Many will probably disagree with my fundamental premise, which is that dialogue is valuable and is the only true path to understanding.

1. Initiate dialogue with those you disagree with
Far too many of us avoid talking about the deepest and most meaningful issues of life, often because we dislike conflict, we fear not knowing the right answers, or perhaps we’re afraid of offending someone. Whatever the reason, the result is that many of us live in ideological bubbles where ideas are seldom challenged and beliefs are rarely scrutinized. There are many people who harbor deep feelings of resentment and dislike, even hatred, towards people who hold opposing viewpoints on religion or politics, but they have never actually had an open and honest conversation with those people.

2. Seek to understand the other side
If you approach these conversations with the goal of changing the other person’s mind, you’re almost certainly going to be disappointed. Now, I know that it’s unrealistic to go into a tough conversation on a controversial issue when you have a dearly held position and truly have an open mind. But do your best. Try and set aside the preconceived notions you have and really listen to what the other person is saying. It might not be as ridiculous as you thought. Even if you still disagree after hearing them out, you may find that you respect them and their beliefs more than you did.

3. Find common ground
When going into tough discussions with people we disagree with, we tend to focus more on what we differ on than what we have in common. This is a mistake, as it sets people as enemies when they may agree on many of the most important points of their positions. A good example of this is the incredible fracturing that occurs in most major religious traditions over the most trivial minutia, despite the fact that they agree on almost all the key tenets of the faith.

4. Keep your emotions in check
Emotion and passion are useful, but only when they are tightly controlled. It’s natural for you to feel something when faced with things you disagree with strongly, but if you let your emotions fuel your reaction, the entire discussion will be useless, and is likely to make things worse. Be calm and rational as best you can, and if you can’t, put the conversation aside until you can. This is one reason that discussing things online or via email is often more useful; each side can take the time to think things through carefully and let their emotions settle down.

5. Stay away from personal attacks
One of my favorite moments in all the debates leading up to the presidential election was when Joe Biden talked about how it’s ok to question people’s judgement, but don’t question their motives. I think this is great advice in general. The truth about liberals and conservatives is that they both love America and want to see Americans succeed and do well; they just differ somewhat about the best way to accomplish that. When you accuse someone of being unpatriotic because of a political belief, or otherwise impugn their character, you only do damage to your own credibility and character. Stick to the issues.

6. Admit when you’re wrong
You don’t think you’ve always got it figured out, right? You will be wrong. When you are, admit it, learn from your mistake, and move on. And take heart…finding out that you’re wrong is a great thing, because you’ve eliminated another incorrect belief from your worldview. Progress

7. Don’t get discouraged
The truth is that even if you follow the above (and any other great advice), you probably won’t see a lot of change in other people’s positions or in your own. People tend to hold many of these beliefs as a part of their overall identity, and getting them (or yourself) to think about them differently is challenging because they feel like they’re losing control over who they are at the core. But do not give up. I am living proof that rational discussion can change at least some minds. It may take years, but it can happen. And you might find that you change your mind on a few things, too.

I’d love to know if you think these tips make these kinds of discussions worth having, or if you have any others to share. Post them below…

There’s a scene in Seinfeld where George and Jerry have this “who are we?” moment. It starts at 1:55 of the video below if you want to jump to it:

Their moment is a bit more light-hearted than most peoples’. Truthfully, I think all of us have felt like this at some point in our life, and it’s not a pleasant feeling at all, which is why we do our best to shove it down as much as possible. Far, far too many people spend the majority of their lives trying to avoid admitting to themselves the extent of the disparity between what their life is and what they wish it was. As Thoreau said, “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”

Side note: If this is not you (and it may very well not be), then this post is not for you. But be aware that most people are unwilling to admit that they fall into this category. Be honest with yourself.

This is the part of the post where I start talking about motivation and making your dreams come true and blah, blah, blah. You’ve heard it all before. At the end of the day, the only thing you can ask yourself is why not?

• Why not quit your job and travel the world?
• Why not go back to school to get that degree that you dreamed of?
• Why not allow yourself to be vulnerable and ask that crush out?
• Why not risk everything to start that business you’ve always dreamed of having?
• Why not be brave enough to share your art with others?

I can give the answers to every one of these, and they’re based on simple odds. The truth is that the odds are against you. You will probably fail. Traveling will likely not be as romantic as you think and the financial burden of not having a job will probably make it worse. That degree will probably not be as interesting or as helpful as you think. The crush will probably turn you down. The business you start will most likely fail. The sad reality is that your art is probably not very good and most people won’t like it. Most things that you try at, you will fail at. If not, you’re not stretching yourself very far.

