I heard a brilliant thing recently concerning making mistakes in a relationship. The person I heard it from described it as “the 5 to 1 rule.” “When you screw up, recognize that you need to do five good things for every one bad thing. So, when I do something that makes my wife mad at me – or which she considers “wrong”, I consciously focus on making sure that I do the next five things right.” ...
Two colleagues have died suddenly in the past two weeks – one was in his 60’s and one was in his 50’s. Both shook me up. A close friend’s mother is very ill. And a close friend’s father died earlier this year. I’ve had a physical challenging year. I ran a marathon in February and was geared up for a lot of running and then hurt my back. Seven months later I’m better, but I had five months of solid and consistent pain (never getting below a two on a 0 to 10 scale and often reaching eight or nine.) On top of that, I’ve had a few nasty colds, including a staph infection in my earlobe that scared the shit out of at least one doctor. Oh, and two weeks ago my extrovert completely burned out . ...
About once a year I completely use up my extrovert capacity. I drain it completely to zero. Whenever this happens, I remember that I’m fundamentally an introvert. If you don’t know how to relate to someone like me when he goes into deep introvert mode, take a look at the great Atlantic Monthly article from 2003 titled “Caring for Your Introvert .” The last sixty days have been awesome but extremely intense. My ordinarily full days had the Do More Faster book tour layered on top along with a bunch of other public appearances, interviews, speaking engagements, and events. About two weeks ago I started feeling a fatigue that I couldn’t get in front of and the last two weeks pushed me over the edge. ...
My TEDxBoulder presentation on The Quarterly Week Off The Grid was recently posted on YouTube. I participated in TEDxBoulder on August 7th and it was an awesome Saturday evening in Boulder. Most of the talks were dynamite – the worst ones were merely good. If you are interested in work-life balance, this is one of my favorite algorithms for it. The video of my presentation follows. If you’ve heard me talk about this before, you’ll recognize some of my schtick. You’ll also recognize this from the first chapter of Theme 7 of Do More Faster (Work-Life Balance). And if you were at Chicago’s Startup Mixology today you’ll recognize pieces of this discussion. But there are a few new gems in here that I had forgotten I’d used. ...
While at the amazing Tahoe Tech Talk, I heard Dave Morin mention a new service called Letter.ly . It’s a great example of brilliance through its simplicity. In my never ending quest to use all the things I find interesting, I’ve started an email newsletter called Feld On Work-Life Balance. While I periodically post on Work-Life Balance, Amy and I are working on a book called The Startup Marriage. There is also a chapter on Work-Life Balance in the book David Cohen and I just wrote called Do More Faster . This is a topic that’s long been important and interesting to me, especially as I travel around explaining to my completely unbalanced friends how they are actually balanced and they just don’t realize it yet. ...
Amy and I created a tradition about a decade ago we call “four minutes in the morning.” We try to – fully clothed – spend four minutes together every morning 100% focused on each other. I’m an early bird – usually getting up around 5am regardless of the time zone I’m in (except on the weekends – then I sleep until I wake up – sometimes 1pm.) Amy sleeps a little later (usually 6:30am). So – I often have around 90 minutes alone every morning, which I treasure. I have a well defined morning routine that includes a cup of coffee and 85 or so minutes in front of my computer. ...
Amy and I have been up at our house in Homer, Alaska for the last two weeks. We try to spent every July up here – something we’ve tried to do every year for the past decade (we missed in 2007 and 2009.) I’ve had a lot of people say things similar to “I hope you are having a great vacation” which I corrected for the first few days (we aren’t on vacation – just living in Homer for the month) but I got tired of this so I stopped correcting folks after a few days. ...
I love summertime. Amy and I spent Memorial Day weekend in Manhattan. We stayed in Soho, hung out with some friends, ate a lot, and just wandered around. Oh – and I slept 17 hours yesterday once again demonstrating that I have amazing sleeping powers. I needed it after two full days at the Glue Conference , a day at Tech Wildcatters in Dallas, and a full week of “normal work.” ...
I had a 19 hour day yesterday – it started when I woke up at my hotel at 26th Street at 5am and ended when I hit the sack at midnight. I had a bunch of meetings, a few scheduled phone calls, was on a panel, and stayed on top of my email throughout the day. I even managed to keep my FishVille fish fed and got my Cafe World food served before it spoiled. ...
I’m sitting in the early dawn light in a cabin in Tabernash, Colorado drinking a cup of coffee and getting ready to go for a run in the mountains. I’ve just spent the last 18 hours with my Foundry Group partners at our quarterly retreat. This is an approximately 24 hour affair that includes staying overnight somewhere in Colorado within driving distance of Boulder. We’ve been doing this quarterly since we conceived of the idea for Foundry Group. ...