Category: Personal Thoughts

An Ode to Jenny

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Jenny was an awesome dog.  She loved people, the beach, growling at chipmunks, playing with stuffed animals and eating any type of food she could beg, borrow or steal.  We brought her home in 2004 from the Humane Society when she was about 3 years old and she immediately won us over with her friendly disposition:  as soon as she met people, she was their best friend.  If you stopped petting her, she’d push you with her head to get you to star again.

She loved to play fetch with her duck stuffed animal and then sit right next to you after she got tired.  She loved people and was always there to be the perfect companion.  Whenever I would change rooms when were were home together, she’d follow.  She was always there to greet me at the door whenever I came home, especially after I came home from Chile after being away for six months.  She went absolutely crazy and couldn’t stop jumping around for what seemed like forever.

She stole food with reckless abandon. No amount of disciplin could stop her.  We always had to make sure bread, meat, fruit, anything edible or potentially edible, was high enough up so that she couldn’t find a way to reach it when we went out.  One time, we were defrosting a huge tbone steak in the sink and we left the house.  When we got back, no steak, no paper, nothing.  Jenny got it.  When we took her to the vet for an xray, she’d eaten the entire frozen steak, bone, paper and all.

Her favorites were honey baked ham, chex and chicken.  She literally couldn’t concentrate on anything else if there was ham around until she got some.  She’d catch 100% of the food I’d toss in the air, sometimes jumping with all four paws off the ground.

She loved long walks, going swimming and being in the water.  Sometimes she’d swim out toward us to make sure we were ok.  She’d chase ducks until the ducks decided to fly away and hunt for frogs by the shoreline, but never got one.  She was a happy, fun loving dog who was in her element outside.

Last week, she was playing with my parents in Northern Wisconsin, having the time of her life.  On friday, she was breathing heavily, and our vet Marcy (our next door neighbor for all of my life, and the biggest reason our family ever had a dog in the first place) said everything seemed fine.  On Monday she stopped eating.  On Tuesday, xrays showed she had late stage lung cancer and today she went downstairs and died.  It happened so fast, nobody could believe it.  Even Marcy couldn’t believe how quickly things went.  Everyone commented how healthy she looked and less than a week ago, everything was completely normal, but in reality nothing could be done.  She didn’t suffer much at the end and had an amazing life right up until the very end.

Jenny was everything you could ask for in a dog.  I’m glad I got to know her so well.

A Week of Help

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A couple of weeks ago, I had some extra free time.  Instead of vegging out watching tv or randomly surfing the internet, I decided to put my talents out to the world to see who needed help, for free.  I decided I would accept any request, as long as it was in my power to help out.  I wasn’t sure what to expect, but was excited to see what would happen.  I posted on my blog, twitter and facebook and watched as the requests rolled in.

My week of helping people was a blast.  I met people I otherwise wouldn’t have and reconnected with people I’d lost touch with.  I learned about industries and ideas that made me think and got closer with people who had previously been only business associates.  Over the course of seven days, I helped 20 people with tasks ranging from helping startups, moving desks out of a basement, cleaning a garage, chopping down trees, going grocery shopping and critiquing websites.

Most people asked for help evaluating a startup idea, followed by asking for advice on how to run an intern program.  Of the 20 people I helped, I’d never met five of them and hadn’t talked to three within the last year.  Multiple people told me they’d been interested in asking for my help before, but either never got around to doing it or did not want to impose.

I thought it was interesting that only two close friends asked me for help and my Mom was my only family member who accepted my offer.  The rest were people I knew, but was not close with or did not know at all.  Two months ago, my friend Andy posted the exact same offer to his close friends ad family and only one friend and one family member took him up on his offer.  I think it’s interesting that we seem to be willing to ask people we don’t know as well for help, but not our closest friends.  I enjoyed myself so much that I’m going to start doing a monthly “day of help” where I’ll do whatever anyone needs during my normal work day.

I truly believe people want to help each other, but most people are too timid to ask.  Think about this: If you received an email from someone asking you to help them with a problem you had experience with, would you help them?  I think for most people, the answer is yes, of course they would.  But people don’t take the next step and actually ask for help very often because they fear people won’t be willing to help.  I think more people should.  What do you think?

How Can I Help You?

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It looks like I’m going to have a bunch of free time over these next few weeks.  Instead of lounging around or watching another movie, I’m putting my skills out into the world to try to help you with anything you need, for free.  It can be anything, small or big.   From business help to manual labor, what can I do to help you?

