Following Your Passion is Better than Doing Good

"Do good."

"Make a difference."

"Make the world a better place."

You can't go long in today's America without receiving a plea to do good or hearing a claim that some group is making the world a better place. I love to hear that. As a matter of fact, my next career step will be something that more directly impacts people's lives for the better. I expect to spend my full time doing something even more directly constructive (in my mind) than what I'm doing.

However, I feel that "doing good" is not the best end-goal. Nope. Sorry.

Sure, whatever we do should have a productive purpose. But, for example, being good isn't always enough to motivate us; in fact, I've found (after years of looking) that there are actually very few philanthropic projects that inspire me. In addition , I feel that it's important to preach what I practice, and it is not practical advice (nor good for society) to tell everyone to spend full time in charity.

So I say: follow your passion!

It may not align with what you've done before. Who cares?

It may not meet the approval of others. Who cares?

It may not make much money. Is that really more important to you?

It may be something destructive. OK, you got me. Find a different passion.

It may not be possible right now due to current commitments. Don't give up your dream: you'll be rewarded as you work toward your passion...

When I was finishing my bachelor's degree, I'd done some job interviews and had been offered a position with IBM. That was fine, but what I really wanted was to go to graduate school and go as far as I could with computer science and maybe even teach it. It seemed almost a fantasy, and part of me thought I should be practical and go with the job. I went with graduate school, stayed poor a while longer, and I've never been happier. I think even Lynnette would agree that it turned out to be a good decision. I believe it's turned out so well because that was my passion at the time.

My desires have changed, and I'm currently considering my next step in my "career" (meaning the way I spend my working hours). I have some ideas and I've done some small things that match my new-found passions. I'm not yet able to spend my full time on it, and I suspect most people are in the same boat. But I'm getting to know myself better and I'm finding things that may make it all possible.

So it's already been worth the effort. And I'm not giving up.

As great as it is to do charitable work, I believe the world will be better served if we all focus first on our greatest passions, because those passions are the things that bring the most joy to our lives. Some might say that the world would be a terrible place if we all did that; I would say that they are misconstruing the idea of true passion. If we're all brutally honest with ourselves and those around us, we'll find that by pursuing our greatest passions (while keeping the long-term point-of-view) we will arrive at the best possible world.

Good luck to us all!

---

Lately, I've been seeing some messages emerge from other sources that emphasize passion over "doing good".

The Boys And Girls Clubs of America put up a billboard that had the word "Passion" on it. It pointed here: http://begreatamerica.org/sheen (Click on Martin Sheen to see more details.)

The Utah Dairy Council has put the following phrase on billboards, next to a picture of farmers and their farms:

Our earth
Our product
My passion

Of course, there are many who have written about following their passion. Two specific writings have stood out to me recently. One is by Fred Brooks, a computer scientist quoted frequently when it comes to project management:

"To only a fraction of the human race does God give the privilege of earning one’s bread doing what one would have gladly pursued free, for passion. I am very thankful." - The Mythical Man Month, p. 291

Finally, I've been following the progress of Phil Windley, my PhD advisor, as he's been starting a new company. I thought there was one post where he explained his reasons for being involved in another startup, but I couldn't find one and I'm starting to think that I've gathered his enthusiasm from multiple posts over time. For example, in 2007 he says how you can impress people when you "express the level of your commitment"; in 2008 he says that this is what he's "passionate" about.

Police earning revenue from tickets write more when they need the money

I would guess that we in America have the least corrupt police forces in the world. I'll even bet that there is not much overt corruption when this situation happens. But when the incentives are there, there will be pressures (maybe even unconscious ones) that bring out an unjust situation. Heck, maybe this means of revenue is the least-bad of all the funding options for police. But let's not ever forget that bad things will happen whenever the incentive exists, no matter how good the institution.

Here is a summary with a news video. And here are some of the articles themselves: "Are Traffic Tickets Countercyclical?" (summary, with a PDF download link) and "Red Ink in the Rearview Mirror: Local Fiscal Conditions and the Issuance of Traffic Tickets" (PDF).

Use Cases for Genealogical Semantic Data

I'm involved with the Thomas Tolman Family Organization (focused on genealogy work and family histories), and there's a discussion going on in the FamilySearch developer network about the potential utility of semantic data along with the genealogical data. I wrote the following examples of ways this could be beneficial to us. (I'm including it in this blog because these ideas touch on future projects that would give extra meaning to people as they do family history research.)

• The source and/or genealogist who submitted the data has an impact on how trustworthy the data is. This is especially important since FamilySearch contains competing data; there are many places where existing FamilySearch data is not correct for our family. Naturally, there are genealogy researchers whom I trust more so I would prefer to see their datasets. Also, we'll tend to trust that data which has the largest number of references (and some references are more trustworthy than others), so that may be a criteria for what data I want to search through. Even though we're not actively working on integrating with FamilySearch right now, it seems that this issue comes up every month in our executive meeting.
  
