It’s helpful for our daily motivation to keep in mind why we do the work we do.  Maybe it’s to feed our families or to change the world or to be filthy rich.  No matter what the reasons are, keeping the reasons we go in to work everyday front of mind helps us do a better job and makes us happier on a day-to-day basis.

Here are my three reasons for working on Killer Aces.  (These were always floating around somewhere in my mind — maybe not quite articulated, but they were in there somewhere — and reading Philip’s post Dream Job or Day Job? this week pushed me to write them down.)

1. Financial independence.

This is the greed part of it.  I want to be rich not for wealth’s sake, but to have the freedom to do what I want.  One of my success visions of “financial freedom” is being able to book a flight to the other side of the world on a whim, and not having to worry about cost or scheduling.

2. Ownership of work.

This is the ego part of it. I was tired of doing work that benefited someone else.  I wanted to own my work.

3. Contribute to humankind / human history.

This is the fulfilling part.  Some ego plays into this too.

I want to do work that matters.  I want to make people’s lives better and leave a mark on human history.

Wise Bread’s book is #1 under Budgeting and #2 in Personal Finance at Amazon.  Wow.  

Pretty amazing job by Will to shepard the book from conception to launch.  And in less than 10 months! 

…

I contributed a couple of guest posts to help the launch cause.

55 Ways to Get More Energy (Zen Habits)

1. Change your socks for refreshment.

It’s an amazing trick. Bring a change of socks to work, and change your socks midway through the day (say, after lunch). You’ll be amazed at how much fresher you’ll feel. This trick is especially handy on days with lots of walking — like during a hike or family outing to the amusement park.

7 Benefits of Decluttering (Unclutterer) – This is what I want.  It’s a war that I’m losing.

I quit so I could give Killer Aces the full-time effort.

Some of the conversations I had with family, friends and co-workers.

Are you making enough from KA to cover your expenses?

That would be a resounding NO. But I believe in the vision and my partners. We’ll see how it goes.

Why now? You’ve been talking about it for a while, but I thought you were going to keep trying to work both?

That was the plan, to work at Rhythm full-time, while building up KA on the side. It was working great for a while, but as Wise Bread grew (in terms of bloggers and readers) and as KA faced new challenges and opportunities, I found that I wanted to work on the KA problem all day. I was preoccupied with whatever issue-of-the-day was on KA’s plate, and I felt horrible that I couldn’t give my partners and the bloggers more time and resources. The worse part was my slacking performance at work. All the problem solving cycles I had went to KA, so by the time I went to work on Rhythm issues, I was drained, cranky and highly ineffective.

So why today? What was the final trigger?

This is my resignation story. I was lying in bed Monday night / Tuesday morning… Wait. Let me back up.

Late Sunday night, we launched WB 2.0. On Monday, the bloggers let us know what they thought. And it wasn’t pretty. Monday was the biggest “crisis” day we’ve ever had. At the end of the day, though, I was more happy than worried. Some thoughts:

1. I spend all day dealing with the KA crisis and I loved it. Rhythm got zero work from me. That was totally uncool.
2. The KA team handled the crisis well. My partners are awesome! Hey, maybe we can make this work….
3. WB got better because of the crisis. We made a couple of changes based on chats with bloggers. Hey, maybe this could work….

That night (it was actually very early Tuesday morning), I lay in bed and could not quiet my mind. We had resolved most of the major issues, so I wasn’t worrying. I think I was excited! After a few hours of laying in bed, dead tired but unable to fall asleep, I got up, took a long walk to getting breakfast, and decided that today was the day. I drove out to Pasadena to talk to my dad about it. He was supportive. That sealed the deal. I drove back to Rhythm and turned in my resignation.

For the second poker game in a row (in 2 weeks), I’ve run really hot. We had a 7 person game at my place tonight. 5 hours or so. Cashed +200. I’m happy.

This morning we launched the beta version of the new Wise Bread to the bloggers. A big milestone in this overhaul project that has occupied us for nearly 4 months. The relaunch is in sight. It should help a lot with reader satisfaction (and retention). (Update: we’re live!)

Wise Bread has a new look and feel today. It’s looks great and is much more usable now. I love it!

To celebrate, we’re giving readers a chance to win $25 from Amazon when they read about our worst financial mistakes and share their stories in the comments.

I love it for the readers. There are more options for finding the articles that they want to read. From popular lists (today and all-time), list of bloggers, theoretically similar articles, popular posts in the same channel or by the same blogger, and more! Better “next article” suggestions will help readers find what they need, and we get more pageviews. Win-win.

I love it for the bloggers. Now there’s a feature box on the homepage. It will direct readers to the best content of the day/week or highlight newly relevant articles from the past (eg., helpful articles to save you gas) or contests or whatever. The best content up front, without taking too much away from the freshness of a lively blog. And we managed to monetize the site better without being aggressive.

We fixed a ton of usability problems, it looks great and the monetization strategy took big steps. Did I already say I love it!

Congratulations to the KA team and thanks to Intuitive Designs.

Edited to add: Here’s Intuitive’s take on the project. Thanks for the kind words!