Did you have some great ideas in 2010? What became of them?  Did you act on them and create something…or are they still just great ideas?

Here are some thoughts about ideas:

1. Ideas without action are called dreams.
2. Ideas are worth exactly $0.00 unless someone brings them to life.
3. Most people don’t care about your ideas (they have plenty of their own).
4. VC’s don’t throw cash at ideas.
5. When people have good ideas, they keep them inside for fear of someone else stealing them.

Now, I’m not suggesting that ideas are bad (although some probably are). They’re also not completely worthless. But ideas require action to become reality. So in 2011, consider this:

1. Generate lots of different ideas.
2. Share your ideas with others and let them help you grow your idea into something even better.
3. When you arrive at your great idea, act on it, execute and see what happens.
4. Be persistent. Give your ideas a chance before you pivot to the next thing. You thought it was great idea for a reason.
5. If for some reason your ideas don’t pan out, learn from them, move on, and try another idea.
6. Keep coming up with new ideas to try.
7. Don’t take action without ideas.

Thanks to Natalie Dee for the image.

Related posts:

1. Where Good Ideas Come From
2. I Can Live with That
3. The Give and Get of Engaged Employees
4. What if: We all did presentations like Starbucks?
5. Did we forget how to talk to each other?

I was recently going through my iPod when I came across my favorite podcast series The Moth. The Moth is an incredible series of storytellers brought together under one electronic roof to tell true stories live, without notes or PowerPoints. Just good old-fashioned story telling. And there are some amazing stories to be heard for sure. I settled on one I had heard before and it makes me laugh, so I listened again. It’s a story by A.J. Jacobs, who is a New York Times bestselling author, Esquire editor, and self-described human guinea pig. His story is called Outsourcing My Life. Without dragging you through the whole story, take a listen to the story right here, and when you’re done, read on. It’s short, captivating, and very funny.

OK, so if you didn’t listen here’s a brief excerpt to set the stage for this post:

“It began a month ago. I was midway through The World Is Flat, the bestseller by Tom Friedman. I like Friedman, despite his puzzling decision to wear a mustache. His book is all about how outsourcing to India and China is not just for tech support and carmakers but is poised to transform every industry in America, from law to banking to accounting.

I don’t have a corporation; I don’t even have an up-to-date business card. I’m a writer and editor working from home, usually in my boxer shorts or, if I’m feeling formal, my penguin-themed pajama bottoms.

Then again, I think, why should Fortune 500 firms have all the fun? Why can’t I join in on the biggest business trend of the new century? Why can’t I outsource my low-end tasks? Why can’t I outsource my life?

The next day I e-mail Brickwork, one of the companies Friedman mentions in his book. Brickwork—based in Bangalore, India—offers “remote executive assistants,” mostly to financial firms and health-care companies that want data processed. I explain that I’d like to hire someone to help with Esquire-related tasks—doing research, formatting memos, like that. The company’s CEO, Vivek Kulkarni, responds, “It would be a great pleasure to be talking to a person of your stature.” Already I’m liking this. I’ve never had stature before. In America, I barely command respect from a Bennigan’s maître d’, so it’s nice to know that in India I have stature. A couple of days later, I get an e-mail from my new “remote executive assistant.”

Dear Mr. Jacobs,

My name is Honey K. Balani. I would be assisting you in your editorial and personal job…. I would try to adapt myself as per your requirements that would lead to desired satisfaction.

Desired satisfaction. This is great. Back when I worked at an office, I had assistants, but there was never any talk of desired satisfaction. In fact, if anyone ever used the phrase “desired satisfaction,” we’d all end up in a solemn meeting with HR.”

Jacobs goes on to detail hiring a team of people in Bangalore, India to live his life for him – answer his emails, call his coworkers, argue with his wife, and read bedtime stories to his son. It’s fascinating.

So, after listening to this podcast I thought, “Hmmm, with 2011 rapidly approaching, I could use some of that.” Then I wondered, what are the low-level tasks that I would love to outsource to free up my time to do more meaningful things. I don’t think I’d go to the extreme of outsourcing story time with my kids (it’s too priceless to me), but there are things I would actually consider, especially in my ever increasing involvement in the world of social media. So, here are some of the things I would really pay someone else to do for me in 2011:

