I’m hardly a Machead, but I have tremendous respect for Steve Jobs and his contributions to humanity. He created two companies that revolutionized several industries. Pixar and feature animation. Apple — personal computing, mobile Internet, music distribution, more?

In 2005, Jobs gave the Stanford commencement speech. I remember listening to the speech  in the summer of 2005, and feeling challenged and anxious. I was approaching my 30th birthday; the self-imposed deadline for figuring out what I wanted to do when I grew up.  It was a year before we launched Wise Bread and two years before I quit my day job.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become.

Rereading that speech today, six years older, another part speaks to me: “Stay Foolish.”

Thanks, Steve. Rest in peace. We’ll miss you.

I just read this article on OPEN Forum by the Behance team title Can Good Teamwork Involve Fighting? Great article!

I think fighting is an integral part of a strong team — with a few caveats, of course.  Here’s some thoughts on how to encourage productive fighting for the betterment of the team or project.

1) Come to a resolution at the end.

At the end of the debate or meeting, it’s important that someone wraps up the points of the fight, and that the team comes to a resolution.  Like that axiom for marriages (don’t go to bed angry), don’t leave a meeting angry.

It helps to have an uneven number of team members and/or a strong leader.  With an uneven number of team members, you can put the conflict to a vote*.  With a strong leader, they can weigh the options and pick a resolution.

* At KAM, we vote with percentages. What I mean by that is I might say, “I’m only 60/40 in favor of X, but you’re 90/10 for Y, so we should probably go with Y.”  Or we may choose to not fight too hard for something. Eg., “I believe 90/10 that X is the right way to go, but I don’t care that much about it, so we’ll go with your idea.”

Even if there are still unresolved points of contention by the end of the meeting, someone should summarize where the team does have (near) consensus.  Throw out the rejected ideas, embrace the stronger points.  Basically, move the argument along so the team knows where it stands.  It’s not helpful to rehash the same old arguments at tomorrow’s meeting. There’s probably new issues to fight over.

2) After the fight, everyone’s on the same page.

Once a resolution is reached by the team, it’s important for individual team members to not hold grudges or undermine the team’s decision.

If your idea is not what wins, you can’t keep reminding people (especially external people) that the team made a “bad decision” by not adopting your views.  After the fight, after the meeting, everyone’s back on the same page supporting the same conclusion.

This reminds me of what my pastor used to say after a contentious church election.  We may be divided during the debates and election process, but once someone wins, we are one unified congregation again.

3) Strong teams encourage dissenting opinions.

I want to hear all sides.  Heck, the Supreme Court even publishes dissenting opinions — it makes their final judgements stronger, not weaker.

If your team is always harmonious and everyone seems to share the same opinions, that’s a bad sign.  There’s two huge problems I see:

1. Team members may not feel comfortable enough sharing their dissenting opinions.  If the team can’t talk openly with each other behind closed doors, that points to a problem with the team dynamics and/or leadership.
2. If dissenting opinions aren’t presented, the team doesn’t get the benefit of seeing the problem from all angles and may miss out on awesome solutions or opportunities.

4) Everyone’s on the same team, with the same goals.

It’s helpful that we all want the same thing — success of the company or project.  That helps make fights productive.  If fights are becoming especially heated, it’s helpful to remind everyone what the overarching goal is — ie., company/team success.  Then if needed, refocus the fight on accomplishing that goal.

5) Pick your battles.

Fighting for the sake of fighting isn’t helpful.  And if you’re the one who’s always playing devil’s advocate and starting an argument, people will want to stop talking to you.  Save your “fight juice” for the battles that are important.

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.

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.

I bought a Treo 680 for $345 shipped from eBay.

I don’t really need it, especially since I just spent ~$400 on the E61 less than 6 months ago. I’ve never paid for a phone before buying the unlocked E61. I don’t know what’s come over me. Two expensive, unlocked phones in the last 6 months! It’s like I’ve become an out-of-control gadget freak.

