Sean Johnson :: Intentionally – Live on Purpose

While I have a considerable freedom in working remotely, I realized that I don’t take nearly as much advantage of that gift as I should. Specifically, even though I’m able to get a considerable amount of work done in a brief period of time (since I don’t have nearly as many meetings or interruptions as I did when I was in the office, and since I’m a “sprinter” by nature), I fill up the time savings in extremely unproductive and stupid ways – reading Digg, playing video games on the XBox, batting at a ball of yarn, etc. The result is that though I have a ton of flexibility in how I structure my life, I have little to show for it other than a high ranking in NBA live and a very comprehensive knowledge of all things Ron Paul related.

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 planners, 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?

Additional resources for managing your time

Getting Things Done was the book that started me down my path of time management enlightenment. It’s fairly complicated to get set up, but the benefits of “next action thinking” and the weekly review have been immensely valuable for me.

The Power of Less is simple and to the point. I got particular value from his conversation on focusing on one thing at a time. It seems intuitive, but I found myself constantly struggling to maintain focus. The upside of forcing yourself to eliminate distractions is immense.

The Four Hour Workweek isn’t just about time management, but it does go into detail about how to eliminate 90% of the “stuff” that you do that’s unnecessary. Batching email came from here, as did my dabbling with a personal assistant.

Last weekend my wife and I had a pretty intense conversation over bagels and coffee. She told me that she’d like to start inviting homeless people out to eat occasionally. Instead of simply giving them some money and moving on with her day, she was seriously contemplating inviting them to lunch or dinner, sitting down with them in a restaurant and getting to know them over a meal.

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.

The phrase “human resources” pretty much encapsulates everything that is wrong with a traditional HR department. It implies impersonal, cold, calculating. It suggests that a company’s employees are resources to be utilized as much as possible, and discarded when their useful life is up. Kind of like a copy machine, except with dreams and goals and kids.

The ever brilliant Tom Peters long ago suggested changing the name to “Talent Department”. Imagine what would happen if you did that.

True, the typical HR professional would still have to spend considerable time dealing with legal issues, making sure the company doesn’t put itself in a position to be sued or taken advantage of. The necessary contracts and policies would still need to exist. But I’d like to think that a subtle psychological shift would take place.

I’d like to think that the folks in the Talent Department would come to realize that there is a world of difference between a good worker and a great one. They’d figure out that Bill Gates was right, that one fantastic engineer or programmer or account manager or accountant is worth 15 mediocre ones.

Once they figured that out, they’d probably bend over backwards to keep those folks. They’d throw out the talk about pay being consistent with market value and pay those people what they’d pay three of their crappy counterparts. They’d get over the old Prussian-based notions that suggest that people can work effectively in tiny cubes for 9 hours a day. They’d realize that one’s ability to work from a coffee shop or a park bench or a home or Maui isn’t a liability but for the right person is a key unlocking tremendous creative potential.

Tom Peters also predicted that within 10 years, 90% of white collar jobs would either be eliminated (via outsourcing and technology) or dramatically changed. He might have been a few years off, but it’s not hard to see much of that happening today.

The implications of that for a company is that many of those functions lose their competitive advantage. As the technology becomes ubiquitous and a truly global organization becomes a reality, the functions those white collar jobs used to perform become commodities.

What remains is a (most likely much smaller) group of highly competent, highly creative, driven, passionate people doing the imaginative, daring work that can never really be outsourced. And the pursuit of those people will become the most important thing that any HR department could do to.

But if the mindset of the department doesn’t change from one of fitting cogs into proverbial wheels… if it doesn’t decide to focus most of it’s energy into finding the most startlingly talented people and doing what it takes to keep them… then the most buttoned-up contracts and policies in the world won’t make a difference.

In the next 10 years, the Talent Department will likely become one of the primary sources of value generation in a company. At least for the ones that figure it out.

I’m starting to think that the reason so many people have a hard time with Christianity and Christians is that we’re not really Christians.

We live in the most powerful country in the world, perhaps in the history of the world. We have prosperity, a massive military, and are the world’s only true superpower.

