Many, many moons ago, I received a Christmas ornament from a woman named Annie. I was fresh out of college and working as a barista in a busy coffee shop in Chicago. Annie became a regular customer for a few months, though she never once ordered coffee.

She visited for the sole purpose of dropping off gifts for anyone working behind the counter. Didn’t matter who, she just liked to give presents. Sometimes it was a pack of ramen noodles or a stack of literature picked up in a hotel lobby. One day near Christmas, she gave me this glass ornament she’d bought on clearance at neighboring Anthropologie.

By most accounts, she was a crazy lady. Her husband had passed away, and she shuffled the streets of Chicago in his old clothes, her petite frame swallowed up by an extra large tweed overcoat, boat-sized leather loafers she could barely keep on her feet clopping with each step. Aside from gifting random things to complete strangers, she also burst into unexpected shouting, often of the profane sort. These other things got her cast out of most the businesses in the neighborhood, my old workplace included.

All of her craziness aside, I get inspired by her zest for gift-giving every year. It’s become an annual tree-trimming tradition that the first ornament to go up is Annie’s. I have no idea what became of her.

This post is part of Think Kit 2011.

As I think about the various people that have made a difference in my life this past year, I realize how very blessed I am with the incredible group of people I am surrounded with. I am truly fortunate to have wonderful family, friends and co-workers. There are many people that impacted my life this year, so I will share just a few stories of these awesome people:

I have a few friends that made a difference in my life by asking me hard questions and being willing to show me tough love as I faced a crossroads in life. They challenged me, but also encouraged me, and I was able to make a big decision in my life with new confidence as a result of their willingness to not tell me what I wanted to hear, but instead challenge me to think past myself and my circumstances and to recognize a greater purpose for the trials we face in life. I came to a place of new clarity and true peace after these hard conversations, and I’m so thankful for these women that were willing to walk that road with me.

One of my very dear friends is about to see her husband go off to serve our country in Afghanistan. Without even knowing it, she has made a huge impact in my life by the way she has faced this new season of life with incredible courage. She has a beautiful attitude and strength about her that I so admire. As she faces a year ahead as a single mom, I know that I want to be intentional about encouraging her and supporting her through this season of life, and hopefully in some small way help her see what a difference both she and her husband are making through their sacrifice and service.

One other special person that has made a major difference in my life is my daughter, Zoe. What I most appreciate about her is her constant zeal and energy for life. She lives each day with purpose and truly looks to find adventure and joy around every corner. Her imagination knows no bounds, and you will often find her singing or dancing- no matter where she’s at or who’s around her. I love her outlook on life and know that her joy is contagious to everyone around her.

I know there are so many people that have made a difference in my life this year, and it makes me so grateful to have those kinds of people around me. As we head into another year, I want to be very intentional about how I live my life, that I would constantly look outwards and find ways to make a difference- big or small- in the lives of the people around me. I know that I have been both encouraged and challenged this year to live life with that kind of purpose.

This post is part of Think Kit 2011.

I wasn’t always a process guy. Back at the start of my career I was very much fueled by the physical production of creative and tangible projects. It was only after going through dozens of these projects that my attention started to turn to, “How can we make this better?” instead of just “How can we make this?” Fast forward a few years and my creative time in the trenches is now spent helping a project and a project team work better rather than always being hands on. It is rewarding for sure, but it’s different type of thrill than the one that comes with creating something from scratch. Needless to say, I still need that fix of “making something” every now and again.

That itch never went away and led me to strike out on a different type or project. A year ago I founded a video game editorial site with some close friends of mine, and the site continues to grow well beyond it’s original intention of just being a outlet for our video game geek outs. As satisfying as that has been, I still wanted to do more. I turn my hobby into something that could help others.

Image courtesy of Nuvo.net

It seemed a bit daunting at first. We were a group of writers scattered throughout the midwest without a good way to bring everything and everyone together. Indianapolis isn’t exactly a hot bed of video gaming culture, but I did find one surprising outlier in a local video game cafe called NetHeads. NetHeads caught my attention as I discovered it was hosting a summer camp for kids and introducing them to basic video game design and development. I reached out and quickly became good friends with the manager, and one of the first conversations we had was about hosting a video game event to raise money for charity.

I was pretty excited, but I had also been here before. Great conversations. Great ideas. No action. I wasn’t about to let the opportunity slip by and I had learned with the successful launch of our website the year before, that’s it’s all about milestones and accountability. We set ourselves a timeline and agreed that we needed to do the event before the end of the year in 2011. We just had to follow through.

As summer turned to fall, the event started coming into focus. NetHeads was the perfect venue not only to host the event itself, but it also gave us the opportunity to livestream video to better promote the event. We decided that the event would be a 24 hour video game marathon that we could blog about and utilize social media to drive traffic to a donation form for a charity that specializes in providing games and toys for children’s hospitals. As we began spreading the word about the event, it became clear that there was much more good we could do through gaming. I met with my team and we decided to form a community service organization that could pursue these opportunities in the future.

On October 14, 2011 the A Call to Gamers (ACTGamers.org) website was launched and the 24 Hour Charity Gaming Challenge began that evening. After 24 hours of gaming, tweeting, blogging, and video coverage we managed to raise over $1,000 for the Child’s Play Charity.

ACTGamers more than tripled the original donation goal that I had set back in the spring. Not only did it feel great to make something and have it be a success, but thanks to support of our donors it was incredibly humbling to have the fruition of that idea actually benefit others. I hope to have an even bigger impact next year through the organization.

After the event we put together this video summary of our coverage and plan on doing another event in the spring.

This post is part of Think Kit 2011.

This year, I tackled something that had been on my to-do list for an age. I learned to bake my own bread. Last winter, I didn’t buy store-made bread at all – not once.

No matter how busy I got, I made it a weekly ritual.
There was something therapeutic about the process. The kneading of the dough, reminiscent of days long ago when I used to work in ceramics. The warmth of the oven, the smell of the loaves baking on the oven… All slow, measured, calming steps.

And the finished product?
It might not be much cheaper, once both time and ingredient are accounted for. It might not be better than the sourdough you can find at local bakeries. But I can’t imagine taking any other bread over a hand-crafted loaf, fresh from the oven with just a bit of butter.

This post is part of Think Kit 2011.