You wrote a great article and helped create a great discussion. Just wanted to share that!

J

… so why am I afraid to get started?

How I push myself in my life? Right now?

A few months ago an electrical engineer left our company in the middle of leading a major enterprise software development project with two deadlines one in Feb and another in May. I volunteered to take over the project in addition to my regular job. I know nothing about electrical engineering and I wanted the opportunity to learn in a hands-on product development project. I wanted the challenge.

To be honest, I didn’t pay much attention in school after the second grade and never went to college. So for the last 10 years, I’ve been working hard on my education. I attend real college classes from time to time, but formal education has never been a good fit for me, so much of it I do on my own. Right now I am working on my personal MBA and also spend time working the open courseware from Yale, Cal Berkley, and MIT. I never learned to type and I am using typefaster to train myself. I also consider this blog part of my education, but lately I’ve been focusing in other areas and blogging less.

I’m considering training in Mixed Martial Arts, which consists of Boxing, Thai Boxing, Ju Jitsu, and Kenpo. But I am afraid I won’t be able to fully commit to the program, so I am waffling.

I help my wife Christine with her growing internet business. We both push very hard there. We both started a dot com in 1998 and worked about 80 hours a week for two years and sold before everything went kaput in 2000. Now this one looks like it has more potential than the last one, so we work hard on that.

Last but not least, I push myself hard to be a good dad. To be available and present as much as possible for my boys.

About burnout… Yes, I’ve burned out before, back in about 2000 before I had kids. I could feel physical and mental deterioration and I was headed for a big fall. That’s why we sold the company. I also had burnout in about 2003.

After that I got into personal development, learned about Zen, meditation, and balance in life. I try to apply the principles daily, but it is hard. I’m only happy when I’m pushing hard. I’m one of those people that is all the way on or all the way off. But I am slowly making progress with balance. The biggest challenges I face are learning to moderate happily and learning to let go of the desire to control everything and trust God (the universe, for my atheist friends) to do more of the work.

Thanks for asking :-)

At the moment I’m thinking of when my daughter was little. I purposely didn’t take a job that would use my problem solving talent because I would become too involved, and spending time with her was the most important use of my time. So I read about child development, did volunteering, and learned to play the piano, practicing a half hour to an hour a day. It satisfied the part of me that wanted some mastery and was an area where I could think in terms of “progress”. But the time I spent with her, giving her a good foundation, was one of the best things I’ve done in my life. And in order to do it I had to put my drive aside for a while. To me that period of my life was different than striving for a goal. You could say I did have a goal, the idea of the kind of person I wanted her to be. But I purposely operated under the assumption that she would never live to be an adult. That wasn’t being fearful or morbid. It was a way of stepping out of the goal-achieving mindset and doing what I was doing for it’s own sake. The best way I can describe it is it was sacred space and time.

Anyway, thanks for this topic and conversation. I love the fact that you are conversing, not just preaching. I’d like to know more about the particulars of your life. How exactly are you pushing yourself? How does taking breaks fit in? Do you sometimes push yourself so hard that you risk burnout? How do other people fit into your schedule? Etc., etc. I’d really like to know. I believe we’re all different, and I love seeing what works for other people.

Golf is the perfect competition. You are playing yourself and the course and the other players are doing the same. The number of times you strike the ball is the measure, but it has nothing to do with anyone else.

To measure your progress at anything, I feel you need a metric. It could be your golf score, the hockey score, your profit margin, your weight, the miles you run, the quality of the code you write, anything can be a metric. That’s why people play games… to test themselves against a metric… a score… another team… a competitor.

My son’s martial arts instructor has a sign on his wall that reads…

“Winning isn’t everything, the attempt to win is.”

It’s not about making someone else a loser, it’s about being the best you can be. Losing isn’t a bad thing, it’s part of growth… it’s humbling.

No matter what you do, there is almost always competition involved. For example you said you attended Stanford. When you were accepted to Stanford someone else wasn’t because of limited space. Your goal wasn’t to keep anyone out of Stanford, you just wanted the opportunity to attend Stanford. But your desire to attend Stanford was indirectly competitive. So your attempt to get in was an attempt to win and your hard work paid off. No shame in that.

Reaching your goals is almost always competitive at some level. Sometimes it isn’t as direct as boxing or football… but it’s there.

Even the search for a mate is competitive… I mean there is 6-7 billion people on earth to choose from… and they have to choose you too. That makes it even more competitive.

Anyway… Jean… I respect you and I understand… I don’t ever feel the desire to beat anyone else either. In fact when I have beat someone in the past… it actually makes me feel really bad inside. If I feel I’ve gained something at someone else expense, I don’t like it.

But I still love to compete. Strange huh?

Nice weekend

AD