Month: February 2014

Yearly Focus

Complete an Ironman: Update 2 – Big Goals & New Bikes

This is one of 14 updates about my 2014 challenge to complete an Ironman – you can see a list of the others here. Big Goals Goals are a good thing. They help us to focus and give us direction. But goals that are easy to achieve defeat much of the benefit of having goals in the first place. I much prefer big goals. Big hairy audacious goals (BHAGs). I’m often inspired by the founders of my current employer, Steve & Clara, and one such way is the size of the goal they set out to achieve when they founded Hearsay Social. They wanted to change the way people do business. Over the past four years the company has taken huge steps in that direction – steps that we might not have taken if we did not have BHAGs. Looking at my 2014 challenge, I wanted to complete an Ironman.

Innovation Session

Innovation Session: My Fantasy Football Auction Draft – Retrospective Part 2

This is the third post in a series about my fantasy football auction strategy. I first wrote about the strategy here. Then after the season I started with part 1 of the retrospective. In this final post I have a few other thoughts that I’ll share. The Importance of the Draft Below are the positions each team ended in and the difference between their expected and actual results. We can see that in general, teams that predicted well on draft day performed well in the season. The r squared for the linear trend line here is .63 which means that for my seasons we can contribute about 63% of the final results to draft performance. What accounts for the other 37%? I would simplify the decision types in fantasy football by describing three. Draft day – who you predict will perform well In-season transactions; waiver wire, free agency & trades

Yearly Focus

2014: Goal, Theme & Challenge: Update 1

2014 Goal: Read 24 Books I’m on track.* In January I completed ‘The Millionaire Next Door’ and am half way through both “Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring” and “David and Goliath”. *The asterisk is because of a decision I made that audiobooks count. It wasn’t my original intent to listen to books, I wanted to read them. As I started I realized how much time I would be spending training for my Ironman, 1-5 hours a day, so I invested in a waterproof mp3 player and got some audiobooks so I could leverage that time. I’m going to try to consume less than 50% of my books as audiobooks and I’m going to try to limit it to the non-fictions. I feel like I am able to learn from a non-fiction even when listening to it while I’m not able to slow down and imagine the world