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 »

Inspired by a post on stevepavlina.com, I decided to come up with a few 30-day trial goals for the month of March. After 30 days, I’ll re-evaluate whether I want to keep these as routines / habits going forward. I’ve been really trying to form good habits in my life overall lately, and so I wanted to pick goals that I could do every day and install some positive habits in my life. I decided that more than 5 would be overwhelming. I brainstormed a list of 12 and then combined, edited, and cut it down to the following 5 goals. For the next 30 days, I’ll complete each of these every single day, weekends included.
Read the rest of this entry »

“Sometimes there is so much beauty in the world, I can’t even stand it, and it feels like my heart is going to burst.”

-American Beauty

San Francisco by the Bay II by ~TheDarkKnight78 on deviantART

Earth seen from 4 billion miles away, photographed by Voyager 1 on June 6, 1990.

Of the “pale blue dot,” astronomer Carl Sagan said, “That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every ’superstar,’ every ’supreme leader,’ every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there €” on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.”

Thanks to Futility Closet for posting this quote.

I have only seen more each day to convince me of how true this is.

“Man, I see in fight club the strongest and smartest men who have ever lived. I see all this potential, and I see it squandered. An entire generation, pumping gas, waiting tables. Slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need. We’re the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no great war, no great depression. Our great war is a spiritual war. Our great depression is our lives. We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires and movie gods and rock stars, but we won’t. We’re slowly realizing that fact. And we are very, very pissed off.”

I’ve been reading “The Richest Man in Babylon”, a series of financial parables set in the Babylonian era. They’ve been around since the mid-1920’s and convey (very simply) some basic principles of finances and money management. They’re the kind of things we all know, but few of us seem to do. The highlights are the following:

1. A portion of all you earn is yours to keep. Save at least 10% of everything you make, no matter what
2. Do the above by controlling your expenses carefully with the use of a budget
3. Put those savings to work for you by investing
4. Don’t be risky in your investments
5. Buy a house
6. Plan for retirement and future generations
7. Increase your earning potential

Again, very basic stuff, but apparently the majority of people just don’t get it. For example, the average savings rate in America is now NEGATIVE. People who make $50k per year spend just over $50k per year and people who make $100k per year spend just over $100k per year. Average household debt goes up every year and the average American only has something like 15k set aside for retirement.

My company (CNET Networks) had a guy come in today from the Social Security Administration and speak to us about how Social Security works. Nothing really new. I was hoping he’d talk about some of the plans to fix SS, but he merely said that it will be bankrupt by 2040 unless we change something. Fantastic. The thing that struck me was, 1) how little money you get, even if you paid a fortune into Social Security, and 2) how jacked up it is to face a retirement of 20+ years knowing that there’s no way you can even come close to living on what you have. What person, at 66, wants to realize that they have to work until they die? How sad. The saddest part was that they actually increase your benefit if you work past 66, because they’re trying to keep people working as long as possible. Isn’t that great? We live in a country where senior citizens are encouraged by their government to work as long as possible, even well into their 70s, or until they die, whichever comes first.

It all kind of clicked for me this evening. I was reading the book again and this part jumped out. The speaker is a slave who fled his city because of debt and fell into the wrong circumstances, eventually ending up as a slave to a very wealthy lady.

“So I was turned over to Sira and that day I led her camel upon a long journey to her sick mother. I took the occasion to thank her for her intercession and also to tell her that I was not a slave by birth, but the son of a free man, an honorable saddle-maker of Babylon. I also told her much of my story. Her comments to me were disconcerting and I pondered much afterword on what she said.

‘How can you call yourself a free man when your weakness has brought you to this? If a man has in himself the soul of a slave, will he not become one no matter what his birth, even as water seeks its level? If a man has within him the soul of a free man, will he not become respected and honored in his own city in spite of his misfortune?’”

Think about it.