has really fallen by the wayside over the last 6-8 months. The difference in utility from using GTD at 80% and using it at 100% is incredible…in order to be truly effective, you must use it constantly and consistently. I have not been, and thus most of the utility is wasted.

What I’ve decided to do is take the following actions:

1. Collect all my goals and lists of things I want to accomplish from all the various places they’re stashed
2. Consolidate, eliminate, and add any new goals to the list
3. Break the list into major categories (Personal, Physical, Real Estate, Career, etc) and time frames (short-, medium-, and long-term)
4. Ensure every goal is SMART
5. Ensure all categories have roughly the same amount of goals, to help ensure well-roundedness
6. Compile into a master document
7. Destroy or archive all source materials to avoid distraction
8. Add all initial steps towards goals to GTD system
9. Devise a schedule for goal review (daily for short-term, monthly for medium-term, every six months for long-term, etc)
10. Determine what projects have relevance to goals, and ditch the ones that don’t
11. Ask five or more people to review my list and help hold me accountable
12. Post my list here and ask my readers to keep me accountable

These are typically the kinds of things that I would do on my own, without telling anyone, but I need some accountability. I need someone to ask me how my goals are going, so I’m laying it all out there. With the possible exception of a few very personal goals, I’ll be posting the results of Project Goalpost hopefully within the next few days.

All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, to make it possible.

T. E. Lawrence, “The Seven Pillars of Wisdom”
British soldier (1888 - 1935)

I’ve posted this quote before, but it’s especially appropriate for recent developments in my life. I haven’t posted to my blog in the last 3 months, and so much has changed since then. Let me give you the highlights:

This Blog
I’ve received lots of notes from people asking if I’m going to finish the investing series I started. I owe my readers an apology. I’ve just been swamped with a bunch of other things, some of which you’ll read about below. I wanted to let people know that not only will I be finishing this series, but I’ll be launching a new project in the next few weeks that the readers of this blog will hopefully find very interesting. It’ll live on a new site of its own and I’ll be releasing details within the next couple weeks, hopefully, so stay tuned. I know you’re probably thinking that I’ll flake on this as well, but the good news is that my time has opened up some. For more, read on…

CNET Networks
As I’ve mentioned before, my day job is an Associate Product Manager at CNET Networks, one of the largest web companies in terms of traffic. I started at CNET in August of 2006 and I’ve really learned a lot there and made some great friends. However, about three weeks ago I started looking around for some contract work, primarily through craigslist.org. After about a week, it was apparent that not only was there enough work for several full-time jobs, I could make 2-3 times as much doing freelance work as I was making at CNET. I managed to hang on for a few more days before I decided that going freelance full-time was the right move and I gave my notice at CNET. My last day was Friday and I am now completely free. I have punched my last clock and done my last 9-5. From where I’m sitting right now, I have a hard time imagining any circumstances under which I would be an employee again, but I’m always open to discussion :-). I already have more than enough work coming my way to stay busy and I now have the flexibility to be able to work from anywhere in the world, at any time that I choose. I’m sitting in a 24-hour starbucks in San Francisco writing this at about 12:30am and it’s comforting to know that I don’t have to get up in the morning unless I want to.

I will say that CNET was an awesome opportunity for me. They gave me a shot when I needed it most and it was a fantastic place to cut my teeth in the web field. I met a lot of very passionate and talented people who inspired me greatly. They offered me a great job before I left, but ultimately, I’m just not an employee. I came to the Bay Area to start a company, not work at one. I don’t want people to think that I’m saying that there’s anything wrong with being an employee or that I didn’t enjoy it. I am fortunate in that I have skills that are in such high demand that I can pay the bills with part-time freelance work and have a lot of time left to focus on projects of my own, some of which I’ll talk about below.

Oh, and my wife quit her job the same day. She’s been working towards it for a lot longer than I have and now we’re both unfettered freelancers, free to travel the world, set our own rules, and take the road less traveled.

BlueSwarm.org
For the last six months or so, I’ve been hard at work with two brilliant and talented partners on a project called BlueSwarm.org. It’s a social network aggregator / lifestreaming / friendstreaming service, which are all fancy ways of saying that it helps you easily keep track of what your friends are doing all over the web and vice versa. Very cool stuff. We launched a private beta of the site on July 7th and have been steadily working on improvements since. Please check it out and request an invite…we hope to be giving out a bunch in the next couple weeks.

Real Estate
As I noted in a post earlier this year, I purchased a single family home with a partner and rehabbed it. We had it on the market for about six months before I finally decided that I’d rather keep it than drop the price any further. I negotiated an agreement to buy out my partner and I now own my 2nd long-term rental property.

Last Wednesday, I was forwarded an email about a sweet little 3/2 condo and managed to put it under contract at a great price within the next 24 hours. The best part is that about 75% of the purchase price is covered by an assumable private note at 6% fixed (!) and the current seller agreed to carry another 15% of the purchase price at 7.5% fixed, leaving me with just 10% to put down and no banks or mortgage companies to hassle with. If you can find a private lender at a good rate, I highly recommend it. We can close any time that works for us, so hopefully in the next couple weeks, I’ll own my third property. The empire grows…

I think that’s pretty much it…I’m also getting my pilot’s license and learning to sail, but so far those haven’t been too time-consuming

In closing, I would just like to say that I’m overwhelmed by how richly God has blessed my life in just about every way. I’ll be 25 years old in less than a month and the world is stretched out in front of me, filled with endless opportunity. I say this not to brag, but to encourage others to take the road less traveled, to take risks, to discover and follow their passions. I won’t say that it hasn’t been hard at times and sometimes it’s completely overwhelming to have a seemingly endless array of options available, but overall, I wouldn’t trade it for anything. Once you taste the freedom, you won’t either.

Lately, I’ve been running up to Muni Pier for my morning workout. The view there is amazing, giving you a full 360-degree panoramic view of the Bay. You can simultaneously see the Downtown/Financial District, Coit tower, Russian Hill, Treasure Island, Alcatraz, the Bay Bridge, and the Golden Gate Bridge. It’s especially stunning at night or in the early morning before the sun rises. I couldn’t find any decent night photos, but here’s a link to a 360-degree Quicktime panorama that may give you a taste of the beauty here.

http://www.lwn-photo.com/images/PanoLg/AquticPrkLg.mov

I’m finishing up Winning by Jack Welch, and I wanted to highlight an excerpt from the very last page. Read the rest of this entry »