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Why Go Above the Bare Minimum?

by Jason on June 18, 2013 in General with 2 Comments

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Most people do the bare minimum and no more.

The term paper requires 5 pages. The new job requires you to be in at 8am. The exercise routine calls for three rounds of 12 reps.

Why do more? Save your energy, save your time, save your money.

The problem is, if you apply this approach to everything, you'll only ever get opportunities that are "the bare minimum".

To land that amazing new position working on special projects that just opened up, or that spacious, below-market room in a great neighborhood, or that smart, funny and gorgeous guy/gal, you've got to be willing to go above and beyond.

Investing an unusual amount of creativity, dedication, spunk or just plain hustle can often pay huge dividends.

But if that’s too hard, you could always just do the bare minimum and hope for the best…

(Link fixed!) Productivity comes from looking forward to your work. I coded a little app called RewardBox to give you incentives to do tasks you dislike.

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FitChal #6 (Pretrained) – Max L-Seat Hold

by Jason on June 13, 2013 in General with 3 Comments

Late last month I was hanging out with some of my old gymnastics teammates from Stanford. At their apartment, there were a pair of parallettes, and my buddy Nick challenged me to an L-Seat competition. Neither of us had done one in a while and we both gave it our best shot. I think he beat me by like 10 seconds —  and I wasn’t thrilled about it.

Much more than a balance exercise, the L-Seat uses chest, triceps, quads and abs to hold. I decided to make this month’s challenge an L-Seat competition and see if I can ramp myself up so next time we face off, I’ll smoke him.

Here’s my pre-trained test.

 

(Link fixed!) Productivity comes from looking forward to your work. I coded a little app called RewardBox to give you incentives to do tasks you dislike.

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What’s Your Big Decision? (My 27th Birthday Giveaway)

by Jason on June 4, 2013 in General with 10 Comments

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So I turned 27 about a week ago.

Last year, for my 26th birthday, I had a giveaway where I asked you, readers, to share your biggest lesson you wish you learned when you turned 26 — or who you hope to be by then if you were younger than me.

That was a lot of fun, so let’s do it again!

The giveaway: Decisive by Chip and Dan Heath - a phenomenal book about making better decisions, not through a soulless spreadsheet, but with sound and proven psychological principles. One lucky commenter gets a free copy (closes June 6th)

The request: Leave a comment about an important decision you made in life and what you learned from it.

Here is mine:

Choosing to work at the Stanford Daily

When I was getting ready to graduate Stanford, I interviewed for and was offered the job as the Chief Operating Officer of the Stanford Daily. It would be a full-time, one year paid position for a recent grad to run business operations for our student newspaper. I was also in final round interviews with Teach For America and the Coro Fellowship in Public Service.

The role at the Daily was less prestigious and I had no particular experience working at the newspaper. It would be local. TFA and Coro could potentially take me far away from the Bay Area and would take me down the road of public service.

I spoke with a mentor of mine, Dan Gill of Huddler, and he told me something I’ll never forget: “It’s rare to get P&L (profit and loss) experience so early in your career, and that’s a really valuable experience. Since newspapers are struggling, if you fail, no one will blame you. And if you succeed, you’ll look like a hero. It’s a no lose proposition.”

Now I’m not saying you should always think about decisions in this way, but that advice made a lot of sense to me and I took the Daily job. It was tough and we did struggle, but I think I did make some lasting contributions to the organization. And I’m really glad I took the job – it put me down the path of business, lead me to working at isocket, and well, the rest is still being written. =)

—

Alright, well, that’s my story. What’s yours?

(Link fixed!) Productivity comes from looking forward to your work. I coded a little app called RewardBox to give you incentives to do tasks you dislike.

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FitChal #5: Increasing My Max Pull-Ups by 40%

by Jason on June 1, 2013 in General with No comments

(Click through to see the video)

As another month closes out, I’ve got the results from my May Fitness Challenge, which was max pull-ups. At the beginning of May, I completed 20 pull-ups. As per usual, I did my normal workout routine which includes a mix of running, interval workouts and heavy lifting.

