Last week I pushed one of the guys who is a little more introverted to start interviewing. I had him come role play one with me. It was really good. I actually enjoyed it quite a bit as it gave me a coulpe ideas for my team. I pushed him to go talk to someone else he knew from church. That one went even better. He did all the arranging. He led the conversation and ended up scoring big time. That good friend took him over to the desk of a job councilor and helped him get set up with some tests to find out what he wants to do with his career. It was just what he needed. He not only got the valuable information, but he came back to the meeting energized, understanding what it was that I have been trying to tell him. Wonderful! He caught the vision. He will be okay.

Now for the self analysis. I haven’t been out network interviewing in a long time. I have got to get back to it. I need to do at least one per week. It is fun. I love meeting new people and learning what they do. So why haven’t I kept up on it? Time. I need a kick in the pants to get moving sometimes. Since you never know when you are going to need a network or your network will need you, it is important to always keep it moving. Time to get back in the saddle.

Passion makes doing something easier. When I was out of work, interviewing was easy because I was passionate about getting a job. Now that I have a job, the passion for interviewing has sagged. It takes time to set up and go and I feel like I don’t always control my schedule. Reality is quite different though.

This week I will set up one interview. That is my goal.

The good news is that I have been actually making some progress on finding my passion. A few months ago, I heard about Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers. I read about it in a blog post by Orson Scott Card. Now, I have to admit I haven’t read the book yet, but it is high on my list. What intrigued me was the notion that an expert is someone who has put 10,000 hours into their craft.

I started asking myself, “what have I spent 10,000 hours doing?” It hit me that I have spent well over 10,000 hours researching time and task management. I have read countless books on the topic and taken nearly a dozen seminars. I think I have found my passion.

In March, I took an opportunity to teach my first class on time management that wasn’t just parroting someone else’s methodology. I actually put a few of my own ideas in it, tying several different things together to make it a ‘time management for technologists’ approach. It went over very well. I had 45 people in the room and only one left before it was over. The number kept growing as time went on. It was a hugely successful experience for me and taught me some good lessons.

Since then, I have been toying with this notion more. I started another blog – Dan in Focus – to discuss the concept of Focus. I am working more on the presentation. I have two more scheduled later this month internally at work. I am making some progress. I just need to build momentum.

This little experience turned into an interesting experiment for me. Could I survive the morning as an IT manager without a computer. Granted, on some days, this would have been a major problem. Today, however, it wasn’t. I didn’t have any meetings. I had a mail-enabled phone, so I could read and respond to email, although at a slower rate. I spent the morning doing tasks on my list that didn’t require a computer.

It was a very productive morning. I got a lot of old tasks off the list. I did a mind sweep. I did some brainstorming. I even spent some time visiting with some people to get information first hand. I was almost sad when the laptop arrived and returned me to the land of the ‘plugged-in’.

I think it can be a valuable thing to ‘unplug’ once in awhile. Turn off the computer, put it away, resist that urge to turn it on. I found by doing email on my phone, I wrote more succinctly because it is harder to type. That has the side benefit of saving time for the receiver as well. Give it a shot. Let me know how it works for you.

Health. I have really been feeling age creeping up on me this year. I hurt in places I have never hurt before. I’m tired all the time and the doctor has started prescribing drugs to take care of things diet and exercise should do for me. 2009 is the year for me to finally start doing what I am supposed to be doing in regards to my health.

1. Lose 25 pounds. Today I weigh 225, having gained the “Holiday 5″. Earlier this year I weighed 215. Under the South Beach Diet, I made it down to 200. That was 4 years ago. The doctor tells me I need to get to 180. Rome wasn’t built in a day. My goal is 2 pounds / month.
2. Exercise 30 minutes each day minimum. My office has a terrific gym. I need to take advantage of it. It is also situated on the Boise River Greenbelt. There is no reason I shouldn’t be taking a few minutes break each day to go for a walk. In the warmer months, I do enjoy riding my bike home from the office. It only takes 10 minutes longer to bike it as opposed to driving.
3. Control the portion size I eat. This is my biggest downfall. I love food and I keep shoving it in until I regret it. I am not sure where the habit came from, but I eat like a starving man fighting for his last meal. I need to slow down, savor each bite and let my stomach catch up. I will also write down everything I eat to keep my caloric intake where it should be. A few months ago, we experimented with tracking the actual calories of everything we ate. I found during that few weeks, I found I could be full on fewer calories than I thought. It forced me to rethink what I ate. Example: I cut out muffins completely. They could destroy a breakfast with just one and leave me wanting so many more.

