I’m about to find out. I leave tomorrow for a one week cruise in Mexico, I’m looking forward to it … should be fun. The kids are staying home … my wife and I are going with friends from our college days. The laptop is staying at home too, which will make this first time in about six years I have been away from my computer for longer than 48 hours! That actually sounds great. Just me, the most beautiful woman in the world and one very long book.

The thing is, the past two weeks have been so stressful preparing for the trip that I wonder if the trip will only SEEM relaxing by comparison. And then the week after a vacation is always crazy with “catch up and patch up” duties. Another reason to seek the 4-Hour Work Week and the attendant “mini-retirements”. Just the general slowing down of life instead of revving the engine way too high just so I can slam on the brakes for a second or two.

I started my life as an entrepreneur/web worker back in 1995. Back then, I was probably on the cutting edge of online development skills. I created some small to mid-size online, database driven applications for myself and others. Back then it was all pretty cool, and I was “the guy” that everybody knew if you needed a website built. Not only was it fun, but I was learning a ton and growing my skill set … every day.

The last five to six years have been a different story. I’ve become so busy with my busyness - oh, I mean business - that I have not really spent the time to learn anything new. I’ve just applied whatever duct tape solution I could find quickly and easily so I could get back to the “day to day” of the business.

I HATE IT!

Not only do I feel like my “hard skills” are waning, but I miss the learning/growing rush that I used to get daily. Well, about a week ago I started on a brand new “side” project that I am really excited about. But I did not want to build it the way I’ve been building/maintaining current projects. Instead I decided to learn something completely new to me that I also believe will be beneficial to my current as well as future projects. I’ve taken on learning CakePHP to build this new app. I may not stick with it, but it is forcing me to learn new concepts (eg: MVC) and encouraging me to learn new technologies (eg: AJAX). And I can already tell I am going to love these models in application development.

I have written a few web services in .NET before, but they were small and I don’t love the Microsoft platform (too expensive to create, host and maintain). I have recently fallen in love with PHP and am excited about taking my skills there to the next level.

Plus it’s just fun to learn something new. I’ve missed this and it is so worth doing. I think I’ll plan on spending at least two weeks a year doing nothing but learning a new language/tool/framework/technology. This should have multiple benefits as described above and also keep me marketable if the whole “biz on the side” thing doesn’t work out.

This post was spawned by reading this article from Web Worker Daily about professional development for the web worker set. Great site, by the way, Web Worker Daily is!

Compassion has been on my mind a lot lately. It was a topic of study for me about two months ago and has continued at “top of mind” for me. It is also one of the definitions of relent that I discussed in my first post on this blog. Leo from ZenHabits has a post on cultivating compassion with a specifically Buddhist bent. I am not Buddhist, but enjoy many of their teachings and particularly how they teach.

One thing I love about the practice of compassion is how powerfully effective it is in nullifying wrongs done. And it works both ways. Compassion can be a great vehicle to receiving forgiveness from somebody you’ve wronged, certainly. But even more powerfully, compassion seems to have a soothing effect when you yourself are being wronged. Somehow, finding compassion for the source of your difficulties can eliminate the feelings and negative emotions generated by the actions. Ahh, the beauty of counter-intuitive “soul lessons”!

Today has been a bit of a difficult one for me. Today is my birthday. But, my wife and I received some disappointing news regarding an adoption we are currently pursuing, and I am frustrated by a group of people because of it. I’ve been feeling sorry for myself to have to deal with mental anguish on my birthday (poor me:). But even the thought of having compassion not only for the child we wish to adopt, but also those that are struggling to do the best they can is a balm. Bad news is bad news, but who knows what tomorrow will hold … and why not be compassionate in the meantime?

