Making progress, and a thought on judging people

It’s been a couple of weeks since I’ve written here, and a lot has happened. I’m finally taking some steps toward goals I’ve long sought. It feels good to be making progress… Some of the things I’ve been up to lately include:

• Working on refinancing the house
• Restructuring mine and my business’s reporting of finances
• Hiring one new person and getting far into the process of hiring another
• Looking for new tenants (almost done)
• Joining a new book club (and thus reading full books for pleasure again)
• Looking at cars for when all the dust settles in the aforementioned big endeavors

These are just some of the potpourri of big decisions, but overall just a lot has been happening. I feel I’m at stage 3 or 4 of the company (don’t feel solo in any way, have financial stability, expanding into a new market, etc) and that I’m coming to a new comfortable place in the rest of life (figuring out who & what I need around me, or at least getting closer).

In going through a pile of papers today I came across a quote I highlighted a while back from Guy Kawasaki’s blog. It’s one bit of advice that I hope sticks with me as many new people seem to be entering my life. Here it is:

Judge others by their intentions and yourself by your results. If you want to be at peace with the world, here’s what you should do. When you judge others, look at what they intended to do. When you judge yourself, look at what you’ve actually accomplished. This attitude is bound to keep you humble. By contrast, if you judge others by their accomplishments (which are usually shortfalls) and yourself by your intentions (which are usually lofty), you will be an angry, despised little man.

That’s something that ought to keep me in check. I could explain how this goes along with my general Kantian deontological view of ethics, but essentially I ought to give people the benefit of the doubt for who they’re trying to be. Most of the time I won’t have any idea about what someone’s accomplishments are so I shouldn’t pretend to be able to judge them accurately upon them. As for me, I shouldn’t get too proud until I’ve actually made it somewhere. All those things at the top of this blog entry sound well and good, but I haven’t yet succeeded in bringing on a very important hire for the company, I don’t know that the book club is going to be a good fit for me, and I don’t yet know that buying a car right now is the best thing (or that I’ll make the right choice). When I make those decisions and see their results then it’s worthy of judging myself based on that outcome…but I shouldn’t get cocky in the process. Thanks for the good advice, Guy. In the mean time, I’ll work on making some more progress…