Intellectual. I know I do things to push me intellectually, but I couldn’t tell you what they are when asked. This year, I am going to track it better. A few years ago, I recorded and reviewed every book I read. It was amazing how much I read in that year. Yes, I was out of work and had more time on my hands, but when I start adding up hom many books I read in 2008, I am surprised. I carved out more time than I thought I did.

1. Read and review 25 books. I should be able to make this goal easy. I know I read more than 2 books per month. Look for my reviews here and the list on LibraryThing.
2. Become a writer. Wow, that is vague. I just don’t know how to measure this one. I have been kicking around several ideas for books for years. I also have a couple ideas for blogs. I feel before I become a good writer, I need to get in the habit of writing regularly, even if the quality is lousy. The measurement is 2 posts to the blog per week and write a short story each month.

Career. This blog was started to help me with this one. I want to define my career better, know what I want to do and make progress toward doing it.

1. Examine my passion and be able to give a 2 minute speech on it. This will require self analysis and examination. my goal is to use this blog for that analysis.
2. Build a strong and active network. I will measure it by having at least one networking contact each week. I will help my network freely during the troubled times in the economy.
3. Work with the Eagle-Star Technology Corridor group. I have struggled whether I have time to devote to this group or not. I probably don’t. But others don’t have time, either. I believe in their cause and I need to be involved in the community. I feel this group will assist me in my first two goals in the career area, so I am going to give it my best shot.

Skills. I have a lot of skills I want to pursue and improve. Writing is one of them and is covered above. I am also a woodturner, woodworker, musician, scriptorian and several other things. My wife says I concentrate on too many things, so this is a very dangerous goal area for me (see my mental goal section).

1. I want to get better at woodturning. I have turned over 330 pens. I do those very well. I want to get better at turning bowls. I will turn 30 bowls this year. I will turn 10 hollow forms. And to support my habit, I will turn and sell 50 pens. I will have my pens, bowls and hollow forms in at least gallery by the end of the year. I will also make 4 pieces of furniture.
2. I tell my son he needs to practice piano 20 minutes, 4 times each week. I will do the same on either the guitar or tin whistle.
3. There is reading scripture and then there is Reading Scriptures. This year I want to train myself to do more than read the scriptures. I want to develop the ability to understand them, build talks from them and know them well enough to link them together and find what the Lord has placed there for me. To do this, I am going to have to spend regular time studying and using them. Last year I started spending time in the morning on a specific topic with the goal of writing a talk for my files on that topic. I didn’t get very far. Later in the year, I begin reading with a pen in my hand to record thoughts on each verse as I read. That was very helpful, but I fell out of the habit. This year I will do better.

Financial. 2007 & 2008 were terrible years for me financially. I blew apart my plan to retire at 56. I invested in the real estate market right at the top and watched it go into freefall, taking me with it. I was able to get out finally just last week. I still owe over $75,000 and my savings are exhausted. At least the bleeding has stopped, though. Now I can get to work on recovery and this is the year to do it.

1. Pay off all loans other than my mortgage. This is a tall order, but there are ways to make it happen and I am pursuing them aggressively.
2. Get a three month emergency fund established.
3. Prepare financially for Jonathan’s mission. He turns 19 in November and may even leave before the end of this year.
4. Rebuild my credit. My credit score took a brutal beating. Time to rebuild. I used to be in the upper 700′s. Now I am at 600. I am not very familiar with rebuilding credit, but I would like to be back to 650 by the end of the year. That may be too aggressive. Time will tell.

