First steps

# Chapter 76

There are many detours on our journeys, but they all begin with the first step. You have to decide where you are going and take the first step, get moving, start, or you will never finish. And then you have to keep on walking and traveling. There will be fires and competitions and long motorcycle rides and epic moments and dastardly depressions and graveside moments and junkyard days and folks I have just described THIS WEEK! Life is sorta just like one big detour for most of us it seems. There is so much going on and so many outside factors coming into play changing the song and dance of our lives that we can’t anticipate or ignore.

That means that you have to buckle down and focus twice as intensely and make sure your steps are moving in the right direction. That your second step follows your first, and all your steps end in the place you wish for them to be, even with all the detours distractions and desires that wish to derail you from your destination. How much do you want to arrive? It all begins with that first step, probably the most difficult step of all, but there will be plenty of challenges along the way. Its called life and you just have to live it. Ride those peaks and valleys with patience and aplomb and you will do fine.

Happy givers

# Chapter 75

It seems that our efforts in life bring us the joy and the unhappiness that we experience. You do good for others and you have a life filled with joy. You do good for you and you have a life filled with unhappiness, because you are fickle on a good day. Let me correct that, I am fickle on a good day so I assume that you are too. When all our actions center around ourselves then we are doomed. That is a circular merry-go-round of selfishness that breeds more selfishness and there is no way to satisfy that animal. It consumes and eats you and you will not find solace, much less happiness or contentment in that path. It will seduce you and tempt you and beg you to buy just one more thing for yourself, but it will not satisfy. History has long proved this, as well as most religious texts and principles.

However if your efforts are focused toward helping others grow, develop, succeed, win, learn and flourish, then I think you will find that your life is extra full. Full of pleasure, happiness, joy and contentment. Is this a panacea? No it is not. Are some people going to take advantage of you? For sure and certain, people always do. But this mere act of focusing on the success of others is a rare gift that you give yourself and you will be astonished at the gifts it brings you the giver. Of course this won’t motivate you at all if you are a happy giver, because happy givers don’t give to get.

Shaped

# Chapter 74

What we work at, our vocation and passions, they change us. You become something different than you would have been, by your work and labors. This is true no matter whether you are a theologian or a painter. The theologian will develop intellectual muscles than others won’t, and likely an emotional complex as well as he or she realizes that they won’t reach the moral levels that God wishes for them, or at least that was my experience. My moral compass is weak and easily swayed compared to other parts of me. The painter on the other hand will develop muscles in his or her arms and shoulders that the theologian can’t compete with at all. I can’t speak to the emotional complexes that painting might induce in the painter, but I want to clearly say that the painter can be an intellectual and the theologian can be a weightlifter. Being shaped by our vocations is a trending action, not a prison cell, you can be more or less along the lines of the trend within a vocation.

Our work shapes us in the fact that it almost always determines our network of relationships and the people we meet in life. This may shape us more than the content of the work we wrestle with each day. While I was and am a mediocre theologian, I have been highly impacted by the people I have had the privilege of working with along the way. I am not sure that the painter would have the same experience because painting seems to be a solitary task compared to the intense people-orientation of the work I have been involved in over the last four and a half decades. Not only the people I get to work with, but the geography of my work has dragged me all over the planet and that has changed me immensely. From the temples of Angkor Wat to the mega crowded cities of Yangon and Bangkok to the coasts of Turkey and Greece to the business districts of London and Malta, these are formative travels.

So who do you want to be?

Pleasures

# Chapter 73

There are days that are just filled with pleasures. Mostly as a relief from hard work, and that is what makes them pleasurable. But if you don’t work hard, then you are taking a different path and the day filled with pleasure is so much more difficult to find and experience. This deep change of pace, this contrast, this specialness is what makes a day filled with pleasures possible and easily obtainable. In fact I am arguing today that they more concentrated and focused you are on working hard and getting it done, the more pleasurable that you will find days not working hard.

But you don’t want too many of these kinds of days, you never want them to lose their specialness. Hard physical work is my preference each day, but I only get to do that when down on the farm with my dad. My day job is a thinking job and while that is plenty difficult, it doesn’t have the added bonus of sweat. You need to sweat. Regularly. Often. This makes pretty much everything better in life but that is a different chapter than this one. There is really no debating this, but as I was walking around in a public store yesterday, the size and shape of most of the people was uniformly heavy and slow. I felt a deep and genuine sorrow for each one of them.

The reason I belabor this point a bit is that, I have far more and better pleasure days as a weight appropriate person, than I ever did as a heavy slow person. Its that sweat thing again. Have a super day!

