Do You Want A Relationship Or A Dog?

Relationships with humans are complicated and they take work. When you make the decision to become closer to someone, be it a best friend, roommate or spouse you’re opting into all that comes along with it. The good: companionship, support, love, laughter and the bad: conflict, miscommunication, baggage, emotions. You make the decision and you dive on in.

Heading into a relationship you easily accept the good but most of the time you don’t initially think about or even notice the bad. But no matter what your relationship is, given the right amount of time and circumstances the bad is going to show up. Of course with some understanding and setting proper expectations the bad really isn’t that bad. Well, at least not for long. Something happens, there’s conflict and in the best case scenario you bring it up, deal with it and move on having made your relationship that much stronger.

We’re all selfish humans and we’re all impossible to please. As long as both people in the relationship understand that and do their best to deal with these issues through love, understanding and persistence it can actually be a healthy thing. But both people need to stick it through and keep on coming back.

Owning A Dog

Owning a dog is much more simple and mostly one-sided. A dog is always happy to see you and is going to love you on matter what. Conflict with a dog is easy to deal with. The dog does something wrong, it gets disciplined and life goes on. The dog doesn’t hold it against you and before you know it you’re back to being best buds. Give the dog a treat and bam, it’s all good.

You can’t create a true relationship with a dog, it’s just not possible. You can love a dog and the dog will definitely love you back but there’s not going to be any deep, human-like connection. Having a dog is great but in the end you’re the master and the dog is your pet that is forced to do what you want, when you want. You feed it, you walk it and you pick up it’s poop but in the end you’re the one who’s always in control.

Having a real relationship with someone else is an amazingly rewarding experience that’s going to be challenging at times. Owning a dog is great but it’s not a mutual relationship and will never give you the things you really need. Are you ready for a relationship or do you just want a dog?

 

Always Selling Something New That No One Understands

I’ve been thinking a lot about what makes working for startups so different, challenging and awesome all at the same time. The one thing that keeps coming to mind the most is the fact that when you work for a startup that’s doing something different you’re always selling something new that no one understands.

In most jobs you have a very specific role that is based upon working on or selling something that’s already understood. For example, you might work at a construction firm and your job is to build relationships with people who need a building built. Most people already know what a building is and whether or not they want to build one, you just need to find them and convince them that you’re the best option.

Or maybe you’re an account manager at a business that sells clothes or cars or food. Your job isn’t getting people to understand why they need these things, that was already done a long time ago. Instead, your job is to do it over and over again in an efficient, organized and consistent way.

This is the complete opposite of working at a startup. At a startup you’re bringing a new product or service to the market that no one really asked for but your goal is to make it something that people can’t live without. Think about that for a minute. Your entire job and overall business is something that’s not proven, isn’t being asked for and will need to be explained over and over and over again. Sounds like fun, huh?

For me, the act of building something from nothing through scrappy problem solving and creativity is the fun part. At isocket I’ve been able to see us grow from two people to fifteen and very soon we’ll be to thirty (yep, we’re hiring) and it’s all happened by pushing a product to market that’s never been done before.

All of this has happened by consistently selling (and building) something new that no one understands. The first two and a half years when we were talking about building the industry’s first programmatic direct deals platform for display advertising people thought we were nuts. We wouldn’t shut up about it but the market just wasn’t responding. We had a feeling it was going to take a while to turn the market into believers so we did what any other good startup does, we just kept on pushing towards not what people wanted but what we believed.

Now things are different and we’re not the only ones talking about it, but that doesn’t mean that we’ve stopped selling things that people don’t understand. I still do it every day and I expect to do it for at quite a while longer. The reality of working at a startup is that once someone gets what you’re doing you’re already working on something else that’s one step closer to where you really want to be. It’s a never ending cycle but it’s what make startups both exciting and demoralizing all at the same time. One day you’re up, one day you’re down but you’re never doing something boring.

If you’ve ever thought about creating or joining a startup I guess you should ask yourself if you’re ok with selling things to people that you know they’re most likely not going to understand (at least for a while). You’ve got to be ok with doing it over and over until you finally make it to the point to where the market understands you and your product is something that they see value in. History shows that it doesn’t happen to very many startups but the ones that get there will never experience anything like it.

