I know I promised not to speak about Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows until everyone I know had a chance to read it, but it has now been over a week since the release date. If you haven’t read it already, you’re probably not getting to it anytime soon.

As most of you know, I lined up to buy the new Harry Potter at midnight and had finished it by 6am on the release date. While it surely wasn’t my favorite of the series, I do feel it was an excellent way to end the saga. There was enough drama, action, and suspense to keep me entertained, enthralled, and even weeping at times.

Now that the series is over, I do want to reflect upon a few things I’ve learned from all the characters in the series as I watched them grow through the seven books.

• Percival Weasley: While everyone makes mistakes, only the strongest admit that they have made them.
• Neville Longbottom: Whatever your weakness and flaws, nothing can stop you if you are determined and motivated.
• Hagrid: It’s not how you look that makes you memorable, but what you do.
• Dolores Umbridge: Ruling with a heavy hand brings fear, but very rarely does it bring respect.
• Hermione Granger: No matter how smart you are, the only thing that matters is how you put those smarts to use.
• Ron Weasley: When you do something good for the world, it doesn’t matter if someone else takes all the glory: the reward is in knowing you’ve made a difference.
• Harry Potter: Sometimes you can’t make it on your own, so it’s okay to ask for help.
• Severus Snape: Even if it is unrequited, there is no force in the world stronger than love.

I left Snape for the end because, in my opinion, he is the true star of the series; Snape is the one character I have held some kind of strong opinion — whether good or bad — through every book.

Of course, there is one other clear lesson I’ve learned through the series, and this one I’ve learned from J.K. Rowling herself: there’s lots of money to be made in children’s literature.

Quick bonus: if you were left craving for more after Rowling’s vague epilogue, she spills the beans in a special interview you can read about here.

I recently had a conversation with a friend who remarked: “You’re so lucky that you work over the web. Not only do you get to set your own hours, but you can also ask other people on the web to do some of your work for you because they’re nice and have nothing better to do.”

Sure, I was a little taken aback by his comment, but I understood his sentiment. What he was essentially referring to was the lazyweb, which is the idea where “if you wait long enough, someone will write/build/design what you were thinking about.” What most people have been appending to that definition these days, however, is the ability to not only wait for things to be done, but to specifically ask for them to be done as well.

A few examples: I’ve mentioned a few times that the “return to inbox” button on the Facebook message interface was much too close to the “send” button, and this was resulting in a few frustrating instances where I would lose my replies because I would click in haste. After one too many of these frustrations, I sent a quick tweet over on Twitter asking for some help. Within minutes, my friend Gabriel Mansour had replied with a link to a quick GM script he had written to help me out. A perfect example of “ask the lazyweb, and you shall receive.”

A few weeks ago, I was lamenting the fact that my email overload was making me go a little crazy. Essentially, I was looking for a system where I could motivate myself to reply to the several hundred emails that swarm my inbox everyday without burning myself out, and I know I wasn’t the only one. The power of the lazyweb then came through when Mike Davidson and friends created sentenc.es, a method for dealing with email overload in a simple and lo-fi way. I could relate to Mike’s thoughts on email when he said:

When faced with an inbox of 100-400 messages, I usually find myself replying to the messages which are quickest to reply to, rather than which are most important to reply to. The end result is a continual paring down of my inbox until I have 50 really important messages to reply to which are then too old to take care of.

Sentenc.es responds to the web’s cry for a way to handle email overload. From now on, you’ll be getting five sentence email replies, thanks to five.sentenc.es and the lazyweb.

There are tons of other examples using Pownce, Facebook, and other tools around the internet that have proven essential to the power of the lazyweb. Web Worker Daily has a great post dealing with the issue of using the lazyweb for your work, but remember that sharing information and resources on the web isn’t just for people that use the internet for their career: it’s for anyone that needs some help and is welling to help someone else in return.

Usually, when I go through my comment spam logs on Wordpress, I skim through, see lots of links to sex sites, penis enlargement products, and credit card debt consolidation services, and quickly press the “Delete All” button to get rid of the offending comments. Today, however, I was a bit taken aback by what I found.

Instead of the usual comment with four links saying “I like this site” or something mundane like that, I found that all my spam comments didn’t contain any links and they all had these little nuggets of wisdom in them. I almost felt bad deleting them. Of course, then I realized that I was admiring spam and immediately got my head together and deleted them all, but not before copying and pasting some of the comments into this post.

