Crowds

# Chapter 216

Don’t try to stand out from the crowd. Avoid crowds altogether. - Masterminds.

This is the mantra of the get-it-done crowd. Don’t look at what others are doing, instead focus on what you should be doing and let that be what sets you apart from anyone else. But don’t even think about that, because you are all in on what you are doing, not what other people are thinking or comparing. It is the attitude that makes certain that the MIT’s are completed and accomplished and that there aren’t any intersections between others and your tasks. It is the the consummate skill of the highly accomplished - utter intensity on what you need to deliver, not what everyone else is focusing on or doing. These are rare skills indeed. You need this and so do I because this is the path to high competency and the best skills.

And avoiding crowds altogether is the just taking this to the natural next level. Stay away from crowds who are talking and comparing, and instead sit down and do the work. Crowds don’t ever do the work. They are navel-gazing destructive teams of do-nothing cohorts. Crowds can only set the tone and standard for the bottom feeders. You want to do something unique and stellar and that will never be found in the crowds. So stay away from crowds altogether. Enough said.

Bigger is not better

# Chapter 215

Bigger is not better - better is better. - Masterminds. But most of the time the majority of us are thinking that bigger is more better. The entrepreneurs out there doing the hard work in the world disagree with you and me and majority. They have come to the conclusion that focusing on scale and size is a blind alley, that doing so will distract at best and destroy at worst the focus on quality and real better. And this is deadly in the estimation of these entrepreneurs as they build their businesses.

Or said another way, the size of a business is not necessarily indicative of its quality. Instead it may be indicative of its monopoly or its marketing or its timing or its scarcity. Bigger is not better by virtue of being bigger or more than the other players in that particular market. Size we will argue here is irrelevant to quality. On the converse it is obvious that many companies become bigger because of their focus on quality or value = better. Apple and Amazon are two companies that have woven their way into every area of my life because of the consistent better they bring. And yes those are two of the biggest betters out there. But I would advocate that the bigger following the better. I was using Apple long before it became bigger. Amazon on the other hand was one of those nearly instant bigger operations, but that is an anomaly.

Better is better. Period. Scale and size can often follow, but will never replace better.

The fake idea

# Chapter 214

I was so insistent on shortcuts, that I tried to tell my Russian teachers at Rostov State University in Rostov-na-donu Russian how Russian language should be constructed. Thus was the man who barely knows English grammar and here I am insisting that there is a quicker short better faster way to speak Russian. Needless to say, that was quite a bit of wasted energy trying to fix Russian. It wasn’t and isn’t broken in the first place - the only problem with learning Russian and learning it well is to do the hard work. No shortcuts to language learning, construction, auto mechanicing, professional hockey, coaching, consulting, nor my doctorate degree. Do the hard work. That is the one and only solution. Shortcuts don’t exist in these fields or any other fields, as far as I can see.

Shortcuts are nothing more than an indication of the character of the person. And I get it honest from my dad. The truck we have just rebuilt is filled with visual reminders of his impatience and shortcuts. But this only affects us sporadically now that we are both ancient and old as dirt. It doesn’t affect us at all if we are working on stuff that we are true experts at and have a high level of expertise. It affects us most when we are working on monotonous repetitious tasks that we are less expert in, that it can really run amok. But at the core, short cuts is fake idea, that you can cheat the process and still retain the results needed. It is also an indicator of the laziness of this person.

Shortcuts

# Chapter 213

I am starting to think that there are no shortcuts. None. I know, there are entire websites dedicated to taking shortcuts. I even subscribe to a couple! But the older I get the more it seems that I get what I pay for, that the results I reap are directly related to the effort and quality that I put it, that the reward may actually be in the effort and work rather than the results! Yeah ok, the results are fine too, but you get out what you put in and that is my point here.

Shortcuts have long been a driving force in my life. Nothing existed for me that a perceived shortcut couldn’t make 10 times better. While my brother lived for the “deal” it didn’t matter if he made $1 or $11,000.00 closing the “deal” brought him the same amount of pleasure, I lived for the shortcut. Faster, better, quicker, shorter, cheaper, though I have to admit that my shortcuts were always about less energy for the same or near same results, because I am a lazy dog. Yep, my shortcuts are driven by laziness for the 95% part, and I own that completely.

I can freely admit that because I am starting to think that there are no shortcuts. Its easy to remember that my dad rejected 99.99% of the shortcuts that I proposed as a kid and not because they were bad ideas, but because it would not give us the results he wanted - no shortcut at all as far as he was concerned and unfortunately I concur that he was more correct than wrong. I have wasted good portion of my life looking for a shortcut. Time to give it up and dig in.