But why not try? The truth about failure is that it hurts. Badly. But it also makes you realize something: it usually doesn’t hurt as bad as you thought it would. You can start another business, ask another crush out, paint another picture. All is not lost. And hopefully you learned a few things the last time around. If you never try, you know where you’ll be in a decade? Right where you are now. Right where you are now. Look back a year. Five years. Ten years. Did you think this would be it? Did you think your life would look like this?

Why not just do it? Right now.

Why not?

I think the question you should ask is what kind of person are you? If you set a goal to lose 15 lbs this month and it comes down to it and you only have a week to go and you’ve only lost five pounds, are you motivated to push as hard as possible, knowing you won’t make it, or do you give up because you know you won’t make it? Are you motivated more by the success itself or the actual act of reaching your goals? Are you likely to blow past your goals and keep going or are you likely to hit your goal and then just taper off?

These questions may be difficult to answer, but they’ll be very useful as you try and determine how far to stretch yourself in your goals.

What about you? How do you set goals that are both realistic and force you to stretch to accomplish them?

There are a lot of possibilities, but part of me wonders if it’s because real estate is truly an industry where people can create incredible success stories in relatively short periods of time. A field where reputation and pedigree are not nearly as important as hustle and persistence. The best lies have an element of truth, so when all these guys sell their ridiculously overpriced seminars and coaching services to starry-eyed dreamers hoping to make it big, maybe we fall for it because deep down, we know it’s partly true.

At least that’s what I’m hoping What do you think?

I have several real estate rental units back in Colorado (I live in San Francisco) and I have a property manager who takes care of them for me. She’s been using QuickBooks to track everything, but as I was transferring all the exported data into TurboTax, I finally had had enough and vowed to seriously check out some web-based property management services and see what the options are. Basically, I’m looking for the following things:

• a simple, clean, efficient user interface
• affordable and scalable
• ability for multiple users with different roles to log into the same account
• track income, expenses, tenant info, maintenance, etc.
• track performance, such as vacancy rate, average rent, etc
• be flexible enough to handle situations like tenants paying late, pro-rated rents, and whatever other weird situation comes up
• ability to upload files, like leases, photos, etc.
• tax reports with pre-defined categories for ease of entry when tax time rolls around
• full data export capability, so that I can get my data out if this company disappears at some point

I looked around and did some searching and came up with a list of seven apps that I wanted to check out and delve into further. Here’s the list:

• propertyware.com
• propertycenteronline.com
• buildium.com
• irealtymanager.com
• rentomatic.com
• rentyield.com
• propertize.com

I don’t really have time to go through all of these one-by-one and give you an overview, but I will say that I was most impressed by Rentomatic and Propertize. Rentomatic has a great interface and a fantastic dashboard that lets you see how your portfolio is performing at any given time. It’s also got a sweet feature where you can setup profiles for each of your units and then post them to Craigslist and other rental sites. The two main features that it’s missing are the ability for multiple users to login and the ability to upload files like leases.

That said, I currently have to give the edge to Propertize. The functionality is very similar to Rentomatic, but it’s a bit cheaper, the interface is a bit better, and it offers the ability for multiple users to login to the account. Sadly, it too lacks the ability to upload, but they’ve been responsive when I’ve offered feedback, so perhaps it’ll make it in the app eventually.

I’m continuing to play around with them both, with the goal of making a decision by Dec 1st, so we can get up to speed on the system by the end of the year. If you’re in this space, let me know what you’ve found that I might have overlooked.

Is it just me, or does productivity come in cycles? Sometimes I’ll go weeks at a time and absolutely tear it up, getting tons done on client work, personal projects, etc. I feel great, motivated, etc. Other times, I struggle to get anything done and never really get into the groove. Why is that? I mean, I do get stuff done, but it just feels like such a freaking chore and I have to force myself to power through. These cycles seem to last several weeks each, perhaps a bit longer. I have a few speculations that I’ve pulled from thin air on why this might occur:

Natural biological process
It might be that there’s some natural chemical process in the brain that makes some people more or less productive and that this process tends to be cyclical in nature. I feel like perhaps I’ve read something about this…if it’s true, I’m not sure how much I can do about it other than be aware of it and try to use it to my advantage? For the record, I think this is the most unlikely of the three scenarios.

