The “risky” thing is rarely as risky as it seems.

Jumping from an established company with equity to take a pay cut at a job that is no sure thing might sound insane. And for a while, it did. But the last six months have taught me more than the last three years. I’ve met amazing, ridiculously talented people, have been trying to solve some very big problems, and have generally had a blast. Regardless of what happens in the next few years, I think the scary decision was the right one.

If you have the right partner, you’re 90% of the way there.

Most women would not have been keen on the idea of jumping ship for a startup 4 months before their first child is born. My wife is not one of those people. For the duration of our short marriage, she has been a constant source of encouragement. She believes in me more than I do. And even when I screw up, she helps me get up and try again. It’s hard to overstate how much of an impact the right woman can have on your life.

I learned how to let go of having to be in control of everything

I’ve watched as two extremely capable men have guided Morpho successfully during the last year with very little direct input from me. I’ve watched as Jelly has continued to grow and thrive in the hands of Jeff. I’ve watched how my last company has continued to plug right along after Matt and I left. And while I don’t think I’m any less valuable to a team, I have learned that life goes on without me, and that things can work amazingly well even if I don’t have my grubby hands involved.

Most importantly, I now know what everyone has been saying all these years about becoming a parent.

I know what it feels like to wake up in a cold sweat after a nightmare about your child. I know what it’s like to hear the smallest noise coming from the other side of the house. I know what it’s like to hold a little person for the first time like he’s made of glass.

I know what it’s like to have a dormant, cold heart ripped open. I know what it’s like to discover how selfish you are. I know what it’s like to go from 8 hours of sleep to 4 and not care. I know what it’s like to spend hours trying to come up goals for the next year and constantly thinking to yourself that having a happy, healthy boy is the only thing that matters.

I know what it’s like to admire your wife in a completely new way. I know what it’s like to be extremely grateful for your parents, for taking him when you need to take a walk, for cleaning the house when you don’t have the energy, for giving you encouraging advice yet keeping enough distance to help you figure things out on your own.

I know what it’s like to think about how your son will one day crawl and walk and pretend to be a superhero and go to school and get a bruised knee and fall in love and have his heart broken and go to college and have his views of the world changed and enter the real world and see his colleagues and friends lose heart and watch his grandparents die and walk down the aisle with a woman so beautiful it takes his breath away. And I know what it’s like to simultaneously want him to enjoy everything good in this world and keep him protected from anything bad.

He’s six weeks old, but it feels like he’s been here forever. And life is never going to be the same.

1. Read constantly.

   Pek beat me to it. But whenever colleagues, interns at the office or anyone else ask me what I do to get ahead, the first thing I say is to read. I was taught early on that people succeed or fail during their non-work times. While most people stop reading after school (or while still in school), people who get ahead are constantly seeking out new information.

   They say that creativity is nothing more than taking old ideas and combining them in new ways. In order to do that, you need a large supply of “old ideas” at your disposal.

   If you have an aversion to lugging around books, grab the Kindle (the device itself, or the iPhone app). I was able to tear through 14 books in 90 days after putting the Kindle app on my phone – the reading experience is fantastic, and it saves a ton of space. The only downside is you can’t share your books once you’ve read them.

   Reading also makes you more interesting at dinner parties.

2. Show up an hour early.

   I mentioned this in my previous post on recession-proofing yourself, but it bears repeating. Early in the morning (or late at night) is a great time to tackle work without all distractions – the world is quiet, your mind is more calm and focused. You end up feeling energized for the rest of the day knowing you have a head start on everyone else.

3. Get one important thing done each day.

   This came from Zen Habits, but has been super successful for me since I started doing it. I try to set one goal to accomplish each day that, no matter how effective or ineffective the rest of my days goes, would lead me to consider that day a successful one. It focuses your intention like a laser on the most important things, and helps you avoid being efficient but ineffective.

4. Reframe everything.

   Every project you are given, no matter how small and inconsequential, is an opportunity to do something amazing. Starting in college, I got in the habit of spending time thinking about how to make a project better. A lot of the things I’m most proud of were simple projects that were transformed by asking this simple question at the outset, including:

   • Laying out every class report in InDesign or Illustrator, and often getting them printed at Kinkos.
   • Creating a stand-up comedy contest and a non-profit ad agency for my marketing student group.
   • Creating a custom website as my cover letter and resume to get my job in New York.
   • Making a series of wedding invitation “booklets”.
   • Buying jerseys and renting the high school field for a flag football game the morning of the wedding.

   It’s a self-reinforcing habit as well – by practicing on smaller things you’re more effectively able to reframe larger projects, and your tendency becomes to ask this instinctively at the beginning of something new.