• I spend a lot of time reading (and yes skimming) over 350 blogs each day. On average, I read/skim probably between 500 and 600 posts each day. Then, I make selected clippings in NetNewsWire to read in more detail or make notes on later.  I also flag posts to share with you all on this blog and on Twitter. I would LOVE to outsource some of that. Give someone my RSS feeds and say, skim these and look for things people would be interested in. I probably wouldn’t outsource writing this blog, but I would consider outsourcing posting interesting links to Twitter. It takes a lot of time to do. Here’s what I’d ask them to do: Look for interesting stuff out there. When you find something useful, use HootSuite to schedule a Tweet sometime later in the day. Basically, I’d ask them to fill the HootSuite schedule with Tweets of interesting items to be dispensed throughout the day. That would free up my Twitter time to interact more with everyone instead of just posting links. I would be able to focus on connecting instead of broadcasting.
• I would love to outsource just about everything on my Facebook account! They could manage my Farm, post photos, wish friends Happy Birthday and finally answer my 25 questions for me! They could even scan old school-days pictures and upload them for me and add some witty captions so my old friends still think I’m funny. They could find people I knew way back when and invite them to be friends. I’d love it. All the things I want to do on Facebook but just don’t have time to do, they could do it for me!
• Find interesting people on Twitter for me to follow. As much as it seems Twitter is about getting followers, I actually enjoy finding and following new, interesting people. In fact, every few days, I search Twitter on keywords that interest me and see who pops up. If their profile and recent Tweets are interesting, I follow them for a while. What I’d love to outsource is the time consuming searching part. If I could pay someone to find me 100 interesting people to follow each week I gladly would. That would make my life simpler. Then all I have to do is read their updates and decide if I still want to follow them or not!
• Manage my LinkedIn account. I can never seem to keep LinkedIn up to date. I also manage two LinkedIn groups (Agilistas and Rally Software) and I’m a terrible moderator. I always forget to accept new members and to check what’s going on in my group discussions. Easy spot to outsource. Manage the groups and give me a weekly digest of what’s going in the discussions.
• I would definitely get help keeping my Flickr account up to date. Most of my family and my wife’s family live out-of-state, so they rely on Flickr to see the latest goings-on of our five- and two-year old boys. We’re both terrible parents about keeping it up to date. We take plenty of pictures. We just never upload them. Again, I’d gladly pay someone to go through our cameras and on a weekly basis pick the best shots and post them on Flickr with some family-friendly descriptions. That would make our families so much happier! I’d probably have them update my Posterous and TwitPic accounts while they were at it too!
• I’d even have them do some old-school clearing for me: email. I have 7 different email accounts and get hundreds of emails every day. If they could weed through the accounts and delete spam and junk, and flag only the things I need to respond to, that would be amazing. I get way too much email and this would cut down so much time from my day! If they could answer my email, that would be even better!
• Another thing I’d outsource from my online life is managing my Dopplr travel account. I use to do a ton of travel for my job and my team used Dopplr to keep each other updated on where we’re at. We also used it to track our carbon footprint. But it’s such a burden to have to keep getting my travel details from our corporate travel agent and transferring them into Dopplr. I’d outsource that with no problem.

I figure that if I could just outsource these simpler tasks in my life, I’d have at least one more free day every week. And that goes a long way to getting me to my goal of achieving Timothy Ferriss‘ much fabled 4-hour Workweek. But I have a feeling that if I outsourced these simple things, I might start getting like A.J. Jacobs and want to outsource more! I mean, what scares me is at the heart of it, I’d probably outsource everything if I could just so I could spend more time with my wife and kids and have more time for cycling the beautiful roads of Colorado. After compiling this short little list, I might actually try outsourcing some of it to see how it works. I looked into pricing for basic executive assistants and A.J. Jacobs is right, you can get a week of assistance for the price of a nice dinner. Pretty cheap, but I think that’s what troubles me on a moral level. I’m not opposed to the outsourcing part, but am opposed to paying people unfair wages for their work (but that’s a whole other blog post). If I can get around my moral objections I might try it. If I actually do it, I’ll be sure to keep you posted.

So I’d like to hear from all of you now: If you could outsource the little things in your life, what would they be and how would you use that new found time?

Related posts:

1. The Life Manifesto
2. Private: Extending Your Personal Brand Without Diluting It
3. Finding Clarity: What’s Really Important in Life
4. Commit to Something Today! You’ll Be Glad You Did.
5. Know Your Users

Last February, I spent a few weeks on my back with a herniated disk and pinched nerves in my neck. (Yes, it hurt). One of the worst parts of spending time in bed was missing my daily indulgence of visiting Starbuck’s for my coffee in the morning. One morning, my amazing wife brought me home a nice, hot Starbucks mocha. I usually don’t look to my coffee cup for inspiration, but laid up and having not much else to do, I started reading “The Way I See It” on the side of the cup. I really liked the quote, but, in a Vicodin-Espresso induced haze, I lost track of the cup and forgot the quote. Well, here I am over a year later sitting in Starbuck’s sipping a mocha and what do you know, I got the same cup. Well, not the very same cup, that would be kind of gross, but I think you get what I mean. I thought, hmmm, maybe karma is telling me something. Here’s what my cup said:

