What does it take to be grateful?

Posted by Jorge Bernal January 01, 2009

If you learn to appreciate more of what you already have, you’ll find yourself having more to appreciate.
Michael Angier

Not much. You can try. Today. Say thanks to someone who has helped or inspired you. Do it now.

Psychologic studies show than being grateful makes you happier. I’ve also read a lot of times how being grateful can make you happy. You should try it and see for yourself.

It seems lately everyone tries to set some goals for the new year this time of the year. Don’t fool yourself. It’s good to have goals, but just because it’s a new year it won’t make them happen easier. Instead, try looking at the previous year and saying thanks to everyone who has helped you in any way.

To make things easier, I’m going to start a blog meme to see how far it goes. I’ve seen memes circulate for much more mundane reasons, so I hope it spreads.

Think about 3 people who have helped, influenced or inspired you at any level and write that you are grateful and why. If they have a blog, link to them. If not, tell them you praised them in your blog. If praising someone is good, doing so in public is much better.

Here is my list of three:

• Esther: my beloved girlfriend. She’s probably the person I’ve thanked most often in person, but she earned that. If I could measure my happiness and success with any metrics, she could probably take responsibility for at least 80% of it. She supported me in my decisions when nobody else did, and she kept doing so until now. Thanks!
• 
  Nacho. Since I arrived at Warp and got into the business world, he has been an inspiration and model to follow. I’ve learned a lot from him about many things, and he always come to mind when I read about true good leadership. Thanks!
• Heidi. I read somewhere that one of the steps to become more creative was to surround yourself with creative people, and she is definitely a creative one. She once was surprise about how I was keeping my passion for photography day after day, when I usually get tired of things very soon. What she may not now (yet) is that she helped me to keep going with her comments and good praise. Thanks!

There are much more like these, but I said three by now. Now it’s your turn.

How to fight your worries and be happier

Posted by Jorge Bernal December 31, 2008

Most people have to feel really bad before they do things that make them feel a little bit better.
David Allen

That’s what happened to me about two years ago. I was overwhelmed with work and life: a lot of “stuff” was going on, and I was worried about too many things. One day, I decided to sit down and write everything that was keeping me worried. This only act of emptying my mind had a very powerful relaxing effect. I knew what the problems were, so I could figure what to do to solve it.

Weeks ago, I found that file in my hard drive, and it made me smile. Everything in it was either gone, irrelevant, or in process of being solved.

Some worries that I’ve fixed in the last two years:

• Leaving home. This weekend will make one year since I left my parents’ house and moved with my girlfriend. No regrets at all.
• Finish the warp website. This ghost was running after me since almost we released the previous version. Finally this year, it happened. It can never be “finished”, but it’s online and I’m pretty satisfied with the result
• Dental health. My teeth were a catastrophic area. Since I left high school, I stopped brushing my teeth progressively, and it had obvious consequences. This year, after spending quite time, money and pain, they got restored and I got into the habit again.
• More exercise. This falls into the “in progress” bin. I wanted to start running, and did it a couple of times. I still plan to do it occasionally. Anyway, I got myself a new folding bike and I go to work biking half of the days.
• Learn and do more photography. Just watch my flickr feed and see for yourself if I’ve improved in quantity and quality

Most of the other things were either projects from work (which I dropped or passed on to someone else), or personal projects which still are in my “someday” list.

A new twist on the blog

Posted by Jorge Bernal December 31, 2008

I have some new ideas to post in this blog, but they don’t fit into the current topics. It’s still a personal blog which should reflect my interests, and they vary widely over time.

I’m still thinking about technology, open source, photography, business and innovation but I’m creating a new topic about personal growth. All the “personal growth”, “self help” and “motivation” terms are sometimes associated to cheap marketing and books for the “losers”. I had the same thought before, and I’m still slightly affected by that prejudice.

But I believe in continuous learning, and learning about yourself and how to feel and act better is also part of it.

After much reading and inspiration from various sources along the years, I know that I improved myself in many different ways. Today, I can affirm that I’m happy, and helping others to be happier would make me happier to.

Does your company have Happiness Engineers?

Posted by Jorge Bernal January 28, 2008

The answer is probably no. We don’t have one at Warp. But the folks at automattic are looking for one. I case you don’t know who I’m talking about, these are the guys behind wordpress and akismet.

The details on this position are as following:

Happiness Engineer

Our software and services are far from perfect, and when things go wrong people aren’t shy about contacting us asking for help. We consider the support side of the user experience to be vitally important because it’s the person who interacts with our customers most and makes the biggest impression in their time of need. In fact everyone who joins Automattic, regardless of position, does support for 3 weeks. The customers range from the everyday blogger to VIPs like CNN, Flickr, and People Magazine. The job requires:

• Patience and grace.
• Excellent writing skills.
• Working knowledge of WordPress, HTML, and CSS.

It’s hard to explain how thrilled I am about the existence of a position like that, but I’ll try: it has made me hesitate. I’m one of the owners of Warp, we have recently passed our third year, we are growing, we have 20 employees and we’re close to release version 1.0 of eBox platform. I’d call this a success. But, when I read job descriptions like these, I feel the need to apply or, at least, meet these people.

I’m aware I cannot be in all places at the same time, so I have to let that one go. The good experience I get from this is collecting those details that made me want to go there and trying to make Warp a better place for all of us

Make your e-mail conversations better using happy faces

Posted by Jorge Bernal November 25, 2007

I’m sure every one who uses email frequently, has suffered more than one email discussion.

Usually you may say things in an email that you wouldn’t say in person, or reply furious about something before counting to ten. This screenshot shows my little trick:

I’m using Apple Mail with Addressbook, but most of email programs support adding pictures to your contacts.

Find a picture of every of your colleagues, or people you write most and assign it to their contact info.

Make sure he or she is smiling, or with a lovely face, or even use a picture that reminds you of the best moments you have spent with that person.

Next time you are furious with that person (no matter what the cause is) you’ll see that picture and it might help you calm down and think in positive. It works quite well for me.

Boss/employee relationships

Posted by Jorge Bernal March 03, 2007

Nacho writes about a nice article at Note from boss to employees. If you follow through the original article, you can find a comment reversing the meaning of the letter (from employee to boss).

I guess both are true. And I guess there are two conclusions to extract from the letter and the replay:

1. We are all human. We all make mistakes
2. Since we all fail, fluent communication is vital for the health of a company (or any other kind of organization)

So I think you can ask an employee some level of empathy if you aren’t offering the same, and viceversa. It’s not so difficult. Remember, just be nice. There’s always a story behind.

Update: via Lifehacker I found an article called A Manager’s Guide to Growing Happy Employees. The key points in this case are:

1. Manage people first, do your own work second.
2. Delegate your best work.
3. Help people get recognized.
4. Make projects relevant to people, not companies.
5. Align yourself with your boss.
6. Work reasonable hours.

And I think the last paragraphs summarize all the previous steps quite well

The best way to think about management is to treat everyone like an unpaid intern.

Each day, your employees ask themselves, “Am I getting enough out of this job to keep doing it?�? And each day, you need to give them a reason to say, “Yes.�?