We call ourselves a Christian nation. “In God We Trust” is printed on our money. Our president is sworn in with a Bible. We say the pledge of allegiance as a nation “under god.” The identity of the church has been grafted into the fabric of America to the point that the majority of Christians have a hard time distinguishing between the two.

But here’s the crazy thing – the story of the Bible is the story of a God who never associated himself with a superpower. He wanted a people “set apart” from the world, a people with no king other than Himself, a people who did not hoard their money, did not fight their enemies, who tried to love people and reflect God’s glory in everything they did.

The early church understood these things, and tried to embody them. They lived during the peak of the Roman empire – a nation similar in might and prosperity. And they did everything they could to set themselves apart from it. Consider the following – how many of these statements sound like anything you’ve ever heard from a Christian or a church?

“The Christians form among themselves secret societies that exist outside the system of laws.” ~ a letter to Origen

“He called Abraham and commanded him to go out from the country where he was living. With this call God has roused us all, and now we have left the state. We have renounced all the things the world offers” ~ Justin Martyr

“You cannot demand military service of Christians any more than you can of priests. We do not go forth as soldiers wit the Emperor even if he demands this” ~ Origen

“I recognize no empire of this present age” ~ Speratus

“I do not wish to be a ruler. I do not strive for wealth. I refuse offices connected with military command.” ~ Tatian

“All of us throughout the whole wide earth have traded in our weapons of war. We have exchanged our swords for plowshares, our spears for farm tools.” ~ Justin Martyr

“The professions and trades of those who are going to be accepted into the community must be examined. The nature and type of each must be established… brothel, sculptors of idols, charioteer, athlete, gladiator… give it up or be rejected. A military constable must be forbidden to kill… a proconsul or magistrate who wears the purple and governs by the sword shall give it up or be rejected.” ~ Hippolytus

“You who are God’s servants are living in a foreign country, for your own city-state is far away from this city-state. Knowing which is yours, why do you acquire fields, costly furnishings, buildings and frail dwellings here? … Acquire no more here than is absolutely necessary. Instead of fields, buy for yourselves people in distress in accordance with your means.” ~ Hermas

“We who formerly treasured money and possessions more than anything else now hand over everything we have to a treasury for all and share it with everyone who needs it. We who formerly hated and murdered one another now live together and share the same table. We pray for our enemies and try to win those who hate us.” ~ Justin Martyr

“The desire to rule is the mother or heresies” ~ John Chrysostom

“Emperors could only believe in Christ if they were not emperors – as if Christians could ever be emperors.” ~ Tertullian

All of this started to change with Constantine, who claimed to be a Christian, slapping crosses on his army’s shields as they expanded the Roman empire. Theodosius later made Christianity the state religion and made it a crime to not be a Christian. Every soldier was soon required to be a Christian. Charlemagne instructed his “Christian” armies to kill pagans who did not choose to be baptized.

One wonders if the last 1700 years have been an enormous, heartbreaking exercise in missing the point. The Crusades, the Inquisition…the War on Terror. Christianity has been so thoroughly co-opted, morphed, twisted that we don’t even realize it. We praise the words of Christ and Paul and then immediately ignore much of what they said.

What if every Christian you ever met was living violently opposed to their God and didn’t even realize it?

Perhaps the only thing scarier than knowing that your life must change is to start changing.

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.

After spending the past few weeks talking about my life and the direction I want to go in long-term, and after a number of intense, heartfelt conversations with my wife about our goals as a family, I made a decision to change careers and become a clown.

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 had a long conversation with my old friend Courtney last night. She’s heading down to Tanzania for six months, her second trip to the country. This time she’s helping an organization that trains rats to a) find and detonate land mines, and b) identify tuberculosis (apparently by smelling a petri dish with a saliva sample they can correctly identify TB with a higher success rate than doctors.)

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.

One of my favorite words for years has been discipline. I love the idea of someone being so passionate about something that they’re willing to spend hours every day working on it. A skill or talent that takes years to develop. Overcoming one’s urges or addictions little by little and prevailing. Chasing a dream that to many seems foolish and finally attaining it by working harder than everyone else.

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.