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I just got back from a short vacation, see my photos for some Tuscan eye candy.

In unrelated news, I no longer live in Seattle. I moved to New York City several weeks back.

Last week was the one year anniversary of my departure from Microsoft.

Although it seems so simple looking back, the decision was tough for me at the time. I thought about it for months, and asked people for a lot of advice.

I quickly noticed a pattern in the advice I received: the vast majority (90%) of people told me to do what they did. If they quit, then they recommended that I quit. If they stayed and the company and climbed the corporate ladder, then that was the path for me as well.

(Aside: The other 10% of advice I received was from people who gave me “anti-advice” — i.e. advising against doing what they had done. This is often the most useful type of guidance.)

I had three theories why this happened:

1. Skilled Introspection: These people really understood themselves and what would make them happy, ultimately making the best choice for themselves.
2. Cognitive Dissonance: Even if their is choice was the wrong one, they’ve convinced themselves that it was right. See also: Dan Gilbert’s talk on Synthetic Happiness.
3. Charmed Lives: My friends, co-workers, and I are extremely fortunate and live a life of luxury compared to the rest of the world. Our “tough” life decisions are choices between the 99.99th and 99.96th percentile, the difference between the two is imperceptible so it really didn’t matter what was chosen.

One year later, I find myself giving the same type of advice — but what other choice do I have? I chose my path and have no idea how the others would have turned out. I don’t believe in my first theory — but the latter two seem completely reasonable to me.

Three times in the past week, I’ve heard a variant of the saying “You could fill a book with what you don’t know.”

It’s a strange thing to say, because so many people already have — in fact, they’ve filled buildings with books filled with things you don’t know.

I never liked running. Although I could play hours of basketball or soccer, if I set out to go running, I would stop before even reaching a mile. I got bored quickly, kept on noticing how tired I was, and eventually gave up and found some other way to exercise like soccer — or a hamburger.

Even though I didn’t like running, I wanted to. There was something romantic about the sport. I was drawn to the simplicity, the minimal equipment necessary, and the lack of dependency on others (no need to wait around for a game of pickup). A lot of runners would tell me how great it was to run while traveling — seeing large parts of the city on foot, especially in the morning, provided context and a different view of the area.

Also, running was a sport that people were to do across their lifetimes. Perhaps its the lack of dependence on others, or the ability to go at your own pace, but I never met sixty year-old soccer or basketball players. The active people that age all seemed to be runners.

During my last weeks in China, feeling unhealthy from the pollution and my emaciated state, I decided it was time to suck it up and become a runner. I emailed some of my runner friends and asked for advice, realized I didn’t have running shoes, and made plans to start running as soon as I came back to the US.

I had a lot of downtime while traveling during those last few weeks in China — so I made up some ground rules for my running: Run every day to build and reinforce the habit, run before doing anything else (like checking email) to make sure it doesn’t get procrastinated away, and run for around a half-hour so it doesn’t take too much time (which could put the habit at risk).

My first runs were terrible, of course. The very first run lasted about twenty minutes, and I probably walked at least eight of those minutes. Luckily, most of my early runs were in Florida, which is drier and warmer than Seattle.

I’ve kept at it, although I’ve revised the rules — I quickly moved to six days a week (taking Sunday off), and now I run whenever I feel like it and the conditions are decent (three to four times a week). I rarely run in the mornings, because it’s usually better to wait until the afternoon when it’s 45, not 35, degrees out.

I’ll typically run between four and five miles, which takes a comfortable thirty to forty minutes, depending on terrain. The longest I’ve run was seven miles, with a mile-long walking break in the middle.

Finding good routes has been a bit of a pain, since Seattle has lots of steep hills — on the upside, I feel much faster when I run in Florida (where the highest point is mostly in Alabama and a hundred feet shorter than Capitol Hill).

My biggest piece of advice to those starting off: Track your progress. Take a note of how far you’re running, and how long it takes. It’ll be depressing at first, but it’s great to see how much you’ve improved since you started. If you’re into gadgets, a GPS tracker is nice to have (got mine for Christmas — thanks!). I’ve found the distance measurement to be accurate and consistent. My only complaint is that altitude readings are pretty much useless — when I ran around Green Lake (which is quite flat) it told me I ascended 500 feet on the first lap, and 360 feet on the second.

The forecast said rain, but it’s currently sunny outside. I’m off…