ShaneLabs

You can see it’s been quite some time since my last post…about 8 months. I had some life events come up and I had to juggle my priorities. Well I’ve finally adjusted my priorities again and getting a presence on the web is at the top of the list again. I’ll be finishing the sites I started developing soon, and trying to post on here every so often again.

During the absence, I had accumulated 2000+ spam comments on this site, and given that there’s only 10 or so posts, I figured that was ridiculous. In order to stop the clutter, I’ve disabled commenting pretty much. Well you can comment on the old posts if you create an account, but I doubt anyone is going to create an account.

So…if you have anything to say to me in response to this blog, contact me at shane @ shanelabs.com

Take care!

One of the blogs I regularly follow is Erica.biz. She recently wrote about how she is always negotiating by simply asking the following question before purchasing something:

“Is that the lowest price you can offer me?”

What an easy way to ask a single question that will probably get you the best price, without sounding like a cheap bastard. I’m gonna try it…

I recently came across 2 blog posts which I found extremely refreshing. They have to do with people working their lives away so they can retire as soon as possible. Here are a few quotes from them…

Most people are still buying into the same old industrial age myth of “work sucks, so do as little of it as you can so you can live your life when you aren’t working.”

For years, we have been taught that work is something you have to do … so that you can do what you really want while you are not working.

I think a quote from Earl Nightingale is appropriate here.
“In an age where we’ve come to nearly deify leisure time, we’ve almost lost sight of the fact that virtually all of our satisfactions, rewards will come not from our leisure, but from our work.”

Life shouldn’t be wasted working towards for your retirement, it should be spent doing things you love.

There have been lots of positive comments, including this one:

Excellent! I am in the process of starting my own business, a bakery, because it is my passion and I love doing it. Living life day to day and being unhappy doing so isn’t what life is about. Have fun everyday, every hour, every minute. Thats what it is about.

I hope to be there one day… 

Here are the original links:

http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1121-early-retirement-is-a-false-idol

http://www.entrepreneurslife.com/thoughts/entry/what-i-hate-about-the-4-hour-work-week/

I really think this is an important reality:

 “I’ve made much more money by choosing the right things to say no to than by choosing things to say yes to. I measure it by the money I haven’t lost and the quality I haven’t sacrificed.”
-Danny Meyer of the Union Square Hospitality Group

I need to stop multi-tasking and spreading my hours out and instead focus on what really matters and do it not just right, but great.

Heard this quote:

“We do not stop playing because we grow old;
We grow old because we stop playing.”

Pass it on…

Saw an article here about how to prevent being negative. Here are the points I liked:

Don’t always “one-up”: It’s annoying when an acquaintance does it to you in a bar, so don’t do it to yourself. When you meet a goal you worked hard for, take a moment to celebrate the achievement instead of immediately focusing on what you can, or should do next.

Live in the moment: As Ferris famously said, “life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.” People who get bogged down in the past or are always looking ahead to the future miss the small joys of life—like eating a perfectly well-done burger or seeing their baby smile—that are right in front of them today.

Look for the good in people: It’s easy to ruminate on your friends’ and family members’ flaws, as I’m sure there are many of them. But by having unrealistic expectations of what people should do or how they should act, you’re setting yourself for disappointment. The truth is that most people mean well, even if they screw up every now and then.

Be thankful for the big things: In my house, we have a tendency to “sweat the small stuff.” But come on. I have a great career, a stable family, a roof over my head, and a healthy body. Do I really need to fret over the fact that Bass didn’t take my expired coupons?

This is going to be a stream of my thoughts as I try to figure something out…so apologies for the lack of organization.

So I’ve always heard that it’s a really good idea in life to have goals. You shouldn’t just live your life, but you should take some time to really decide what you want to do with your life, and then consciously strive for those goals. This is supposed to give you direction and motivation, which sound like good things to do.