Reflection of what I’m working on
Perhaps I’m just more excited at times about things that I’m working on because they’re more interesting. This one is hard to evaluate, because I’m not sure if I’m feeling unmotivated because of boring projects or if the projects seem boring because I’m feeling unmotivated.

Motivational momentum
I think is probably the most likely scenario. Basically, I think that certain people (myself included) swim better against the current. When things aren’t going well and I’ve got a lot of pressure (both external and internal) to get stuff done, I tend to build up a lot of motivational momentum and push hard to get things done. On the way up this hill of accomplishment, things are good, as I’m getting a lot done, keeping up with all my responsibilities, etc. It feels great. But as I accomplish more and more, that pressure and stress begins to dissipate, and so does some of the motivation. At this point, I begin to crest the top of the motivational hill and the old feelings of being unmotivated begin to return. Over the next few weeks, stuff begins to gradually pile up again and the pressure and stress begins to build. But until it hits a certain point, my motivation doesn’t seem to really kick in. Once it does, the cycle starts over.

This has been an issue my entire life and I’m just now getting to the point where I can deal with it more effectively. In college, I dealt with it by keeping my schedule absolutely slammed so there was virtually no room for error. I finished 75% of my bachelor’s degree in 17 months and graduated with a 3.9 GPA. I say this not to brag, but just to point out that I had virtually no room to slow down or slack off. This is highly effective, but it carries two huge price tags: risk and stress. The risk is that you’re juggling so much that if you drop one thing, it can all come crumbling down. The stress comes from the fact that you have no margin for error. These two things feed off each other, as the high risk stresses you out and the high stress increases the risk that you’ll make a mistake. Obviously, this is not a viable long-term solution.

The core problem here (for me, anyway) is relying too much on motivation, which is a fickle emotion. It can be incredibly useful, usually at the start of a venture, to kickstart your efforts and give you that critical early boost in the right direction. But if you rely too much on it, you’ll find that it never lasts long enough to get you where you need to go. The primary reason that people fail is because they give up, and I believe that the primary reason people give up is because they rely too much on motivation. The going gets rough and they find that the only fuel they really had was an emotion that’s now gone, so they just kind of let things die out.

Here’s what I’ve tried to do: replace motivation (emotion) with decision (habit). This is the primary reason that I do my seven daily habits. These habits were carefully chosen as things that I want to accomplish daily to get me closer to where I want to be, regardless of whether I feel like doing them or not.

That doesn’t mean that motivation has no place in productivity and self-improvement, but I think that you can’t rely too much on it. To the extent that motivation does play a role in my productivity, I’ve tried to replace external motivation with internal motivation, where I’m pushing myself harder rather than waiting for other people to pressure me. As an example, one of my daily habits is to look at my goal plan every single day. I also carefully track my goals from month to month, recording what percentage I accomplished, and preparing a new plan for the next thirty days. I also carefully track the amount of time that I work on various projects and initiatives in my life. I do all these things not because I have some weird fascination with data (at least not primarily so), but because by carefully tracking my productivity and advancement towards my goals, I am often motivated to push myself harder because I’m not moving as fast as I would like. The adage that “what gets measured gets managed” is true for the simple reason that when we’re confronted with the data about how we’re spending our time and the results of our efforts, we’re often encouraged and motivated to improve.

I’d love to hear what other people’s thoughts are. Have you experienced cyclical productivity? If so, how do you deal with it?

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I’m hoping to get an office mate to help defray the cost, so if you know of someone who is looking for a sweet office, have them contact me.

Truthfully, I can’t say that I’m unhappy about the progress I made over the last year, but it’s definitely less than what I had hoped for. I tend to look forward a year and imagine that things will have changed much more than they have. I imagine that my progress towards various goals will be much more substantial, that my life will look more different than it inevitably does, that I’ll have changed more than I have. Why? Well, probably because I’m an optimist. But also because change is hard.

There’s nothing really profound in this post, just some lessons that I need to remind myself of on occasion. Earlier this evening, I was sitting at dinner, pondering some conversations I had today about opportunities in the real estate market. The real estate market has taken a beating, and right now is a fantastic time to buy if you can make the deals happen. But financing those deals is hard, lenders are wary, and cash is scarce. On top of that, the general feeling in the real estate market right now is one of fear and dejection. The vast majority of people (even experienced investors) would conclude that this is a good time to sit on the sidelines for a bit and wait for sanity to return. But I wonder if times like these separate the timid from the titans. I spent some time today on the phone with lenders and people who are out there doing deals, and I’m much, much further along than I was at the beginning of the day, though perhaps still a long way from doing any deals. But the thing I realized tonight is that lack of capital, connections, experience, etc, etc. are not what’s holding me back. The only thing holding me back is me. The only thing keeping me from diving in 100% and making something happen is my unwillingness to do so, for whatever reason. Sure, lack of capital, connections, experience or whatever else will slow me down and make it that much harder. But it definitely can be done. I just have to want it badly enough.

