I read the Corner Office in the NYTimes and I struggle with the focus on hiring well. I mean I get it, it's an ego stroking line of question for someone in a position of power... yes I am a genius, I ask this clever question, peer into my crystal ball and shazam, I consistently identify the greatest employee(s) on the face of the earth. Seriously, that's just crap. Hiring is a coinflip at best, maybe, just maybe if you are the hiring guru of all time you get to a 60% probability of success.

Me, I believe in firing well. The best business book I've read is the "The First 90 Days" which serves up the core logic of returning more to the organization by the end of month three than you take out and you will thrive. My gating is more like 45 days and if you aren't swimming in the deep end of the pool by then, you go. The cost of keeping marginal employees around is extreme in terms of productivity, drain on resources and culture. Fire early, find the next coinflip and for the ones that survive the gauntlet, invest in them heavily. Mentor, set time aside for career planning, open doors that are slightly beyond their existing skill-set, give them stretch goals and keep a close eye. Identify future leaders, double down the investment and figure out who rounds out a world-class team.

It's a hard line of thinking but it works. It's even harder to actualize, most leaders don't have the stomach for it; firing is a forced discipline. It keeps an organization from getting bloated and even more importantly it benefits culture. It seems ironic, I know, but I've seen the confidence that an elite team of employees have, they know they've earned their place at the table. Darwinian indeed, but fire well and you may just shape a remarkable, highly rewarding work environment.

A year+ after writing this, I realize how important this concept of the 10,000 hours is - putting in the cycles, over and over, against an area of opportunity, against a skill that shows promise, is how you get there. There are no short-cuts.

What I have observed in this last year, is that there is a compounding effect over time. I am a more balanced leader, a more accomplished operator, a far more successful salesman than one year ago; I am 5x what I was three years ago.

If you show early promise in a space, keep after it, doggedly, and be humble enough to know you are forever going to be a work in progress.

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If Van Gogh can do it, we all can. Even though he had a better head start than most.

I have a picture I took of a series of postcards from the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. It shows his path to genius. The images illustrate his early, dark, character driven work out to the lighter Parisian paintings, settling finally on his signature style of dabbed oil, the images of irises, fields of hay at harvest, wheat under the noon-day sun. Van Gogh's path to greatness, unrecognized as it was at the time, tracked raw talent, a journey of hundreds of paintings, a stop in Paris, a spark from two brilliant artists and suddenly, and, finally, a form that changes the art world. My guess is he put in his 10,000 hours as well.

I am four+ years into the technology space and well past 200 weeks @ 65+ hours of work. I can now see the potential for reaching that higher plane. A friend of mine recently said that to do one thing extremely well, you have to put in time. A not-insignificant amount of time. You have to grind out at least 10,000 hours at a thing, a task, a sport, whatever it is that you seek greatness in. Add in some basic talent and inspiration and you can reach that 1 percenter status.

You may not ever be the absolute best in class (I certainly am not in the ranks of Carnegie, Buffett, Gates, Zuckerberg (damn him)) but I see now how one can get there, how I can find a common ground with the business leaders that I admire, from Dave S, to Sunil to John and Rodney. I am getting close to the thinner air up there.

If I pass nothing else onto my children (outside of unequivocal love), I want to inspire this idea in them. Find something, as soon as you can, that you are passionate about, and do that one thing well. It may take years, it may not, but I do know it will take applied effort, you have to put in your 10,000 hours and you may just find a way to change the world, even if just a bit.

When I was a kid, I was always restless before a day of fishing or hunting. I remember showing up at my friend Billy's house at 4am, rods and lunchbucket in tow, ready for a day of tarpon fishing. Friend or not, his father sent me packing until 5:30 - a civilized hour for going to the dock. I sat on the doorstep, in the dark for an hour and a half, still eager for the day to break and for the trip to begin.

This last weekend, I had the opportunity to relive a moment like that. Invited to North Dakota, my 50th state, for a couple of days of upland shooting, I was restless the night before leaving, eager to be on the road. My bag was packed, shotgun and gear sent ahead with my friends. At 42, I was reminded, intensely, of my youth.