With the $8M investment that me and the rest of the isocket team just announced we’re one step closer to getting to where we want to go. It’s been a great ride so far and I’m blessed to work with so many awesome people. Every day I go into the office and face new challenges and problems that no one has ever tried to figure out and yes, I’m always selling something new that most people still don’t understand (but they’re getting there).

 

Thoughts On Living A Life Less Posted

The other day I was checking out Hacker News and I was struck by this post that was titled A Life Less Posted. In the post the author Rian Van Der Merwe hits on some interesting points about the feelings and emotions that happen when vicariously looking at people’s lives through Facebook and other social networks. This is something that I’ve thought about a lot, I agree with many points that he brings up and I like the way he has related it to his own life and experiences.

First, he talks about the feelings that he went through while following some of his friends Euro-trip through Instagram and Facebook:

Last month several of my friends were in Europe on vacation. I know this because I followed their every move on Instagram and Facebook. Sometimes their photos reminded me of places we went on our trip. Sometimes I was jealous. Sometimes I just thought, wow, that’s pretty.

I don’t think that he’s the only one who feels this way while scrolling through newsfeeds, although he’s one of the first I’ve seen to publicly admit it. He went on to talk about how he’s happy that he didn’t have social networks and an always-on mindset when he and his wife went on their own trek through Europe.

In a sense I’m glad we did our big Europe trip before social networks existed. We checked our email maybe once in every city — if we could find an Internet cafe. For the most part we were on our own. Just one couple amongst a sea of tourists. There was nothing different about the bottle of wine we had in that one Italian restaurant. Except that it was our bottle of wine, and we shared it just with each other. Not with anyone else. It was a whole month of secret moments in public, and we were just… there. We didn’t check in on Foursquare, we didn’t talk about it on Facebook, we didn’t post any photos anywhere. I now look back and appreciate the incredible freedom we had to live before we all got online and got this idea that the value of a moment is directly proportional to the number of likes it receives.

I love when he says that he shared it with no one else and that the wine they were drinking was theirs and that’s it. They were in the moment, they were the only ones who mattered and they weren’t worried about Instagramming the moment for the rest of the world to see. They own that moment and unless someone comes by their house and takes a look at a photo album they’re not going to share it. I know this is sounding like I’m some old, grumpy man telling kids to get off his lawn, but to me there’s something refreshingly romantic about that.

Of course, the ironic thing is that unless you see this post’s link on Facebook or Twitter you would never know it existed. Ah, the irony. Thanks for reading and let me know your thoughts in the comments if you have any.

 

I Voted For The First Time Today

I’m thirty-two years old and for some reason I’ve never voted before. I can remember last time around, four short years ago, when everyone else voted and I didn’t. For the first time I felt like I was missing out, that I wasn’t doing my part and I felt a little ashamed and embarrassed that I didn’t take the time to vote. After all, it’s a blessing to live in a country where my vote actually counts so it just doesn’t make any sense not to.

But, today I finally voted and it was exciting. I was a little nervous when they handed me the ballots and I felt like a noob when I had to read the instructions on how to fill out each of the three big sheets. One sheet had the main elected positions that included voting for the president. The next one was a list of propositions that are California specific and then the other one was even more local to San Francisco.

It didn’t take me long to make my way through them and to be totally honest there were several positions (like board of education) that I had no clue who to vote for. For those positions I looked at what each person’s background was and picked the one I thought seemed best for the role. If there was an incumbent and I felt like things are going well with whatever they’re running for I voted for them to keep the position. For the California propositions I did my homework last night and had a list ready to either mark yes or no. With the propositions I’m just happy that they’re finally done with so I can stop seeing the commercials, billboards and posts on Facebook about them. It’s ridiculous how much money goes towards getting support for each one and being in advertising I have a much better idea of how much that really is. It’s crazy money.

The one thing that’s different now that I’ve voted is that I can’t complain about the process anymore and I can’t have the feeling that my vote doesn’t count, because it does. I’m not sure how close the votes going to be but regardless how it shakes out it feels good to know that I’ve been part of the process. I wish that I would have taken it more seriously over the past twelve years that I was legal to vote but unfortunately at that point in my life I just didn’t care. I didn’t think it was worth it, I didn’t want to put my vote where my beliefs were and it was just easier to skip it.

But not this year, this year I voted and I hope you did, too. If not, I can’t even begin to judge you — just promise that you’ll do it next time.