Excuses or results?

# Chapter 72

/"You can have results or you can have your excuses. You cannot have both." ~ Unknown/

As I sit here making mental excuses for the situation I find myself in, this statement really bites hard. I have to own the changes and results that I want, or all I am going to have are excuses in the end. And I don’t know about you, but I can’t afford excuses. I need results, and to get results I will clearly have to make some changes. This is really hard to swallow because my morning routine has been carefully honed for decades and I have a super high resistance to throwing that baby out with the bath water, but I might have to do just that.

Perhaps I need to experiment with doing my morning routine in the evenings? Like right at this moment I am going in to have to walk away from this blog and continue later or on a different device because I have got to get a shower and get all my stuff together and be at work in less than an hour. ...

So I made it to “work” and of course the job is not ready to start. So back to redeeming the time that I have, this is how your produce results and not excuses.

What we did

# Chapter 71

Our message to the world is mostly frequently, just us. I know I know we want to be judged primarily by what we say or write and there will be some of that but not as much as you think. Mostly we are going to be judged by what we did, and this will remain as our message to the world. Apologies for bringing this out into the open as it seems to be a painful subject for some, but this needs to be talked about so that we can stay aware of the impact of our actions. These daily living actions are, and are becoming our message to the world, what they remember about us and will take from us and hopefully pass on to others.

If you are feeling argumentative this morning and think me wrong, I will tell you a short story. When we took our son to boarding school, they were doing the typical boarding school first grade interview, and they asked my first grade aged son “what does your father do?” And he he answered with six year old truthfulness and six year old perspective, “he talks on the phone all day and plays on the computer.” No matter the reasons for the phone and computer, this was my message to my son. From that point forward I made certain that my son received a different message from my life.

Be inspiring, be bold, be courageous, be spiritual, be adventuresome, be quiet, be reflective and be what you want to be, but with the understanding and acceptance that your life is your message to the world.

Take your temperature

# Chapter 70

If you want to make, do, or create something then failures or mistakes are part of your normative experiences. Get used to it. So much energy and bandwidth gets wasted on trying to avoid mistakes and failures that a great deal of forward progress is eclipsed. Again we are talking about “failure” not in the competitive trauma sort of way that many Americans do, but in the make a wrong choice, choose the less than ideal path, experimentation, prototyping kind of “failure”. The learning kind of failure, that teaches you something, even if it is negative, so that your next attempt can be better, smarter, moving the ball forward in a positive direction.

Whew! Even trying to find neutral language to describe this is challenging as I see that I used the words negative and positive in the previous sentence. This is not helpful because the entire point of this chapter is to help you see and feel failure and mistakes as a normative learning experiences for those in a typical development trajectory. Like last night, my grandson’s soccer team lost 0-3 to a superior opponent. The team they were playing was far better coached, and executed the basics of the game in every way in every play. Jonathan’s team executed the basic fundamentals about 25-33% of the time. It was a very instructive time for the team if they can choose to see it and understand it to be so. If they simply flip it off as a “loss” then they have squandered this wonderful gift they have been given. The opportunity is to learn. So to take your temperature this morning, what are you learning?

The learning process

# Chapter 69

No matter how many famous people talk about their failures, I find that most people, myself included, have a very difficult time feeling the solid connection to failure and success. Yet if you have achieved any level of success within your field, then you very likely have had lots of failures, because that is almost always the path to success. Don’t be confused by how this sounds on paper, it sounds binary and mechanical and simple. Real life is messy and hurtful and difficult and emotional and our failures and successes take long meandering paths to our doors. And please hear me well, I don’t want to celebrate failure. There is nothing more disturbing and boring than the American competitive trauma about who has had the most difficult life, and who had more bootstraps and who had the darkest pit to climb out of, and who had the most trauma, and the least loving mother, blah blah blah. This is not failure, this is a celebration of pain and drama and poor pitiful me.

Failure is essentially a learning process, where some action or decision or understanding or skill or knowledge did not meet the expectations and requirements of whatever you were working on or toward. It is this definition and experience of failure that always leads one to success, assuming that you have now gained that action, understanding, skill or knowledge that you lacked before this point. It is negative only in the sense that you have to wait longer to achieve your desired outcome. Everything else is a win. And this is the part that is so difficult to feel in the correct and healthy way. Failure feels like a loss, not a gain, it feels like a negative not a positive, it feels like losing not winning. But those feelings are not accurate.

Poison excuses

# Chapter 68

What if you had less than five years left? To live? What would change? Its almost been five years since my mom passed away, and last night my first cousin who was at my mom’s funeral, passed away. I think Jerry was a year younger than me, maybe two. But what would have changed had he known five years ago that unless he massively changed the way he was living, that he had 4 years and 11 months more to go . . .

