When I was a kid my parents taught me to always have a plan and to always aim high. As a result, I have a master plan for life that I execute against. Things like losing weight, being a dedicated husband and father, coding nightly, retiring young, even this blog.
Like any kind of plan or project it must be flexible enough to change given new priorities or requirements. It also must have frequent results which can be measured (lbs lost, time spent, lines of code, posts and readership).
I’m probably not alone in this thinking, but I naturally apply agile methods to my life, just like I tend to apply them to software development. When some external problem comes up or I just get the urge to-do something new here’s my thought process:
- Does this change affect my other goals?
- How does this affect the priority of these goals?
- What goals can I postpone or drop to deal with this change?
The current economic situation has forced me to change some of my goals and priorities but having an agile approach to life, I believe, gives me the tools to handle it better.
Do you live an agile life too?
jake hacks, happiness, lessons, life
When I was a kid I thought my parents were always right. Whether it was the best way to dress or the best way to write a sentence for english class; if my parents said it was the better way then it was.
It wasn’t until 8th grade that I realized my parents really didn’t know much about a lot of things like clothes or music or grammar but they would have never admitted it. Eventually I learned to weigh my parents views as opinions that I respect, while at the same time using my own brain to decide on the right way for me.
If you are an entrepreneur, keep that in mind when you read something from people, companies or bloggers with authority. If you find yourself always accepting what they say and do as correct then you are probably like me in 7th grade.
jake business, lessons, life, web
I have a great life. A beautiful baby, a supportive wife, a mind full of ideas, a strong will to succeed and a crappy full time job. I guess you can’t have it all right?
Well today I thought of a funny analogy when arguing with a QA manager over why it wasn’t necessary to do two days of system testing on an internal application simply because we recompiled it without debugging symbols. I thought to myself, there are two kinds of people in this world; Hurdles and Hurdlers. People that define themselves by putting up hurdles in the way of others and those that attempt to overcome any challenge placed in front of them. I’m a hurdler.
jake analogy, life
I have an 8 month old daughter named Mia. She is great; laughs a lot, loves to dance and play all day.
Anyone will tell you having kids can be tough, esp at 3am. I know before we had her I thought my hobbies and career were essentially over. That I’d have to find my happiness in my family only and use work as means to an end. But what I didn’t anticipate how incredibly motivating having children can be.
Your free time becomes precious. So much so that you don’t want to waste it vegging out. In fact, I rarely am bored anymore. I think the challenge of having children has taught me to challenge myself in other aspects of my life. The amount of work I am able to accomplish in the couple hours I have between putting the baby to bed and sleeping myself is as much as if I spent the day working before we had her.
My purpose now is to work as hard as I can to be the best father I can and provide her with the life I know she deserves. That doesn’t mean being rich. It means being able to NOT work like a dog the rest of my life for someone else. To create a flexible and secure life for my family.
Of course, none of it is easy but it doesn’t really matter anymore which is the best part.
So all of you who think having kids is some kind of prison of responsibility, it’s not. It’s more like a cult :)
jake happiness, kids, life
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