 

Explain Yourself

For a long time in my life I never had to explain myself. If I made decisions I just did whatever I wanted and that was it. No reasons were needed whenever I did this or bought that. When I went here or went there. I had no one I reported to. I never had to explain myself. I’m guessing that most people’s college years and twenties were/are similar to this. Do what we want, when we want.

At this point in my life though that’s changed a lot. One of the places I notice it the most is my job at isocket. Working at a startup is a lot different than working at a big company. At a big company you’re told what to do most of the time and have a very specific role you’re filling. This means that there’s not a whole lot of explaining why you make certain decisions and most of the time you’re not making them on your own. At isocket it’s the complete opposite.

An example of explaining myself at work would be communicating to the team that we need to add a certain feature to our product as soon as possible. Once communicated, I would be asked why I feel like we need to add it, the evidence that I’ve seen in the market, the impact that adding this feature to our product would have on our business and why this certain feature is should be prioritized ahead of other features that we already have in our roadmap. In other words, I would need to clearly explain myself and why I felt the way I did about this new feature. Conversations like this happen multiple times a day at isocket and it’s something that any early employee at a startup needs to be able to handle.

Decisions that would take other companies weeks or months take us only a few minutes. But, with this speed and freedom comes a lot more accountability. Being able to articulate why you want to do something and what it will mean to our business is critical when making important decisions very quickly. This is really what being at a startup is all about. It can get a little crazy at times, but I can guarantee you’re never going to be bored.

Another good example of explaining myself is when I make decisions in my marriage and other relationships that are important to me. Making a decision is easy, but thinking about why you made it and being able to explain the reasoning behind it is what’s hard. But, the more you can facilitate these types of conversations in a healthy way the more you’re going to be able to understand others and the more they’re going to understand you.

Explaining yourself in a personal relationship is actually pretty similar to how it happens in business but the topics are going to be much different. For example, my wife might wonder why I took a certain route to IKEA instead of the way that she would usually go. This doesn’t seem like something that’s a big deal, but being able to explain even the smallest of decisions is important. Being able to say that I took a different route because I thought that there would be a lot of traffic the other way due to the time of day would be a simple and straight-forward explanation. Of course, how she accepts my explanation is important but that’s not in my control. I gave my honest explanation and it’s up to her how she handles it.

Sometimes going through this process isn’t easy and being asked to explain yourself can make you feel like you’re being attacked for no reason. More times than not this isn’t the case and it’s up to you to be able to give the reasoning behind the things that you’re doing. If you can’t explain your decisions or simply don’t want to that’s your choice but your viewpoint or way of doing things won’t be nearly as respected as if you did.

Between being married and working at isocket over the past few years this has been a real learning experience for me and I still struggle though it sometimes. But I know that figuring out a way to confidently give my honest reasoning behind the choices that I make will only help me become a better and stronger communicator. Boo yah.

 

Being Productive vs. Being Destructive

In this life there are different choices that you can make and paths you can take. One is being productive and the other is being destructive. Usually we’re not all one or the other but we’re all living at a certain point on a sliding scale between the two. Here’s how I define both of these extremes.

Being productive is fulfilling your potential in all areas of life, given your current abilities, environment and restrictions all while feeling a strong sense of contentment (not complacency). It’s not just a work thing, it affects all parts of your life.

When you’re productive you’re intentional about the things you do day-to-day and take action to make things happen that in your mind and heart you know are good for you. You don’t let culture, peer pressure, jealousy or any other force dictate who you are and what you do.

Your personal relationships are strong and you surround yourself with people who are going to speak truth into your life and truly care about you in a deep and meaningful way.

Being destructive is choosing to live out your life in a way that’s harmful to your relationships, personal health or overall well-being most likely for some type of unattainable expectations you’ve set for yourself.

You let your emotions pull you in different directions and depending on the day you let the current of life sweep you in whatever way it wants. You complain and are frustrated about things that in your heart you know you can change, you just don’t have the discipline or understanding of how to do it. You feel like you deserve better and get upset when others are doing things you feel you’re entitled to. You have a serious case of FOMO (fear of missing out) and you’re more worried about what others are doing than yourself.

You make the assumption that you can do everything without anyone else’s help and your motivations to succeed are based on what you feel like other people want you to be.

Every decision we make and everything that we do can be bucketed into these two different types of outcomes. Sometimes we make a decision knowing which way it’s going to lead us, but others we have to make the decision first to find out. Then it’s up to us whether or not we make the same decision over and over again.

