They’re separated into three categories: business, life, and how I work.

Business

Why I gave away my company to charity

Two friends were at a party held at the mansion of a billionaire. One said, “Wow! Look at this place! This guy has everything!” The other said, “Yes, but I have something he’ll never have: enough.”

I always make sure to read this article first because it helps me think about having enough. Right now, I constantly imagine how my life could be better. I could have a nicer car or a bigger laptop screen or a family of my own. Through storytelling, Derek reminds me that there is more to life than things and wanting more. I’m always wanting more, but I will someday be completely happy with everything I have.

Profitable and proud: Campaign Monitor

While the financial success has been great, there are other aspects of the business that I would consider more of a success personally. I genuinely still love what I do. I work with interesting, funny people. My wife and I are expecting our first child soon and I can work the hours I want. For me these things are much better indicators of a successful business than anything on a spreadsheet.

I do what I do to make money. That’s how I gauge my success, but that isn’t my end goal. The end goal is my happiness and money is just one thing that contributes to that. You couldn’t beg me to take a $250,000 a year job if I wasn’t going to love what I was doing. Too many people chase a paycheck and realize too late that there is more to life than that piece of paper you get every two weeks. Dave from Campaign Monitor helps me understand that money isn’t the only thing that will determine how successful I am.

Life

Making the Clackity Noise

Tell me something that happened. Use the names of people you’d forgotten about, and say what you’d thought would happen but didn’t. Write down what part of the song was playing when you slammed the door only to realize you had to go back inside for your car keys. Can you remember when you were still little enough to hide under the kitchen sink where it smelled like ammonia and Comet and old sponges? What was the color of the clunky old car your Dad would let you help steer. What brand did he smoke?

Merlin never ceases to inspire me as a writer. If I’m down to earth, he’s slightly below that. The best writing I seem to do is when I sit down at the computer and type. I write about whatever I’m thinking at the moment. Most of it is crap, but the good parts always float to the top.

That’s how I won a $1,500 scholarship for school. I had to write a two-page essay about what we wanted to do in life. So I just sat outside one day with my laptop and started typing. I typed for 20 minutes, proofread it for another 10 and handed it in. My professor who picked the winners said it was some of the best writing he’s ever seen. That’s the last time I make an outline for a 5-paragraph essay like they beat into my head in high school. From now on, I’ll just tell a story.

I need to make that clackity noise more often.

Life is Beautiful

This tune we’re too busy to hear will not be played again. Never forget to be thankful for your life.

It’s something we hear thousands of times, but it’s something that too many people forget in the daily hustle. They get distracted by what direction their career is headed instead of enjoying the simple, meaningful things like family and friendship.

I’m guilty of this as well. I convince myself that I’ll only be this busy until I save up more money and then I can carry on. It’s only temporary, right? I’m still wrestling with the line between work and life. Work is winning right now, but I’m determined not to let that rule my short time doing the “proton dance.”

How I work

Playing is Serious

Fooling around is serious stuff, whether it’s for the sake of our work or for the sake of our sanity. Don’t get me wrong: design can be serious stuff, and every professional has the right to take their craft seriously. But, somewhere in the myriad of analysis and tight deadlines, we’ve revoked our permission to play around with ideas and experiment.

And that’s unfortunate. Everyone needs a sandbox, somewhere they can try out new ideas without any consequences. I haven’t discovered how I play best and maybe that’s not what playing is about. Maybe I shouldn’t be trying to optimize my play-to-work ratio. Maybe play can be more productive and improve my real work in the long run.

Better

The things that are meant to make you feel more connected today often turn out to be insubstantial time sinks – empty, programmatic encouragements to groom and refine your personality while sitting alone at a screen.

Funny how all this social media makes me more anti-social. I’d rather Facebook message someone I haven’t talked to in a while than give them a call or meet them for coffee. I talk to people on Twitter who I’ve never met in person and sometimes I enjoy that more than talking to a friend I haven’t seen in a while. Maybe I need to go on a digital diet.

Hey speedy, slow yourself down

I needed to set a new pace. I need to balance the quality with the quantity. I need to say NO to projects, time lines and budgets. I need to pay attention to the details and prevent stupid mistakes.

I’m going through the same thing Kyle went through. I’m concentrating on being efficient and productive, but I give very little thought to actually making something I’m proud of. I haven’t updated my portfolio in a while for a reason.

I have recently been sacrificing quality under the pressure of deadlines and project budgets.

But my current project is going to be my best yet. How am I going to make it the best? Magic probably. Or I’ll take my time to go over every little design element and HTML tag to make it the best that it can be. I know I can do better.

10 Ideas in January

Be picky in work relationships. Realize that agreeing to unfair circumstances not only hurts you, but your peers as well, because it pushes what is acceptable behavior in the wrong direction.