5. Unnetwork:

   A large percentage of my closest friendships these days started at networking functions, and I attribute that to the concept of unnetworking. I never go into an event expecting to grab a bunch of cards and shake a bunch of hands. Instead, I set the goal to meet one super interesting person, try to genuinely connect with them, and then become their friend. I almost never ask for things from them, I try to help them out whenever I can. The goal isn’t to get business from them, but to have a relationship with them, which has way more upside (although it’s often intangible).

   Of course, business opportunities often come up eventually, but they’re for the right reasons – because you have a mutual relationship based on trust and friendship, not elevator pitches and systematic follow-up.

6. Have an inner circle.

   While I have a fair number of friends, I have a much smaller number of folks (as in 4) that I consider my inner circle. The most important criteria has been that they know and largely be in alignment with my values, and are willing to give me honest feedback and keep me accountable.

   Most people think I have a tendency to be too hard on myself. They think that my focus on character development and insistence on trying to become the “right” kind of person is misguided, or a waste of time. Aspiring to a certain standard and being willing to admit that you aren’t living up to it makes most people uncomfortable – they tell you to just be happy and live your life, and that everything is a process, and what’s important is to live in the moment and just… be.

   Which is fine if that’s your perspective, but it isn’t mine. Mine is that I have one life on this earth, that I have certain talents and abilities, and certain weaknesses and vices. And that all of this is for a reason and my job is to use all of that in the best way possible, according to a set of standards that are not ultimately defined by me.

   And in order for me to be successful on my path, I need people who are on the same page, and who are willing to push and be pushed, not who want to convince me that I’m wrong.

   Regardless of your beliefs about who you are, why you’re here and where you’re going, I’d argue an inner circle is vitally important. They help you maintain your sanity when things aren’t going well, they celebrate with you when things are going well, and they keep you focused on the right things. You only need a couple – it would actually be difficult to maintain that level of intimacy with more than a few people. But finding your inner circle is an exercise that’s very much worth the time.

7. Keep a budget, and make your financial goals automatic.

   Three years ago, I returned from my honeymoon with nothing in savings and 8 credit cards that were maxed out. Today my wife and I have no credit card debt and save or invest 40% of what we make. And the secret to that transition was a Google Spreadsheet.

   We started keeping a monthly budget, accounting for every dollar that came and went from our accounts. Having a visual document that you both look at keeps you accountable and honest. And we quickly found that there was a direct correlation between how often we look at it and how diligent we are in implementing it. To this day, if we go a few days without looking at it we resort to our old habits. Which is fun, but ultimately destructive.

   It was important that we set gradual goals each month – cut back $50 here, $100 here. Doing it in increments instead of all at once allowed us to break our old habits and develop new ones.

   In order to knock out debt and accelerate savings, we set aggressive goals for both and made the transfers automatic. Once we took it out of our control, the system ran itself. Of course, every month following a big readjustment we’d screw up and overspend. We gave ourselves an “idiot fund” to accommodate this, and we allowed ourselves a lot of grace. We didn’t let the short term missteps get in the way of the longer term strategy, and that made a huge difference.

8. Whenever you think something bad about someone else, never say it. Whenever you think something great about someone else, always say it.

   The seeds of discord are almost always sown with something trivial. You think something critical, sarcastic or downright mean about someone else, and you decide to say it. Because it feels good – there’s a bizarre joy in it.

   But once it’s out there, it’s in the world. It’s permanent. It causes a small cut in the fabric of a relationship. Enough cuts, and the fabric begins to fray, starts to come apart.

   I get in trouble sometimes for this one, but I believe it wholeheartedly. It staggers me how many people struggle to keep friendships, romances, or family ties together. Close friends of mine talk often of relationship troubles, wishing they could do something about it, but when I offer up this bit of advice, they often reply with “You and Michelle are different. It doesn’t work that way in normal couples.”

   But it can. My wife and I, if we’re honest, get that same temporary high from the sarcastic comment as anyone else. We make a conscious choice not to. Instead, our language with each other is constantly and unceasingly positive.

   Does this make us naive? I don’t think so – we both know that the other isn’t always happy with us. We both know that sometimes we do something stupid, or look silly. We both know that the other knows that guy or girl who just walked by is extremely attractive. But that doesn’t mean you have to say it.

   What everyone wonders, perpetually, is whether they’re good enough. Whether the other person thinks they’re valuable, lovable, beautiful, worthy of their time. Our entire lives are lived with this subtext – am I really worthy of someone’s love? Saying the nice thing every time you think it doesn’t remove this, but it definitely provides assurance. And there’s no downside.

It gives you something to push towards. Or many things. Or some vague nothingness that nonetheless drives you forward.

When things go great, when something is accomplished or a gift given, it’s often almost anti-climactic – the attainment is often less gratifying than the desire that preceded it.

But being unsatisfied isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. There’s a reason why some of the world’s more “successful” people are also the most lonely, the most unsettled. The habit of being unsatisfied becomes so entrenched that long after getting everything they originally set their eyes on, they still feel underwhelmed, like something is missing.