You’re not always going to make productive decisions but you should be aware which way each one is going to take you. Also, how do you feel after making each one and why should you/shouldn’t you make the same decision again? Take some time to think though what you’re doing and why it’s making you feel the way it is. Then you can decide whether or not it’s a decision you want to continue making in your life.

It sounds simple, but in the world we live in there’s always something else that we can distract ourselves with instead of focusing on the things that really make a difference in our lives. Knowing if the things you’re doing are productive or destructive is a great way to take that focus back and make some positive changes in your life.

 

Don’t Let A Speed Bump Throw You Completely Off The Road

Lately I feel like I’ve got it all figured out. I’m going to bed early, getting a lot of work done, running like I want to be, praying like crazy and staying connected with the people I care about. Well, except for last week. Last week didn’t go as planned.

I had thought through everything I would be doing during the week and was ready to take it on. That all worked well until I ended up staying at my office one night later than I wanted to on Tuesday and didn’t go to bed to bed until 2 am. That threw me off for my run on Wednesday (which I missed), got me into work later that day (feeling groggy), made me feel all tired and I didn’t end up running for the rest of the week until Saturday. I slept in later every morning of the week after that trying to catch up on my sleep but it never really happened. I was thrown off my game.

“Did you run this morning?” my co-worker Rex asked me on Wednesday when I got into work later than usual on Wednesday.

“Nope.” I said as a feeling of shame and guilt hit my gut. “I didn’t get up in time, but it’s all good – I’ll get back into it.” I was disappointed in myself.

You see, Rex has been on top of it lately. He runs after work and I can’t remember the last time he’s missed. He’s losing weight and seems to have more energy than ever. We’ve been keeping each other accountable and it was hurting my pride a bit when he asked me about my recent slacking. Rex is like a whole new man and I didn’t want to let him or myself down.

The reality for me was that I was thrown off my schedule by a speed bump and needed to get back on the road. I didn’t end up running the rest of the week but I knew Saturday was going to be the day to get back to where I needed to be. That’s what I had to keep telling myself, I had to adjust my schedule this week but that doesn’t mean I’m totally off my plan. The plan stays the same and it’s a matter of when I can get back in synch with it.

Sometimes we let our head tell us we’re way worse off than we really are and that’s dangerous. Don’t let the feelings you have about accepting adjustments or making mistakes take you out of the bigger plan you’ve put together for yourself. Keep telling yourself that you’ll get back on track and eventually you will.

So, today is Monday and I woke up early and ran this morning (it felt awesome). This means I’m back on my schedule that gives me the best chance to do the things I want to do this week. I’m not sure what’s going to happen after today, but for now I’m on track and it feels good. Now, onto the rest of the week.

 

Keeping My Emotions In Check

 

I should never be complaining about anything. I’ve got my health, an amazing wife, good friends, a great job, a growing relationship with Christ and a Pug that’s about as awesome as they come. But, for some reason that doesn’t stop me from getting down on myself sometimes and feeling like I’m doing it all wrong.

I don’t even know why and how it happens, but it does. In my head my emotions are telling me that I’m not doing enough, that other people are doing things that are better and that my relationships should be something different than they are. It’s hard to stop these thoughts from getting into my head and unfortunately it’s a reality that I have to deal with.

Depending on what’s going on in my life sometimes my emotions can be better or worse, higher or lower. One day my emotions can motivate me and another day they can make me feel worthless. My emotions can be all over the place and I guess the thing I’ve learned is that they’re always going to be changing. I think this happens to a lot of people and it’s a major driver why so many people are on antidepressant or other mood-altering meds (which admittedly I was on a few years back).

Here are some things I do to keep my emotions in check:

– I make sure I’m getting the sleep that I need for the week. The number one way for me to get in a bad emotional mess is lack of sleep. This might be different for you but you need to learn what you need in your life and what you don’t. Here’s some more detail about how I set these types of boundaries in my life.

– I share how I’m feeling with other people as much as possible. This is something that’s new for me and it still doesn’t feel natural but it always helps. No one likes to seem like they’re vulnerable but letting someone else know how you’re feeling is the first step in healing.