I need to learn how to say no. I rarely turn down a project because I always think it’s going to be my last offer. I’m stuffing my stomach with every last bit of work in case there’s nothing else left to eat.

At least that’s what I tell myself. Really my project opportunities have never been better, and with my constant hunger for learning, they’re only going to keep getting better. I’m beginning to get used to that feeling.

De-optimizing

What if my bookmarks were hard to get to? What if I stripped all the links out of the article I’m reading? What if I had to solve an algebra problem before jumping into Google Reader? Would I go? What if every time I turned on my TV, it told me that the average American spends 2 months watching television per year? Would I watch?

What if I could only check Twitter once a week? What if I couldn’t eat dessert before eating all my vegetables? What if I didn’t have internet for a day? Smells like freedom to me and I’d like to give that a shot.

Stay up to date with my text playlist with the RSS feed. I’d love to see your text playlist.

In my mind, curating goes beyond a collection of great things. Curating is picking the best of the best after well thought-out deliberation. It isn’t just letting anything acceptable climb the imaginary wall of greatness.

Curating is separating the art from the noise: cherry-picking the stuff that really matters out of an endless stream of blah. And that art can be anything. A website. A tweet. Anything a human is responsible for making can be art, but it isn’t considered art by default.

If you’re writing about web application usability to people who might not understand what that means, the dictionary definition isn’t going to help them. It may be right, but it isn’t useful.

Instead explain it in your own words to ease your reader into the topic. Eliminate jargon like “accessibility” and “user personas” to get down to the basics. All the sexy buzz words come later.

Copying and pasting a definition is the lazy way out. Think about how you would explain it to someone who has no idea what you’re talking about and use that as your introduction.

Try these:

1. Hold the door for someone, even if they are 15 seconds from getting to the door. The awkward eye contact and shy smiles will put you both in a good mood.
2. Let someone go ahead of you in traffic. People merging onto a crowded highway tend to think they have the right of way. They don’t, but why not be nice and let them go. Traffic is stressful enough.
3. Thank people. Always, thank people. I find it rude if you hold the door or elevator for someone and they do not thank me. The phrase is two words, but it weighs more than the 8 letters that make it up.
4. Buy your romantic partner flowers on the way home from work. Or chocolate. Or a DVD. Or a book they’ve been eyeing.
5. Compliment someone. Guys: You’d be surprised how far a small compliment goes to improve the mood of the women around you. Try “I like how you did your hair today” or “Your eyes look very blue today.”
6. Start a conversation while waiting in line (queue as they say in Europe).
7. Pick up a piece of trash rolling along the sidewalk.
8. Let the mother behind you with three fidgety kids go ahead of you in the grocery line. You can wait another 5 minutes and her being 5 minutes closer to wrangling her kids into the car would mean the world.
9. Randomly buy your friends something little. My friend bought me a CD a couple years ago and gave it to me straight from the Amazon package while we were checking our mail together. The CD was awesome and the gesture makes me crack a smile to this day.

Imagine the power to improve the world if everyone did one of these each day.

What would you add to this list?

Update: Unit Interactive released a site where people post something that made their day. I’m surprised how many of those things are little things that would take less than five minutes to do. Five minutes for 24 hours of happiness. Sounds like good ROI to me.

One space helps your writing flow better because the reader doesn’t get distracted by the unnecessary white space.

Generalizations (as in “Most user don’t know what a double click is.”) are worse than not writing anything at all. They mean nothing and waste the reader’s time. On the internet, having a reader spend time on your site is a privilege. Write wisely.

Common Offenders

• Research shows that – “Research shows that IE6 is one of the most popular browsers ever.” – If research does actually support your argument, cite it. Otherwise, don’t make it up.
• Most – “Most users don’t scroll below the fold.” – ‘Most’ is unspecific. It could mean 51% or 99.99%. Use a more specific number instead, even if it’s an informal survey of your friends or your past experiences (I find that 55% of my readers don’t scroll below the fold.)
• More – “More often than not a user doesn’t even go to a second page.” – If it’s true, prove it. Cite the source or your experience. Make it a more specific statement.
• A lot – “A lot of wars have happened in the past.” – The phrase ‘a lot’ is relative. Does it mean 5? 150? 700 billion?
• Some say – The only one who can pull this off is Jeremy Clarkson when he introduces the Stig. (Some say that he’s seen the Lion King 1,780 times)
• They say – “They say that the swine flu will be bad this year.” – Who said that? The experts did. What experts? Errrr…

It’s okay to use these words and phrases, but don’t base your writing on them. Don’t overuse generalizations. Used occasionally, they can reinforce your point. If they are your point, you might not have much substance behind your writing to begin with. Work on the substance instead of your generalizations and your writing will be more useful and comprehensive.