Here are a few excerpts from the bulletin I send every Friday. The bulletin is a collection of 5 things you may find helpful. If you’d like to see more, sign up! Thought of the week “In theory there’s no difference between theory and practice. But, in practice, there is.”-Jan L. A. van de Snepscheut, computer scientist What are you theorising about that you just need to put into practice to test? Turning an old laptop into a Chromebook Another project I’ve completed is converting an old Dell Inspiron Mini laptop into a Chromebook for the kids. I’ve had this laptop for about 10 years and eventually the Windows 7 starter edition it came with just wouldn’t boot up. So I erased it all and made it a simple Chromebook. You can surf the net, watch movies and do basic … Read More
Only start something if you’re ready to continue it
The other day I gave my daughter her first taste of chocolate. It took her a while to process the taste, but once she did she didn’t want to stop eating it. Before then, my wife and I could happily open a bar of chocolate in front of her, eat what we want, and then put it away. Without any fear of harassment or complaining. Now we’re reduced to sneaking away one by one, hiding in the cupboard and quickly eating one or two pieces before going back into the lounge as if nothing happened. Once my daughter had the taste for chocolate, she’ll never lose that again. She’ll always see it and know she wants it. That got me thinking, how often do we start things that we don’t actually want to continue? It doesn’t necessarily have to be … Read More
What are you actually doing right now?
What are you actually doing right now? A few days ago I was playing on the back deck with my daughter, just stacking toys and pointlessly moving buckets around. As I was doing this I thought ‘I really should be doing something more productive’. And then the question came to me. Why do we feel so guilty when we’re not doing something that can be immediately quantified? I think it’s because we love to immediately measure how we’re spending time. And the easiest way to measure it is by the improvement we see straight away, or the financial reward we get for what we’re doing. It’s a real struggle to measure our time in other ways, but it’s a very important exercise to go through. We first have to start with what our priorities are. For me it’s my … Read More
(Book) What matters now – things to think about (and do) this year
I’ve just finished this great little booklet about what matters, from various thought leaders such as Seth Godin, Kevin Kelly, Arianna Huffington, Guy Kawasaki, Steve Pressfield, Derek Sivers and more. You can find it here: http://sethgodin.typepad.com/files/what-matters-now-1.pdf It’s only 82 pages so you should read the whole thing, but the highlights for me were: Generosity – Seth Godin When the economy tanks, it’s natural to think of yourself first. You have a family to feed a mortgage to pay. Getting more appears to be the order of business. It turns out that the connected economy doesn’t respect this natural instinct. Instead, we’re rewarded for being generous. Generous with our time and money but most important generous with our art. If you make a difference, people will gravitate to you. They want to engage, to interact and to get you more involved. … Read More