In addition, I also started adding sets of pullups. Here’s the breakdown:

Week 1 + 2: 4x 12 pull-ups
Week 3: 2x 14 pull-ups + 2x 13 pull-ups
Week 4: 4x 15 pull-ups

In retrospect, I should have ramped up sooner to 13/14 sets so my last week I could have been doing sets of 16. I think that could have put me over the edge and finished 30, but who knows. In any case, I’m pretty happy with the 40% improvement, especially when I watched the tape and realized I undercounted by one at the moment of the trial.

You can catch up with my other fitness challenges, and read more about how these FitChals got started.

(Link fixed!) Productivity comes from looking forward to your work. I coded a little app called RewardBox to give you incentives to do tasks you dislike.

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If You Don’t Have Time for a Side Project, You Are Probably Just Lying to Yourself

by Jason on May 27, 2013 in General with No comments

 

side projectsHaving a side project to work on is a tremendously powerful way to develop new skills, improve your career capital and recharge from the repetitive tasks you do at work. In a couple of months (or less) you could learn how to code, or train to run a marathon, improve your social skills or write a novel.

Despite these advantages, most people never even get started with their side projects.

They make excuses, saying how they don’t have time, how next month will be less busy or how they’re more dedicated to their job or their families to embark on such extracurriculars. Look, I know it can be tough to find the energy to embark on a side project. But unless you are working 100 hours a week (and you’re probably exaggerating) or the parent of a newborn child, you are probably just lying to yourself.

Stop Watching So Much TV

Most Americans watch around THREE HOURS of television per day. Sure, there are probably a few people watching like 10 hours a day, but that’s still a lot of people vegging out for over an hour a day. For a lot of folks, TV can be swapped with social media or video games to the same effect.

You really only need average 35 mins a day on your side project to net 4 hours a week on your side project. That’s 200+ hours over a year – which would allow you to do a tremendous number of things.

 

The Mayor of Newark Has a Side Project

Cory Booker is the well-known mayor of Newark, NJ and unofficial Senatorial candidate, has also co-founded a video sharing startup called Waywire. Now, I don’t care what your political stance is, being the mayor is a lot of work. And if you believe even half the stories that make him one of the “hardest working mayors in America” you’ll understand that Booker is not just punching the clock on his public service duties.

Yet that has NOT stopped him from creating something new from scratch – on the side.

Paul Graham Spends 3-4 Hours a Day on Hacker News

Paul Graham is the cofounder of Y Combinator, which funded my startup Ridejoy and other, far more successful startups like Airbnb, Heroku and Dropbox. In addition to running Y Combinator as a partner and being a husband and father, he also spends a lot of time working on Hacker News, the Reddit-like community he created that gets 1.6M pageviews daily.

How much time? Three to four hours per day, according to a recent article on TechCrunch. Sure, Hacker News is tangentially related to his job running Y Combinator, but most side projects do provide real tangible benefits to your main work responsibilities.

Start Slow

Swayed? Thinking about buckling down to really take on that side project? Cool. But don’t start too hard.

From my research on human behavior change, I think one of the big missteps of human psychology is that we’re overly optimistic about our own abilities to change. We bite off more than we can chew.

Instead of diving in for hours one day, try spending 10 minutes a day on the project for a week. Consistency is great than intensity. You’ll make more progress in the long run if you keep at it a little bit each day, than if you immerse yourself once every few weeks.

I estimate it took me about 100 hours over many months to learn enough programing to build the first version of RewardBox, but there’s no way I would been able to do it over 50 hrs/wk for 2 weeks.

What’s a side project you’ve wanted to start? Let me know what’s holding you back in the comments.

(Link fixed!) Productivity comes from looking forward to your work. I coded a little app called RewardBox to give you incentives to do tasks you dislike.

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