“The irony of commitment is that it’s deeply liberating – in work, in play, in love. The act frees you from the tyranny of your internal critic, from the fear that likes to dress itself up and parade as rational hesitation. To commit is to remove your head as the barrier to your life.” – Anne Morriss

Well, I’d have to say I’m glad I found this cup again and I’m glad I found it now. I’ve been very non-committed to writing my blog in the past few weeks. Things have been swirling around in my professional and personal life and I just couldn’t focus. My blogging and Tweeting had been taking too much time away from my personal life. So, I stopped really putting my all into my blog. In fact, I stopped writing all together for almost a month. Then I realized I missed it. Somehow, I needed to commit to a better balance between my real life and my “online life”. So, that’s commitment number one: I’ll continue to blog and Twitter but with a much greater respect for my personal time. It’s a commitment to those that I love and a commitment to all of you who read my blog (and yes, I love all of you too, but in a different way). OK, got that out of the way and I’m feeling good. I’m breathing again!

But more than that, this cup really woke me up (and not just from the double espresso) to my growing desire to write a book “one of these days“. I’ve had this idea in my mind for a book about the power of collaboration and it’s impact on innovation in successful organizations for some time and I’ve kept putting it off for a variety of “really good” reasons. Hmmm, can you say internal critic and fear? Apparently I can’t, so I did what Anne Morriss said, and I dressed it up as rational hesitation. I had a million excuses why I couldn’t start writing it. Well, I think I’m going to go out on a limb here and free myself by finally, openly committing to writing this book that I’ve had inside me for a long time. Aaaah, I feel better already. Two big commitments and I didn’t die, I didn’t implode, I’m still here. And because I believe deeply in commitment, I feel deeply liberated by openly making these commitments. Wow, what a great feeling!

So, what’s holding you back from doing something you’re passionate about? Maybe today is your day too. Maybe you just need to make a commitment and go for it. I promise, it won’t hurt (unless you’re committing to finally getting that tattoo you’ve always dreamed of). Go ahead and make your commitment right here for everyone else to read. Tell us what you’re passionate about and what you’re going to commit to.

Related posts:

1. What if: We all did presentations like Starbucks?
2. Private: Extending Your Personal Brand Without Diluting It
3. Effectiveness vs. Efficiency
4. My Outsourced Life: Maybe I should try this
5. Agile/Scrum Elevator Speech

Something incredible happened to me a few weeks ago. Something life changing. Something that gave me a lot of clarity. Something close to miraculous. I lost my job. That’s right, I lost my full-time job. And do you know what? It was one of the best things to happen to me in a long, long time! In all the hustle and bustle and “busy-ness” of keeping my career going on just about a 24-7 basis, I lost sight of a lot of things.

Since I lost my job, I’ve had a lot of free time. And free time is a good thing. Maybe the best thing in life. It gives you time to slow down and actually see the things that surround you everyday. Things you take for granted. Yup, I’m talking about family…wife, kids, dogs…you remember them right? Well, it’s been amazing spending entire days playing with my kids. Noticing how much they smile and laugh. How big they’ve gotten. How much fun they are to be around. And it’s been amazing spending time with my wife. Realizing once again why it was her that I married. She’s the most supportive, positive, amazing person in the world. And it’s been nice getting to know that again (although I’m not sure I ever forgot that or doubted it).

Besides spending time with family it’s given me a lot of time to do what I love doing most, riding my bike through Colorado’s beautiful mountains. Cycling is a meditation time for me. It’s when my mind finds the most clarity and everything starts to fall into place for me. During all of my recent cycling, I’ve found a lot of clarity in my life. I’ve thought a lot about the direction my life and my career should go in next. And I’ve realized that where I was may not have been the healthiest place for me mentally, physically, spiritually or even career-wise. I’ve been given a great opportunity to really think through the choices I’ve made in my life and reevaluate them. I have the time now to decide what will make me and my family the happiest. And I believe that if you’re happy with your life and your choices, then that’s as good as it gets. As Tony Hsieh, the CEO of Zappos.com said: “When your work is an extension of who you really are deep down inside it’s no longer a job or a career. It’s a calling.” I think it’s time I found my calling.

Related posts:

1. Learning from Quincy Jones
2. My Outsourced Life: Maybe I should try this
3. Commit to Something Today! You’ll Be Glad You Did.
4. If it hurts, you’re probably doing it right
5. The Life Manifesto