I think that he would have change absolutely nothing. We change nothing and we know that we are going to die too. Not the precise 4 years and 11 months kind of knowing, but the certainty that death is stalking us is sure, and yet we change nothing or very little. And the little we may change is aimed most often at thwarting an immediate and pressing discomfort, not delaying death or extending life.

Now I may be completely wrong here, but I don’t think that I am, yet knowing the date of our death may have real results and see us actually changing the way we eat and move and sleep and work and live. What do you think? My brother always insisted that he could quit drinking anytime that he wanted to, but he would also confess that if he couldn’t drink beer 24/7 then he didn’t want to live anyways. That is the kind of circular reasoning that makes me fairly certain that having a death date beforehand would not actually result in any large gains in our healthy living cycles. We make endless excuses for the poisons that we are killing ourselves with every day and that is the real truth of the matter.

Sober curious

# Chapter 66

Another great eight solid hours of sleep. Can’t say that I have ever enjoyed sleeping so much, and the way I feel when I wake up is pretty spectacular. Even after my second getting up to pee, I only had to count down to 240 (backwards from 300 by 3s) in order to fall back to sleep. This is super groovy, because getting up to pee is usually the harbinger of my brain kicking up into gears that won’t let me return to never never land. So I am always looking for technics and processes to overcome this problem and keep my brain in neutral, so I can got right back to sleep.

I know there is a ton of information on the internet about sleep, how much, what quality, how to fall to sleep, stay asleep, etc etc, and mostly proclaiming how American’s aren’t getting enough sleep. I don’t want to review any of that here, just instead proclaim that if and when you get the right amount and quality of sleep, it is revolutionary. It is a game-changer. Try it. You will love it. But alcohol will prevent you from ever achieving this, both in my experience and in all that I read - they are in agreement.

In fact the “sober curious” movement argues that you have to go at the very minimum three full weeks without drinking any alcohol, before the effects are completely out of your body. (Read Ruby Warrington’s “Sober Curious” if you want more details). Just taking a two day break from drinking is not gonna give you the full effect. Having said that, I could usually experience a big boost in quality of sleep even with a one day break. In my life, if I did not have a drink on a given day, I slept better period. That has been truth for decades for me.

The gravity of airport runs

# Chapter 65

There are many things that are required of us as we build our networks and our people. Last night required me to do a 250 mile airport run in the dark, two things I would rather not do, but it was necessary. The very fact that they asked me to do it shows the confidence that I have built with these people over the years. They never had a doubt that I would go and make a pickup. These are the kinds of people and leaders we want to be and must be.

Having said that, they did not clearly consider that my 60 year old eyes don’t drive at nighttime very often, hardly ever in fact for almost 10 years now. But they made the call based on relationship not the facts or mitigating factors. And that is a huge win! Don’t underestimate the importance of that critical factor. I would have found someone else to drive us down if the route had not been all Interstate and big highways. There are ways to work around dangerous factors when the motivation is right. And when people trust you this much and you are their go-to person, then you step up and deliver.

Plus they are asking because of the implied reciprocity of our decades of relationship. I have crashed at their flat in Berlin literally hundreds of nights over the last 17 years. I was the most natural person in the world for them to reach out to and make an ask. Again these are very positive things and if you don’t have people asking you for help, then you haven’t been or aren’t the kind of person that you should be. People asking us to assist them doesn’t mean that you are a pushover, it means that you are valuable to them and that your importance in their lives has far reaching effects.

Antiques on constraints

# Chapter 64

Constraints are good, when you follow them.

What I mean is that I found myself driving an antique pickup truck on the interstate at night. This is so wrong for me to be doing that in so many ways. First of all the truck has 55 year old lights which don't work very well when they work at all. Second is my eyesight, because I haven't driven at night intentionally in years, maybe a decade. And add the speed and manner of other drivers and this became a disaster waiting to happen. This is the situation you find yourself in when you don't follow the constraints in your life.

Boundaries and constraints can be your best friends. They can keep you focused and safe and on the road that you need to be on, rather than the road you think you should be on. Constraints and boundaries often define what and how you are doing what you are doing.

Sometimes, the constraints and boundaries will even define what you're doing. There are so many different ways to look at constraints and boundaries. But the older I get the more I find that they actually protect me, and keep me within the realms of my possibilities, rather than restraining me from doing something astonishing.

