Perspective

# Chapter 317

We need different experiences and different contexts in order to properly appreciate our home and norms. Sometimes we need to experience the rocking boat in order to appreciate the steady ground under our feet. Sometimes we need to get rained on at night in order to to keenly appreciate our warm dry bed. Sometimes we need to experience the constant wind and swells on the Bay in order to appreciate a still quiet moment. Sometimes we need a minor disaster on the journey there, in order to be thankful that no one was hurt nor to take for granted the effortless way we can usually move from one place to another. Sometimes we need a holiday to see how much we have been working and to make appropriate adjustments. Just how different and how major these contexts and experiences are depends on many varying factors, needs, willingness, risk ability and enthusiasm for adventure. At one point in life I was an adrenaline junkie, the bigger the risk the better, now not so much.

These contexts and experiences can range from a quick trip to the lake for fishing or boating, to camping, to trips across the States, to trips international, to living overseas. I have done them all and they all have value for resetting your understanding about the great gifts we have in life, regaining perspective about the blessings we enjoy every day and often don’t appreciate properly. Most times seeing and experiencing first hand, far outweigh the reading of words about something.

It costs less than you think and offers more than you know

# Chapter 316

There I did it, I choose that tradeoff over the other one, and I am so glad that I did. You can never ever calculate what the outcomes are gonna be. There are those things that you THINK are going to occur when you make this choice over that choice, but it rarely works the way that you think it will. And at least half the time, something unexpected and wonderful happens, instead of the price that you were expecting to pay by making this choice. Yes yes the pay off is there regardless as a matter of course, but half the time, something special or unusual or better than expected happens and it transforms the entire experience. Only half the time. The other half of the time you get what you thought you might and sometimes even less, but the other half! Wow.

Yesterday I started a fishing trip with a buddy and it started off plenty challenging, and ended up being spectacular! I would have lost so much if I had opted for the more pressing urgent loud tradeoff, rather than the important tradeoff. Read that sentence again. I would have lost so much if I had opted for the more pressing urgent loud tradeoff, rather than the important tradeoff. And this is what these last two chapters have been about, choosing the important over the loud urgent pressing option that usually sucks you in. It is very difficult to fight this trend in our lives. Yes there are always possible negative tradeoffs that you really don’t want to pay, but then there are those magical moments that make it worth 10 times what you invested in the decision. Choose the important consistently over the urgent and you will reap these same benefits that I am listing here.

The tradeoff

# Chapter 315

Life is simply a long series of choices and tradeoffs. We make choices constantly as we debate the tradeoffs. We want parts of each tradeoff, without the negatives of each tradeoff, and that is simply not going to happen, even though that is what we want. At the very least that is what I want and what my clients want, you may be some kind of superhuman exception, but I don’t think so. We all pretty much want the paycheck but don’t want to do the work. This is the normative experience that I hear from everyone, with one consistently different voice - the entrepreneurial startup guy - he just gets off on making something big and making something work. His appetite for work exceeds most of us though, and granted he makes some pretty cool stuff in Africa. But I am falling into the wrong hole here, I want to talk about those tradeoffs.

The message I want to communicate this morning is that the positives are better than you think and the negatives are less than you feel on these tradeoffs. The reason that we are even chatting about this is because of the awesome luxury that we have of choice. The majority of the world has less choice than do we, far less. It took me years living in a third world country before I could even SEE the colors that they were referring to, the subtle design differences from one concrete building to the next, the barely-there differences between one car and the next - these constituted their choices, their tradeoffs. I could not even see the difference with my Western eyes, so subtle and barely there were these differences. Your choices are better than you think.

