My friend Bryan put into words a concept I wrestled with for years, which is the difference between being nice and kind. For many years I used the two interchangeably. However, that would often lead me to make choices in the moment that I thought would be helpful. Instead, it usually made life more difficult and stressful for all parties involved.

So what's the difference?

Imagine pulling up Google Maps and asking where to find the best slice of pizza. This is already a loaded question because “best” can be highly subjective based on personal tastes and preferences. But let’s imagine that we could systematically take each one of these inputs, insert into an algorithm that adds it all up, and assign a single value to hundreds of thousands of restaurants that may sell pizza.

Last week, the Contact Mapping team flew to the ANMP event in Dallas with aspirations to make a massive impact at once of the largest annual conferences in Network Marketing. By every metric, we blew the doors down! I couldn't be more proud of the team and what we were able to accomplish. I wanted to share some of the highlights.

Before the information age, it was possible to have a 30, 40, even 50-year career working in a single company in a single industry. And in many situations, it was advantageous to do so because the world changed slowly enough such that a person's knowledge and expertise could adapt with the times. In doing so, they could retain their position of power and maximize the size of their paycheck.

1.5 million. This is the number of dogs and cats that are euthanized every year in the US alone. 10 years ago, my wife and I rescued a sweet, gentle pit bull/bulldog mix from the local humane society. It breaks my heart to think how close he was another rounding error on this statistic. It’s also hard to consider the fact that he was an anomaly, and that most of the others like him won’t get a chance to find a loving home.

People matter. We all know this. Yet, when life gets busy, it is our relationships that are usually the first to suffer. The urgent crises in front of us take precedent again and again while people get pushed further and further down the priority list. Worse, the people closest to us can bear the brunt of this because we think they will always understand and forgive us. And they might... to a point. However, I've had the great misfortune of losing this gamble more than once as friends gave up waiting for me.

Peter Agelasto is one of the most fascinating people I know. As many great stories go, we met in a chance encounter after a long series of other chance encounters. Some would say this is fate. Others? Chaos theory in action. Whatever the case, my world forever changed the day I sent him an email asking him to join me on a massive website project. He didn't know this at the time, but I would have been 100% screwed had he not accepted. I had zero experience in the industry at that time, and I could have easily botched the project and burned several relationships along the way.

As Bitcoin surged in price the past week ($5,000 to $8,000 USD), it's important to highlight to enthusiasts and skeptics alike the importance of Bitcoin's censorship resistance qualities.

Burnout is a powerful teacher. It’s from its ruinous ashes (fueled by exhausting one’s physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual resources) that it becomes abundantly clear that money isn’t everything. Restating this cliché another way—your net worth is one number. And this one number may have zero correlation to the poorness or richness of every other dimension of your life. Examples[1]:

Managing web development projects at digital agencies involves a lot of moving parts. Projects change hands many times as they move from RFP to proposal, to development, to initial launch and ongoing maintenance. I look at this as part of a DevOps culture mindset; focusing on the smooth flow of information across silos in an organization. In this post, I share my template for Project Reference Guides, which makes it easy for teams to collect and share key project information across all stakeholders.