Persistence rising to the top

# Chapter 63

Persistence and patience are the keys to mega-productivity and few of us seem to have enough of either. I have persistence down pat pretty good, but I could always use extra doses of patience. Having said that, my patience mechanism varies depending on what we are working on. Like I have NO patience when I am hungry. I mean when I need to eat I need to eat! But if we are talking about selling a piece of real estate or buying one (as long as I am not going to be living in it) I seem to have endless patience. My last house sale took over an entire year to bring the deal together and get a check. Zero to one year is a very wide variance and I am still looking for the pieces that makes me patient in selling a property or fishing, but are absent when it comes to eating or making a change in my schedule?

Persistence on the other hand is much easier to use and to manage than is patience, in my opinion. The easiest way to let persistence float to the top all the time, is to remove all those time-wasting practices that would inhibit persistence, like watching TV or movies, or doomscrolling social media or the internet in general. If most people removed those from their lives, they would find that they have tons of space for persistence to rise to the top. When you are not distracted you will find that you can sit and be bored, or get all those persistent tasks that are always on your to-do list, done or at least make some progress on them. And that is the beautiful thing about persistence, it doesn’t require completion, just progress.

Life building

# Chapter 62

What life are you building in the new COVID world? I bought a house, got my wife back from our coronavirus enforced separation, moved to a different state, starting a new job, slept great on a new (different) bed, driving new and different roads, new scenery, new possibilities, new friends and neighbors, and new risks, new problems, new challenges, new things to resolve with different people and so much more. It would take a book to write down all the changes that could and are happening.

Is it stressful? Oh heck yes! Am I handling it poorly? Often! Are we frustrated? Very much! Is this for everyone? Absolutely! The alternative is for you to stay in your historical circle and complain that things are not the way that they were before, assuming you liked that better than the way things are now. Of course you don’t have to move and buy another or different house in order to decide to build a better life in the new COVID world. You can do this right where you are, although the scale will be different than what I took on with a new house and a different job.

But you can try new foods out at home while you experiment with cooking new dishes. You can try different routes to work. You can choose to talk to different people while at work. You can listen to different stories than you did in the past. You can stop watching the “news”. You can read instead. Read widely and make sure it is non-political stuff. You can stop doomscollling on the internet. There are a thousand more decisions you can make to have and make a different life for yourself in the new COVID world. You don’t have to move to Pennsylvania to do it.

Slow and steady win the day

# Chapter 61

Like I said yesterday the young bucks in my life want big rocks so that they can show off their strength and power and muscles. They generally want to do everything on a big showy scale. In fact they have little interest in doing small amounts regularly and making progress in that fashion. Oh they have so much to learn!! Small amounts regularly almost always outperforms big and showy, but its just not . . . well, big and showy. Small regular contributions will produce a snowball effect as well, they will gain momentum and power and energy and they often surprise you in their collective accomplishment.

This in effect is moving the spotlight off of the actor and onto the actions and results. When we can be fully focused on the actions and results we will no longer distain small contributions. This daily 275 word blog that you are reading right now, is a small contribution. But it is difficult enough to produce this 365 days and year and make a difference in the world. Refusing to do it because it is not a full length book with a nice cover sounds ludicrous from where I am sitting on my porch shaping this page, because I understand the work we are discussing in intimate detail.

Don’t choose to stand on the sidelines because you can’t produce Mozart level work at the beginning, or ever. Produce. Make. Do. Create. This is what you and I are called to do. So do it, and do it well, and do it better and better as you build your skill level and capacity. Don’t not do it because it is small and insignificant at the beginning or ever.

The mountains in my life

# Chapter 60

Big rocks, small rocks and mountains. Of course we want to move mountains and change the face of the world we live in and those are no small things to be a changin’. But no one can just pick up the mountain. Mountains by their very nature can only be moved by nature and only then when cataclysmic events occur. No we need daily mountain moving and that requires process and small and smaller rocks. We all have mountains that need moving whether that be addictions, job changes, new responsibilities, aging, sickness, injuries, loss, or my never-ending leaking roof. Mountains are always there and always too big to move instantly.

But move them we must. They need to be disassembled so to speak. Think big rocks and smaller rocks and then yet smaller rocks. The young bucks in my life want all big rocks because they are strong and impatient and it seems the quickest way to move the mountain. But I am neither strong nor impatient and smaller rocks seems to be the slow steady way to move the mountain. I am sure there is a scale here and you can land wherever you want and do it however you like, but once you start to break down the mountain into rocks of any size and move them to where you want them to be, then you have started moving your mountain.

Hopefully this metaphor for the challenges and tasks you face, has helped you understand that you can and will move these mountains in your life. It is the very most necessary part of forward progress. Lets move this thing!