Happiness in a box?

# Chapter 212

Happiness in a box. Doesn’t exist. Marketed ruthlessly and you start to think it is actually possible, but it is not. There are some close facsimiles like coffee peanut butter and Nutella, but this too is a duplicate, a replica, a story. Like the story of the last 60 years in the USA that a car is happiness in a box. That is a story almost all of us have purchased at one time or another. The objective reality is that a car is an expensive polluting machine that gets you from point A to point B and it is not happiness in a box.

Another myth is that a house is happiness in a box. Myth or marketing ploy, I mean you do have to live somewhere and at the same time, few home owners think of their house as happiness in a box, not unless they have very deep pockets. Repairs are never-ending and upkeep is relentless and cleaning and taxes and insurance and grass always keep growing, so this is no happiness in a box unless you just enjoy all these things and once again have deep pockets. My father-in-law built his last house, every block, truss, wall and board, and it was definitely a pleasure point for him, and this I would say was a close as you ever get to happiness in a box, it was a complete package for a strong outdoorsy mechanical engineer in retirement. Dad had a ball building that place. He didn’t enjoy owning it and living in it nearly as much as he did building it. But those were three wonderful years of fun for him . . . .

And there is the closest you will get to happiness in a box, long projects that bring you joy and contentment = happiness. For my father-in-law it was building a house, for my dad it is rebuilding an antique car. For me and you?

Games

# Chapter 211

There is no use playing these emotional games. The ones were you want to resist the inevitable, when you act surprised that your spouse wants to go to church this morning, even though she is wearing her church clothes and is ready to go. You are playing a game, resisting and delaying and acting. Stop now! Address it directly. Quit being a coward and just say what you are thinking or express what you are wanting and then take action. Clearly and obviously your spouse wants something different, and you have to decide what you want more, your wishes or to please her, and how much of a battle you are willing to put into it.

But stop all this awkward and unnecessary posturing and game-playing in hopes that she will let you off the hook and then you can tell people that she decided not to go. This is not owning your actions one bit! This is playing with all sort of emotional games that will not bring you or anyone around you the slightest bit of health or wisdom. I know I know, you are mentally sending me all the reasons why this was a special circumstance, the time changed, the neighbors called, the shirt you wanted to wear was in the hamper, etc etc. This is all BS. You are not being honest with yourself nor anyone else. Stop being such a weak person and at least tell yourself the truth! You already know it, so why not own it?

Of course I picked a metaphor that may not apply to you and your situation of the moment, but this happens 30 times a day in the drama’s I see unfolding around me. It happens at work, it happens at school, it happens in class, it happens on the ball field, it happens in deciding about lunch. Just quit it!

Self-inflicted pressure

# Chapter 210

Pressure is normal. Many times we create our own though, perhaps most of the time? Like this morning trying to fit too many things into a scheduled too constrained to hold them all. The math doesn’t work. Something has to give. I would have needed to get up an hour earlier than I did if I wanted to get everything I desire into the schedule this morning. So I either have to skip breakfast, shorten this post, shorten my bike time, skip lifting weights, forego my second cup of coffee or be late for my next appointment. Probably end being a combination of several of these, shave a little here, shave a little there and try to make up for the extra hour of sleep. You do what you value and you likely create most of the pressure you feel.

If you really want to be radical, put less things in your schedule - that is an automatic pressure relief valve that you can use all the time.

Shots

# Chapter 209

There is a direct correlation between your failure rate and your success rate. I know, if you are from my generation, that just FEELS wrong, because we did everything we could to avoid failure. But we failed. And then we failed again. What we really need is a reassessment of our understanding and relationship with failure. Failure was all the basketball shots we missed, but unless you were playing for the high school team, you just picked the ball back up and shot again and again and again. If you were playing for the high school team and the stakes were high, the expectations crushing, then when you missed a shot it was so so painful and humiliating and it FELT like the world was coming to an end.

This is the relationship and emotional part we gotta reevaluate with failure. Because a missed shot is a missed shot in the objective world. If you pick the ball back up and shoot again and again until you are better and miss less future shots, then failure has begun to work its magic on your life and make you a success. If you let the trauma of missing a shot wreck you and prevent you from ever picking up a basketball again, then you have short-circuited the work that failure could bring to you. But don’t get me wrong here, failure is a very emotional topic and it affects us in strong ways.

Notice that I have chosen basketball as my metaphor of choice here in this short chapter, largely because basketball has zero meaning for me as a short round man. But if we had chosen a metaphor close to my heart, and at the center of my life, then this analysis would have not been so objective! This is why we have to bear down and change our relationship with failure, so that we can gain all the benefits from it that are possible.