I would argue that what we really need is contentment. Gratitude. A thankful heart.

A thankful heart is what allows you to decide that four cars is enough. Or that one car is. Or (gasp) that public transit is fine.

A thankful heart is what reminds you that another 80 hour work week in the name of providing for your family is silly given that your family already has food, shelter, the ability to see a doctor. Contentment is what compels you to turn the Blackberry off and enjoy an evening or a weekend with your wife and kids who are well fed but desperately miss their dad.

A thankful heart is what helps someone realize that they have enough. That the highest and best use for their resources might not be themselves, but rather people who weren’t given the skills and the intelligence and the discipline and the luck that they were.

Of course the world will never tell us this. We are all bombarded by thousands of messages telling us that we should never be satisfied. Planned obsolescence tells us that the iPhone we were given a year ago is rubbish and desperately needs to be replaced. Advertisements tell us that the key to our happiness is an SUV, some body spray and a television set that can also order you dinner.

It’s even infected religion – the refrain from pulpits is that there is a hole in your heart, a piece of you is missing, and that the answer is God. And that once you’re on the team, you will have a life of abundance, generally measured in dollars. Greed and discontent, hiding behind a dude with a Bible, white teeth and a fake tan.

Problem is the Bible doesn’t say that. Quite the opposite – the people who took God seriously were fed to lions, thrown into fire, crucified, stoned to death, beaten, thrown in jail, exiled or beheaded. The people who wanted to be a part of the movement were told to quit striving for what the world strives for and to be immensely grateful for what they had, to the point that the natural expression of their joy was to share all they had with others.

Abundance never meant money, status or power. Abundance was first and foremost an inward heart of gratitude, and a life of peaceful joy.

While in many ways people back then had it harder than we do, in one way our lives are much more difficult. We live in a part of the world that experiences unprecedented affluence. We literally have everything at our fingertips. We work hard, strive for excellence, are consistently driven to achieve, to attain, to accomplish. We are the wealthiest people who have ever lived. And we’re miserable.

The reason there’s such a gap between the rich and the poor today is because we’re unsatisfied. We’re in the top 1% of the world in wealth but we’re too busy looking up at the .01% to see the 99% below us.

Because we want more. We cling to everything we have and covet what little we don’t. Many of us never even pause to consider that no generation has ever had it this good.

We’re addicted to dissatisfaction.

This Thanksgiving, I’m trying to really think about how ridiculously lucky I am. Trying to step back and realize that there are more important things than stock options or wealth preservation. That my life is, by any reasonable standard, pretty amazing. And I’m hoping to carry that sense of contentment with me into the rest of the year.

It won’t be easy – the media doesn’t want me to be content, many of the people I know (if they’re honest) don’t either. But once you realize that dissatisfaction is a hunger that can never be satiated, the only logical response is to do whatever it takes to learn to be thankful. To quick cold turkey.

Happy Thanksgiving.

It’s something I’ve tried to remedy in the last year, and I’m pleased to say that today I feel much more effective, much more balanced, than I ever have. What follows are the best strategies and tactics that have helped me get there – your mileage may vary, but for me this stuff has represented the best of what I’ve read and tried given my disposition, station in life, etc.

• Start with values

  Part of my problem historically was that I spent considerable time on things that weren’t really that important to me. I’d get stuff done, but it wasn’t stuff that I was proud of, didn’t advance my goals, and didn’t represent what I value in life. So I wrote out what my most important values were. These were more than goals – they were the aspects or values in my life that were important to me, and for which my goals (subconsciously) were trying to facilitate.

  I pick between 3-5 and focus on those for 3 months. The idea is that after 90 days I would have done a lot in a few areas, and developed new habits that would then be ingrained into my life, even as I moved on to addressing other values.

• Translate values into goals

  Each week I tried to make at least goal related to each value. It could a reminder to call someone, or read something, or call for information, etc. As I made these goals, I’d try to schedule them in my calendar. This kept me from having them be vague goals that I wouldn’t get around to. They become appointments that I wanted to keep.

• What’s most important today?

  Each morning I try to think about the most important thing I need to get done that day. I ask myself “If this is the only thing I accomplish, will I feel good about how I spent my day?”

• Eliminate switching costs

  Every time I get interrupted with a phone call or an email, or particularly an instant message, it distracts me from what I’m working on. The time it takes to get re-focused on what I was doing is lost, useless time. So I’ve made a strong effort to eliminate those distractions. When I’m working on something that needs my concentration for a few hours, I turn off IM, I put my phone on silent, and I close my email. When you remove the things that create the distractions, the distractions don’t happen nearly as much.

  That one took a little bit of risk on my part, since there was a risk that people would think I wasn’t doing anything, or was trying to avoid them. But the reverse actually happens – focus leads to increased output, and since a big chunk of what I do is very tangible people think I’m actually working more.