• When doing genealogy research, the source locations and/or genealogists can be good information to correlate. After our president came back from a trip to Boston, he heard about a source site that he was near and could have visited, but he didn't know about it at the time; our genealogist spends time contacting people in America and Europe besides hours in libraries locally, and it would be nice for her to be able to see what other lines she could extend by asking a few more questions at the same source; we maintain old documents and we just learned of some old journals that were donated to a library because the person didn't know there was a family organization, and he is now making extra effort to either recover them for us or get us copies. These are cases where we would benefit from tools combing through the meta-data, much of which is now simply contained in notes. This could even be the beginning of another social network, where genealogists might find, collaborate, and even rank the dependability of other genealogists. :-)
  
• This one may not apply directly to genealogical data: my interest is in the personal histories, and allowing people to find histories for their ancestors and search for (and tag?) the things that are meaningful to them. These free-form documents will benefit a lot from semantic tags, allowing people to find correlations with concurrent historical events, with other families, and maybe even with other living individuals with the same interests.

Help Audit The Fed

There are currently bills in both the House and the Senate to audit the Federal Reserve. It should work transparently, seeing as how it controls our money supply. I hope you support this idea. If so, please take the next 5 minutes and call your congress-people (or call the Congressional switchboard at 202-224-3121) and ask them to support this legislation and maybe even co-sponsor it.

The Federal Reserve has absolute control over our money supply. Whether or not it's good to have them as a central bank, there is no reason that they should be working in secret. (In fact, not too long ago they stopped publishing one of the measurements of our money supply, one which has been accounting for an increasing share of the total.)

There's also a petition you can fill out, which will be passed along. But your quick phone call will do even more to help.

And spread the word.

Peer-to-Peer Lending: an awesome idea being strangled by federal overreach

Yesterday I revisited one of my favorite examples of internet technology tackling important social issues: Prosper.com, who brings lenders and borrowers together. It's exciting because this is my favorite application of the internet; it brings people face-to-face with one another, and shares personal successes and failures. And besides the rewards of helping one another individually, it is a remarkable social invention that will allow for more and more transparency as we work with one another.

Unfortunately, I was surprised to find the following notice:

"We are not accepting new lender registrations or new commitments from existing lenders at this time."

Sure enough, securities regulators have found that their business must be registered and monitored. I'm extremely sad. Jim Bruene from NetBanker.com has already explained why this type of thing is bad, including more examples of how this really puts a damper on innovation. I, for one, hunger for the opportunity to work with individuals rather than institutions, and I'm willing to accept the risk (and rewards) involved. How did my national government get the power to forbid this kind of trade? Actually, Jim says that our federal legislators didn't directly cause this problem, but rather the SEC decided to classify these loans such that they're in trouble. This is typical; if Congress can delegate the power

I'm not good at tirades, so I'll end here. I'm just very, very sad that this is going on, and getting worse.

"Making Money While Going Green"

I've just listened to a podcast by Gary Hirshberg, founder of the environmentally-friendly yogurt producer Stonyfield Farms; this business is profitable while being committed to measurable, sustainable production, and this talk is remarkable because he is so enthusiastic and he gives so many details, both facts about how they run their business and stories about making such an endeavor successful. His book looks as interesting and informative as this talk, so I've got to get a copy!

Here are the facts I'd like to remember:

• Before Stonyfield he worked with New Alchemy, where he found we could support 10 people on 1/10 of an acre using solar power and no fossil fuels. (3:30 into podcast)
• Yoplait is about 14% net revenue bottom-line and Stonyfield is about 13%, but their gross margins are 10 points behind. (I don't know what those mean; must learn.) (6:45 into podcast)
• They have their own climate footprint methodology, and they look through their P&L to improve it and save money.
• For our sewage, we typically "dilute with enough water, add oxygen, [and] agitate"; they built an "anaerobic "facility to handle their waste and generate energy and they'll have a net payback of $4-5 million. (11:00 into podcast)
• With smarter sugar production, they have better soil, water quality, yields, worker health, and wildlife in the area, and now the cost of their sugar is equal to conventional sugar. (13:50 into podcast)
• Discussed how UPS saved $10 million (per year?) by only making right turns in their trucks.
• Great stories about advertising and building the business: building loyalty by adopting out cows and thanking and giving out free samples to commuters (18:00-21:00 into podcast)
• They have their own scoring, where they're only 63% but trying to do better... like IBM who is at 70%. (I'm guessing this is the Climate Counts campaign.) (26:40 into podcast)
• At birth, we have 287 chemicals in our blood, 188 of which are (or may be) carcinogenic.
  

Celebrating the two-month anniversary of our financial sector bailout with a status report

Today is the two-month anniversary of the huge emergency bailout that was absolutely critical to avoid imminent catastrophe. However, they have not even used half of it yet, and they have spent the first half mostly in places other than where promised. (And when I say "where promised", I mean "where the law directs".)

As much as I am disappointed by widespread support for government overreach, it is good to hear widespread applause when Cody Willard pointed out the flaws in this whole bailout mess. The best and most informative part is the 2 minutes from 3:30-5:30: "Last weekend we we sent more money to Citigroup, one company, than the entire budget for food stamps in this country every year." I've never heard of Cody before today, but it looks like he is worth watching: in a recent post, he points out how our current government "destroys the rule of law". Very true. And I hope that understanding is spreading.