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Laura and I went out on Saturday night to a house party and I got completely sloshed for the first time in my life.  While I remember having a good time, I don’t really remember why I was having a good time.  When I woke up, 2 hours past my Club Championship Qualification tee time, I had a splitting headache along with the sensation of wanting to hurl, although I didn’t give in.  After calling the golf course to be informed that I had been disqualified from the competition, Laura gave me a summary of some of my drunken shenanigans, some of which I can share with you:

1) At 1:30 a.m., I was telling Shawn to follow women into the bathroom, because that’s surely what women want when they are asking for directions to the bathroom.

2) By 3 a.m., I was telling anyone I could find about my plan to get my body fat down to 10% from 16%.

3) By 4:30 a.m., I was telling people that I grew up on the mean streets of Ville St-Laurent.

4) By 5:30 a.m., I was giving Doug shit for being a 26 year member and having a 10 handicap

There’s more, but the rest is just too embarrassing.  Two things I learned from that night: I have an extremely tolerant and awesome wife in Laura and being drunk is definitely overrated.

I can’t imagine what that’s like.  I just saw Michael Phelps win his 7th gold medal, but how the Serbian, Milorad Cavic, lost is simply unbelievable.  Cavic’s hand was about 6 inches away from touching the last wall and Phelps was an arms length away.  Phelps lunged for the wall using a butterfly style motion and Cavic, probably letting up a bit, didn’t keep his head down to extend his own lunge, allowing Phelps to touch the wall 1/100 sec in front of him.  How do you go to sleep after training for 4 years to lose by a fingernail on what is most likely a mental error?  When he sees that replay, he’s going to want to kill himself.  I hope the Serbians have good sports psychologists on staff :-).
P.S.  I know I haven’t updated this blog as much as I promised.  I apologize for that.  It seems I didn’t know what I was getting into and I did a poor job of estimating how much time and energy I actually had available to commit to this.  September should be better, but Omnifocus should also help me somewhat.

So I’ve missed a few days of blogging. A recap of my last few days:

- Saw the Dark Knight Premiere, 12 a.m. show. Was definitely worth the wait. Heath Ledger’s Joker is brilliant. The movie is much heavier and darker than Batman Begins, so I’m planning to watch it a second time with Laura sometime later this week. Anyone interested in joining us?

- Laura and I finally replaced our “office chairs” with real, ergonomic and comfortable office chairs. Got a great deal at Bureau en Gros (Staples for the rest of the world) and found out that they negotiate on office furniture. Cool.

- Saw my physio therapist for my back. Turns out, my back is fine. This diagnosis was that my lower body is just over-rotated, and thus my back muscles are pushing on my sciatic nerve. Doing the exercises she recommended allowed me to hit 50 balls without pain yesterday, so that’s encouraging. Still, this experience helped me realize that if I ever want to perform at the elite level of golf that I aspire to achieve, I need to re-dedicate myself to fitness.

Finally, I’m back on the GTD horse. My office has been a mess for some time and again, I found myself having to remember my to-do items in my head, neglecting my Omnifocus. After re-reading the beginning of the book, I found out that I was under-utilizing my calendar and over-scheduling my to-do items. For example, I gave the task “Watch Ricardo Semler’s presentation Leading by Omission” some arbitrary due date. I thought it was a good idea at the time, but given that I have roughly 120 tasks that I’d like to do but don’t have to get done, I was constantly going into my daily Omnifocus and rescheduling about 65% of the tasks. That conditioned me to to go numb to Omnifocus since I learned most of the daily tasks were tasks I didn’t have to do or couldn’t do, effectively killing my productivity system. I’m in the middle of re-organizng my tasks and hopefully this 4th GTD iteration will be the most effective yet. I think the biggest cause for being on my 4th iteration of this effort is that I didn’t take the time to read the book in in its entirety, a mistake I won’t make this time. Although the first chapters talk about the concepts, I’m finding the instruction provided in the later chapters of equal importance, if not greater. If anyone is serious about being more productive and effective with their time, this book is a must.

nK

Identifying an opportunity (i.e. hitting a ball almost fully submerged in water).

Focusing on your target

Visualizing the result

…

Learning from failure (here, my good friend Joel learned that not even he is powerful enough to bend the laws of physics).

nK.

When I saw this in the San Francisco Safeway, I’m pretty sure I let an audible “Holy Shit!” out. There are two things one can learn from this pic
1) This is why the average American is so terribly out of shape.
2) This picture is a fantastic example of why a frame of reference is necessary when photographing the extraordinary when it comes to size (or speed). Given the lack of one in this photograph, I have no choice but to explain that the cake was probably 8-10 inches high and 6-8 inches wide. I’ll try to remember that next time…

nK.

Anyone can make it to the PGA Tour. Sounds absurd, I know. But if you think about it, it makes sense. If this guy can make it, I know for certain that I can at least reach his level of physical fitness, so that’s not an obstacle. In terms of age, Kenny Perry, the hottest PGA tour pro right now with 3 victories in his last 5 starts, is 47. So time is not an obstacle. The largest obstacle however is the mental aspect of the sport. Hitting a tee shot on the 18th hole with water on the right and trees on the left when you have a 1 shot lead in a tournament demands significantly more focus than the 18th tee shot with your buddies after a few beers. Learning how to win is something that can not be taken for granted. Just ask Michelle Wie. But this too can be learned over time as there are many local golf tournaments a golfer can enter. Moreover, playing with some cash on the line further helps simulate the pressure of a real tournament. So if I can meet the physical and mental criteria to become a PGA tour pro, what’s stopping me? Discipline. Discipline to practice my short game (I love practicing my long game). Discipline to work out my core, so I can hit the ball further, which will help me shoot lower scores. Discipline to play the right club for the shot, not the most fun club, or the club that I would like to hit. Deep inside of me, I have this wild aspiration to make it to the PGA tour. I’m convinced that discipline is what stands between me and the PGA Tour. So why haven’t I regimented myself accordingly?

nK.

