Via Reddit.

To the lady working construction at 6am, on Jefferson Blvd:

Thank you!  You know who you are; I drive right by you every week.  Your job is to direct traffic when one of the big trucks comes in our out of the construction site.  Those trucks don’t come very often, and someone else would sit around and look bored.  Or maybe they’d bring a magazine or pull out their phone and text their friends.  But not you.

You stand on the corner and wave with both hands at every car passing by.  You wish us a good morning the way some people shout I love you.  The sun’s not even up yet.  And you smile like it’s your birthday, again. 

So I smile too, roll down my window, and wish you a good morning right back.  And that smile lasts me the whole day.  I wonder how many other hundreds of people feel that way?  Thank you for brightening my day.

This past weekend I volunteered at Opportunity Green 2008, a conference on being green + being profitable (Thanks to Noah for the intro!). 

My reasons for attending were 1) to meet cool people with similar interests, 2) to see what is going on in green business in LA, and 3) to see if there are any cool jobs close by.  By these measures, the conference was a total success (for me anyway!) Amidst the serving out of organic, green-tea sodas and fair-trade coffee in a can, I got to meet very cool people (here, here, and here) and also the owners of one of my favorite restaurants.  I squeezed in a panel on getting funded by Adeo Ressi and Andy Funk, and I even got a few job leads out of the after-party, with its (no kidding) all-organic open bar.

I just wanted to share my gratitude for today and hope for the future.  This is truly a woderful an exciting time to be alive.

The drive to grow has always been with me; I’m pretty sure that I can thank my parents for that.  This little gem from my childhood comes to mind.

Good, better, best --
Never let them rest.
Until your good is better,
And your better best.

Alas, my introduction to books on growth didn’t happen until sometime during college, when I read Dale Carnegie’s “How to Win Friends & Influence People.” From that point on I was hooked, and I’ve been slowly reading my way through the genre ever since.  Steven Covey, M. Scott Peck, Hal Urban, Susan Jeffers, Miguel Ruiz, Carol Dweck, Viktor Frankl and on and on.  I love having access to so much wisdom, and I can identify moments of growth, changes in beliefs, and life events that were in part catalyzed by these authors.

This blog itself is such an event.  Reach all the way back to the first post and you’ll see that I launched this site shortly after reading a blog post by Steve Pavlina.  Steve is one of my favorite personal development authors, probably because our minds work along similar lines.  His writing is analytical and logical and at the same time rooted in intuition and open to non-traditional ideas.  I find a similar dichotomy of analytical versus intuitive in myself.

I’ve followed Steve’s writing (and his crazy adventures) periodically since he inspired me to launch Flee the Cube three years ago.  And when I saw an opportunity to get an early review copy of his book by writing a review, I was all for it.

In keeping with the first one of the books three core principles (which are Truth, Love, Power) let me say that I haven’t finished reading the book.  I’ve read a majority of Steve’s website though, and since I want to get this review up before the end of the month, here it is.

The bottom line is that I would definitely recommend the book to anyone interested (or not) in personal growth.  The book approaches growth from the general to the specific, focusing first on the core principles of truth, love, and power and working its way to practical applications in habits, career, money, health, relationships, and spirit.

The first thing you will notice if you read self-help literature is the refreshing lack of words such as free, easy, secrets, millionaire, revealed, and steps.  As in “The 7 Easy Steps to Millionaire Secrets, Revealed for Free!” That’s refreshing because growth is not easy, but it’s always worthwhile (as Steve says so right up front).  This also makes the book a good bet for skeptics.

The next thing you will notice is that Steve put a lot of thought, and a lot of love into his book.  Looked at from the lens of a trained engineer, it’s apparent that he was looking for an “elegant solution” to the “problem” of personal growth.  The book is not centered around a single technique or idea, as is so often the case.  Instead, it is an attempt to distill the field of personal growth to its essential principles.

One of the main reasons I was initially drawn to Steve’s writing is his focus on practicality and application.  WHERE do you start to work on yourself?  How exactly DO you change your habits?  What’s an exercise to determine your core message?  His blog is chock full of this kind of information.  And this is probably why his book is a little light in this area.  The focus is on the principles of growth, which leaves less space for the practical stuff.  It’s there, but at a more superficial level than you will find on his site.

Link to Personal Development for Smart People on Amazon.

“You Make a living by what you do, but you make a life by what you give.” —Dean Kamen

Wonderfully said.  Dean really puts our privilege as a first-world, educated minority in perspective.  It is a sad commentary that “I R AN IDIOT” videos will get 200k views while this one is remains relatively unknown.

The average job search in the US takes about 19 weeks.  That’s almost 4 months too long.  So when I got back to LA from my cross-country bicycle trip, my friend John had some good advice for me.  Hey, you can get to work right away through a temp agency.  (But hold on, that’s not the good part of the advice.) Most temp agencies will have you working right away, yes, counting the inventory on shelves and photocopying flyers (yes, I’ve tried this path before).

The good part of the advice is that there are temp agencies out there that specialize in YOUR skills (I know you have ‘em).  I signed up with TEK systems, Robert Half Technology, and Creative Circle which allowed me start interviewing for contract work right away and to start working within two weeks of arriving in LA.  The account managers have a strong incentive (ahem, commission) to place you in a suitable situation, where both you and the employer will be happy.  The contracts vary in length and are generally interesting work at reasonable rates.  And the upsides are that you get to work sooner, you get to experience different organizations and cultures, and you get to build your resume with a varied set of experiences and (hopefully) new skills.