– I make time for prayer as much as I can. As a follower of Christ I rely on prayer and it’s not always easy to make the time. I’m working on proactively making time in the mornings for some silent prayer time so that I’m able to get my day started with some quality time with my man Jesus.

– I exercise a few times a week and now that my toe is healed up after breaking it I’m starting to get to the point to where I can crank out some decent morning runs. I run in the morning because it’s when it energizes me for the rest of the day and I don’t have to squeeze it in later, but that might be different for you.

– I’ve started to plan more things on a proactive basis instead of just hoping that they’ll fall into place. I’m all about being spontaneous, but nothing will cause more problems than not planning out your week and workdays at least a little bit a little in advance. You don’t have to get too granular, but at least know what’s going on at a high level.

I could keep going on but this should give you a good idea of the amount of time and effort it takes me to keep my emotions in check (and sometimes they’re still really hard to deal with). I just never want to be in a situation where I feel like they’re getting the best of me. That’s how larger problems get started and it’s all a downward spiral from there.

Listen to what your emotions are telling you and do your best to understand them, but don’t let them control you.

 

Typing 64 WPM And Waking Up At 5:30am

Whenever I set goals I tend to be really hard on myself when looking at the progress (or lack of) that I’ve made. I’m not sure why, but I feel like I should be able to achieve the goals I want faster than what is actually possible. This sets my expectations all wrong which then makes me feel like I’m not doing what I need to do in order to make my goal happen. Frustration then follows and before I know it I’m not making any progress towards the goal was trying to reach in the first place. Sounds crazy, but it happens.

Losing track of my goals really sucks and most of the time it ends with me being disappointed in myself, but I’ve decided to finally make a change and it’s starting to work. It’s nothing that seems mind-blowing, but to me the results have been.

Here are two goals that I’ve recently set and how I’ve somehow stuck with them to the point to where I’m starting to see some real results. These might not sound like life-changers but they’ve already made a big impact on my life.

Learning To Type (and to type faster)

I’m not sure how this ever happened but for some crazy reason I never learned how to type the right way. This means that I couldn’t use the home row and only typed with like five of my fingers. This not only made me a slow typer but it also meant that I always had to look down at my fingers on the keyboard. This was terrible for my posture and didn’t allow me to use a larger monitor along with my laptop. It wasn’t healthy for me (my neck was starting to hurt) and it slowed me down and frustrated me any time I had to type on a keyboard (which is pretty much all the time).

I knew I had to do something about this over four years ago but for some reason two years ago I got more serious about it and spent some time over Christmas vacation learning some of the basics like what finger is supposed to type what letter. I first used a program called GoodTyping and once I made it through that I found another one called TypingWeb that I still use up to this day.

Once I grinded through the initial awkwardness and frustration of leaning to type the right way I started to make some serious progress. I just kept going and even when I felt like I was “good enough” I didn’t stop. The one thing that is keeping my progress moving along is the fact that I practice typing every morning before I start working. It gets my fingers warmed up and my brain thinking in a good way to start off the morning.

How well has all of this worked? At this point I’m typing around an average of 64 words per minute which is over double what I was able to do less than a year ago. I still have a ways to go (I’d like to type around 80 WPM) but I’m going to keep working on it a little bit at a time every day and before I know it I’ll be there.

Going To Bed Earlier (and getting more rest)

Another goal I’ve talked about lately is going to be earlier (and getting up earlier), which has always been a struggle for me. I wrote about some of the structure and boundaries I set up as a way to make this goal happen and I’m happy to report that after only two weeks I’ve seen some amazing results.

The first week that I got to bed earlier I felt energized throughout my 10-12 hour workdays, even when working on things that I didn’t like doing. I didn’t need to rely on caffeine to keep me going and I kept up a good pace of getting things knocked off my to-do list. I did start to feel a little tired toward the end of the week, but I think that’s normal considering that I’m still getting used to waking up early every day and I’m starting to run again.

That first week went great, but the second week (and now into my third) was freaking amazing. Something started to happen to my body during the second week and I got on a consistent sleep schedule that had never happened to me before. Not only did I go to bed early every night but on three of the mornings I woke up at 5:30am without an alarm going off. Yeah, you heard me — I woke up at 5:30am in the morning without an alarm. The first time it happened to me I swear it felt like an out of body experience. I’m not even kidding. I woke up, looked at my phone to see what time it was (my alarm was set for 6am) and I felt wide awake. At that point I woke up, ran and felt great for the rest of the day. Then it happened two more times. Mind blown.

