I’ve been in a very reflective state of mind for the past several weeks. I think part of this has to do with graduating from college. Part of it is starting my own business, and part of it comes from preparing for a huge step in my life.

Why I’ve been reflective may be besides the point, anyways. I’ve thought a lot about my life recently. I’ve thought about my achievements, my errors, and the things I have done and not done in my life. Focusing on the things that I’ve done well in, I’ve realized something really important. All the good stuff and accolades have come with things that I have a burning passion for. In this post, I’d like to talk a little bit about the relationship between passion and excellence.

What is Passion?

In my mind, passion is defined by a certain type of love. I’m not talking about romantic (or physical) love, but a love of discussion, participation, or observation of a thing. Passion can exist for anything and I think that if you’re passionate about something you can do the following things:

• Never tire of discussing the item
• Appreciate those who have the skills to excel at the thing you’re passionate about
• Actively participate in your passion

In my mind, I am passionate about several different things. A brief list of my passions reads as follows:

• Football
• Bodybuilding
• Software development

I can’t get enough of these things (although I’m pretty sure my family and friends tire of me talking about them all the time.) I am passionate about them and pour a lot of time into learning about these items. So how do you go from being passionate about something to excelling in it?

Passion Resembles Extremism

Anyone who knows me can attest to the fact that I take things pretty far when I get into them. I know the entire starting lineup of my favorite football team (and most of the backups, too). I ate 26 egg whites a day for a couple of weeks earlier this year. I will sit down for hours on end and program for fun, even after completing the programming for a job or assignment.

Many people, including my mom and grandfather, see these elements of my life as extremisms. I, however, do not. I believe that my passion for the items I listed above drives me to excel at them. Excelling at something involves putting a lot of time and effort into learning about something and acting on that information. Why do these things when they seem so extreme to others? Because they’ll get me where I want to be in regards to my passions and I love doing them.

Find What You Love and Do It!

I am a software developer and I love software development so I opened my own niche software development business. I love bodybuilding and weightlifting so I follow a very specific diet and exercise plan. I do these things because I love them. Other people see them as hardships, but my passion tells me differently. If I have to eat chicken and rice every day in order to look a certain way, that’s fine. If I occasionally have to work weekends or nights in order to get a project done, that’s fine too. In the end, I don’t care because I love the things I’m doing so much. It’s hardly even work!

Excellence comes from passion because, if you love what you do, then you’ll do it over and over and over until you’re awesome at it. Be passionate in life and accolades will come your way. I never would have won the Outstanding Senior Award in Computer Science without my passion for software development. I never would have achieved 7% bodyfat without a love of exercise. Have fun, love what you do, and you’ll be great at it.

I’ll be graduating from the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology in less than a week. I’ve finished all my classes and I don’t have to take any finals, so this next week will be spent doing development work for clients and just relaxing.

While I’m excited about being done, a little part of me is really going to miss this school. I’ve made friends with so many people and I’ve learned so many things over the years. Every year has been good, but this year has been great for me. In this post, I’d like to share why that is.

Major Life Events

Many, many things happened over the course of the year that were life-changing in some way. The most important, at least in my opinion, is my engagement to my wonderful fiancee, Angela. While not much has changed practically, yet, there is a sense now that the course my life is going to take is a little more determined. That’s exciting to me.

I’ve also decided that my career will probably take a more entrepreneurial route. This was a decision that was a long time in coming and was partly decided by the fact that I don’t want to “work for the man.” I plan on doing a lot of contract development over the next couple of years and I have a bunch of different product ideas that I’m working on considering the feasibility and market for.

All About the People

I’ve lived in the same beautiful residence hall the last 3 years. Unfortunately, it has established a reputation as the “lame” hall that students should stay away from at all costs. Luckily, through a decided lack of residence hall space, we ended up with a great group of guys in my hall this year and I was able to make fast friends.

I’ve met so many people this year that I’m happy to call friends. They’re wild, wacky, studious, entertaining, mumbly, and sometimes even slightly fat. In spite of their differing qualities, though, all my friends are nice guys are heart. From our resident giant leprechaun to our experienced backpack occupant, all my hall mates were amazing guys. I’d like to extend my gratitude to my awesome RA, Justin for helping to bring us together through IM sports and other activities.

Of course, I’ve tried to keep up with my friends from the past, too. It’s hard, here at Rose-Hulman, to keep in contact with all the people that you’d like to over the years. Sometimes, it’s like you’re being pulled in a million different directions at once and if you don’t see someone in a class it’s hard to remain friends.

I’m happy to say, though, that I’ve been able to keep a friendship over the years that I made back when I was a sophomore. Hopefully, we’ll be able to keep in contact over the years as she heads to grad school and I move to Seattle.

Classes

As is normal here at Rose-Hulman, most of my time this year was spent in classes and doing homework for those classes. I feel that I’ve been blessed this year to have classes that I thought were interesting, challenging, and fun (for the most part.)

I learned how to design and implement a microprocessor and instruction set. I learned about XML databases and more about process and documentation that I ever thought I would learn in a formal setting. Straying from my technical education, I also had the chance to partake in a mock presidential election. I got to take my turn playing the media and writing biased news reports on our candidates.

In all, I enjoyed my classes this year, but I’m glad I won’t have to go to anymore. About 2/3 of the way through the year, I developed a great deal of apathy for actually going to my classes. I missed more class sessions this year than I did in the 3 previous years combined. I just felt that the classes weren’t worth my time when I could be doing other things and teaching myself new skills and technologies.

