This past ten days have been a little crazy in my household. Our son Tim and his girlfriend dropped in for a few days before heading out again with his work. Sarah had her birthday and then moved into her own place and Elise had her car window smashed and bag stolen.

In amongst these personal comings and goings ParkLogic has been rolling out its new Next monetization platform from one client after another. We’ve also been deploying new systems for registries, registrars, and hosting companies to get the most from the domains they manage.

I’m now looking at a coming week where Tim returns for a few days with a work colleague and he’s hoping I can spend some time with him developing a business plan for a new venture.

While I’m doing this Roselyn and I are getting ready for GDD in Madrid and Domaining Europe in Berlin. The cherry on the cake is preparing for three speaking sessions and twenty plus meetings. Somehow amongst all of this I’m signing off on our corporate, trust and personal tax returns. It's going to be a busy week....

I must admit that the thought of the plane door closing as we commence our 24-hour flight to Madrid via Dubai sounds like bliss. With any luck, I’ll have some time to do some thinking rather than just racing around from one task to another like a headless chicken.

To say that I’ve been in the middle of a whirlwind this past couple of weeks is a bit of an understatement…..it’s been more like a tornado. A strange thing happens when you’re extremely busy…..stuff just seems to get done.

I’ve said this in my blog before, “If you want to get something done then give it to a busy person.” Why is this? Busy people tend to prioritise tasks and ensure that everything is completed. A person with lots of time on their hands will get around to things one day.

I think that it’s absolutely incredible the amount of work that domain investors do to maintain their passive incomes. Responding to sales inquiries, ensuring DNS’s are set, renewals are done and an escrow transaction is complete is but a few of our daily tasks. All the while we're looking around for the next batch of domains to purchase. It can be frenetic and 24 hours per day job.

At the same time, we all need to learn to take some time out. You can’t keep the foot on your life’s accelerator forever without something going wrong. For me, I secretly look forward to long flights as it allows me to write another chapter or two in my next Battleframe book series. I find that I can relax with my laptop while I let my imagination take flight to the background hum of an A380’s engines.

What do you do to relax? What is it that recharges your batteries? Are you burning the candle at both ends as you pour yourself into your business while forgetting why and whom you’re doing this all for? One of the most under rated things that we can all do is take some time out to really think. We seem to be rewarded for doing when in fact it’s the thinking before the doing that brings the rewards.

Stop, right now as you finish reading this article and do some thinking. I'm sure you'll be surprised at some of the creative ideas you come up with.

Have a great weekend!

It’s that time of year, where the tree is trimmed and Christmas is in every shop window enticing us to buy, Buy, BUY! Despite the commercialisation of Christmas there is an underpinning of good-will and generosity that permeates the air. So what is generosity and why is it so important?

For a start, people often view generosity as something that involves money. This is only one of the facets of generosity and depending upon your circumstances it is often the easiest one to enact. There is no reason you can’t be generous with your time, your attention, or your love. Generosity is more of an attitude of life rather than doing something at a point in time.

For example, there is nothing worse than talking to someone that is constantly looking at their phone. They are being a miser with their attention as they constantly tell you that someone else is more important than you are. It’s also just plain rude.

If a person is to be generous then it must be an act of free will. This seems obvious but have you ever been to a restaurant with someone where they’ve waited for you to pick up the tab? They’ve essentially stolen the joy of being generous by manipulating the situation for you to pay…..not cool.

A generous person also needs to be wealthy in what they are being generous with. If you’re time poor then you’re unlikely to be generous with your time…..you just can’t afford it. You may need to ask yourself why you are a pauper in that area of your life and work on how you can bring some flexibility to your schedule that allows you to become time rich.

So many people claim to be time poor but after a few minutes of talking with them you quickly realise they are this way because they consume their time on themselves rather than being generous to others. For example, how much time do you spend watching television, youtube or play games on your phone? Could you cut out just one of these activities and suddenly be in a position to bless others with your time?