The trip itself was sublime. The Dakota countryside was made up of rolling hills, recently tilled fields or just harvested potato rows, pockets of water everywhere, just beginning to fill with the late migrating ducks and geese. An hour from Bismarck's airport, driving down the long country road to the farmhouse, the sun just set, the trail rippled like the tread of a bulldozer, we saw a dozen pheasant and grouse. I knew I wouldn't sleep much that night .

The next two days were dawn to dusk walking fields. Two young dogs, full of themselves and thriving on instinct, worked up birds one after the other. We saw pheasant on the road, we chased them through the cattails, we tracked them down when shot at too great of a distance. The roosters are colorful and fast in the air and on the ground - they run like demons through the sloughs when winged. The dogs weren't disciplined enough to track the downed birds, so we bird-dogged quite a few of our own. We walked and we walked, until my citified feet were swollen and raw.

At night we ate birds, duck and pheasant, rotisserie style; Popeil's "set it and forget" commercials are aired in ND as well. We laughed a bit about that - to my wife's chagrin, I have one of the analog versions of the Ronco, a pale cousin to the new modern one set in the kitchen of the farmhouse. We ate well. We drank cases of beer. We talked with the farmers. We were tricked by our host with a stuffed skunk placed thoughtfully by the door, begging to be shot by a half-eyed hunter late in the night. We laughed even more about the real McCoy that popped out of its den in the middle of a hollow and came within a split-second of dousing me the following day. We watched the ALCS. We went to town, population 84, and drank with the few locals who ventured a drink on a Sunday night. We argued about the right order to play dice, at stake an ugly moose covered lamp that would soon be raffled. We ate breakfast in the cafe amongst distant cousins of our host, all telling stories and sharing their ideas on the winter that would soon be upon them.

Short of having my daughters with me (my wife will never suffer a hunting trip), I couldn't image a better time. My friends are a pleasure to pass the hours with. There was a simplicity to all of it that is remarkable. I look forward to the day when we have a place of our own up there. I've recalled my youth and the restlessness of the night before a day in the field. It is not something that I will easily let go of.

I am in an airport often these days. Usually racing to catch a plane, failing to see the tens of thousands of American stories going on around me in the gated corridor of DIA or O'Hare, Newark, or Detroit, which are favorites these last few months. But two weeks ago I noticed something. It was a snapshot of change. It was my threefold future before me.

Two teenagers were holding hands. Oblivious to the flow of soon to be passengers on the moving sidewalk, these two were grounded solely in one another. Their world slowed to a point where there was a universe of exactly two. And it was sweet.

What was telling for me however was that the dynamic of my family is soon to evolve. My oldest daughter at ten is at the edge of some new space, where the epicenter of her existence will no longer be her nuclear family. Isabella will soon care more for friends and, in a minute or two, boys, than us. I am sure she'll always be grounded in her family, we are very close, but change is coming.

Fastforward to a few days later. Princeton, NJ before a meeting with a client, walking down the main street in this charming enclave, first year students checking into their University. The dynamic of student walking ahead with newfound friends or in some cases siblings, parents more often than not ten paces behind. I could see the nervousness in them, standing at the edge of a radical change in life, a foot in their future and a foot in their past. The kids all looking behind to see where their parents are, needing that net of security at a moment of total dislocation, but at the same, wanting them less than at hand. After all, their next four years are about a gateway to their future, to intellectual and actual freedom as an absolute. Parents were a loved backstop, not quite afterthought. It too was sweet.

So our lives will change. We will watch our daughters flourish in their independence, struggle at times with the friction of being teenagers, of shifting cliques, of attention wanted and sometimes not. Of finding themselves as much as anything else. We will be there for our girls through high and low. My heart both sings at the growth that will come for them, and at the same, it breaks just a bit knowing there is a different age soon upon us.

This economy has done strange things to me and my family. We have learned the value of simplicity. I sit in our living room, a comfortable space, an elegant Christmas tree lighting the room, a fire burning in the hearth and I consider this year. We have learned to live modestly again, as a commitment to an early stage business changed our economics dramatically and the broader economy pushing a sense of frugality on virtually everyone that we know.

