In 1983 I was working for a small company making microprocessor-based data entry terminals. I’ve often referred to it as being on a “reverse growth” trajectory.

When I started they were 25 employees strong. When I left there were 5. When I started I was the latest addition to the three person software department. When I left, I was the software department. (And, no, it wasn’t me, I swear!)

You get the idea. The writing was on the wall well before I left, so I’d started keeping my eyes peeled. And I encountered an advertisement in the local paper.

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Today marks the half-way point in my “60 Days of Gratitude” project. If you’re slogging through with me in this little exercise … well, I’m grateful you’re here. 🙂

Today, I’m also grateful for the grateful.

Let me explain…

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Today is the 14th anniversary of the very first Ask Leo! article.

I’d left Microsoft a year and a half earlier, at which point I’d joined a mastermind group of internet entrepreneurs. At the end of April in 2003 we had our first face-to-face conference, and it was within that conference that the germ of the idea that would become Ask Leo! was born.

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Pictured above is Dagmar. She’s a 13+ year old Cardigan Welsh Corgi.

Dagmar has lymphoma, a type of cancer.

What makes Dagmar remarkable is that as I write this she’s been in remission for well over a year and a half. Later this year we’ll celebrate two years since diagnosis. That’s well above average, and definitely puts her at the far end of the bell curve of cancer survival.

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To quote Ask Leo! on Business, “The internet is connecting us – across the street or across the planet. Mankind is more connected today in more ways than ever before.”

And yes, that has both upsides and downsides.

Today I’m grateful for one of the undervalued upsides: online philanthropy.

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We have, today, available at our fingertips a wealth of knowledge that was unthinkable just a few decades ago. While it’s not exactly as he originally envisioned it, Bill Gates’ “Information At Your Fingertips” has come to pass in ways that most of us would never have considered 20 years ago.

And yet we take it all for granted. Bill Murray captured it correctly just a few years ago: “My iPhone has 2 million times the storage of the 1969 Apollo 11 spacecraft computer. They went to the moon. I throw birds at pig houses.”

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It’s something I’ve said on many occasions: it’s good to be a geek. It’s good to be comfortable with and somewhat knowledgeable about technology. It opens doors, makes classes of problems not problems at all, and just generally makes my life more interesting and fun.

It’s also what allows me to help others; from Ask Leo! to select friends and neighbors, my comfort with technology serves me well and allows me to serve others.

Though I do wish more people weren’t quite so timid when it comes to technology — it could serve them better as well.

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A mastermind group is a peer-to-peer mentoring concept used to help members solve their problems with input and advice from the other group members. —Wikipedia

This post will have to be intentionally vague on specifics, for reasons which will become clear.

In 2001 I was invited to join a mastermind group of online internet entrepreneurs. Doing so changed my life.

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I chose good parents.

While there are a lot of things we can, and often should, do to keep ourselves healthy and long-lived, there are two that are major influences that are completely out of our control: genetics and random chance.

I keep seeing reports that some are starting to believe that it’s chance — the luck of the draw — that’s responsible for more cancer than previously understood. I guess I’m grateful for my luck so far, but honestly … it’s my genes I appreciate more.

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One of the greatest gifts my parents ever gave me was power of attorney.

I know, it doesn’t sound particularly romantic, or fun, or even special, but I can tell you that it was incredibly pragmatic and saved me no end of trouble when I finally needed it.

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I was telling a friend recently that in general people have a strange relationship with money.

At one level it’s difficult to talk about with anyone other than your spouse, banker, or financial planner. At another it’s often the cause of significant consternation when trying to do something as simple as splitting the check.

Talking about what you do or don’t have is often considered to be either boasting, or feeling sorry for yourself. There’s a lot of shame around both having and not having money.

I do want to talk about it, and though I won’t get into specifics I don’t want to be seen as boasting. I had to think long and hard about posting this publicly, which goes to show that how we feel about money can be very complicated.

I’m grateful not for what I have, but for what it enables me to do.

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The older  get the more I come to realize that education isn’t a state, it’s a process. You’re never done; it’s a life-long process.

I believe that many people — perhaps even most — take their education for granted, and as a result fail to take advantage of the many opportunities available. Certainly those who have basic education available — much of the world still does not — are very likely not to realize what a wonderful gift it is.

I try not to. In fact, I try very hard to be grateful for all of my education – past and present.

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Our neighbor had … issues. That’s really the only way to put it.

It was our first home, back in Mountlake Terrace in the early 1980’s. We’d occasionally hear her holding what I can only describe as on-person religious revivals in her back yard. She accused us of somehow influencing our cats, as well as all the other cats in the neighborhood to come poop in her gardens.

You can imagine that living next door to someone like that was a bit of a challenge at times.

One day it all came to a head.

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I’ve talked about our breeder, now it’s time to talk about something else Corgi-related: the community.

Yes, there’s a “Corgi community”, and it’s pretty darned cool.

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One of the very major changes in recent years has nothing to do with the speed of technology, or even the its vast improvements in capability or power. Yet one, single aspect of technological change in recent years has impacted me more than any other.

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On October 7, 1977 I met Kathy. We’d been “set up” by my roommate a the time and his fiance — they had decided we should meet.

The rest, as they say, is history.

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Good help is hard to find. I think we’ve all heard that, if not said that, particularly if you’re a homeowner.

One of the themes of our home ownership, however, goes a tad more basic than even that. Even good help can be no help at all, if they don’t show up.

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It should be absolutely no surprise that any list of gratitude I create would include the dogs currently sleeping in my office as I write this.

More specifically, though, I’m grateful that we hooked up with an awesome breeder.

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I plan to share my “path to meditation” sometime in the future. It’s the path that lead the skeptical, pragmatic, logical, rational, engineer that I am to embrace meditation as a daily habit. It’s been useful, and I’ve been doing for some years now.

But it dawned on me that I owe a debt of gratitude to some authors and apps that helped me get here on that path.

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I had lunch the other day with a good friend — the kind of friend who challenges my thinking, all in a very positive way. This person is one of those people with whom I need no mask.

In reflecting on our relationship I realized that in the last few years I’ve grown — personally, spiritually, intellectually — in part because of my relationship and interactions with this person.

If that’s not something to be grateful for, then I don’t know what is. 🙂

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