For me, there is no faster way to destroy an evening out then when someone pulls out a calculator app to work out how much they should pay. It gets even worse when they ask the waiter for a menu so they can get their numbers down to the cent. But isn’t this fair? What’s the problem with that?

The real enemy of being generous is people who live a life of being fair. Being fair sounds so good until you realise that it removes all generosity. You see, generosity isn’t about being fair, in fact, it’s the polar opposite. Being generous is going above and beyond fair just because you want to bless someone else.

True generosity also means there are no strings attached. I know some people who act like they are being generous but carry a mental ledger of whom owes what to whom. This isn’t about being generous at all…..it’s about balancing the scales so everything is fair…..it’s also a lot how politicians behave.

I knew a couple that would literally keep track of who spent what amount of money on themselves so they could balance everything up. The wife bought some new clothes so the husband could then spend money on some technical gadget. Rather than being happy for the other person’s purchases they had a desire to balance the ledger…..sadly, the relationship broke apart.

One of the sad things about Christmas is it can dissolve into a time of obligations. I must buy a present for so-and-so because that’s what’s expected. The levels of expectations rise up and is one of the contributing factors for why Christmas is not very “merry” for many people.

The fastest way to put a smile on your face is to decide to be generous with your giving…..this doesn’t necessarily mean more money. It could be you spend the time making something. I’ve kept every birthday, Christmas and Father’s Day card that my kids have ever made for me.…..they are more precious than anything Hallmark could have produced. Maybe it’s time you dusted off your artistic skills?

If you ever want to do a “generosity health check” then do something for someone else where there is no possible way you can get anything in return. Don’t be a miser, go way over the top. Buy the groceries of the person in front of you at the store, give your favourite coat to a homeless person, pay for the McDonald’s of the car behind you in the drive through, anonymously donate money to a worthy cause, help a stranger with a broken down car or spend an afternoon with a nephew or niece.

One of the most amazing things about being generous is when you do so you will actually get more from the act then the person you are being generous to. It’s like magic! The feelings of well-being and happiness that envelopes you are worth every penny, second or effort the deed required. It’s only a few weeks until Christmas, decide to bring joy into the lives of those around you by being generous and receive a great gift in return……love.

We can all be a littler more generous.....we just need to practice harder.

There was a knock at the front door and sure enough a smiling Irishman greeted me in his paint flecked overalls. He was here to paint the interior of the house and modernise the look a little.

What I didn’t really comprehend was the level of disruption that we would all experience as the furniture was dragged to the middle of each room.

So after a couple of days’ work, Roselyn (my wife) and I looked at the colour on the walls and decided we didn’t like it. This is despite the incredible number of sample pots of paint that we splashed against the walls.

We could have stayed with the colour and grumbled for the next ten years of our lives but today we made the decision to cut our losses and get something more to our taste rather than the tastes of some potential buyer at some point in the future. Sometimes you just have to say, “No, I just don’t like that.”

While this was all going on I’ve been getting back on the tools and writing some pretty awesome code for a new project. There’s nothing quite like the inspiration of paint fumes to fan the juices of creativity and inspiration.

I enjoy coding for a number of reasons and foremost is I have a personal belief that if a company founder in our industry really understands what’s going on at that level then they can ultimately bring better results to customers. I also find there’s something strangely beautiful and calming about a project materialising one line of code at a time. It’s all about seeing a vision come to fruition out of the chaos of the data right before your eyes.

It many respects, coding is like our Irish painter working on our house. By themselves, each brushstroke would look like a patchwork mess but combined they form the basis of a beautiful environment to live in.

Running an online business or domain investment portfolio is similar to painting as well. Each click that brings a customer, an interaction on your website or a dollar of revenue is what makes the canvas of your business so great and at times, all consuming. Tweaking advertising expenditure, portfolio mixes and deal structures is what makes you get up in the morning, pick up your brush and add some colour to your ventures.

Which reminds me, I think that I’d better get back to my own canvas with some new inspiration! Have a great weekend!