Lines

# Chapter 208

What lines are you drawing with your life? Everyone does, few recognize them. You are drawing lines in morality, you are drawing lines politically, you are drawing lines relationally, you are drawing lines in so many ways as you interact with the world. You leave these lines in your wake, visible to those who experience you and interact with you in the world, so why don’t you make a conscious decision to make them good lines? There are already so many bad lines in the world and in the sand, so draw something elaborate and beautiful and life-giving! Yeah! That sounds way more better.

But then there are those like me that truly cannot draw a straight line without a ruler or square to keep the line straight. So I am not talking about straight lines, I am talking about good lines. Lines of character and love, lines of goodness and kindness, lines of strength and hope, lines of purpose and integrity, lines of joy and peace. There are more that we could list here, but you get the idea and now you can run with it in your own life. I just wrote down the ones that I need the most and that those in my daily path need the most.

Most of all I just want to advocate the thought that we are making lines and impressions on our world, to own that and be intentional about it. The opposite can be all too easy, where we don’t have any ownership in the life we live, the lives we impact or the actions we inspire. But you were made for more than this.

Shadows

# Chapter 207

Like Emerson pointed out, most of our shadows in life are of our own making. Reaching the goal of being 100% responsible for what happens in your life is the path to countering this weird phenomena. All the shadows we bring into our lives, envy, jealousy, discontent, disharmony, avarice, plus the way we live, overeating, poor nutrition choices, no exercise, no solid sleep patterns, too much drinking and more - its only a wonder that we don’t live in utter darkness much less shadows. But these are all shadows that we could dispel and that we could counter. So why don’t we???

When we could choose joy and hope and love and kindness and generosity and eating well and working out and moderation and have few shadows in our lives, so why don’t we? Do we actually like the shadows? I think there is something true about this, that we actually prefer the shadows because it permits us far more easily to NOT take 100% responsibility for us. Responsibility avoidance is perhaps the driving factor for why we choose the shadowlands? Could it really be that simple and that empty? Out of an abundance of character deficiency and laziness we choose lives filled and driven by shadows? There is one part of me that is thinking, “no way” and there is another part of me that is looking around and seeing what surrounds me and thinking, “yeah that could be the most straightforward answer to shadowland living.” Emerson saw something similar and wrote prose about for which he is famous. While fame is nothing I chase, shadow-free living is most definitely a goal.

What business you are in

# Chapter 206

Understanding yourself is as important as understanding your business. My business is this - granting perspective and changing the view of the change-the-world entrepreneur in international contexts around the world. My business is to leverage other people to their maximum contribution and help them accomplish their vision mission and goals. We are a developer of people styled incubator. We foster and challenge and model the changes that could be in the world and inspire the leader to make it happen in her context and with her vision. That is what the business is about.

What I am about is - I am a consultant of the international variety working with change the world peeps in far flung places around the world. I equip people to succeed. I aim to make the highly competent flourish and thrive. I aim to help the discouraged explode with possibilities and production. I am a world-class expert in helping people transition and reinvent themselves. This is where I stand strongest, in helping others succeed.

Once you understand who you are and what business you are in, then you can more easily see who you need on your team. Like I said I am an equipper and so my most needed teammates are an innovator and an achiever. These additional roles bring a balance and impact to my team that I can’t produce alone as a solo-preneur. These additional team members increase the reach and impact of the business in every way.

No matter who you are or what business you are in, you can improve it by understand them.

A new start

# Chapter 205

Taking the wife out for breakfast. You should try it sometime. It shakes up the status quo and it makes a new pattern possible. In fact you should try new things regularly. We all need to do so. New things force us into uncharted territory and demands something unusual from us. For instance I did not have some form of eggs for breakfast today for probably the first time in three to four years! Granted that was in part because they had no Tabasco source to put on the eggs after they were cooked, but that is a post for another day. But I also had the possibility of having something other than eggs for breakfast today because I took my wife out for an early morning jaunt. This simple act/decision created a whole new set of events today.

Not only did it change our actual food that we started the day out with, but it also it changed the view outside our window, it changed the sounds we heard during breakfast, we got two turns wrong on the way there and had to turn around changing the whole experience, we stopped at a different grocery store on the way home that we would usually never go to, we joined in with rush hour traffic on the way there, we delayed some morning habits and skipped others, we got in more conversation than usual, we spent two exclusive hours with each other before the grandkids arrived, and we got a fresh different start. You should try it some time!