My mood has better, I can think though things better, I get more work done and I’m getting all of my morning runs in without feeling rushed. I would say that it’s working, wouldn’t you?

Now I just need to keep it up.

—
photo credit: labnol.org 

 

A Week of Structure and Boundaries

Last week I wrote a post about how you need to stop disappointing yourself and while I gave a good overview of my thoughts I didn’t talk about the hardest part, which is putting them into action. I wanted to talk a little more about how I stopped disappointing myself with one thing in my life for a week (hey, it’s a start) and some of the surprising results.

In that post I brought up the example of not getting enough sleep and constantly disappointing myself after failing over and over to get to bed early. I’ve always been someone who has stayed up late but with my life getting busier and more things needing my attention I’ve felt like my lack of good or enough sleep was having a negative effect on me. Couple this with the fact that I’ve now started to enjoy getting up early to run and this was a habit that I had to change.

Looking back I think I started getting more serious about fixing this issue after I had gotten sick of not feeling energized during the day at work and the sense that my overall mood was way worse than it should have been whenever I was tired. I’m sure from the outside looking in most people wouldn’t be able to tell the way I’m feeling, but to me I was over it and wanted to make a change.

I guess recognizing that it was even an issue was the first step for me. Even though it was something I thought about a lot I just kept falling into the same traps of not getting to bed on time and then feeling tired the next day.

The first thing that really got me thinking more about doing something about this little issue of mine was sharing was sharing it with one of my friends and co-workers Rex. I remember I told him about how when Stephanie’s out of town I would fall asleep on the couch and then end up waking up around 3am to go to bed, which would totally mess me up for the entire next day. He told me that he sometimes does the same, exact thing and from that point on we’ve started to keep each other a little more accountable. I’ll text him “GET OFF THE COUCH!” and he’ll do the same to me, which sounds like something small, but it works.

The next step was for me to really make sure that I set myself up for success as much as possible. I guess you could say that I set some boundaries and structure and even though that sounds super cheesy it’s actually working. I won’t give too much detail on each of the things I’ve done but here’s a quick list so you can get a good idea of where my head’s at with all of it.

  • I set a goal of always getting to bed by 11pm or earlier. I don’t nail it every time, but giving myself a goal of when I need to get in bed by has been really helpful.
  • I’m getting up early on weekends, too. I want to be able to keep the same sleep schedule throughout the week because the more consistent I am with it, the better. Yes, this means that I set my alarm for Saturday morning. Hey, whatever works.
  • I removed the Reddit app from my phone, which was something that I always ended up wasting time on at night before I went to bed. Do I miss it? A little, but it’s helped me get more control of my time, which is the goal.
  • I don’t spend time playing on my phone before I go to bed or when I wake up. These are both time sucks that are fun to do but they don’t add any value. If you’re going to bed, then go to sleep. Do you read before bed? That’s fine, but wasting your time watching an endless number of YouTube videos for an hour before you put your head on your pillow is only taking away from the sleep you need.
  • This past week I had something scheduled for before work every, single morning. Either I had a quick 30-45 minute coffee meeting or I went for a morning run before work every day last week and it was awesome. By having that meeting setup I get out of bed when I need to and there’s no way I’m going to hit the snooze button. Both running and having good conversations with awesome people are both great ways to start my mornings (read more on the importance of coffee meetings over here on my buddy Jason Shen’s blog).

The results of these changes have been really positive so far. The mix of getting more sleep and having better control of my time and energy has only made me feel so much better. I’m getting more done at work and I’m getting my mornings started with things that energize me, which is a lot better than getting out of bed groggy and then heading into work.

I did notice that I felt a little worn down toward the end of the week which still had some negative effects on my mood, but that’s just a result of running again after breaking my toe and putting all of this plan into action. I know I’m doing the right things to keep me moving in the right direction and once my mind and body get used to my new routine I’m only going to feel better and better.

If you made it down here I know this was a little long and it might seem like I’m making a big deal out of getting more sleep. But breaking bad habits, no matter what they are, is never an easy thing and will never happen unless you have some type of plan in place. Even though it’s been hard, I’ve enjoyed putting all of this into action and once it becomes a good, new habit for me I’m sure there’s something else I’ll start working on next.

photo credit: Seven Wonders of the World