A couple of things prompted this (kinda) impulse buy:

1. I saw and held my aunt’s Treo when I was in Singapore. It’s narrower than the E61, which is better for my small hands. I can’t really use the E61 with one hand because I can’t reach the farthest characters on the keyboard without some incredible balance.
2. As I go through my GTD life reorganization, I’ve become increasingly frustrated with the E61′s calendar and todo lists. I don’t know if they’re Symbian products or Nokia’s, I just know I hate them. The Palm OS was built for just this sort of thing and it has a long history of keeping people organized. Plus, Johnny said he loves using the Palm to track his action lists. Yeah. Blame Johnny.
3. I’ve wanted a Treo for a long time. I almost pulled the trigger on the Treo when I bought the E61. I chose the E61 over the Treo because the E61 has wifi. That was important to me at the time. I’ve since decided that wifi on a phone isn’t nearly as useful as a cellular data plan.
4. The 680 is the first Treo without the antenna nubbin. And it was “only” $330 or so on eBay — not the over $700 I’ve come to associate with Treos. Yes, it’s a generation behind the lastest Treos, but I’m cool with that.
5. I won $350+ from last Sunday’s poker game. Thanks guys!

I can’t wait to get my hands on it. Probably at least another week.

I need to pick up some more GTD supplies — folders, a label maker, filing system, etc. Time to schedule another poker game. ;)

This week, the reorganization (or really, organization) of my life has been foremost in my mind. I started applying GTD principles to various areas of my life. So far, I’ve broken it down by personal and professional arenas. I don’t really have a system in place yet, as I’m trying to actually organize my life and not get bogged down in evaluating various tools. (And there’s a ton of GTD related tools to research!)

So far, two actions have been very rewarding emotionally.

1. An empty inbox – I went through the last few inbox items in gmail, and archived everything else! 760+ message gone. Poof. It’s scary, but incredibly liberating to see an empty inbox. I wasn’t ever going to reply to those messages anyway, and starting from scratch is a good way to help ensure I stay on track. (Many previous attempts at reorganization have failed even before they really got started.)
2. Writing down everthing on my mind. From little nagging errands to far-off pie-in-the-sky projects, and everything in between, I’ve tried to get it all off my mind. I’m just using a plain text file on my laptop. It’s not the most efficient method, and I’m sure my system will evolve (maybe I’ll join the Moleskin crowd), but it’s great for the initial collection process because I could get started right away with something super simple. That was key.

As I process the “in” collection, I just move the line to a different part of the plain text file — action lists in context. These lists are evolving. My initial impulse is to make too many context lists. I’m simplifying and finding out what would work well going forward. I’ve been conciously trying to keep the system as simple as possible, and as integrated into my normal routine as possible. I know I’m just going to abandon it if I have to change my behavior radically.

I’m not done with the collection process yet. I need to do it at Rhythm — the sphere with the biggest “pile” of open loops. I can’t wait to have an empty inbox in my work email too!

I wish I had a big chunk of time to dedicate to a complete initial collection, but real life beckons and there are fires to fight every day. So my GTD initiation is a gradual process, but I think the key is that I’m now mentally ready for this “spring cleaning”.

I’ve been trying to get my life back to some semblance of order, and GTD is a major part of the plan.

The 3 key GTD concepts that should help make me stress free, highly productive and personally “get it together” are:

1. Get all todos and ideas out of my head.
   Put these pending thoughts into a system outside my head so I don’t keep wasting cycles on the same thoughts.
2. The 2 minute rule.
   If it will take less than 2 minutes to do an incoming item, then just do it.
3. Read inbox items only once.
   An extension of point #1, this point means having empty email inboxes and getting rid of the really long, never checked, monolithic “todo” list.

None of those things are actual actionable implementations, but they are the key points guiding my life reorganization. I’ll share my actual implementation when I get that sorted out.