Footprints

# Chapter 314

There are so many ways to connect today, it is an exciting time in history to be alive and grow and develop. Yesterday I listened to three podcasts about business development, and I plan to listen to more later today. And then I have an online meeting today with an old friend and current co-worker who is many miles away, but not very far at all with technology. All these possibilities! It is just breath-taking and awesome and we don’t utilize it nearly enough. We remain under-developed because we don’t capitalize on these tools and opportunities nearly enough. Instead we allow distractions and busy work to creep into our flow and keep us from doing the harder work of sitting down and focusing on the important rather than the urgent, or loud, or flashy, or eye-catching. The quality of our attention is in such a sad state of affair, constantly flitting from one attention grabbing moment to the next one that comes along eight seconds later, thus reducing us to goldfish level intelligence for all that we produce.

We were made for more. As we move closer and closer to the attention-span of a gnat, we are less and less. Only you and only me can choose to change this, to make a different decision and go a different path. To decide to develop ourselves, to engage in leadership material and leadership challenges in our orgs. To be all in on seeing our places of work and our missions succeed and grow. To have the chance to pass it along to others and serve them in ways that few served us. To be more than we are today, to have a reach and influence that is leveraged through brilliance and diligence. To have as large a footprint as we possibly can.

Not deciding is a decision

# Chapter 313

At the very least you have to continue your development a little bit each day. I understand that you can’t necessarily take up large portions of each day and dedicate it to making you bigger stronger and better, but everyone can take moments throughout the day and make improvements and challenge themselves to move forward. Instead of your go-to candy-crushesque game that you use to “relax” or burn some down time with, usually when you are in the toilet, read a short chapter in an improvement genre book. Instead of YouTubing fishing vids, take a ride on a learning vid. This is not rocket science, it is a decision and you can find your own material, and have it delivered in such a way that it is easy for you to review it and assimilate it, you need no coaching from me there. But its a decision, and that part is the real difficult piece.

If you don’t make this decision, then you are doomed to never move further than you are today. If you are really ok with equal or less than you are today, then fine, you don’t have to pull this trigger. But if you have needs, wants, aspirations of any kind, then you have to make a decision to make it happen. I am telling you that you can do it in small bite-sized chunks, rather than taking on a $90k MBA online or some massive commitment like that. Since I am almost out of coffee and that signifies the end of my writing time, I just want to leave you with this idea - not deciding is a decision too.

Smarter than any of us, but . . .

# Chapter 312

The death of a non-friend. As often happens with people who are simply way smarter than the rest of us, he was socially very awkward. In the extreme. He was a couple of years younger than me, but way way smarter than me, and impossible to talk to, converse with, be around, one of the most uncomfortable humans I have ever spent any time with, and I am pretty sure we all bored him immensely, yet he wanted our approval and admiration more than he wanted his next breath. He wanted respect and honor without giving any, he wanted love and high regard without being very loving or lovable, and the only regard he gave someone was because they were male. Unfortunately for him, he had a wife and three daughters and that caused him the same challenges that my brother experienced because of his low view of womankind. Why is it that men who have only daughters are these kinds of men? Perhaps I am generalizing too much, but it doesn’t feel like I am. Both of my daughters didn’t want to spend a single moment with my non-friend nor my brother.

I tried to be a friend, and I think I can converse with any human on the planet and one of my superpowers is context-switching - talking to an uneducated laborer one moment, and physician the next - but being a friend to this man was impossible even for me. I barely survived the occasional encounters that life foist upon us. He was black hole on life, sucking away all the parts that make this journey precious and important, probably because he was so brilliant and needy. Yet his death has weighed heavily on me, so much unrealized talent gone to waste, so insistent he was on making it about him. I always fear that I am only a few steps removed from being someone just like him, and that scares me to death.

Energy Flow

# Chapter 311

The sharpest moment of the day, when everything is most alive and vibrant. You need to understand when those moments are for you during the course of the day and you need to capitalize on them, and make them work for you. For me, they are right now, immediately following breakfast filled with protein, with hot hot coffee and chocolate of some form sitting beside me! And if by chance you can add a little quiet to this moment (which doesn’t happen very often), then it can be supercharged! It’s that time of day when you think the clearest and with the least effort. It’s that time of day when you can corral your focus and get lost in a single project. It’s that time of day when you can get the most done in the shortest time frames, accomplish the maximum per minute that your day will afford. It’s the time of day when you have the most control over your attention! You are powerful and can block out all distractions at this time of the day and in your work cycle.