I’ve always considered myself a strategist. I determine what options are available to me, weigh pros and cons (sometimes obsessively) and make a decision. It’s worked well for me. It’s worked so well for me, that at this point in my life it would take a fantastic set of occurrences to fuck things up. At the same time, I sometimes find myself not wanting any of what I have. The house, the car, the businesses. Probably because with them comes the responsibility and the weight of managing them. When you have “things” you always have something to lose. I seem to miss the days where I had nothing to lose. Life seemed lighter. Unfortunately, I didn’t recognize the advantages of having nothing. Instead, because I thought I grew up poor, I always focussed on acquiring wealth and didn’t pay nearly as much attention to living or experiencing life.

Btw, I say thought I grew up poor because in hindsight I never really grew up poor. Although I lived in a 3 BR apartment with my mom and grandparents, never having my own room until I moved out at 21, I never went without food (lots of food), clothing, shelter and some pocket money. I thought we were poor because my parents didn’t dress me up in MTV clothing: Reebok pumps / Nike Airs, Tommy Hilfiger polos, cK jeans, etc. For these reasons, I didn’t fit in prior to uniforms being enforced in high school. I also grew up in a poor neighbourhood, but I realize now that my grandfather’s choice of area had more to do with value than comfort. In actuality, I was richer than most, I just didn’t look the part. Anyways, I’ve digressed.

Don’t get me wrong, I love making money and I love what I do to make money, I’m just questioning whether I placed too much emphasis on it too early. I like to think that I’m talented when it comes to developing and creating businesses. Given my cup is pretty empty when it comes to travel and living a life where I have more options than obligations on a daily basis, self-made or otherwise, the concept seems romantic. Maybe I could take a few months off and make up on some lost opportunities. Time to strategize on what it will take to make that happen :p.

In some parallel universe right now, I’m complaining about the lack of structure in my life and how I’m tired of not knowing what tomorrow will bring :-).

nK.

Keith and Kevin have gone through the exercise of 1 blog post per day, and both tell me it’s a useful exercise to make blogging more of a habit so I’m going to give it a shot for 1 month and see what happens.

Golf

Kind of sucks right now.  I pinched my sciatic nerve last week hitting golf balls.  I seem to have a minor case of sciatica.  Basically, if I move the wrong way, it feels like I got shot in my lower back. It’s especially a downer because I was hitting pretty well and there’s an event at the club this weekend that is always a blast, but I can’t attend.  The one positive out of all this is that I seem to want to recommit myself to crazy fitness.  I guess I’m not in as good of a shape as I thought I was.  Time to train like Tiger :-).

Web Apps

I like to think I have good ideas for profitable web apps.  OK, really, I think I have some kick ass ideas for web apps.  But it started to annoy me that I had to convince technologists that my ideas were kick ass, because without them, I can’t even execute an online proof of concept, which would probably be more useful in getting people to believe in my ideas than my broken english.  So, I’m serious about learning Ruby on Rails.  Keith was over for the week and was kind enough to spend 5 hours with me on an app I’ve been wanting to build since December 2007.  As we were working, I was pretty impressed with how quickly Rails can get the skeleton of your app up and running.  But the biggest surprise was how quickly my developer skills came back to me.  Very cool.  We even did some work with CSS, which I had no experience with, but after a 5 minute explanation from Keith, it seemed pretty easy.  Applied it to the blog, so I hope you like the changes :-).

I have more to talk about, especially my dilemma on whether to buy Apple stock now or to buy after the US banking system collapses.  Seems like the right decision would be the latter, but that App store is going to be a mother cash cow for Apple.  Brilliant move to cut the price of the iPhone in half, reduce the barrier to entry, introduce the App store, make hundreds of millions.  Their stock should fly, I just don’t know how much the market is going to punish them for the crappy US banking system, rising oil and a weaker dollar.

À demain.

nK.

Watching Pens vs. Wings game 6 while writing this…

It took only 14 days before I started to feel overwhelmed with work, again. The symptoms were familiar: Long working hours, fatigue, knots in my stomach, guilt when I wasn’t working and mild headaches. Initially, I attributed these feelings to the incompletion of significant client deliverables, but once I completed those (on time) the feelings didn’t go away.

Context switch: Pens score in OT 3! Wings were 34.8 seconds away from the cup. What a turnaround for the Pens. Back to original topic

As I was working away last Friday, I stopped, realizing the root cause of my problem: My work actions weren’t always coming from my Omnifocus lists. Since I hadn’t input various important actions in a trusted repository that I check frequently (Omnifocus), my mind would remain in an anxious state, “working” to keep track of these tasks. Anyhow, I took care of this earlier today by dumping these taks in Omnifocus and I feel much better. Having a repository that contains all your current projects, ideas, actions, errands absolves your mind of the responsibility to track them. When your mind is free of this burden, it can think about other things, like getting your golf swing on plane for instance :-).