Tim Goessling writes a cool piece for The Good Men Project describing a day adhering to Benjamin Franklin’s daily schedule.

I’d like to try this practice and see how much more I can get out of a day.

Click to learn more on Benjamin Franklin’s daily practices.

Via Jessica Jenkins

“It is possible to be happy and joyful most of the time. You just have to look at little children and see their natural joy. You may say that little children are free and don’t have anything to worry about, but you are free too! You are free to choose worry or to choose joy, and whatever you choose will attract exactly that. Worry attracts more worry. Joy attracts more joy.”

Via Rhonda Byrne and Secret Scrolls

If I could suggest just one thing you could do that would transform how 2014 goes for you, it would be this:

Select three colleagues, bosses, investors, employees, co-conspirators or family members that have an influence over how you do your work. Choose people who care about you and what you produce.

Identify three books that challenge your status quo, business books that outline a new attitude/approach or strategy, or perhaps fiction or non-fiction that challenges you. Books you’ve read that you need them to read.

Buy the three books for each of the three people, and ask them each to read all three over the holiday break.

That’s it. Three people, nine books, many conversations and forward leaps. No better way to spend $130.

I still remember handing copies of Snow Crash to my founding team at Yoyodyne. It changed our conversations for years. And years before that, Soul of a New Machine and The Mythical Man Month were touchstones used by programmers I worked with. When the team has a reference, a shared vocabulary and a new standard, you raise the bar for each other.

[If the Pick Three approach makes you uncomfortable, because you’re not allowed to do this, or not supposed to, you have just confronted something important. And if this feels too expensive, it’s worth thinking about how hard you’re expecting to work next year, and how you plan to leverage all that effort.]

Via Seth Godin