• Focus on one thing at at time

  I’ve found that the switching cost thing impacts many areas of my life – talking to my wife while I’m working means I don’t focus on either and both suffer. So as much as possible, I try to focus on one thing at a time and be fully present. Fully engaged on the phone, fully participating in conversation, fully tuned in to my work, etc.

• Use tools that work for you

  In college I dabbled with a PDA, but just ended up playing that snake game with it. I also bought Franklin Covey plannes, but found I never used them because they were too bulky. Even having a small moleskine didn’t work because I didn’t want to take it with me everywhere. As a result, I never had a system that worked for me.

  That was until the brilliant combination of the iPhone, Omnifocus and Evernote came into my life. I now have a reliable, elegant system for capturing notes, info and things to do wherever I am, without having a bulky planner (or anything other than my phone) at my disposal. Everything syncs up in the cloud so I can access it from wherever I am.

  The point is less about the technology though, and more about the tools that work for me. Many people prefer paper – my wife loves being able to create a list by hand and have the satisfaction of crossing things off as she tackles them. I don’t think she should force herself to use a different system – it works for her.

• Batch email

  Taking a cue from Tim Ferris, Merlin Mann and others, I became obsessive about batching email – I schedule an appointment with myself twice a day where I go through all the emails in my inbox. The goal is to have an empty inbox with everything being read and processed one time. That means replying to emails that I need to reply to, deleting junk, archiving stuff I might need later, and moving stuff I need to do into Omnifocus.

  Having an empty inbox leaves you with a sense that you’re on top of things. And batching it reduces the switching costs I mentioned earlier – you can get a lot more done when you’re doing email and only email vs. email and talking on the phone and working on a design concept.

• Schedule recurring talking appointments

  I used to routinely kick myself for not calling my friends as much as I’d like. And while I’m still working on that, one thing that has helped me is to schedule appointments on my calendar to talk with them. I make them recurring, which means that I don’t have to remind myself that I haven’t talked to someone in a while. My system does it for me.

• Make appointments with yourself

  There are some goals that I’ve always had a hard time with, most notably to read the Bible more and work out regularly. I’m still pretty mediocre at both, but I have found some success by scheduling appointments with myself. Again, if it’s in the calendar it becomes more real to me, and I’ve found it’s much more likely that I’ll do it.

  Even better is to make appointments where you’re on the hook with someone else – a good example is my basketball league. I’ve never been able to keep up a workout regimen for more than a few weeks, but for a year I played in every single game unless I had to be out of town. When you’re accountable to others you don’t miss it nearly as much.

• Delegate everything you can

  This one has been one of the hardest for me to learn, but it’s been extremely helpful. I have a very arrogant and misguided perception that I’m always the person most qualified to do something, and that has gotten me into a ton of trouble. But even if it were true, that doesn’t mean that I should be the one to do it. The fact is that most things don’t need me to do them at all – someone else can do them for me. And either they’ll do them better than I would, or they’ll do them worse and give me an opportunity to teach them how to be better, which makes their lives an career better as well.

  I’ve become much better about delegating stuff at work, and even have started delegating personal stuff as well. A few months ago we started dabbling with an outsourced personal assistant, and it’s been awesome. We don’t use her a ton yet, but we have been able to have her tackle projects that we’ve wanted to do for a long time but never seem to get around to. And for $6 an hour, it’s been completely worth it.

What about you? Do you use any tricks or strategies to be more effective on things that matter to you?

It was a daring, beautiful idea. And I spent the next half hour trying to convince her out of it.

I told her that she needs to consider the risks that doing something like that would involve. What if lunch leads to dinner? What if it leads to them wanting to come over to the house? What if they become a permanent part of our lives? What if they stole from us? What if they tried to hurt us?

As I was talking with her, another dialogue was going on inside my head. I kept thinking about the shame I would feel. If I were that close to someone who had nothing, I’d feel ashamed that I had a nice apartment with nice clothes and fancy gadgets. I’d keep my iPhone off so I wouldn’t have to answer a call in front of them. Sitting next to them, my priorities would be brought into sharp focus. And I don’t think I could handle it.

A friend of mine once asked me how I’d define being poor. I replied with what you’d expect – not having a place to sleep, food to eat, etc. She replied by asking me how long it’d take for me to find these necessities were I to lose everything. Not long, since I could tap my friends and family for those things if I had to. Couple of hours at most.

She said that’s why I’m not poor.

She said that poor isn’t lacking food or a bed. It’s lacking friends. People who love you and want the best for you and are willing to help you out when you’re in a jam. She said that there could be many reasons for the lack of such relationships (mental imbalance, off-putting disposition, etc.) but that’s really what defines being poor. A lack of love. A lack of friendship.