The most obvious change has been a centricity around our dining room table. We don't go out much, we eat in. Meals have become a luxury, a way of passing hours in preparation and sharing. Invariably accompanied by bottles of wine, some brilliant, others a kissing cousin away from the Gallo by the jug ilk. Brunches are stately, others are Waffle House good. But common to all of them is a sharing that wasn't always an ingredient before - there is always someone at our table other than our nuclear family. And this is wonderful.

Christine, our close family friend who came for a visit and was quickly recruited into the working ranks of my company and as a housemate, will share a few meals a week - the girls love her like a sister and scream when she comes through the front door. Trude and Tale stayed with us for four weeks this summer and everyone pitched in on meals, both buying and preparing. My Mom was here for a week, my brother and his wife for a day, cousin Arron and my Aunt for a night, we went back and forth with our neighbors all through the summer, the Denisons and my Aunt and Uncle were here for a day or two. When the Epsteins are avaiable, they stop in; we see the Hochs as often as we can; Traci, Billy, Lily, Kristen & Mark, Cara and TS, Shana & Duncan, Mrs. Hartman, Sylvana, Anima, the Miller Family, the Warners, Wyatt and Celsea, Jerry, Alejandro, Bianca + Ronny, the summercamp that was the visit from the Samuels, The Stacks and their lovely girls who chase around the house with Sasha and Isabella as if they were two sets of twins, and even the Frankums, when Bianca doesn't scare off their three boys who think her an alien. We have shared some remarkable spreads this year.

So I am thankful. For this economy that has sobered up our view of expense and brought my family and our friends closer to us. For our home and its centerpiece, the family table, where we can sit and talk for hours about life, argue politics on occasion, review the comings and goings of a school day or life. We have found angles on religion, we have fallen in love, we have been happy.

A wonderful year indeed.

One of the rarest combinations in life is the intersection of truly memorable detail around a highly usable object, a thing that leaps to life because you can't live without it and is easily communicated to others as to why. Basically you can like it a LOT and tell people in 30 seconds or less. At this point nearly everyone is thinking of Apple and rightly so because Steve Jobs has single handedly reshaped a few of the most important spaces of the last twenty years: music, mobile and computers. He is a genius and he has changed people's lives.

But that is not what I am after today. This example is closer to home because, in fact, it is about our home. I have always had great housing karma, the bit of luck the gods have given me. Those that know me would never stand behind me in a line, in fact they would sprint to the next one over and snicker as mine was slowed by the man pleading his case about parking tickets or the woman with 43 coupons revealed at the last minute. But living well I have over the years.

Rich, poor, living high or living low I have always been able to land in an address that has some inspiring element to it - light, a certain paneling, a barn wall turned to flooring, Biscayne Bay outside our doorstep, just beyond the infinity pool, a charming fireplace, towering redwoods in the surreal garden outside our door. There is always a signature detail that makes the home memorable, outside of the life that we bring to it.

So it is with our new house. It is a duplex, our neighbors are the designers and the builders. In its price tier it is as good as it gets. At the entrance, light abounds, you turn left and you see the first signature design item with stairs of pressed wood, colorful, environmentally friendly, they pull you up to the second level and create a design element that is visible from anywhere in the main floor. The kitchen is perfect, the bedrooms are the right size, great closets and bathrooms, of course - nary the fool would pass these opportunities over in new construction - but the real value is on floor one and the basement. It is about connection.

There is a portal in the middle of the living room that connects us downstairs to a basement that has very high ceilings and towers of light spilling into the room. You can breathe down there and just in case you can't, you look to the middle of the ceiling and at the right angle, you are looking into our dining room area. Our kids are always close to us, by design, but in this home they can have their own space and still feel connected to the central hub of our day to day - the kitchen and dining area. As they grow, this is essential for their sanity and our own and a lesser architect would have missed this opportunity. The Kungs did not, they got it just right.