A lot of what I have recently read about and tried putting into practice has been about the simplification of life. Even when reading things I would not normally anticipate having this theme, there it is. So I’ve run a couple expirements lately in regards to this. With the 80/20 principle in mind I have begun to eliminate some activities and materials from my life. I’ve pared down my rss subscriptions quite a bit, with decided benefit. I’ve stopped much of my research surfing on the Internet, which has been a big help in a number of ways. And I’ve cut out about 3/4 of the time I normally spend in exercise, also with some pretty astounding results. I’ve taken a few other actions along the same lines, but these are those currently at “top of mind”.

In regards to the feed reading, I’m reading much higher quality stuff now and finding a lot more time for other, more important things. As I went through my feeds I discovered at least half of those I subscribed were ever read and a bulk of the ones left were rehashes of the feeds I was truly interested in. Net benefit: about 3 1/2 hours a week gained and a lot more “brain space” freed up.

As for Internet research, it’s kind of my thing. I love reading and learning and spending a ton of time exploring the mundane, the fascinating as well as the weird. Usually when somebody I know has a weird or obscure question, they will call or email me if I know anything about it. I’ll quickly jump online and find the answer if I don’t have it in my head yet, I hate not being in the know. So that being the case, this one is truly hard for me. But I am trying to limit my “surf time” to a few hours a week, instead of my normal “do it whenever I have a spare five minutes” routine. While I have still not been perfect on this one, I’ve been better and it’s actually been nice in a way. My mind is quieter, my thoughts more focused. I miss not having all of the different ideas, concepts and thoughts swirling and trying to find homes and connections. But it’s also nice not to have to deal with the incongruities and mental difficulties that also arise because of the “swirling”. Plus, I’ve saved a ton of time. Net benefit: haven’t tracked this one well, but probably about 8-10 hours a week and a lot more “stillness of mind”.

The exercise expirement has been truly fascinating for me. I have been a “do it daily” weight lifter since I was about 14 years old. By that, I don’t mean that I have lifted weights every day for the last 20 years. What I mean is that my philosophy has always been that to do it right and to make progress, you had to lift different body parts everyday and lift at least five times a week (but usually six). I figured that focusing on one body part each day would give me greater strength gains and size growth on each part and eventually on the whole body. I thought that this generally worked for me because of what happened between my 17th and 18th birthdays. As I ended my junior year in high school I weighed 150 pounds (I have been 6′ 2″ since I was 13) and hadn’t gained any significant weight in two years. I ended my senior year I was 195 pounds of muscle (I had about 7% body fat, not a bad index). I figured that my “do it daily” routine had finally kicked in after four years and that was that. I think I may have been duped. You see, I have not made any serious advances on this front since then, and I have worked really hard at times. It is likely that while my workouts helped, I was probably just due to mature at that point.

So anyway, the recent story has been very interesting for me. I have about 10 pounds of fat to lose, but that will come soon enough (I do cardio 3-4 times a week, and have cut my caloric intake by about 1/3 recently — also part of my 80/20 expirement). I have wanted to build bigger arms, chest and legs for a while now (my wife loves big arms, so why not try to please!). So for the last three weeks I have lifted weights max twice a week, but actually only once a week for two of the three. I do the whole body on Friday morning and an occasional light arms or trunk workout on Tuesdays. I have increased my strength on the bench press by 25% and added 1/2 inch to my upper arm. My legs are also seeing similar gains in strength and size. I’ve also made a change in the “how” of my lifting. Instead of trying to “power lift” a ton of weight in rapid bursts, I have lowered the pounds slightly and do a “five count up, five count down” movement. It really seems to be working and I’m making progress for the first time in about 15 years! Also, lest you think I am a “muscle head”, I’m not. I’m a soccer player and generally have that type of build. Net benefit: added strength and size and growing and about 5-6 hours a week.

I am really pretty jazzed about this whole thing. I am currently trying to figure out where else I can “cut and release” wasted energy and time. From these three things alone I have gained about 20 hours a week in additional time. Of course, that is often filled with other useless, time wasting activities, but I’ll figure it out eventually.

If anybody actually ever reads this, do you have any experiences with “addition by subtraction”? Please share.