I keep saying I want to have a heart for the poor, want to help out in some way. But all my solutions involve throwing money at the problem and keeping my hands clean. Doing whatever it takes to avoid talking to the poor. And absolutely not inviting them to dinner or to my house.

I’m not proud of the concerns racing through my mind last weekend, but I think they were accurate explanations of what we’re all afraid of. Deep down, we all know that if we actually got to know the poor, it’d be impossible for us to continue to focus on the same things.

Lunch would turn into dinner which would turn into letting them stay with us. Because they’d become our friends and we couldn’t long endure watching our friends suffer like that. If our places were too small, we’d find places for them to stay.

Both of us have had friends who’ve helped us out with rough patches in our lives. They opened their homes to us, helped us look for jobs, bought us meals. We were lacking, but we weren’t poor.

Maybe you don’t fight poverty with money. Maybe you fight it with friendship.

For the last few weeks, Michelle and I have been seemingly inundated with subtle and not-so-subtle hints that something about our lives needs to change. The veil of smoke that I talk so often about seems to have lifted permanently, and we now look at our lives quite a bit differently.

We’re under 30 and we’re part of the top .0001% richest people in the world. We don’t buy a lot of things, but we get to do whatever we want pretty much whenever we want. We get to go on three week vacations to South America, eat out at fancy restaurants in the city. We can buy Christmas presents for our family and not worry about whether we can cover the bill. We have no credit card debt and save about a third of what we make. By all indications we’re doing well.

We spend time with our family and friends. We work hard at our jobs – she’s become an expert in her field already, and I have the job I was told would take 15 years to attain in college. We go to church and participate in a Bible study. We exercise fairly regularly. We read all the time. We’re basically living the life we talked about when we first started dating.

Up until a month ago I would have considered us to be living the perfect life. But then God messed everything up.

Not everyone believes in God or Christianity, and that’s fine. For them, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with the above. But I’ve started to realize that there is something wrong with the above if you are a Christian. Trouble is, almost no one tells you that.

We’re told that we’re supposed to say a prayer and then we get to go to heaven. We’re told that we’re supposed to find nice husbands and wives and have nice, pleasant children together. We’re told that we should give 10% of what we make to the church or some charitable organization, but that the other 90% is all ours to do as we wish, even if that means buying an enormous house and five cars. We’re told that while there are terrible things going on in other parts of the world, there’s nothing we can realistically do other than write checks or pray about it. We’re told that America is God’s country, and when we go and blow people up in God’s name it’s a righteous thing to do.

Again, if you aren’t from my background some or all of that may sound foreign or silly or scary to you. If you did grow up like me, a lot of that sounds familiar.

The problem is that I think it might all be wrong.

I think that there’s a chance that we’ve become “selective hearers”, taking the parts of the Gospel we like, ignoring the parts that we don’t.

I think that there’s a chance Jesus wasn’t speaking in hyperbole when he said that for the rich man to be saved he had to give up everything he had and give it to the poor. I think he might have actually meant it when he said it was easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of Heaven.

I think he might have been serious when he said that the last will be first and the first will be last, which puts me in a pretty bad spot.

I think he might have actually meant it when he said that when you clothed the naked and fed the hungry you were clothing and feeding him….and that by not doing those things you were leaving him hungry and naked.

I think he probably serious when he asked why people call him “Lord, Lord” but then didn’t do what he said.

I think that he would be shocked to see my closet full of clothes when he told us that if we have two coats we should give one to the person who needs it.

I think he meant what he said when he suggested that the Kingdom of Heaven isn’t something that happens when you die, but also begins right here on Earth. I also think that, given how he talked and spent his time, that such a kingdom probably isn’t in large church buildings in the suburbs, but rather in homeless shelters, in elderly homes, in the urban areas of America and the destitute places around the world. In Iraq, Afghanistan, Darfur.

I think that Christ would probably have looked at 21st century America and thought it eerily similar to the Roman Empire, with it’s idea that peace is brought by conquest and that loyalty to the state is the most important thing in the world.

I think he would be shocked to see how Christians wave their flags and shout about killing in the name of God. I think he would wonder how we could have taken what he said about peace and love and reconciliation and turned it into war and revenge and retaliation.

I think he would wonder how we could sit in church and watch some video about African children dying because they lack drinking water, produced by an organization desperately hoping to wake us up, only to find us forget immediately as we leave the service and hop back into our SUVs on our way to brunch.

I think he would look at his church and weep. I think he looks at me and weeps. No wonder so many people think Christianity isn’t attractive – who wants to join a bunch of people who ignore what we claim we believe?

For the first time, my wife and I are looking at a world that is truly broken, and wondering if the way we’re living our lives makes sense in that context. We’re wondering what God plan is for us, given our unique skills, occupying this unique place in time. We’re wondering if there aren’t better ways for us to use our money and free time. We’re wondering what all of this means in the context of our work, entertainment, family, friends.

