Scott Porad

My grandma turns 91 today.

Ninety One.

Just think about how much has changed in 91 years.  Every single piece of technology that is being used for me to create this blog post, and for you to consume it…not a single one of them existed then.

There were no phones, smart or otherwise, no cars, no NFL, no…I wonder if they had radio in 1919?  Sure, they must of had radio.  Yes, absolutely they did.  But they didn’t have all these fancy kitchen appliances or fancy automobiles.

And, as far as I can tell from TV (which they didn’t have back then either) all their clothes were shades of grey.  Can you imagine that?  My grandma didn’t even have color!

Awhile ago I asked my grandma about The Great Depression and she said, “well, it didn’t seem as bad as it does now because nobody had as much of anything back then”.

More recently, she told me that her grandfather (my great, great grandfather) had a men’s clothing store.  I did not know that.  When I asked what ever happened to it she replied, “it went out of business in The Depression, [you idiot,] what do you think happened to it?”

My grandma comes from a different era; and era where ladies were far too polite to actually say, “you idiot”, but her tone of voice subtly conveyed the message just the same.

Thing is, I wonder if they had more happiness back then.

I had coffee this morning with a friend who is looking for work.  (He’s a great guy…10 years at Amazon.com…if you’re looking for someone, let me know!)

As we talked, we came to the subject of “job listings” which are so impersonal.  For a professional, they feel like a pretty bogus way of getting a job.  Or, at least, uncertain and unreliable.

Of course, my thought was that it’s all about who you know…networking.  Essentially, my view is that personal relationships are what will lead to the next opportunity.

After coffee, I came into the office, was reading the paper, and came across David Brooks’ most recent column that addresses the impacts of the recession on people:

Recessions test social capital. If social bonds are strong, nations can be surprisingly resilient. If they are weak, things are terrible. The U.S. endured the Great Depression reasonably well because family bonds and social trust were high. Russia, on the other hand, was decimated by the post-Soviet economic turmoil because social trust was nonexistent.

Brooks illustrates my point in a macro-way, and both of us are simply expressing the point Lisa made when she said people and relationships keep you safe.

Finally, Brooks writes about the impact that social media has on the situation:

Facebook is great, but social networking sites do not by themselves create support networks when jobs disappear and poverty looms.

and notice the exact words he uses: “support networks”.  A “support network” is something different than a “social network”.  The support network is what we’re really talking about here.

Following up on yesterday’s post about how to make successful New Years Resolutions, I wanted to add some wisdom from the Agile community.

As background, Agile is a software development methodology.  One part of Agile is that you take a big project and break it up into little pieces.  (Have you heard this before?  The journey of a thousand miles takes a million steps.)  Agile refers to each of these little pieces as “stories”.

INVEST is a heuristic for writing good stories.  In other words, it’s a way to effectively break the big journey up into little pieces.  What is INVEST?

• Independent
• Negotiable
• Valuable
• Estimable
• Small
• Testable

Let me try to illustrate each of these:

Independent — Make each goal independent of your others goals.  Simply put, creating dependencies makes things harder to achieve.

Negotiable — Don’t make your goals so specific that you’re locked into plans that can’t be made.  Be flexible.  Compare these examples, “I resolve to exercise for 60 minutes per week” versus “I resolve to exercise Monday, Wednesday and Friday mornings for 20 minutes”.  Suddenly you’re too busy with work on Wednesday and now you’re beating yourself up for not keeping your resolution.

Valuable — One very good way of creating resolutions that will fail is to create resolutions that you don’t value.  Be honest with yourself: if you don’t care about improving your health, then you’re not going to exercise…neither “get in shape” or “go to the gym this week” will be successful resolutions.

Estimable — If you can’t figure out what it’s going to take to achieve the goal, then it’s unlikely that you’ll be able to find the time to do it.  When can you schedule “get in shape” on your calendar…between 5-6 on Tuesday?  Unlikely.  “Go to the gym this week” can be estimated…it will take one hour, so it can be put on the calendar.

Small — If you read this space, you know I’m an advocate of smaller efforts resulting in greater success.  “Get in shape” is a big goal, but “go to the gym this week” is small.  Small goals can be achieved, crossed off a list, and feel good…it feels good to succeed…success begets success.