Final Thoughts

It’s hard to summarize an entire school year in one post. I love it here at Rose, but I’m happy to be moving on to (hopefully) bigger and better things. My classes and experiences here have taught me so much, and my gratitude toward the faculty, staff, and other students is immeasurable. I can only hope that I can take the education I’ve received and use it to transform my life and, possibly, transform the world.

I’m a big fan of online communities. I rely on them for a lot of advice and I like to give back as much as I receive. When Earner’s Forum started a while ago, I was one of the first members, but school was killing me and I had to scale back my investment in the community. Now, I see that Earner’s Forum and Webmaster Talk are merging. Not only that, but they have a huge contest going on right now that runs through May 13th. While it is a little late to get started, the prizes are definitely worth aiming for.

I’ve been posting like crazy on the forums for the past day, and I’m already up to 50 posts today. Of course, there are people on the forum with over 5000 posts as of today, and posts are worth 2 points each. I’m obviously not going to catch up like this. I’ll have to resort to other means, like writing articles and getting blog posts.

I highly recommend that you signup for the forum and post there. I’m sure you’ll find it enlightening, and I’ll try to help you if I find you there. If you do sign up, please do so through my referral link. I appreciate it :)

On Saturday, I had the distinct pleasure of attending the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology’s Annual Honors and Awards banquet. Other then commencement, this is the largest honorary event of the school year held by the school.

I was happy to have my achievements at this school recognized in a way that was visible to my family, friends, and the community as a whole. I was also happy to see that my hard work has paid off in a way other than good grades.

I won two awards from the CSSE department. The first was the Doc Criss Outstanding Senior Project Award. This award is

Awarded annually to the most outstanding computer science or software engineering senior project or thesis.

I was pleased to receive this with two of my classmates, Eric Brynsvold and Jon Atkinson. The other award that I ended up winning was the Addison-Wesley Outstanding Senior Award, an individual honor. This award is

Presented to the senior computer science or software engineering student who, in the opinion of the faculty, has distinguished him(her)self in academics, service, character, and attitude, and who has the promise of an outstanding career in some aspect of computer science.

The reason this award was so special to me was that I have only been a Computer Science major for two years. Prior to switching, I was a mechanical engineering major. I worked hard in my last two years at Rose-Hulman, and I’m happy to claim this award.

Other than pride and bragging rights, these awards came with special perks. I received a check with the Outstanding Senior Project award, and I received The Art of Computer Programming, Volumes 1-3 in a sweet boxed set. The following is a stock image of what I received:

In a recent post, I reflected on my accomplishments and important personal events in 2007. Now that 2008 is almost a third of the way done, I think it’s high time to lay out my plans and goals for the year. For your convenience I’ve separated the goals into three loose groupings.

Personal

2008 is going to be a very important year in my process of personal development. First, I’m going to be graduating from college with a degree in computer science and taking the next steps into adulthood. Also, I’ll be moving to Seattle with my fiancee sometime after graduation.

I will be attempting to blog here more, focusing on programming tutorials and similar articles. I’ve been furthering my programming skills a lot over the past year, and I’m excited to share the techniques I’ve learned with others.

Finally, I’ll be helping to plan my wedding to the most amazing girl on the planet. We’ll be together permanently this summer and then we get down to the dirty work of finding the things we need to get the ball rolling. I’m excited for this more than anything.

Professional

My professional life is at an intersection right now. I’m still trying to decide if I want to seek a traditional job for post-graduation life or if I prefer the free wheeling life of running my own business. I have a number of different options when it comes to making money after obtaining my degree:

Traditional Job

Computer science majors are in demand, and my skills are quite mature in a variety of technologies. I’m a fast learner and I enjoy a challenge. A traditional job would not be difficult to obtain, in my mind. The concerns come from what I would be giving up: flexible hours, being my own boss, and always working on the things that I want to work on. Is the security worth those tradeoffs?

Contractor

This is what I did all last year, and it was a blast. I enjoyed working from home and making my own hours. Because I didn’t have to commute, I was able to put in more hours on actual work and still have time for the fun stuff in life. This is one option that I have experience with and would love to do it again.

Personal Trainer

I’m a pseudo personal trainer as it stands. I make sure my floor exercises and I’ve gotten a lot of people started on exercise programs this year. I know I could make a living personal training, and its something that i would enjoy doing. The only problem is that they don’t make that much money unless they can establish a loyal and somewhat affluent clientèle.

Independent Software Vendor

This is the option I’m really leaning towards. I want to create software to fulfill a need that I know exists, primarily in the sports and fitness world. I have so many ideas, but I’m not sure how to market the products that I create.

So, you can see I’m being pulled in a number of different directions. I have no idea, right now, what my plan is, but I’m sure it’ll work out in the end.

Fitness

My fitness level is an integral part of my life. I’m an active exercise enthusiast and I find that I work best when I have particular fitness goals to strive for. As such, by the end of 2008 I plan to have achieved each of the following at some point in the year:

• 5% body fat while weighing more than 200 pounds
• Dead lift 585 pounds
• Barbell bench press 325 pounds
• Become a certified personal trainer

I have a pretty thorough plan for the next 6 weeks to attempt to decrease my bodyfat to a point where I may be able to start fitness modeling. You can download the Workout and Nutrition Plan I’ve put together.