A lot of larger decisions are way too scary to consider right now. But we have made some small decisions that we’re just starting to explore.

We’re trying to take our commitment to preserving God’s creation seriously. We’re turning our computers off when we’re not using them and running them on the lowest brightness setting when we are. We’re turning off lights we aren’t using and buying energy efficient bulbs. We’re not running the heater (or the AC whenever summer actually arrives). We’re trying to figure out whether it makes sense to have Netflix send us a DVD from 1000 miles away when we have the Internet right in front of us. Or a book. We’re looking into carbon offsets.

I’ve started working from home more often rather than traveling to Evanston just so I can be around people. When it gets warmer, I’m thinking about taking the bike out as an alternative.

We’re going through our closets to see what clothing we can get rid of. We’re looking at our bookshelves to see if there are books that we don’t need that others could use.

We’re going to try and break the bottled water habit. We’re starting to buy only fair trade coffee, or organic tea. We’ve started trying to cut down on the amount of meat we eat, and have started cooking vegetarian recipes. We’re thinking about growing herbs in our back porch.

We’re starting to donate to Living Water international to help dig deep water wells. We’re going to start making meals for the local homeless shelter. We’re considering getting involved in the homeless ministry at our church.

Long term, we’re talking about how we can organize our lives around what God truly finds important. We’re talking about how to get involved in our community instead of moving away from it. We’re talking about what our buying habits should be given the heartbreaking need all around us. We’re talking about how we should approach investing and what constitutes responsible saving versus hoarding, keeping in mind Christ’s desire to live on what you need and use the rest to help others.

These are all small changes, and even they feel a little bit ridiculous given the monstrous difference between how we live and how others live, both across the ocean and across the street. But we have to start somewhere. I’ve detected a pattern in my life where I talk about something long before I do anything about it, and I’m desperately hoping to remedy that. I feel like these small steps are definitely in the right direction.

None of this is being shared to pat myself on the back – in fact, it makes me sad how many things we talked about doing we’ve backed down from. I think we’re barely scratching the surface of this thing, and right now we’re too afraid to do anything huge.

We still have a lot more questions than answers, and honestly we’re really nervous about the direction our lives will take in the next few years. There will undoubtedly be plenty of people who will think we’re strange for not living at or above our means. And while we have no plans to grow out dreadlocks or start smelling strange, there’s a chance some of our friends might think we’re too weird and stop hanging out with us.

I hope you’re not one of them.

So it’s been about six months since I made the switch to a Mac. It’s amazing to think about how much better my work life has been because of it. As someone who designed, coded, etc. on PCs for years, I used to bristle hearing that kind of hyperbole. How could a machine possibly make your life that much better?

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways…

But it really does. Apple spent considerable time thinking about how people actually work. From the way the trackpad works to the ease of switching between apps…you actually enjoy the process of working on the machine. Just off the top of my head, I can point to several considerable advantages.

• The fact that it can be opened and closed in a second without having to completely reboot – I move from place to place fairly often and it’s awesome to be able to pick right up where I left off.
• The ability to open PSD files in Preview (or even directly in Mail) without having to load up Photoshop every time.
• Installing/detecting printers – the NY office has 5 printers on the network. Before it would’ve taken our IT guy 20 minutes sitting in front of my machine to get me up and running. The Mac just finds them on its own, looks for the necessary software and it’s done.
• The dock – I thought it looked silly at first, but it really makes a difference for me. I’ve always hated having a cluttered desktop – having the dock gives me all my common programs instantly available without a ton of icons on my desktop as an ever-present distraction.
• The trackpad – the two finger scrolling, etc. makes navigating around pages so easy.
• App crashes are few and far between, and there’s no bulky spyware software to slow things down.
• Finder makes it ridiculously easy to find whatever I need.
• The keyboard shortcuts – I can control Expose, Finder, etc. super fast, without having to use the trackpad or open anything up.
• The Terminal gives you all kinds of power to get under the hood, in a language most developers are at least somewhat familiar with.
• The love and attention on getting the user experience right was wore off on app developers as well. There is so much free or inexpensive software that is a joy to use, and that play really nicely with the OS (and often each other.)

Love is all around

People find it funny to see someone become such a convert so fast, but it really is such a wonderful machine. But it’s not just the Mac itself that’s made a difference, but the amazing software that is available as well. For anyone who’s a web developer or designer, having a Mac is such an improvement it’s hard to put into words. It’s amazing, but half of the work I do these days is on software I’d never heard of months ago. The ease of use, the gentle learning curve and the feature sets make learning and adopting new software painless.

