It’s 15-minutes of time that we should all periodically invest in.

Have a good and safe holiday weekend, my friends. And please take 15 minutes sometime during this period to review Steve’s speech. It has some insights that we all really need to internalize. If you have already internalized them all, you are to be commended.

Since several of you are gadget enthusiasts, I thought it would be good to point this site out to you.

I think it will be interesting to see how it develops. Will it become the key place people go to get opinions about gadgets, or will people just continue to Google and Bing and Yahoo for information, or use the Amazon ratings of a product to see what others think of a gadget? A lot depends on how well the community supports GDGT, with good and useful comments and data, and a lot depends on how good their ratings algorithms are. I know that Amazon’s algorithms are sound and have been thoroughly tested and improved based on years of use. So, GDGT faces tough competition.

Anyway, it’s a site you may want to add to your “periodically browse” list, or at least one to keep in mind the next time you are thinking of adding to your gadget collection.

Sources: a tweet from @trhall and a Gear Diary post

My first lifestream post explains why I have decided to set this sort of thing up. Basically it is to let me think out loud, and to have a place where I can share information with you that is interesting but not necessarily immediately useful. For example, it may be about some new finding in science that is just so fascinating that it should be shared, but one which has no practical value for your lives at this time.

I used to have a blog, a few years ago, called bkreflections, and it was this sort of thing. I have missed having an ability to just think out loud, without having to worry about relevance. I have fallen into the trap of doing a little bit of it here from time to time, and I have later realized it is not fair to those who are looking for life management / learning / technology information, which is presumably what readers of this blog are interested in.

Steve Rubel has a good post on why this “lifestreaming” sort of thing is emerging. I am interested in your thoughts on lifestreaming and blogging and where “this whole web thing” is going, or where it should go.

The difficulty I find in answering the question about being of service to you is that I really do not know your needs. Sometimes it is hard for us to know what our own needs really are, let alone the needs of someone else.

So, I have to guess at answers to the question. Hopefully I do reasonably well with this, but I know that I am far from 100%. Hence, please feel free to email me with suggested topics or use the Skribit widget on the front page sidebar to suggest topics.

My overall goal with this blog is to give you insights to help you live a better life. I try hard to not be another “me too blog” that posts what 10,000 blogs post about. For example, I would wager that at least 1,000 blogs today had a post announcing the release of Firefox 3.5 … so, I don’t see a value in me piling on with such an announcement. You’ll get the news through a dozen sources.

Okay, now let’s side that aside for a moment and talk about the value of service in general.

As I think back over my life, the people I have most admired (and do admire) had some involvement with being of service to others. In some cases, such as with priests/pastors, their entire lives were lived in the service of others. In other cases, service was a significant component, even if not the complete picture of the person.

We aren’t born with a desire to be of service. In fact, if it comes to us at all, it is sometimes in our later years. An example is my younger brother, who is the person I most admire. He retired a little more than a year ago and is now dedicating significant amounts of his time to public service. He’s always been helpful to others, but when you work 16 hours a day, there’s no time for public service.

My own desire to be of service is a fairly recent one … I sure didn’t have the desire in my 20’s or 30’s, or even 40’s.

But, one thing I am finding about service is that it adds a sense of meaning to our lives. That is not to say that you can’t have a sense of meaning if you are not of service, but being of service certainly adds to that sense.

So, I will leave you for now with these thoughts:

• Think about how I can be of more service to you in the areas of life management and learning and technology, and let me know.
• Think about whether you of being of service to the extent you can/should be, and take action as appropriate.

The first birthday that really made me focus on my age was my 30th. I had always thought I would be a millionaire by my 30th birthday, and when that did not happen, it really impacted me. Realizing that I had not achieved that dream was a real letdown to me. I realized that it was not too late to become a millionaire, but I also realized I would never turn 30 again. Hence my dream could never come true.

• Insight: Thinking is not doing. Dreams and aspirations never come to life unless they are turned into goals with action plans and corresponding actions.

That is not to say that I did too much thinking and not enough doing. Rather, it is to say that I just did not do enough doing.

In fact, many of the top-selling books today emphasize that we do not do enough thinking. David Allen certain makes a point of that in his newest book, Making It All Work. He notes within it that GTD is about mind management, not time management. The book Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness also notes that so much of our actions are just us “operating in the automatic mode,” without really doing any quality thinking.

Anyway, I guess as a consequence of my being so bummed out at turning 30 without becoming a millionaire, I entered a long period in my life in which I did not think about my age. It got to the point that, when people asked my age, I would actually have to figure it out. My view was “I cannot change my age, so why think about it?”

• Insight: Although being obsessed with your age is probably unhealthy, mentally, I’d say being as flippant about it as I was can be unhealthy, too.

I don’t remember my 40th birthday being a very big deal to me. I did not have an overwhelming desire to enter my second childhood, as so many do who turn 40. I’d say my general disposition was that I was pretty content.

My 50th birtday had a bit of an impact. It did not depress me, but it did cause me to realize, solemnly, that I had lived for a half-century. Moreover, it caused me to realize that more than half of my life was gone.

Then, a couple of years after Vickie died (my wife), I decided that I wanted to retire at 57. So, age finally became important to me again. It became a part of my plans and my tracking spreadsheets.

• Insights: Vickie’s death drove home to me, in a very hard way, the fact that life is short, and we never know when it might end for us. Realizing this caused me to get my estate in order, to have my will prepared, to literally plan my own funeral, to sign my DNR and other directives, and so on. If you have not done these things, you should not put them off.

So, what about my 60th birthday?

I was very saddened by the passing of Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett. My insights from thinking about the deaths of these national treasures are as follows:

• So many people die with so much talent and potential still inside of them. I realized from this that I am wasting a good of my own talents, and that I need to get back to using them more. This is something you should reflect on, too. I suspect that many of you have talents you are not even aware of. Perhaps that is true for most of us. But, I do know for sure that a lot of talent is never fully used.

Also:

• I was saddened by how I had labeled Michael Jackson as a weirdo and possible child molester. He did have some strange ways, of course, but who in his shoes would not have had some eccentricities, being in the spotlight continuously since he was 4 years old? In thinking back on the news stories of him, none of them had any real evidence that he molested children. Yet, I labeled him as such, and many of you probably did so, too. One thing I now know is that I want to stop being so judgmental about people, and I want to stop allowing the media have such an influence on my thinking.

I hope there are some insights in here that you can and will use. And, I look forward to hearing from you in the comments.