Bill Watt’s Blog

My favorite thing to do is to spend time with people I love.

I was going through a bunch of pictures on my iPhone (one of the many ways I distract myself from my hour commute in the morning) and I was pretty pumped to come across this pic. It was taken during our wedding weekend up in Portsmouth, NH and while I was freaking out on the inside about the big life event about to happen I couldn’t help but enjoy this moment. It is funny to realize that Corinne was the only person who knew everyone else in the picture before this meal. (This was pre-Facebook where you social networks didn’t cross as readily.)

I only have a couple things I would have wished to be different (a few of my friends living in CA couldn’t make it, Jen and Jason would arrive a few minutes after this and just missed being in it, Paul, Jen, Amelia, Kitty and a few others hadn’t arrived yet) but that is like a 1st world billionaire wishing he had change kinda problem.

The next day we were able to have the picture that got a lot closer to my perfect picture requirements.

(I’ll try to remember to replace these images with the higher quality versions later… not the versions that were optimized for the iPhone.)

Anyway, I wanted to say thanks to everyone who helped give me these memories but especially Alice who pulled it all together.

Yes, I’m about a week behind in writing. It has been a busy week.

As is my tradition, my gift to myself was a dinner with a bunch of friends. It is always comforting to know I have more friends than the room available and yet sad that I can’t invite everyone I wanted to invite. So, on Saturday we gathered at Twist and had a great time catching up with old friends, introducing some new friends to the group, and generally ate too much. It was fun mingling FairMarket, eBay,  and Current friends.

It was also nice to see the benefits of a Web 2.0 / global social networking world where the birthday wishes came in from all corners of the Earth.  One more way technology is making the world a bit smaller and way more fun.

Anyway- thanks to everyone who could make it, sorry to everyone who I couldn’t invite, thanks to everyone who wished we me a happy birthday, and thanks to the folks who shared their favorite things with me, and a special thanks to Amanda who baked my favorite cookies.

As much as I love and crave physical world interactions I do have most of my day to day connections via the web, email, IM, twitter, facebook, and on and on. Unlike many people I actually love that. It isn’t that I’m replacing people with virtual connections but instead that I’m extending ability to interact with folks using all these tools. The interesting thing is how many new relationships this has opened up. People I would never have known I know follow through twitter. I interact with celebrities and presidential candidates in ways my grandfather would never believe. And staying in touch or reconnecting with people from my childhood is now as close as a super poke (or tossing a cow at them!).

Anyway- I posted earlier about watching Teri Garr on Dave Letterman and how amazing she is. When I got home tonight I found a very nice email waiting for me from a woman who had seen my blog post appear in a Google Alert for brain aneurysms. She thanked me for posting because she doesn’t get a chance to watch Letterman often (neither would I if it weren’t for DVR’s) and let me know she had added the clip to her blog for others to see. Check out her post about the Teri Garr interview.

I would encourage you to check out Heidi’s blog(s).

Yeah, I’ve had a little bot to drink tonight so this may sound like an, “I love you man!” moment but bear with me. This has been an interesting week. I’ve been enjoying work even though I’m completely behind and crazed, Alice is going to Boston for the week (including our anniversary), Jason and Carol moved to ATL on me, my little brother turned 37, and we just had a dinner sort of celebration for Lily who is winding down her years at eBay.

I’m not a big fan of change and yet none of this has flustered me. I’m really enjoying my life these days. My family is all doing well, my friends are having fun, starting families (go Chad & Jen, Amelia & Ben, and others who are not yet named ), I’m making good friends at the new job, and Alice is starting a new adventure.

My favorite thing is catching up with people over a meal and wine. I don’t know… I’m just enjoying life and thought I would share.

I’ll be the first to admit I’m hoping for good eBay news that pushes up the stock by the end of the month when my options expire… and yet it looks like other people are looking much harder for a sliver of hope. Take this article on Seeking Alpha. I know the part about Oprah being an influencer is true and yet 4 lines like this is enough to make me laugh:

Oprah appeals to many viewers in the United States. Although Skype is well known in Europe and Asia, it is virtually unknown in the United States. Oprah wouldn’t team up with Skype if she felt it was a fly by night outfit. Thus, I believe this is ground breaking news.

I looked just now and saw that eBay closed last night at $25.85 which is less than it was 4.5 years ago when we started there. (After splits the initial grant was at $26.31.) Sigh.

Nephews- if they still have options when you hit the work circuit make sure you mentally count it as free money. Don’t let them tell you about long term compensation!