If you need help with something, send me an email or write in the comments and I’ll do my best to help everyone who sends in a request.  It can be anything.

Edit to add: I’ve gotten a bunch of requests to help with coding apps/setting up databases, but unfortunately I don’t have those skills.  If you need help with that, I’m happy to try to connect you with the right person.

Like a Ton of Bricks

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What makes a person change for the better or for the worse?  What makes someone realize they were wrong? Or that they acted poorly?  How do you realize that you need to make a change?  Is it gradual, or does it hit you like a ton of bricks, creating an instantaneous change?  For me, most of my big changes in my life have happened in an instant.  One second, I’ll be rolling along through life, then something happens and everything changes.  Sometimes these changes are good, sometimes they are bad.

The first time I remember instant change was in 2nd grade.  My soccer team was in the intramural championship game, which was during our lunchtime recess.  In music class in the morning, I tripped a friend of mine, just for fun.  He tumbled down, knocking down a ton of chairs in the process.  I got a detention, my first ever.  It was during recess.  I was going to miss my soccer game.  In my 2nd grade head, I said “screw it, I’m skipping detention and playing.”  It took three quarters of the game before a teacher came out, grabbed me off the field and gave me detention for the rest of the week.  I didn’t care.  I had scored a goal and we won the game.  Detention didn’t matter.  In that instant, I became a terror.  I realized that teachers and school authority couldn’t really hurt me.  Everything changed, probably for the worse.

It took 8 years before an instant snap changed my behavior again.  It was freshman year of high school.  I was bored in class and pretty much made teachers’ lives miserable.  I was in a class and I was goofing around with one of my best friends.  I’m pretty sure we were trying to draw on each other with pens.  The teacher had tried to get us to stop for a few weeks, but we just didn’t care.  Finally, the person sitting in front of us turned back, looked me in the eye and simply said “stop.”  I don’t know why it clicked then, but in that instant, I realized how poorly I’d treated some of my middle school teachers and realized it had to stop.  I had one of those “rapid fire montages” of all the bad things I’d done and felt horrible.  From then on, I never disrupted a class ever again.

I got self confidence in an instant on the soccer field as a 12 year old referee.  In my first game, a coach ran onto the field and cursed me out, with just about every name in the book.  I’d gotten the call right, but he thought I should have given the 10 year old a yellow card.  I was scarred.  I called my referee assignor and he told me I had to stick with my calls and that if anyone did it ever again, I had all the power and should throw them out.  Two weeks later, another coach swore at me over a call he didn’t like.  I threw him out and stood my ground as he threatened me.  In that instant, everything changed.  I knew I could handle pretty much any situation.

Another example came from business.  When I was selling my first company, the final six weeks of the deal were incredibly stressful.  The deal almost fell through multiple times, there were tough negotiations and there was a bunch of shady stuff that happened that caused a ton of stress.  I got more and more involved in the deal and started to turn inward, become less involved with my friends and let my business spill over into other aspects of my life.  I was spending more time on the phone, in front of the computer and let it affect my life.  I was angry at the buyer and I started to take it out on other people.  I didn’t realize it any of this at the time, but looking back, everything was obvious.

I went on a business trip and enlisted one of my friends to help.  We drove to Michigan and I was on horrible phone call after phone call.  We were eating lunch at a diner and I got another phone call.  My friend started to playfully mess with me, just like he had for all of our friendship.  This time, I took my anger at how the deal was going out on him.  I hit him really hard in the leg (sorry Ken).  In that instant, I snapped back to reality.  I was disgusted with myself.  I instantly knew I’d acted like an idiot for the past six weeks and vowed to never let my business affect my friendships.

For me, realization and change comes in an instant.  I don’t realize I’m acting poorly (being mean to teachers, acting without confidence, taking my business frustrations out on friends), until something hits me like a ton of bricks and causes me to realize all of the things I’d done wrong or need to change.  I look back and can’t even imagine how I acted that way in the first place.  I look at my prechange self and see someone else.

I’ve had at least 9 of these in my life so far, 2 for the worse,  7 for the better.  I’d love to be able to find a way to accelerate the changes for the good at the expense of the bad, but I think that’s probably asking too much.  I think it’s human nature to have both.  At the very least, I’m hoping as I learn lessons from these ton of bricks moments, I’ll need to have fewer of them.  I’m just glad that so far my changes for the better outweight the changes for the worse.