Play Hard

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21
Feb 12

My recent visit to the Florida Keys

Teresa and I celebrated our birthdays last week in the Florida Keys. Although my Mother is from Florida, I had never visited anything south of Miami. I love the ecosystems and the individual beauty that each island displays.

We had dinner with one of Teresa’s cousins and her husband. Her husband is a veterinarian and they have lived on Marathon Key for many years. We talked about the transient nature of the residents. Most folks stay about three years and either run out of money or miss their friends and move back home.

I know that I missed my friends and family. The beauty of the area was wonderful to visit, but living in the area did not appeal to me.

What is it that makes us wish to live in places that we vacation?

More goals are better

Today I made the transition from 51 years to 52. I tend to get reflective on my birthday, and today I am thinking about how badly I need goals in my life to be happy and to get better.

Whether it’s a sales goal or an Indianapolis adventure race that I’m training for, it helps me focus. It makes the day-to-day discipline required seem less like drudgery and more like meaningful work.

How badly do you need goals? Do you need to lengthen your goals list?

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25
Jan 12

Inc. – Get a Life Outside Your Start-up: 22 Tips

Work-life balance a little out of whack? We asked busy entrepreneurs to give us their best tricks for coping with the daily grind.

Launching a start-up is demanding and takes huge amounts of time, energy, and attention. Is it possible to have a life outside of work? It’s not easy, say the founders I talked to, but they do have tips to help you launch and maintain some vestige of work-life balance.

1. Start dancing. It’s physical, it’s fun, it’s social, and you can’t check your phone or be working on your laptop while you’re out dancing. Find the coolest place wherever you live, and go out dancing once a week. You’ll feel completely renewed, energized and ready to tackle the world, or at least your start-up. – Vivian Rosenthal, founder and CEO of GoldRun, an augmented reality iOS application.

More of the Inc. article from Christina DesMarais

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23
Nov 11

Notre Dame News: Walking through doorways causes forgetting, new research shows

I’m staying right here.

We’ve all experienced it: The frustration of entering a room and forgetting what we were going to do. Or get. Or find. New research from University of Notre Dame Psychology Professor Gabriel Radvansky suggests that passing through doorways is the cause of these memory lapses.
“Entering or exiting through a doorway serves as an ‘event boundary’ in the mind, which separates episodes of activity and files them away,” Radvansky explains.
“Recalling the decision or activity that was made in a different room is difficult because it has been compartmentalized.”
The study was published recently in the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology.
Conducting three experiments in both real and virtual environments, Radvansky’s subjects – all college students – performed memory tasks while crossing a room and while exiting a doorway.

More of the Notre Dame News article from Susan Guibert

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14
Nov 11

Seth Godin: Adversity is the route to success

From Seth Godin’s blog:

Resource-rich regions often fall behind in developing significant industrial and cultural capabilities. Japan does well despite having very few resources at all.

Well-rounded and popular people rarely change the world. The one voted most likely to succeed probably won’t.

Genuine success is scarce, and the scarcity comes from the barriers that keep everyone from having it. If it weren’t for the scarcity, it wouldn’t be valuable, after all.

It’s difficult to change an industry, set a world record, land big clients, or do art that influences others. When faced with this difficulty, those with other, seemingly better options see the barrier and walk away.

My family depends on Skype

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Click to zoom in and see Emily chatting with Cricket via Skype.

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03
Nov 11

Emily Theis is one of my role models

I admire Emily Theis and her relentlessness in making the lives of less fortunate people better.

Ball State Better Way Imports Party from Emily Theis on Vimeo.