Mental. There are some mental bad habits I need to get rid of this year. These will probablybe the hardest of all, but the most rewarding when I do make the change.

1. Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. I can’t count the number of times I haven’t started something only because I haven’t figured out how to make it perfect. These goals are an example. Instead of scribbing at them in my moleskine, I put it off because I didn’t want to “mess up the paper with half formed goals”. Looking back on it now, it seems ridiculous. It is a problem of mine.
2. Do not say negative things about myself. That includes weight, lack of hair, etc. I need to replace those thoughts with positive, uplifting observations.
3. Allow myself room to grow. I often beat myself up for not being as good as I think I should be and removing any possibility to improve. I need to replace it with “Hmm. That didn’t go so well, but I bet next time I’ll do better.”
4. Spend quality time building my children. Okay, everyone uses ‘quality’ as an excuse for little to no quantity. True and that is something I can improve on as well. However, I do spend time with my kids. My wife and I have started talking and recording specific things we want to do to help our kids. Those are the things I want to work on weekly.
5. Keep a success journal. Write daily about one thing I did better than the day before. My wife has been keeping a ‘Thankful’ journal for the last year, writing each day one thing she is thankful for, without duplicating a prior entry. Great idea!

Well, if that isn’t enough goals for a year, I don’t know what would be. I know I have a tendancy to try to work on too many things at one time. I wanted to get all these thoughts down, though, while I still had them. I don’t have to accomplish all of them by January 2 (which is now only 25 minutes away). I still have a whole year left!

I found this on the Happiness Project. I had heard this quote many times, but didn’t know where it came from. If Gretchen did her homework (and I believe she does), then I finally know. Regardless, this is becoming my mantra.

I find myself staring at projects all the time, afraid to start because it won’t meet my expectations. I suffer from the drive that everything must be perfect. I don’t know why. I have been talking to people about it and we haven’t come up with the answer yet.

I really like this post from Gretchen. It resonates with me. I tried it today. I had a project I had been dreading for quite awhile. Today I just started. I didn’t expect to finish it or even make much headway. And I didn’t.

But I did get started and that is enough for me. I just needed the space to say it is in flight and that it doesn’t have to be perfect. Sometimes I think Stephen Covey’s “begin with the end in mind” is not a good place for me. I can image up all kinds of perfect ends. I get the end so perfectly in mind I don’t know how to start. Sometimes I need to just begin.

And so I did. And it felt good.

So I said I was going to do a free write on what my favorite job would be. Twenty moniutes is a long time. i have been procrastinating this for a long time. That should tell me something about it. Do I know what my dream job would be? I was thinking about it on the way home from work today. I have a 8.5 mile commute and I have been riding my bike as often as convenient for the last two years. I’m pretty proud of the fact I have put on over 2000 miles in that time. I don’t do it for the ‘green’ aspects, although I do enjoy not spending money on gas. Coudln’t care less about the carbon. I do it fo the exercise I am getting and the opportunity to feel like I’m ‘a biker’. I thought I would lose weight doing it, but that hasn’t happened. I weigh the same. My doctor tells me I have to quit eating so much. That is my problem. I am a nervous eater and like to have something crunching away all the time. That doesn’t help the weight part of the problem at all.

So that was to say I want my job to be in a place where I can continue to ride the bike. That I do enjoy, although not every day. I ride the bus to work in the mornings and bike home. That way I don’t have to take a shower and spend extra time on that. Perhaps when my company finishes the renovation they are doing and open the new health club, I may go back to taking showers at work in the mornings. I do enjoy it in the winter. Unlimited hot water to bask in. Don’t get that at home. So I want my job to be biking distance away. I can’t see it being too much further than the 8 miles it is now. It also needs to be a safe commute. I go East-West now. Going North-South in this town is dangerous. There aren’t any good bike routes that I know of that aren’t taking your life in your hands. I suppose I would be able to find ome somewhere. There aren’t too many places to cross the river.