For both people interested, my current setup includes the following:

• Entourage (I was using Mail.app until last week, when we got set up with an Exchange server at work. Oh well…)
• Photoshop (and lots of paper) for mockup work
• Powerpoint for the frequent presentations (I learned my lesson the hard way after designing three presentations in Keynote only to have to port them over so others could use them.
• Transmit for FTP – haven’t made the switch yet to Coda. For some reason, the integration of all the tools doesn’t seem like that much of an improvement to me. Keep in mind I’m generally wrong.
• Textmate for coding – can’t even begin to express how much I love this.
• Twitterific for keeping tabs on people’s updates
• Journler for writing meeting notes, drafting blog posts, etc.
• Skitch for giving people feedback on mockups or sharing ideas
• Fluid to run stand-alone versions of GMail and Basecamp
• Snapz Pro – this program is one of two that have done the most for me. I use it to record user testing to improve our interfaces, and recently started using it to make screencasts of anything I need to show people. It literally takes less time for me to record a screencast on how to use Wordpress or our Admin at work and send it to someone than it does to call them and explain it over the phone. An absolute life-saver.
• OmniFocus – I would try to explain to you how much I love this application, but you wouldn’t believe me. Let’s just say that if you’ve ever read Getting Things Done, this application will make implementing your trusted system ridiculously easy. I literally have everything I need to do personally or professionally, next week or 6 months from now, in this program. David Allen is right – you have no idea how much less stress you feel when your mind knows where to go to find your list of to-dos and action items.

There are plenty of others that people swear by, like Coda, Adium, Growl, etc. I still don’t get why Quicksilver is the greatest thing in the world, but people love it. But even with the small set of tools I use above, my working days have been transformed.

Needless to say, I’d recommend a Mac to anyone who will listen. It really, truly is that much of a difference.

Anyone who’s known me for a while knows of my consistent efforts to try to make people laugh (some of you have even been unfortunate enough to witness my old days as a stand-up comedian during and shortly after college.) I feel like this is an opportunity to channel that energy trying to make people happy in a direction that I can actually be paid for. It’ll also represent a new challenge, as slapstick has not historically been a strong suit of mine (although it can’t be any less funny than my usual material.)

It obviously will be a huge change for me, not just in terms of my income and the type of work I’ll be doing, but in a philosophical way as well. As one can imagine, there isn’t exactly a career path for clowns – a few make it to traveling circuses (circi?) and the like, but the majority of them stay in their communities locally and perform gigs on a contract basis.
The biggest challenge through all this has been me overcoming my natural drive to want to achieve and move up – it will hopefully teach me some necessary humility and teach me to approach my work more like a craftsman or artisan, less like a businessperson. Although who knows – maybe I’ll eventually leverage my contacts in the industry and create a clown-finder directory site. Not a bad idea…

Thankfully I have the support of my loving wife on this – I was shocked but she was actually really enthusiastic about it. I think she’s secretly excited about being able to use the extra makeup, but she seems really sincere.

So yeah, I’m super nervous, excited, and scared all at once. I’ll continue of course to post my progress through clown school here as I complete the curriculum. I imagine it’ll be pretty interesting…

I’ve been friends with this girl for 10 years, and the entire time her life has been a shining example of someone making a difference. Whether it was working with rape victims in college or helping AIDS patients or teaching African communities about gender equality or planning events to raise money supporting ecotourism and sustainable development or working with Make-A-Wish or genius rats…everything has been about helping others and trying to address some of the largest problems in society today.

When we were in high school together we were often lumped together when people would talk about overachieving students – we were in the same organizations, went to the same functions, were offered the same scholarships.

And then our paths diverged. I decided to go into business and she went into non-profit work. Which would be fine, if we had both held onto the ideals that drove us. But one of us forgot about most of what he cared about. One of us forgot that his life and talents and abilities aren’t ultimately for the benefit of himself but for the world around him.

One of us abandoned service while the other came to epitomize it.

It’s hard realizing how far off that track I went. It’s not just a matter of the organizations you choose to work for – helping kids find a college and then stay in school is a noble enterprise. It’s more about motive – what drives me to do what I do. And if I’m honest with myself, it’s almost entirely about doing work that I enjoy personally and being rewarded for it – no more, no less.

My wife and I talk often about our goals – what we think we want to be doing in 5 years, 10 years. And until recently, those conversations centered around where we wanted to live, what kind of house we wanted, the places we wanted to visit, when the right time would be to have little ones, etc. When work came up, I’d talk about the entrepreneurial venture I’d start that’d bring me excitement and challenges (and if I’m honest, rewards for my bank account and my ego.)

I recently heard a sermon talking about this couple that followed a similar path. They worked hard and saved and were able to retire early, and spend the rest of their lives traveling around the world, gathering photos and seashells and memories of wonderful food and activities. And when they died and got to Heaven, God asked them what they did with their lives, with the time granted them. All they could offer him was a handful of pretty seashells. The pastor’s conclusion – “What a colossal waste of life.”