The tornado of your thoughts

# Chapter 204

When you face the difficult and/or unknown. This comes to each of us eventually. There are nights when you don’t sleep well because of this. You can’t turn your brain off and you can’t get the rest that you really need. Instead you lay there with your thoughts in a tornado that you can’t stop and sooner or later you give up and get up. Laying there hour after hour is pointless, unless you are recovering from jet lag, and then there are actually real benefits from laying there hour after hour even if you can’t sleep.

But with the standard tornado brain working against you, getting up after an hour of trying to go back sleep is the only reasonable thing to do. Take a long shower, enjoy a good grooming, get dressed and even if all you can do (because its the middle of the night) is sit downstairs or in your living room and read, that is progress of the only sort you will get tonight. So take it. Make use of it. Think - in the sense that you take control of the tornado and give it some direction and work toward some solutions. None of this will restore your lost sleep but perhaps it will redeem some of the losses of the night. Or of course you can lay there and toss and tumble and look at the clock or your watch every 10 minutes for the next how many hours. While you may not have a choice about the tornado in your head keeping you awake, you do have a choice in how to respond as always.

Steps in the dark

# Chapter 203

Steps in the dark, we all have to take them sometimes. Part of the time they are steps in the dark but familiar places, and we just have to be careful, count the steps, hold the rail, reach out for the edge of the bed, run your hands along the wall, whatever system you have in place to manage the dark, as you walk to the bathroom in the middle of the night, or as you relax and then head to bed, or when you get up before everyone else and don’t want to disturb them, or when you are walking in the dark on a clear winter night. You have a system in place to not stumble and fall.

Then there is the other kind of steps in the dark, but in unfamiliar places. This is where you have no systems of navigation, no safety nets, no second or third plan. The first one is a process of systems, this second type is a step of faith. Faith based on relatively dependable facts. I mean if you are climbing an unfamiliar staircase in the dark, you still are climbing a staircase and they generally are built within certain parameters, the depth of the steps may vary, even the height may vary, but not by much. You can still depend on certain parts of this climb of faith to have known qualities to it.

So while dark, it is not without clues and patterns and you can work with that and make some progress. Steps in the dark are something we all face and understanding the type of walk in the dark you are facing gives you more power and control. You got this.

Our signature gift

# Chapter 202

What are you dealing out these days? Hope? Despair? Complaints? Encouragement? Sweetness? Meanness? Joy? Madness? Love? Hate? And of course you don’t have to be one of these extremes, you can be mindlessly mediocre and doling out the Doldrums, Blahs, Mehs, Uninspiring, Unmoving, Unexciting, Uninvolved, Unengaged, Uninteresting.

So while I could have gone on for pages and pages of more adjectives, the real point here is that we are all dealers. We all are giving out something to the rest of the world, or at the very least our worlds, and that we have a choice in the matter. So what are you known for dealing? What is it like to be in your emotional wake? What do you leave behind in your exchanges with other Homo sapiens? Are people energized and excited or are they deflated and depressed? Somewhere in-between? You and I are dishing out something and I know the poisonous as well as the fragrant. I have seen those that hurt and those that heal. I have seen those that inspire and those that crush. I have known those that generate anger and those that gift with generosity. I have rubbed elbows with the amazingly spiteful and with the beautifully benevolent.

Today (and tomorrow’s) question is this, what is my signature gift? What am I best known for and most remembered by? And if it is not outstandingly awesome, why am I not choosing to change what I am dealing?

Time frames and limits

# Chapter 201

So what do you do in light of such analysis paralysis? Well time is gonna force your hand so you better think about this. There is a time frame - always. So the time frame if nothing else will force your hand. That is happening today now for me. One of my thorniest problems has a time limit of today. No matter what action I take or don’t take it will be decided today. And not taking action is the action I have been taking all along and that is how we got to the time limitations of this decision. Not taking action is definitely an action. Even my wife agrees 100% and that rarely happens, so you can take this one to the bank.

So if you don’t want inertia to finally make this decision for you and determine what happens, then that will require you to step up and pull the trigger on some definitive course. You have had these possible routes laid out before you for a while now and you must choose one or one will choose you. That is simply how it is and how it has always been.

The largest benefit to you choosing any definitive course is that you begin to apply all your energy, thinking and capacity to that choice once it is made. That is useful potential in action. Whereas if you allow inertia to decide in the end, all that energy, thinking, contemplating, and bandwidth that you have used to this point in consideration - is wasted, gone, unusable and unrecoverable. Every problem or opportunity has a time frame and the time is ticking.

