Tuesday, July 31, 2007

Baseball conversation with a 7 year old

This evening as I put my oldest daughter to bed we talked a bit about baseball and softball. I asked her what a home run was. You might expect her reply to be a simple definition of a common baseball term. Instead I was reminded that her experiences and understanding of the world is something I get to help shape. I find I can take as much delight in explaining the details of a sporting event or watching her participate as I did when I was a kid participating in them myself.

Below is her definition of a home run:

It's when you hit the ball so hard that you can run around all of the bases. I think you get 1 point for each base you touch. If you make it to home plate you get to bat again. But I'm not sure, I don't know that much about baseball.

I have a feeling we'll be having more of these talks...

Monday, July 30, 2007

I need a Personal Board of Directors

I think there is some benefit in building a close-knit, small group of advisers to help make informed, logical, and non-emotional decisions. I've been thinking about this idea for a while now, and I'm going to send off an email to a few friends to see if they would be interested in conducting an experiment of this sort.

The questions to answer are:

  • If I ran my life like you run a business, could the structured approach produce better results than I could make on my own?
  • Expanding on the 2 heads are better than 1, could I gain valuable insight from trusted friends who have a different, unique perspective than I?
  • What subjects would be off-limits? (I would prefer these guys remain my friends after this experiment)
  • How much personal information do I want to share, anyway?

Here are my ideas on building this team so far:
  1. The Boards (BoD) goal will be to review status reports and provide guidance on the subject at hand.
  2. Reports to the BoD need to be detailed but brief. This should be a low volume of material to maximize the time they spend, and hopefully improve the likelihood of receiving data back.
  3. You have to compensate the BoD for their efforts. (Ex. Guys weekend in Myrtle Beach or something)
I need to work up the format of the status report, and provide some synopsis of what I hope to get out of each topic. I've got a perfect test case in mind for the experiment, let's see if I can find 3 takers to kick of my BoD.

I'll report back with my progress.