Testable — How will you test or confirm that you’ve achieved this goal?  “Get in shape”….what does that mean?  When have you achieved that?  “Go to the gym once per week” is very testable…you can prove to yourself and others that it has been achieved.  (Be careful—Testable can cross swords with Negotiable leading to pitfalls.)

Obviously, there is no perfect resolution, but INVEST provides good guidelines for creating resolutions that will succeed.

Randy just wandered into my office, as he often does, and made the comment:

I don’t make New Years Resolutions because they’re bound to fail.  Look at it outside—how can you resolve to start exercising when it looks like that!  Perhaps in May or June, but not now.  They should be Mid-Year Resolutions.

He has a point: the weather is seriously ugly today, but I don’t think that’s why New Years Resolutions fail.

New Years Resolutions fail because we try to complete the journey in a single step.  After weeks, months or years of sitting on the couch, we resolve to “exercise daily and lose 20 pounds”.  Yeah, right…I’m sure that’s going to happen.

No, it’s not.  Let’s be honest with ourselves: that New Years Resolution is bound to fail, almost for certain.  You know the resolution that will succeed, try this:

Since I haven’t exercised in [weeks, months, years], I’m going to go to the gym once this week.

Now, that, my friends, is a resolution that will succeed!  It is specific and achievable, and small enough that know that you can fit it into your busy schedule.

If I have said it once, I have said it a thousand times: the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.  Resolve to take the first step.  Don’t resolve to complete the journey, resolve to get it started.

Lately I’ve been thinking: what is the difference between an optimist and a pessimist?  The answer lies in how they deal with adversity.

When an optimist faces a setback, a loss, or a failure they look at the specific situation and consider the setback temporary. It’s no matter, they think…next time will be a success.

In the same situation, a pessimist thinks of the setback as permanent and global.  I’ll never be able to do this, they think…I’m doomed.

When I’m feeling down—and let’s be honest, we all feel down from time-to-time—I remind myself: global and permanent versus specific and temporary, that’s the difference.

Then, I try to change my outlook by looking for the specific and temporary aspects of the situation.  When I am able to do this effectively, it feels really good.  I feel better knowing that clouds will pass and sunny days will come again.

A young man introduced himself to me after my presentation at BlogWorld Expo. We sat down to talk and he explained that he was an engineer at an aerospace firm, but wants to get into blogging…

…he was at BlogWorld to learn and explore options…a blog, a podcast, a video podcast…he was trying to figure out what the best thing to do…to figure out something that had the greatest chance of success given the amount of time he could put forth as a side-project…

…after learning about Cheezburger from my presentation, he considered user-generated content…perhaps it would be easier to identify quality content as opposed to generate it. “Maybe that would work,” he wondered aloud.

Until this point, I listened. New to the world of blogging and social media, his mind was brimming with new ideas. I could see the gears turning as he worked out this thoughts aloud. But, when he said the phrase, “that would work” I jumped in.

“There is only one thing that works,” I said, being really forward. “Do you want to know what it is?”  Dramatic pause.

The only thing that works is doing the something you love.

Whatever you choose to do, it’s going to be hard. At first, there will be very few people paying attention, if any, and it’s unlikely that you’re going to make any money.

You have to do something that makes you happy all by itself; something that you enjoy enough that you’ll done it for free.  Inevitably there are going to be tough times, and as I’ve written before, if you’re not passionate about your project then you won’t persevere because your heart won’t be in it.

It’s my birthday today, and yesterday my family came over to celebrate.  As I was waiting for them to arrive, I sat on my front deck for a bit thinking about the past year, and the one coming.

Where my thinking let me is to the phrase I find myself saying nearly every day: the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.  Typically, that phrase is the motivation I use to jump in and get something started, but this time it was different.

On a journey of a thousand miles, there are many steps in between the first and last.  What occurred to me is that sticking with the journey and persevering is just as hard as starting it, if not harder.

Often I’m discouraged because I haven’t arrived at my destination, haven’t achieved my goals.  But, many of the goals we have in life don’t have an actual destination.  I suppose really the discouragement is because I fail to see how the current step is helping me along my way to my destination.  Perhaps the phrase should be the journey of a thousand miles takes a million steps.