The correct small stones

# Chapter 200

Trying to find the right small stones to move my mountain. This is more difficult than I thought it would be. Analysis paralysis is not something that I have had to struggle with very often - until now. It is burning my feet at the moment. I can’t get a grip on what the primary issues are and so I am stuck in the doldrums looking for definitive traction on the right problem so that I am certain I am moving the correct mountain. If you are like me, there are pretty much endless mountains to choose from, you want the MIT mountain of the moment. While this MIT mountain of the moment is usually clearly apparent and obvious, not so this time. Sifting through peaks is not fun. They can be fun from a visual breathtaking vista point of view, but there is no fun in the lack of clarity view.

I mean do you focus on your health or your job? Your spouse or your mental health? Your kids or your grandkids? The termites or the leaking roof? The broken window or the toilet that won’t flush? No these aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive choices, just providing some food for thought in the comparison minefield. Given choices like these I think most of us would struggle to know which one to tackle first. Given close proximity choices like these plays havoc with your priority pyramid of decision making. Your accustomed clarity is absent and paralysis results. Paralysis on a scale rarely encountered in my short 60 years. I think the last time I felt like this was back in my early 20’s.

Awareness and action

# Chapter 199

Cascading problems seem to nip at your heels. This is a little known phenomena that when trouble starts, it gets a head of steam and more and more trouble follows. Its not really that you have more problems than you had before, its that you are aware of more problems than you were aware of before. The processes you use to resolve one problem reveal four more. This is a normal experience I think for most people and most businesses. It can really knock you off your stride and wreck your productivity and your peace. Things aren’t objectively worse today than they were yesterday, you just are aware of more problems than you were yesterday. And once known, then you have to own them. And owning them is stress filled and uncomfortable.

Again objectively you are no worse off than yesterday, you are no sicker, no poorer, no slower, no closer to any disaster. What you are, is aware. You have new mental demons to wrestle with than you knew you did yesterday. What you have to decide now, and for all the minutes following this discovery, is what action are you going to take and how much of your attention are you going to give these cascading problems? I think many of you might be like me in that you just want to ignore the new problems entirely, but find them to be very insistent. This is the challenge that you will have to resolve, how intrusive will you allow these new cascading problems to intertwine themselves into your daily thoughts and routines, and how to resolve them at the same time with the energy you are willing to allow them?

Overcoming the Past

# Chapter 198

Being set free from a past you cannot change. Its a lovely idea and only one that can happen with supernatural power its seems to me - because you cannot change the past. That unchangeable nature of the past is the horror of it, and demands a supernatural hand. My friend Trent was retelling what happened today as he was called to an elderly lady’s house. She related that she was once again having nightmares as she watched the evening news and was hearing the sirens go off warning of another bombing raid hitting Ukraine - she said its just like when I was kid going through WWII. The past that cannot be changed. And there are thousands of other and different stories of the past that cannot be changed though we wish it could.

So since there is no way to change the past, then I must be changed in order to be free from its grasp on me. Some fundamental piece of me must undergo transformation so that that past no longer has such power in my life, and continues to hold me hostage for all my future days. As Trent’s eventful day shows though, time alone is not enough to resolve the past, we need more. While the past cannot be changed and our actions or experiences cannot be removed, my relationship with that past can change as I do. And again, I would argue that this needs literal supernatural divine intervention to set us free from the power of that past. Dear God in heaven, make it so please!

Factories for Idols

# Chapter 197

The human heart is an idol factory. We can turn most anything into an obsession or an idol in our lives, where it blocks out all the vibrant other important pieces that make up life. We can make the most improbable things King of our lives. For instance my eight month old granddaughter holds me in the palm of her hand. Its a good thing she can’t talk yet, or I would give her whatever she asked for and bankrupt myself in a moment for her. But more commonly we make our career’s or our income or our business or our status or our house or car or our position or connections or football team, etc etc, our King. As we are natural worshippers, humanity always looks for a King to worship. Since we don’t care much for the Gods, we look for more temporal subjects and they are easily manufactured in our hearts. Remember the human heart is an idol factory.

And we are most indiscriminate about who sits in that throne. Since we disdain the Gods sitting there, we settle for much less. Less worthy, less eternal, less powerful, less character, less capacity, just less in pretty much every category. While the idols of our hearts don’t claim deity or a divine nature, we exchange the promise of eternity for the mundane, for the control and temporal nature and temporary characteristics of our heart idols. The nature of the Gods and all that they represent demands far too much from us, far more than we willing give, and so we exchange them for a while for the idols of our hearts. But you can’t escape the Gods, even were they no more than Father Time.