You can love your iPhone or your Mac and evangelize until the cows come home, but at our address on Grove Street, we get to LIVE our signature details and usability day in and day out. When we outgrow this place, I can't wait to have them help us with a home of our own design. For now, this one will do quite well.

me

2 cups of happy

1 cup of mad

3 cups of love

5 cups of imagination

4 cups of smart

2,000 ounces of experience

1 pound of lonely

5 pounds of excited

3 cups of playful

and you got me!

I am not a religious man. Let's start there and work outward.

In the early evening, my daughter's teacher came to our house and we talked about education, the extraordinary joy of parenting, the taxing moments when you are looking for a trade to improve your roster, and we talked about God. Do you believe in God was the question.

Now, to be clear, this wasn't a woman on a mission, there was no black badge over her left breast and white oxford beneath, this was a very enlightened woman, to whom we have entrusted our little B one day a week, asking about the role of religion in our household. She is a Waldorf evangelist, not a bible slinger.

I said I have none; I have no sense of a God. She made no judgement and continued down the path a bit further. Are you spiritual? Still no, but I could at least throw in a comma and offer up something other than a monosylabic reply. I believe there is a collective energy greater than any one individual. This said, I continued on to rail the empires that are religion, man essentially flexing power and ambition from behind the holiness of the cloth.

We kept at it and as a result I have a new view of this issue. We got there through two realizations: one, the subject of God and religion has always been a source of friction for me, something that I too passionately lambast to be entirely disinterested. You can't lash out at other's mention of an idea, a belief, if you are neutral. You fight something when it provokes you. The idea of spirituality is like a burr under my saddle. So part one is acknowledging that there is something there.

The second epiphany, if you will, came from the idea that you can appreciate spirituality through others. I am a pragmatic man, a problem solver, not easily given over to emotion (save the occasional flare of temper); my world is ordered and has to make sense. This is not the case with my wife and the girls who are far more inclined to let feelings carry the day. Within these differences may lie an openness to a greater being and an idea that religion is a binding agent for humanity; it is the reason that Isa begs the discussion of God almost daily, by saying her prayers, by provoking me at the dinner table to explore the idea and my total lack of buy-in. They press because they don't quite understand my no and at the same time they are expressing a curiousity, which we wholly support. If you want to be a Buddhist, a Jew or a devout Catholic, the world is your oyster.

What I have come away with is this. My wife is not a religious woman but she has a deep sense of spirituality. She is a believer, she is closely attuned to the idea of a greater being. And you know what, that is just fine with me. I can appreciate a God, many gods, the power of nature, and maybe even religion through her. And maybe that burr will wear itself to nothing or, in fact, I might step away from my apathy and take up a book, actually talk with people far more educated and impassioned on the subject than I, and learn something. Don't expect me at church any time soon but before long I might just have a real opinion, a sense of what spirituality actually means to me, and not just a knee jerk reaction.

I am reading an excellent book about the late 1800's and the demise of the bison in America. Common to the 1860s were the buffalo hunters, many of whom would go out and take down 50 to 100 buffalo at a time, as many as they could skin in a day.The animals, short of site and strong of smell, would nose into the wind, and a sharpshooter could lay out dozens before the herd would break, never smelling danger if they were bulleted in the right order. Mostly cows, which had finer coats. 

Money from shipping the hides East would provide the hunters and their crews with a stake for the tables in Hays or Kansas City. One dollar on a fast turn to be gambled at something more.

Reading the book, I am reminded of part of my past, a one year stint on the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade, my college for finance. In the early 1990's, the 30 year bond pit was the biggest trading arena in the world. 8 steps around a circle the size of a bullfighting ring, a very clear hierarchy established by your position and status on or proxmity to the top tier. The 1000 lot traders stood where they wanted, with brokers making clear way and obvious lines of site to the big prop traders who would take the other side of their orders. It is, by far, the most Darwinian environment I have ever been a part of - the strongest, most aggressive, and the fastest of mind rose above their peers.