As I think about what’s truly and honestly holding me back, I’m reminded of a quote:

“After a lifetime of making money and observing better men and women than I fall by the wayside, I am convinced that fear of failing in the eyes of the world is the single biggest impediment to amassing wealth.”
-Felix Dennis

What’s holding you back?

My activities

Everyday
I’m a web developer / entrepreneur, so I spend a good portion of each day working from home or from my neighborhood coffee shop. I would like to look halfway presentable during these times, but comfort is a key factor here.

Professional meetings
As part of my work, I often have to meet with clients and potential partners. Obviously, this requires a bit more decorum than sitting alone at home does, but this is San Francisco, so I don’t need to show up in a suit or anything. Perhaps a button-down and a sweater when it’s cold?

Casual evenings out
Dinner with family, accompanying my wife to a play, grabbing drinks with an old friend. I don’t need to wear a tie, but perhaps a blazer or something?

Formal affairs
Weddings, funerals, very special occasions, etc. I have a good dark suit, so I’m pretty much set here, I think.

My criteria for clothes

Flexible
I don’t have a lot of cash or space, so it’s important to get staples that can be paired into as many combinations as possible. I’d rather not buy an item of clothing that can only be worn with one other item of clothing, for example.

Affordable
I’m willing to spend some money here, but I’m not paying more than $100 for a pair of jeans, for example. I’m willing to spend more for great articles of clothing that will last years and fit with a lot of situations.

Durable
I hate clothes that shrink in the dryer, get stretched out after just a few times of wearing them, fade easily, etc. I’m looking for good stuff that will last awhile. I’m also looking for classic items that are durable in the sense that they won’t go out of style in six months. I think guys have it easier here, fortunately, but there are still fads that I want to avoid, at least for the most part.

Comfortable
If I’m not comfortable in my clothes, I won’t wear them. I’ll revert back to my jeans and tshirt “style”, which is not what I want. Not sure what people can suggest here, but there it is.

Easy to take care of
I hate to iron. Seriously, anything that doesn’t require me to iron it for twenty minutes has a huge advantage. If I can just throw it in the washer and dryer without worrying about ruining it or having it shrink, that’s a big plus. I’m willing to do some work to take care of things, but I’m not sure I’m into hand-washing and line-drying all my clothes.

What I need help with

What to buy (and what NOT to buy)
What are the absolute essentials? What are some ideas for good combinations that fit the criteria above? What should I not buy…are sweater vests still awesome? Something like this, for example:
- 2 pairs of jeans
- 2 pairs of dress slacks
- 4 button-down dress shirts (2 dark, 2 light)
- 2 sweaters (1 dark, 1 light)
- 2 pairs of shoes (black dress shoes, brown casual shoes)
- etc, etc.

Where to buy it
Should I be looking at Brooks Brothers, Old Navy, Macy’s, Wal-Mart, Banana Republic, or some funky thrift store? Ok, a couple of those were jokes, but seriously…what kinds of stores are great to find what I need? Links to online stores are definitely appreciated.

How to buy it
Is it worth waiting for sales? Should I be more opportunistic and buy stuff that strikes my eye, or should I come up with a plan and stick to it? Should I only buy stuff that fits perfectly, or should I consider buying and having things tailored? Which kinds of clothing work well with that strategy, and which don’t?

Other resources
Good books, blogs, or sites that are geared towards helping young professionals dress appropriately in a variety of social situations. most of the books I’ve looked at for men’s fashion were clearly written for people who are trying to decide what combination of tie and dress shirt to wear with their suit every day. I need to wear a suit perhaps once or twice a year. Links to particular articles of clothing would also be interesting. Even TV shows or movies where you like the wardrobe styles would be helpful at this point.

This post turned out a lot longer than I had envisioned. I was just thinking I’d ask for a bit of advice. Am I being too…structured here? I really want to get better at this area of my life, so I welcome any and all suggestions. Please post something in the comments…I’d really appreciate it. Thanks!