Thankfully, those conversations in my house have started to change. I’m realizing (or more accurately remembering) that my life is supposed to be about more. I ache with sadness at the countless opportunities passed by over the last 10 years, but am starting to be encouraged about what I can do with my life in the future.

Though it will certainly manifest itself differently, I’m hopeful I will have the courage to follow in Courtney’s footsteps. I know there are no shortage of sedatives lurking around every corner, aiming to knock me back into a stupor of comfort and safety and self-centeredness until I wake up an old, greedy, miserable man. They’re opiates I’ve fallen for hundreds of times in these 10 short years, and it will certainly take effort to force my brain off the well-established track it’s found itself on.

It will require substantial changes in habits, in my choices about how I spend my time, what I read, what I dream about. It will require a lot of learning and re-learning – It’s been so long since I focused on things outside of my own needs and wants that I haven’t the faintest idea what directions I should start directing my energy and free time.

Luckily I’m not alone – I have a small group of people that can serve as my inspiration and sounding board, my muse and my source for accountability. And in my wife I have the most concentrated ball of energy and support and love anyone has ever been fortunate enough to be around. And ultimately I have a God that has probably been waiting for me to wake up for a long time, and that wants more than anything to take the special gifts he’s given me and use them to make the amazing creation that is his world a little better.

But recently, I started thinking about a similar word – disciple. I’m not sure which one came first, but I found it odd that while I always considered myself a person of discipline, I never considered myself a disciple. Truthfully, I never wanted to be.

I bet that people in the first century would have found that odd. I bet that back then, if you were a follower of Christ it was assumed that you would be a disciple. After all, to be a disciple means to, slowly and over time, become the kind of person who thinks and acts like the person they are following. And if you believed that Christ was who he said he was and took seriously his command to put down your nets, pick up your cross and follow him, it would seem that becoming a disciple was not the exception but the rule.

But somewhere along the way that changed. Perhaps it happened hundreds of years ago after Christians stopped being nailed to crosses or stoned to death or fed to lions in front of angry crowds. Perhaps it happened in the 20th century as humanism (and man’s happiness and comfort) became the objective of mankind. Who knows. But at some point it became not just accepted but normal to be a believer but not be a disciple.

To think one way but do (or not do) another.

To talk the talk but not walk the walk.

To call Christ your master but ignore his desire for your life.

I know this has been the case for me, and it has been the case for just about everyone I’ve ever met. The arguments against discipleship almost immediately bubble up – that not everyone is called to do that, that I don’t feel God leading me in that direction, etc etc etc.

But the more I’ve thought about it, the more wrong I think that is. The more wrong I think I’ve been my entire life.

You see, Christ rarely talks about heaven, about a life after death. He spends the majority of his time talking about how to bring heaven here to earth – about how by loving each other and caring for the poor and seeking peace and avoiding anger and sharing our gifts and talents with each other we can bring God’s kingdom to our world now.

But very few Christians (myself included) don’t live this way. For us, Christianity is about saying “the prayer” so we don’t go to hell, and then living our lives pretty much the same way we would have otherwise. Only with less cursing. Out loud at least.

Some go further and talk about “growing in their walk with God”, but that doesn’t really mean much other than going to church and praying more often and reading the Bible some more. And when we’re not doing that we’re still ignoring the homeless guy en route to our fancy cars with the bags of fancy clothes in the back that we’ll try on when we get back to our fancy house, careful not to brake too fast lest we spill our fancy coffee drink in our laps and ruin our fancy pants.

No wonder so many people think God is dead. Our lives are no different than they would be if we believed in the tooth fairy. We’re not disciples, we’re just believers. And we sit here, watching Season One of 30 Rock for the third time after another long week at work, waiting to die.

I think there’s another way.

A way that starts with a decision to actually take God up on his offer. A decision to actively learn to walk and talk and act and think the way that Christ did. A decision to become a disciple.

It’s a very recent realization, and I haven’t the slightest idea what a life like that would be like in modern America. But I imagine it involves constructing my days quite differently than I currently do.

I imagine it means not sleeping in until 11 on Saturday, or spending three hours getting my butt kicked by a 9 year-old in Madden football on a Sunday afternoon.

I imagine it means centering my life around the same disciplines of study, prayer, solitude, fasting, simplicity, and the like that hundreds of Christians before us have used to draw closer to God.

I imagine it means working my tail off at work, not for a promotion or money or equity or bragging rights but because God gave me breath and and a brain and the ability to make things look pretty and words sound compelling.

I imagine it means being much slower to anger, not allowing myself the demented joy that comes from holding a grudge.

I imagine it means sitting down with my wife and honestly assessing how we spend our money, and determining how much we’d need to give away in order to truly be stewards instead of misers.

Most importantly, I imagine it means asking God what he really wants me to do with my life – what my part to play is in this grand plan to bring heaven to earth.

I imagine it means to stop sitting on the sidelines.

Belief is easy. Following is much more difficult.