To understand this space, imagine 500 people jammed in like sardines, all wearing wildly patterned lab-like coats with large plastic badges clearly visible for all to see - your acronym was the code by which you were tracked in a trade. I sold 300 contracts to YNG, I am into MCL for 500. All transactions engaged by a standardized set of hand signals and invariably a screamed confirmation. Written on paper cards in those years, handed to your trade checker who would race around the pit to find the opposing checker, praying like hell that everyone was literally on the same page. It was sheer madness, a highly orechestrated dance with fortunes at stake.

The pits were busy early and late on most days, around the release of government data that moved the markets. The big traders, the Tom Baldwins of the world, would only come in when there was a strong ebb and flow of orders - when Goldman Sachs et al were laying off cash trades in orders that added to billions. Floor traders made the markets, scalping a tick or two here and there, and making and losing millions in a day. At the end they typically went home flat, neither long nor short the market.

When the big guys were out, sitting their plush offices, off to the bar for a drink or to a local hotel for a nooner with one of their ring hungry clerks, the pit dwellers would work their way up to a higher step. They would literally step up, take on bigger trades, emulate the posture and aggressiveness of their seniors, like adolescent bulls sparring before the rut. To bring this story back, these young amibious traders were often Turks who had been blown out of their stake in the past, gone out and worked two or three real jobs for months to put together 20 grand and then back to the gambling hall of the bond pit to take their shot once more. Boom to bust, an expensive tuition paid more than a few times on average. No different than the buffalo hunters of a century past.

One story stuck in my mind, it speaks to the utter ruthlessness of this sea of predators that were the scalpers. I remember a day watching Baldwin come into the pit a half hour after lunch, when it was a mere trickle of liquidity. There was a kid who I had watched step up earlier that day, and who had been consistently making a move over the last weeks - he had beaten up a few smaller traders along the way, and made no friends in the process. As far as I could tell, he hadn't had any interaction with Baldwin before that early afternoon. They didn't exactly trade in the same flow, this kid was a ten lot trader.

Here he was in a dead calm market, and he'd put on a position that was bigger than he was comfortable with; I watched Baldwin sitting on the sidelines taking it all in, taking the measure of who was in for what and where the market was. As soon as this fellow took the top step and put on this 100 contract position, I watched Baldwin step in, bid the market three ticks away from the position this kid had, and quickly proceed to move the market a half point with a huge bid. As soon as the young overly ambitious trader coughed up his short and bought back the position, Baldwin sold the market off and walked away. In a few short minutes, the kid was taken down, his hard won stake blown out. He sat there stunned, not unlike a buffalo with a bullet through it's lungs, not yet aware that it was dead in its tracks.

I figured out one thing in the last decade, if nothing else. Think long and hard about the body of water you swim in. Given a certain skillset, one that you believe can translate to a broad range of businesses (I can't exactly start a career as a surgeon tomorrow, per se), you have choices. Use them wisely. If you are confident that you are going to add value to any organization that you join, then the real discussion is about how expansive is the opportunity by industry, not by company.

For the record, this is a hard reality to engage. Changing industries is not for the faint of heart, and it gets a whole lot harder as your responsibilities multiply. At the same time, the dislocation of this economy is creating stunning upside - many people HAVE to find a new place to splash around.

The blue ocean is in technology. Even in the music space. I went from trying to doggypaddle in the half-filled bathtub of the concert promotion world to racing in the fast moving, emerald green of the Gulfstream. Look at Beatport - terrific company, innovator, very solid revenue producing enterprise. No money is being made in the concert world, save for artists, yet the pool of opportunity around distributing music in the digital age is in the billions (Itunes, Beatport and eventually Spotify, are the poster children).

If you know you have game, that you can create momentum in any vertical, then you have to make a choice at some point in your career, and invest against opportunity. You have to be willing to wade into the shallow end of a stream, knowing that at some point, if all goes well, you'll end up in the Gulf of Mexico. Technology is an adolescent industry at best, scarcity is ubiquitous when it comes to great talent, and literally, technology is the channel to the future.

If you are lucky, you will jump in with a great company, with brilliant leadership and change the world. But even if you don't, your odds of a great swim are far better.