What else do I want in a job? i want to be challenged, but have the opportunity to be successful. I finally have that at work now. The last 6 months have been hard, because there is no way I, or anyone else, could have been successful. There was just too much piled on. Now that half the burden is gone, there is hope. I just hope I haven’t forgotten how to move things forward in the last 6 months of treading water. I like a manager that encourages me, gives me atta-boys regularly for successes. Those help me push forward. I want to please my boss. I think everyone does. If I don’t hear that he/she is happy, then I wonder if I am doing anything right. It has been real hard with my current boss being based out of the country. We have seen each other less than 5 times in the last 6 months. We talk occasionally, but it isn’t the same. I know I am keeping him up late and he knows I am getting up really early. Therefore, we rush through things and haven’t really got to the things that matter. He is transferring back to the states this week. He will be in the same office as I am and that will be great. I am really looking forward to learning from him and getting some feedback.

Feedback. That is what i want in a job. I want to hear back from people how they think I am doing. I need some sort of measure to tell me how things are going. Metrics are fun. I like measuring things and watching for progress. When I get busy, I forget to do it and things suffer. I need to remember to do that.

My team is 90% remote at the moment. I have only one in the same city as me. That is the new way of managing for my company. I don’t think it is the most effective. It is hard to tell when the people are struggling, unless they tell me. I only hear bad things about performance from other managers. I feel like I am blind. Now I am picking up team members in India. Good guys, but it is adding another element that is even more difficult – culture and language. Never meeting these guys is going to really make it challenging. If they don’t want to open up, I will never know what they are thinking. I think I would prefer to have all my team members in the same location. I feel I can coordinate training, interaction and overall happiness better that way. both their happiness and mine.

Fifteen minutes have gone by. Interesting. Lots can spill out in a short amount of time. I want my job to have a bit of prestige to it. I enjoy dressing for work in a button down shirt and dress slacks. I enjoy some days in levis, but it isn’t that important to me. I want a place that allows people to dress as they please. If you like levis, why not? As long as it doesn’t distract other workers (no low cut blouses, please!), I don’t mind. I don’t really study my coworkers’ clothing unless it is obviously inappropriate.

I like having smart people to work with. I like feeling like I am one of the dumbest people in the room. I love learning from people. I like managing people, although I wouldn’t call it management. I like leading, directing and clearing the path for a team. I like being able to move obstacles from their way so they can be better. I enjoybucking the trends to make work a little better. I caught a lot of flack from other managers at my last job when I took the entire department out to see Lord of the Rings or go mini-golfing. We even went real golfing, complete with carts. It was a great time and everyone else in the company hated us for doing it. What I should have done was get the team to volunteer to cover for them while they went off and had some fun. I read some books on having fun at work and have to agree with them.

Other important factors  in a job include having autonomy. I want to be in charge. I don’t like being micromanaged. I like having support to bounce ideas off and to help with big, hairy decision. I hate having someone tell me every answer and reminding me of all the details that were missed while we were pulling a miracle out of the hat.

I like a fast paced environment, but not a constant sprint. There has to be times where the team can relax and regroup. No team can constantly be stressed. Periodic stress builds growth. Constant stress breaks people down and makes them start looking for jobs. Granted the economy right now sucks and people are not in the mood to be doing too much jumping, but that is no reason to take advantage of them. Sometimes the answers need to be ‘No, we can’t do that’. I like having support for that as well.

I like a work space that is not too light. After having a window for a few months, I do enjoy a good view. Somedays, though, I like to pull the shades, turn out the lights and be in the dim. Dark isn’t good. It is too stiffling. The place in which I sit now can be really dark in no one turns on the lights. It was that way this morning when I came in. I don’t know where the lights are, so I had to just sit in the dark until someone else came in. It didn’t take too long. I would probably do better if I took the tubes out of one of the two fixtures above my cube.

Cube. Yeah. I want an office. WIth a door. Sometimes I just need to concentrate. So do my people. I am in a corner and there is only one person near me. But his job requires him to be on the phone all the time and he isn’t a soft spoken person. It isn’t his fault, but it is enough to distract me. I have to wear headphones and listen to music all the time or I can’t think. Of course, listening to music is distracting in itself, so how good is my work? I find myself constantly distracted and unable to keep a logical thought going very long. I need to concentrate.