The better version of me

Chapter 59

The life on the road is wonderful terrible. Wonderful because I get a chance to have some quiet and catch up on some tasks and projects that need to be done. Terrible because I am sharing this space with 100’s of other people, one of which pulled the fire alarm this morning which created quite a stir. They crowd the breakfast space, they crowd the elevators and the fitness center. You get the picture.

But my systems save me from the traveling chaos, and these habits keep me on track. That is why I am sitting here writing this chapter out, because of habits. For instance, I am wanting to make not drinking one of my most stable habits if for no other reason than alcohol will never make me a better version of myself, or improve on what I am right now. The people in my life deserve and need the best version of me, and that can never be the alcohol-fueled version of me.

Instead, drinking alcohol is the tacit approval to NOT be responsible and caring and thoughtful and adult. It is the decision to “let our hair down” and not do what we know should be done. It is the decision to not make any more decisions, at least the one’s that the non-drinking version of me would likely make. This is why I can never think of alcohol as the reward, ever again. Thursday night out with boys, is a horrible manner in which to express “I am finished” with whatever. There has to be a healthier and more positive manner in which to say “enough” and “full stop.” If drinking is the reward, then it is a thorny painful regret-filled reward.

The process

# Chapter 58

Life is lived is many small steps. Whether it is graduation or marriage or your job or post graduate studies, it all happens as a result of many small steps that leads to a larger event. You go to how many college classes and write how many papers and take how many tests before you can graduate? You go on how many dates and eat how many meals together, and go how many places and talk about every subject under the sun before you say I do? The same with your jobs, you have to take many incremental steps before you land a better job, or move up in the ranks or discover the next great web browser.

This is the way that life is lived. But why don’t we just apply this to how we approach everything? I see it all around me, people taking large risks, taking huge steps, looking for the quick payoff, the awesome shortcut, the quick result - and many times this backfires and they are knocked down on their keister and they have to start over and try again, if they can find the courage to do so, if they can recover from the losses they incurred. But mark my words, they have failed most importantly to make forward progress on a critical venture by trying to reach for the finish line, the pay off, the preferred outcome, without the process. And the process is tiny small steps toward the goal. This is how life is lived. Stop taking shortcuts. You are just hurting yourself and preventing yourself from success.

Imaginary success

# Chapter 57

You and I need outside input. I remember when with a previous parent organization, that they “developed” all their internal training and materials and perspectives. They were so short-sighted, ingrown and myopic that they couldn’t see that they couldn’t see! Yes this insulated them from uninformed opinions and underdeveloped understandings from outsiders, but it also created a situation where they never faced the consequences of their choices and decisions, nor did they ever get valuable input from other organizations attempting to accomplish the same objectives. They literally reinvented the wheel all the time, and then told themselves that they were awesome for having done so!

They have created a closed system so that they can continue to propagate pointless and failed efforts, because they don’t use any outside input or objectives to measure their success by. If only I were joking, but I am not. They consider themselves to be one of the most successful businesses in the world at what they do, and the reality is that many people in the business have not even heard of them, or have barely heard of them. Their imagined impact is far greater than reality supports. The imagined success is only viable in the way that people give them more money so that they can continue making up fantasy progress.

This is why we all need outside input. It changes everything. It quantifies what is being successful or not. It compares apples to apples and lets you know if this real or imaginary progress. It gives you fresh ideas and new understandings and insights into how others experience your work. Without it you are just having imaginary success.

Overloaded

# Chapter 56

Stress out the wazzu and up the creek. This week I have hit all my stress limits and ambiguity limits and inner structure limits. And I mean I hit the limits, the outer possibilities of what I can handle, my overload safety mechanism went into play for the first time in over a decade. I couldn’t talk, and I couldn’t think, I could only rage and fight, so I either had to explode or sleep. I took a two hour nap. Exploding is too costly at my age. Literally I laid back in the easy chair and pretty much passed out from stress. All systems overloaded and they just shut down to protect me.

I rarely rarely nap because it screws up my nightly rest so badly. But your body knows what you need more than you know what you need sometimes, and you just can’t resist, nor should you. A nap was precisely what I needed at that moment yesterday. Well ok, what i really needed was the problems to be resolved, but since that wasn’t going to happen yesterday, it was either nap or check myself into the psych ward at the mental hospital. So napping was perfect for the situation I was in, and fine it shortened my overnight sleep up by a couple of hours, but it also saved my bacon.

Today is another day and hopefully no naps are in my future for today. Decisions are made and we are moving forward, no matter how unfair the situation may be. Is there really any other choice?