Indy Adventure Racing / Play Hard / Uncategorized — Comments Off
02
Nov 11

Great year of racing with Team Ragged Glory

My favorite diversion is adventure racing. A group of friends and I have been doing adventure races since 2001 as Team Ragged Glory. This year we did four races and finished well in each :

Planet Adventure Urban Sprint – 1st overall
Planet Adventure 30 Hour Challenge – 6th overall
Planet Adventure Urban Sprint Race – 2nd all male division
Indianapolis Adventure Race – 3rd overall

Our success this year was due to a combination of factors: experience, navigation skills and good team dynamics. It’s the people that are the key ingredient to the fun we have every year. I raced with some incredible teammates in 2011:

Eric Henricks – Exceptional navigator, calm thinker, great all-around athlete. Eric knows how to lead.
Dave Tanner – Endurance legend, incredible swimmer, cyclist and navigator. Dave is kind, gentle, and relaxed during every race.
Nancy Gawrys – Energetic, positive, focused, competitive and fun. Nancy is probably the best athlete on the team, and the easily the most fun.
Julie Nor – College athlete, long-distance deity, Julie is one of our youngest and strongest. Her first race with TRG was legendary. Her faith and her strength make every race memorable.
Steve Kincade – a founding member of Team Ragged Glory, Steve is more of a brother to me than a teammate. Steve navigates, he’s supportive and considerate in-race. He effortlessly cranks out unbelievable distance on foot. He’s a rock.
Jeff Boxell – Jeff’s steady, focused relentlessness and his understanding of the inner game of adventure racing make him an excellent teammate. And brother-in law.
Joe Madren – Another one of our youngest, Joe’s strength, team mind, and focus on the finish line all give him the strength to lead. He’s also a fine brother-in-law.
Bob Mueller – Fast, accurate navigator, our strongest cyclist and a true all-around athlete, when Bob’s race face is on, we’re headed toward the finish line. The last race this season was amazing thanks to Bob’s navigation.

And even though Leslie Thompson didn’t get to race this year, Team Ragged Glory is really all her fault. She is the one who introduced me to adventure racing in 1999. She is the third founding member of Team Ragged Glory. Thanks Lester.

If you haven’t tried adventure racing, make 2012 your year. If you’re fortunate enough, you can race with friends that you respect and admire. I’m grateful for the friendships with each of these teammates. These friends make me a better person.

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19
Apr 11

Telegraph UK: Happiness is U-shaped … which explains why the middle-aged are grumpy

Satisfaction with life starts to drop as early as a person’s late 20s and does not begin to recover until well past 50, says Bert van Landeghem, an economist at Maastricht University in Belgium.

While young adults are carefree and full of hope for the future and the over-50s have come to terms with the trials of life, the research indicates that those in the middle feel weighed down by the demands on them.

The study found “a substantial dip in happiness during the middle of people’s lives is the equivalent to becoming unemployed or losing a family member”.
The conclusions come in a study of how people perceive their wellbeing.

Mr van Landeghem, who is 29, will present his research at the Royal Economic Society annual conference at Royal Holloway, the University of London, this week.

While he said happiness did return with age, he warned that older people did not actually recapture the spirit of their youth. They simply learnt to be satisfied with their lot.
“A U-shaped happiness curve does not necessarily imply that a 65 year-old prefers his own life to the life of a 25 year-old,” he said. “Both the 25 year-old and 65 year-old might agree that it is nicer to be 25 than to be 65. But the 65 year-old might nevertheless be more satisfied, as he has learned to be satisfied with what he has.”

More of the Telegraph article from Stephen Adams

Business Development / Play Hard — Comments Off
12
Apr 11

Information Week: AT&T’s iPhone Drops More Calls Than Verizon’s

Research firm ChangeWave set out to compare how iPhone 4 users feel about their devices and the network the use with their iPhones. It polled more than 4,000 consumers in hopes of spotting some differences between how AT&T and Verizon Wireless customers rate their experiences.

The results showed that, overall, AT&T and Verizon Wireless iPhone users are about equally satisfied when it comes to their device. Verizon users claiming to be “very satisfied” reached 82%, while 16% said they were somewhat satisfied. AT&T users claiming to be “very satisfied” reached 80%, while 18% said they were somewhat satisfied. That’s a dead heat, statistically, and makes sense given the phone is more or less identical on both networks.

More of the Information Week article from Eric Zeman

Doug Theis Leave your comfort zone.