So here you are, a selection (only six of about 350 this week) of spam comments that got me thinking. Yes, I know they’re just famous quotes that have been stolen by the spammers without attribution, but hey, you can’t fault them for trying to be clever:

• There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle. (Quote by Albert Einstein.)
• I arise from dreams of thee In the first sweet sleep of night, When the winds are breathing low And the stars are shining bright. (Quote by Percy Bysshe Shelley.)
• But why, some say, the moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask, why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas? We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade, and to do the other things, not because they are easy but because they are hard. (Quote by John F. Kennedy.)
• Was she so loved because her eyes were so beautiful or were her eyes so beautiful because she was loved? (Quote by Anzia Yezierska.)
• Whether outwardly or inwardly, whether in space or time, the farther we penetrate the unknown, the vaster and more marvelous it becomes. (Quote by Charles Lindbergh.)
• I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary. Whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me. (Quote by Isaac Newton.)

Sometimes, even comment spam can be enlightening. But most of time, it’s just annoying. If you aren’t using it yet, get the Akismet plugin for Wordpress, it is by far the best spam protection you can get for your weblog.

Earlier this week, I sat down for coffee at Balzac’s with my good friend Tina. As she always does, Tina asked me about parts of my life I have a tendency to forgot: my health, my sleeping patterns, my level of personal satisfaction. I can always count on Tina to remind me that I do have a life outside of my work, no matter how hard I try to forget that sometimes.

To be honest, over the past few years, I haven’t been the best (to put it mildly) when it comes to maintaining a positive work-life balance. In fact, when work consumes me, I have a tendency to neglect many of the things I need to worry about most: my mental health, my physical health, and my emotional health — much to the consternation of my friends and family.

Of course, before I make myself sound like a horrible workaholic, I have to say that in the recent past I have been doing a lot to try and maintain a balance between my professional and personal life. While part of this process has been a few changes in my way of approaching work, and fundamental change has come through the realization that it is almost impossible for me to work effectively without using my personal life as inspiration.

Khoi said something similar to this when he posted about his Design Advice for Personal Life a few weeks ago:

I do contend that it is important to maintain a satisfying, diverse personal life alongside a satisfying, challenging professional life. For me, anyway, these two elements are dependent upon one another; I couldn’t do my day job without regularly spending time close to the ones I care about. I’d break down and cease to function creatively if I didn’t have some kind of release for all the frustration that also accompanies the rewards of professional work.

So for those of you who may feel stuck in a career-dominated life as I was a little while ago (and perhaps still am to some extent), I’ve got a few tips that have helped me get move slowly towards a more fruitful balance between my personal and professional lives:

• Don’t be afraid to make mistakes. Some of my best learnings come from my mistakes, and if I tried to dwell on the errors of my past too much I wouldn’t have time to learn from them. When you make a mistake, talk about it over coffee with your friends instead of sitting in the office beating yourself over what just happened.
• Let other people do their job. I’ve always been a bit of a micro-manager, to the extent that I’ll often do someone else’s work if it means it will get done quickly and properly even if I have to sacrifice my personal time to do it. If you let other people do their work though, you’ll be surprised how many times they’ll impress you.
• Leave comparison for shopping time. Just because the guy in the office next to you closed a deal, scored a contract, or delivered early on a deadline doesn’t mean you aren’t doing your job well. By constantly judging yourself against other people instead of judging yourself against your personal best, you’re not only doing yourself a disservice, but you’re more likely to over-exert yourself trying to play catch-up.
• File work away when you’re done for the day. My biggest problem when it came to work-life balance was the fact that I always brought my work home with me: I’d wake up in the middle of the night to finish a report, or even leave dinner to take a business phone call. Now, when my work is done for the day, I wrap up it all up and consecrate the rest of my day to myself and the people around me. Sure, inspiration may hit you at any time (that’s why I carry a Moleskine in my pocket), but take a note and keep living your life — your idea will be that much better when you can devote real work time to it instead of sacrificing your fun.

That’s a short list, and most of it is obvious, but sometimes people need a reminder. When look back at your life several years from now, there’s a very low likelihood that you’re going to wish you had spent more time in your cubicle, but a very high likelihood you’re going to wish you spent more time with the people that care about you most. If you ever see me going crazy with work, do me a favor and remind me of that, okay?