But what do you do when you reach those goals? Do you claim happiness and stop there? Or do you set new goals or make those goals more impressive? I figure that if you leave your goals as is perhaps your life will become boring, having achieved all you wanted to achieve at a young age. However if you create new goals then will you always be striving for the unachievable? It’d be like you’d be setting yourself up for failure and unhappiness, because you’d never be satisfied!

As a side note, this internal discussion was triggered in me by my workout routine. I had goals of how many reps/weights I wanted to get to. But once I achieved those, I didn’t know whether I should up the numbers, or just be happy that succeeded.

Part of me thinks that if you leave the goals as is, your life may not become boring because if those goals are challenging enough you will have to struggle to keep them achieved. For example, say one of your goals is to have a few good friends that you know you can always count on. Once you achieve that it may not always stay achieved, as I may lose those friends and have to aquire more, or I may have to work to keep those friendships.

Or perhaps instead of creating new goals everytime they are achieved, just have more difficult goals but then break it down into intermediary achievements - like temporary goals. For example, say I want to accumulate $500k for retirement. Should I have that as my life goal, and then as I’m working towards it set mini goals of 100k, 200k, etc., knowing that I really wanna get to $500k in the long run?

Another part that I want to explore is what if my goals change over time? I would hope that I can define these life goals that they remain applicable to me over my entire life. Maybe that will also help me filter out the random unnecessary goals that I think are goals.

So, let’s consider the alternatives…
1) Create one set of life goals that will apply to my life over time, and always strive to keep them.
2) Create temporary sets of goals and redefine them as my life changes and as I achieve them.
3) #1, but with little steps in between goals to help me get some sense of accomplishment over time.

I’m starting to lean towards #1, as it seems to me that even if I have a constant set of goals, what I do to achieve them will be changing over time, which would keep my life interesting and challenging. However I do fear getting stuck in a rut if there are no changes in how I achieve them for some time and I end up doing the same thing over and over.

Let’s take a look at my life goals, which I just came up with, to see how this would apply.

 - Strong Relationships
 - Feeling of Usefulness
 - Time for Hobbies
 - Safe/Secure

This is my first stab, and it will likely be refined. So now lets add the current ways I would achieve these goals:

 - Strong Relationships
    - Wife
    - Family
    - Friends
 - Feeling of Usefulness
    - Job importance
    - charity, volunteering
    - Love from relationships
 - Time for Hobbies
    - Fun activities
    - Learning, reading, inventing
    - Enjoying outdoors
 - Safe/Secure
    - Stable job
    - Stable money
    - Physically out of danger
    - Physically healthy

So, if I achieve all of these, will I be happy? Let’s try and find out. I think I’ll definitely have to reflect on these very often to see how I’m doing and to help make decisions. In order to make it easy to remember perhaps I need an acronym. How about RUSH.

Relationships
Usefulness
Safety
Hobbies

I wish that didn’t have that negative connotation of not stopping to smell the roses…

I can already tell that I want to divide these into life goals and approaches/campaigns used to satisfy them. But that will come at another day.

I recently did a lot of research concerning the effects of your driving speed on your car’s fuel efficiency. I was very shocked by all the info and results I found. I was also shocked that there wasn’t 1 site that explained it all together. So, I created one:

http://www.mpgforspeed.com/

The site gives you the detailed numbers and facts, and explains why it is. As always, comments are welcome…

I’ve always heard that your fuel mileage of your car drops the faster you go. Well I wanted to know how much! So, I did some research, crunched the numbers, and created a site that would tell you exactly how much!

http://www.slowdowntosavegas.com/

 Just enter your MPG, the number miles you drive everyday, and the price of gas, and it will calculate how much it costs you to travel at different speeds. I was shocked! 5 mph slower and I would get a yearly savings of about $500!

They stated following in order to unwind:

2. Use other parts of brain: As the saying goes - “all work, no play makes Jack a dull boy.” Have things going on at home that will stimulate other parts of your brain. For most of us keyed-up, type-A personalities, doing nothing is not remedy. Many times doing something fun and stimulating to other parts of the brain gives our “work brain” a rest.

That makes sense!