Author: Joel Gross

Over the last month, I have taken up the sport of rock climbing.  Three times a week I drive over to Santa Monica to go to my rock climbing gym, Rockreation.

Rock climbing is a great sport for me and I really enjoy it for the following reasons:

• Excellent physical workout – tones and strengthens your whole body especially your core and forearms
• Challenging mental workout – it’s like playing chess or solving a riddle each time you approach a new climb
• Enjoy the outdoors – you visit obscure places and climb up interesting rock formations.

Over the last year, my business has spawned three imitators.  Each is a friend who saw my success and said, “If Joel can do it, I can do it.”

One started an SEO company a year ago, another started a web design company then an SEO company, and the third just started a copy of our services fairly directly.… read more “Business Imitators and Copycats”

We plan our work time carefully, creating task lists and projects and calendars and goals.  Why don’t we do the same thing with our free time and fun time? What happens if you actually do so?

Most of my life my free time has been very unstructured. I wouldn’t think about what I was going to do next and when the time came I’d do whatever was easiest – read a book, watch a movie, go to the gym.… read more “Focused Planning Of Fun Activities and Free Time”

On Friday I attended the funeral for Nilesh Patel, a young man who’s life was taken by Huntington’s Disease.

Huntington’s Disease is a neurodegenerative genetic disorder that causes involuntary movements, cognitive and psychiatric problems.  The disease is caused by a genetic mutation in which an individual has two copies of a specific gene.  When the disease occurs in young people, as it did to Nilesh, it progresses rapidly and very harmfully.… read more “Huntington’s Disease Society Fundraiser”

Jeremy and I have been doing what for lack of a better term, I will call “Idea Meetings” every Tuesday.

The concept is this: we meet on Tuesday evenings at 8pm and pick a topic off our list to discuss in depth.  We spend two hours doing so.  Here is a sampling of our list of our topics:

Accessible longterm structured freetime top 10 freetime ideas, fun social constructive activities
Research how we can eat & live to increase brain power
Discipline to execute (talk about strategies to do this
Discover a list of new, challenging activities for us to participate in
Skills we would want to learn (adwords, speaking, basketball, etc)
Come up with product ideas (tech or nontech)
Build client retention management service
Keyboard shortcuts
Technologies that can boost productivity
Find good potential networking meet ups (including book clubs)
Research the people we want to be… confidence, style, swagger, abilities, skills, lifestyle
Build something useful
Use dual n back in recruiting programmers/anybody
Shopping in stores… find business ideas, marketing strategies (mall)
Personal life improvements
Great blog posts for each of our blogs
Figure out recruiting strategies
Create something interesting with google apps scripts or in marketplace
Analyze personal history to understand weaknesses and apply to present
Share computer knowledge & efficiencies
Find ways to reinforce behavior in employees