Well, I think it is pretty clear that Seth Godin’s blog now has a place of prominence in my blog reader. When his new post shows up I generally will read it before anything else, even my friend status updates from Facebook.

Anyway, today he has a post about Workaholics that struck a chord with me. Here is his post but you should go and check out his blog:

Workaholics

 

A workaholic lives on fear. It’s fear that drives him to show up all the time. The best defense, apparently, is a good attendance record.

A new class of jobs (and workers) is creating a different sort of worker, though. This is the person who works out of passion and curiosity, not fear.

The passionate worker doesn’t show up because she’s afraid of getting in trouble, she shows up because it’s a hobby that pays. The passionate worker is busy blogging on vacation… because posting that thought and seeing the feedback it generates is actually more fun than sitting on the beach for another hour. The passionate worker tweaks a site design after dinner because, hey, it’s a lot more fun than watching TV.

It was hard to imagine someone being passionate about mining coal or scrubbing dishes. But the new face of work, at least for some people, opens up the possibility that work is the thing (much of the time) that you’d most like to do. Designing jobs like that is obviously smart. Finding one is brilliant.

See, when I leave a job I try to find something that I want to change and fix it. The new people don’t know all my history and instead of treating it like starting at a new school and picking a new name for people to call me (”Hi, I’m Will.I.Am”) I try to use the fresh start to fix something. It is a easy time to change and start fresh. When I left CompUSA for FairMarket in 1998 I wanted to be better about my level of responsiveness. Working at CompUSA was not fulfilling but that shouldn’t impact my delivery to the customer so I opted to take that up a notch. Some people may think I took it to an extreme but I love being known for a high level of support. Also, tools like blackberries and email became much more a part of my life which enabled the change.

I’ll leave you with a tale from my final days at eBay. I gave ~10 weeks notice to help recruit and train my replacement. I loved my job and my extended team and wanted to leave them as well off as possible. I knew many people had the PM skills to manage the team and deliver the products but I wanted to find someone who had the potential to be passionate about the platform. It had been my life for 10 years and stay or go it will always be important to me. (Thanks to my VP for enabling the non-standard overlap so I could do that training.)

Anyway- almost every exec and HR rep I met with during my long march to the door ended up asking me the same question, “Are you sure you’re leaving? You seem really passionate for someone on the way out.” My response was similar in most cases and tempered in some but it went along the lines of, “instead of asking why I’m passionate about my job, why aren’t the people staying more passionate?”

Now, I’m not saying there aren’t passionate people there…this was mainly in response to people and a set of “issues” right at the end. In the context of those issues it was funny that anyone would ask me why I was leaving. Can’t really go deeper into that in a public blog but buy me a beer and I’m sure to share.

I just bought a 500 GB external backup drive for less than $160 retail… that is awesome! It comes with one touch backup software so I can set it up and alice can hit a button when she has updated itunes purchases or whatever and make sure and capture it and I can schedule weekly backups too. Very simple. Very nice.

My first computer only had floppy drives and 64k of RAM. I’m so jealous of my nephews mainly cause they’re going to see really cool technology by the time they hit high school AND they have an uncle who might not be around every weekend but will spoil the crap out of them with technology. I can pretty much guarantee they’ll be the only middle school kids with their own DVR and slingboxes (or current equivalents) for when they head to camp.

I’m adding a new category to my blog and a new thing I want to think about as I go day to day and that is how to live a sustainable life.

I’m not talking about going whole hog and only eating what I grow organically in my front yard but instead want to think of how to live a life that gives back more than it takes. From now on this category on my blog will track my attempts to do a better job at it.

I’m not trying to make a self promotional thread but given it is a public blog, you can think what you want. I also don’t expect everything will be a success but it will be a trail and error that hopefully will be more success than failure. Also, if I do the right things, maybe something that my nephews can learn from as they make their way.

OK, I’m starting a new thread of thoughts for my nephews. Should blogging still be something I’m doing when they get older and move online these thoughts will be waiting for them.

I’m going to kick this off with a thought I had while watching MTV’s “Engaged and Under Age”: if you’re getting married and any of the following are true, you’re doing the wrong thing. Stop what you’re doing and run away. Call me… I’ll fund the escape and you’ll only have to listen to a short lecture about how you shouldn’t have made it to that point in the first place.

• You’re not legal to drink
• The two of you are planning to live with your parents so you can finish college
• You’re tearing down your BMX ramp to build a bridge for your bride to walk over at the ceremony
• Your bride to be has never heard the phrase, “something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue.”

I wrote another post about the couple who had never discussed their respective beliefs so read this post and I won’t go into it here.