Well, there is 30 minutes on my dream job. I’ll have to go back now and reread it to see what it really means. That, however, is for another day. I hope you enjoyed the free write. Try one sometime.

In our case, we reconnected because my daughter said we should. The family came up at the breakfast table. She scolded me for keeping usconnected. I took it to heart and called them the same day to see if they would come over for dinner. They accepted and I was surprised to hear even all of their kids, including one in college, were excited to get back together.

I was wondering how the kids would react, would they still have anything in common after all the years? Within 15 minutes of their arrival, they all went into the other room to talk and left us adults to ourselves. They were the ones dragging their heels when it came time to go. I was pleasently surprised. We vowed not to let another 4 years go by.

So what does this have to do with passion? I helped (in a very small way) push my friend to start his own business when he was laid off from his job several years ago. He was scared, like I am now, but he did it. He had found his passion and had the clientbase that believed in him, so it was an easy transition to doing it for himself instead of for someone else. Fast forward years later, he is very successful and enjoying the fruits of his labor. I am proud to know him and call him a friend.

And I learned something tonight about him. He is as indecisive and incapable of making a decision as I am. To listen to his wife describe it, he and I could be twins in this department. It was very comforting to me to hear that about someone I admire greatly and wish to emulate.

I have worried about my inability to make decisions quickly to be a major obstacle to having my own company. Now, hearing about his identical problem helps me think it may not be so impossible for me. It helps put that little fear to rest. I know it is something I am going to have to be aware of and work to overcome.

I will have to remember to look at the options and just make a decision. In most cases, it doesn’t matter that much and often can be corrected or adjusted in flight.

I read a few blogs regularly and those people always have such great posts. They are concise, well, written and enjoyable. Some go places I wouldn’t go myself, but they interesting. Some I read regularly because they help me understand myself better.

Like the Great Oz said, I need to quit reading about life and starting doing something. I was reading a book last night about job hunting and said to myself, I need to put this down and actually organize my network contact list, like the chapter I am reading says. But, my wife was using the laptop, I didn’t have my list in a convenient place to reorganize and I hadn’t figured out how I wanted it to look yet. So I kept reading. I can talk myself out of just about anything worthwhile. I think the Great Oz knows me pretty well.

So, after my wife was done with the computer tonight, I took the computer to write a couple quick email before bed. I kept saying, “I need to post something.” Well, here I am, tossing something off because I want to make this into a habit and there is no other way besides writing.

I can’t make this perfect. It has to be messy. It has to be a search, and searches are not structured or clean. My first assignment to myself is a free write on passion. A free write is something I picked up in college a few years ago (the second time I went, not the first). The idea is to take the topic, set a timer and put whatever comes to mind on the paper (or keyboard, in this case). Punctuation, spelling and formatting are not important. The goal is to put as many words onto paper as possible. Stream of concious thought is the desire. No editing is allowed after the fact. It is a peek into your mind. That can be scary, if it is an honest free write. Well, tomorrow. That is what I will do. Right after I fix my bike tire, start making a couple pens and perhaps a few games of mah jong. Ouch! I can feel the Great Oz beating me.

I don’t hate my job. I don’t love it, either. I enjoy parts of it and detest others. What does that make me other than normal? So why should I want more? I make great money. Why should I risk it all for passion?

I was talking about this desire to find my passion with a dear friend we call The Great Oz. She asked me to define passion. Good start. Couldn’t do it. I guess that is the first task – define passion.

There are several definitions for passion, none of which really define it for me. The closest is perhaps, the object of such a fondness or desire. However, this doesn’t adequately describe that for which I am searching. There is something more, something like a defining quest or reason for being involved.

So, that is my search. I hope you will share your ideas and observations on passion. Have you found yours? Is it important to you? Do you think I am tipping at windmills? Come join the ride. Let’s see what we find.