My goal for the coming year is look at the glass half-full in this regard: to become better at appreciating how what I’m doing is moving me toward my destination, as opposed to the half-empty view of only looking at how I have not achieved my goals yet.

The post I wrote about quitting your job is one of the most popular I’ve ever written in this space.

I’ve received e-mails from a few people about the post, and some of the things they wrote scared me.  My goodness, I’m telling all these people to quit…I feel sort of responsible for that.

Of course, I’m not responsible: they’re adults and make their own decisions.  But, what if they quit based on my advice, and can’t find a job, and go broke and homeless.  That’s a lot of weight to carry around, so I feel compelled to write this follow up.

The very most important thing to note about my friend Mark was that he had a financial backstop: it was his wife.   Because she was employed and could support them completely, his family was not going to go broke and homeless.

Take that lesson to heart: only quit your job if you have a financial backstop that is very deep.  If you have only 3 months of cash in savings, I’d say you probably shouldn’t just go quit your job.  If you have 12 months…well, maybe, that’s up to you, but I’d say it’s borderline.

Now, let’s say you don’t have the financial backstop: that doesn’t mean you can’t start looking for a new job.  As I’ve written before, change doesn’t happen by itself.

So, take that first step: update your resume and apply for a new job.  That doesn’t mean you have to take the job if offered, or even go to the interview if invited.  It’s just the first step on a long journey, nothing more, nothing less.

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Yesterday, I was trying to talk my friend Mark into quitting his job, and was reminded of a Chris Brogan a post about how You are the Captain of your life:

…no one is actively trying to move you up from where you are to where you want to go, until after you take command of your own ship

Yes, in this economy, I want him to quit.  Why?  Because he can and it’s ruining his life.  Let me break those down:

Because He Can

Mark’s wife is a well respected doctor working at a hospital where she is a nationally known expert in her field.  So, I asked him, “Mark, how long could you live on her salary before you ran out of money?”  “Forever”.  Okay, so problem solved: quitting his job, and spending time, perhaps months, looking for a new one is not a financial issue.

Because It’s Ruining His Life

The nature of Mark’s job is that he spends about 4 hours of every work day dealing with irate customers who as often as not treat him rudely.  After 10 years of this, Mark’s job has made him dislike people.  In general, he’s come to conclude that people are, on average, not very nice, so short of his few friends he doesn’t want anything to do with ‘em.

To me, this is heart breaking.  As I’ve written previously, people are all we have in this life, so you do the math: if people equal life, then a job that ruins people are ruining his life.

Then Why Won’t He Quit?

That’s a great question, and I don’t know the answer.  If he’s not doing the job for happiness, and he’s not doing it for money, and he’s not doing it altruistically, then I don’t know why he’s doing it.  I can speculate on a number of reasons, but the bottom line is that he’s scared.

He’s scared that he won’t find another job. (Wrong!  He’s in sales and account management!  If you can sell, you can work!)  He’s scared that his wife will think him less of a man for quitting.  (Wrong!  Your wife, more than anyone, wants you to be happy!)  He’s scared of change.  (Wrong!  Change is like Death and Taxes…it can’t be avoided, so use it as a tool to your advantage.)

You know the real thing to be scared of: when you there is no excuse to stop you–not the money, not the spouse, not nothing…spending your natural gifts, talents and potential–your life, for goodness sake!!–on a job that neither makes you rich or happy or makes the world a better place.  Seriously, what is there to lose?  Nothing.  There’s only happiness to be gained.  Life is too damn short otherwise.

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This week, I sat down for an hour to talk with Erica O’Grady of ReinventingErica.com about how to use change as a tool for achieving greater happiness.  Here’s a summary of what we talked about.

• Nobody is going to change for you. Claiming personal responsibility is possibly the most important ingredient of change.  Say to yourself: I am the only person who is going to change this thing; there is nobody who will make me happy but me.
• Change is incremental. The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.  For example, losing weight doesn’t happen all at once–it happens one pound at a time.  Change can seem overwhelming, so break it into small, achievable tasks.
• An object in motion tends to stay in motion. Focus on making small changes because each small change results in positive feedback creating momentum that leads to the next.  The key is to take action to begin the momentum. After taking the first step, the second step will be easier.

It was a wonderful conversation, and when Erica makes the video of the conversation available, I’ll post it here.