This world has a power to make us humble.

Many things I consider important are not really worth spending precious efforts on. And many of the things that are worth it are not getting the attention.

Poverty, I believe, belongs to the second group.

Habitat for Humanity is doing important work bringing shelter to the beat up people of Haiti. Let’s help them out by collecting the money to build one house for one family.

Just a quick update to all Donation Can users out there: The first update to my Donation Can plugin is live!

Here’s a brief update on what’s new in this version:

1. You can now allow your visitors to specify the amount they want to donate. To do this, go to edit the donation goal and tick the check box that says “Include freeform donation option” in the “Donation Options” sections.
2. If you want to only have the freeform donation option, remove all donation options from the general settings and tick the checkbox mentioned above.
3. You can create goals without a target amount. For an example of this in action, check out the donation widget in this blog’s right side sidebar. To do this, just leave the “Fundraising Target” field empty and save changes.
4. You can embed donation forms to your blog posts and pages using a new quick tag. See this page for detailed instructions.

I have some bug fixes and new features (including support for recurring donations, different donation widget styles, and localization) still in the works and they will be released in a few weeks from now. And as always, I’d love to hear your comments and improvement ideas!

Go get the plugin here.

Today, I decided, it’s time to turn you all into runners.

So here we go: a collection of eight shots that I’ve taken on my runs around the neighborhood.

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At last, it’s getting time to announce the release of my first full featured free WordPress plugin: Donation Can will be released in one week from today, on Monday, August 24th, 2009.

In this post, I want to tell you a bit about the plugin and show one of the most interesting features, and hopefully get you at least a bit excited about what is coming up.

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It’s 2:30 and I can’t sleep. That’s why after an hour and half of trying to fake sleeping, I decided to just get up and write a blog post instead. All the things I wanted to say where already filling my head anyway.

This feeling is new to me. Usually, I’m the first one in any group of people to fall asleep. And until today, I’ve believed that even running wouldn’t change that fact. I was wrong — I just hadn’t experienced a tough enough exercise. Now, in the past two and a half hours since finishing my run, I’ve experienced everything from exhaustion to feeling shivery, to feeling so sweaty that I thought I was melting, and now, this feeling of extreme alertness that makes it impossible to fall asleep. Just like trying to sleep in the middle of the day.

So what happened?

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In his recent talk at the London School of Economics (listen the podcast here for free), Thomas L. Friedman, bestselling author of The World Is Flat, and Hot, Flat, and Crowded, made a great point about the financial crashes in history and compared to that of today.

His reasoning goes like this:

• In the late 1800’s, when the US railroad bubble collapsed, it left the country with an amazing railroad network.
• In the early 2000, when the dot com bubble burst, it left us with a highly developed Internet infrastructure.
• When this latest credit bubble broke at the end of last year, it left us with nothing more than half-built condos and worthless credit.

This got me thinking: In the end, companies go down all the time, people lose their jobs every day, and there is no such thing as financial security. The world is fragile and unpredictable. If my employer went bankrupt, pretty much no one would notice. Or even more, if my tiny home business didn’t fly, who on earth would care?

That’s why we need to ask ourselves a new question: If your company went down today, what would be the legacy it left behind?

I’ll start by a contradiction: No matter what the title says, just doing things is no guarantee for success. Read Malcolm Gladwell’s latest book, Outliers: The Story of Success, and you’ll hear that success is a combination of hard work, one thousand hours of practice, and equally importantly, pure luck. Being in the right place at the right time. And if you want to challenge your thinking even more, check out anything written by Nassim Nicholas Taleb (I suggest Fooled by Randomness). He will show you how most of the things we see as cause and effect really are just manifestations of randomness at work.

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Why good people do good things?

I don’t find the question of good people doing bad things nearly as interesting as the one of good people doing good things. We are a greedy, sometimes quite ignorant bunch of people. We seek to do the right thing (which makes us good enough), but still can’t help but think, “What’s in it for me?”

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In his book, The Dip, Seth Godin talks about a period of hard times that you have to get through before you can become the best in what you do.

At first, everything goes smoothly and you seem unstoppable. Then, as if there was some kind of dark magic at play, you hit a wall that you just need to struggle through to get to the next level. 

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Here’s for a merry, peaceful Christmas with your closest ones!

Big thanks for making 2008 special, and see you again in 2009! (It will come sooner than you’d expect…)

- Jarkko