As you get older this becomes more important and more powerful if you are wise enough to harness these moments. This is essentially managing your energy flow throughout the day rather than focusing on the clock per se, because my best moments are usually way way before any clocks get involved. 9-5 definitely would not fall within my best moments of the day. But everyone is different and has varying energy cycles. You need to know and understand your energy flow, to be the best version of you every day.

rhythms

# Chapter 310

Full mornings are … well full. This morning has been packed, trying to cram all my patterns into a compressed time frame, along with the addition of a church service which requires an additional two hours of time. So long story short is that I end up “typing “ this on my phone. Ah ha, now I have switched to the computer and this is much faster and better. Two thumbs versus ten fingers. A vast improvement. Now if only I could make my brain that much faster by doing something, like switching locations, or enjoying a cigar, or taking a nap. But this time of the day, my brain is sluggish and my thoughts are muddled and slow. Or that is at least how it feels to me. Cigars and near beer aren’t nearly as invigorating as coffee first thing in the morning. I usually feel like my mental acumen declines throughout the day, and that is why I usually write first thing in the morning directly after breakfast, the sharpest moment of my day.

While that may not be objectively true, it still feels that way and I typically act as if it is true. And what we believe, we act upon and it can easily become a self-fulfilling truth, an actual experience. Of course I am really talking about understanding your energy flow throughout the day and knowing when your most productive moments occur, when you can get the best work accomplished, and when you are shining brightest. This time of the day, I am usually a vegetable and barely functioning at all. Understand your rhythms and stick to them.

Look for the waves

# Chapter 309

Battles and struggles are just a standard part of life, but there are also cycles of intensity that happen as well. This is not a matter of if, but of when. And yet we find ourselves so unprepared and unready. These things seem to happen in waves, concentrated, and then a pause, and then another wave. I think most people experience this pattern from what I can see. Death and sickness comes to us all, and there is a pattern. Perhaps the pattern doesn’t interest you, or seem important to you, but patterns help me usually with my anticipation.

This week is a wave, two acquaintances passed away and we are reeling from the suddenness of it, and my sister-in-law was diagnosed with kidney disease, which seemed to have come out of the blue with zero notice. This is why anticipation is so important, to prepare a proper response so that we can be the best friends and the best helps we can possibly be, and not be so overwhelmed as to be useless in these difficult situations. Its hard enough when you are a bit prepared, its disastrous when you don’t see it coming at all.

Yes these are just emotional states of being, a mental position that can allow you to be strong for others and yourself. Strength matters in these battles and struggles because someone has to bear the weight of what others are going through, someone has to share that load whether they want to or not. Read the signs, look for the waves, prepare yourself, you can do this.

Where is the Son?

# Chapter 308

Still no nice stable even sleep pattern and yet, the sleep that I got was pretty good quality. I don’t feel super rested, but neither do I feel super depleted. More depleted by all the demands and tasks that I have accumulated than by the simply negation of sleep. And that is mostly happening inside my head than some objective number of things that I and only I can do and must do and should do, etc. etc.. My internal pieces are driving that bus so to speak. How to change the destination and the speed? The internal forces are one thing, but the external forces are altogether a different factor. The turns and twists and structure and geography of this journey feels overwhelming and the motor is weak and the brakes seem soft and dangerous.

Its not yet 7:00 am and I have been awake for hours and am already wishing for the evening and a return to bed and rest. Not an ideal start to the day and at least is partially contributing to the metaphoric obscure style of prose that I am writing with this morning. I feel a certain lack of substance this morning, that reality has some fog and vagueness to it that makes it less. That I am only a shadow in terms of existence, but that I have the weight of the world in terms of responsibilities. A shadow can’t bear this load and thrive. A shadow needs bright sunlight to exist most firmly, not cloudy skies heavy with rain. Where is the Son?

Restoration

# Chapter 307

As you can see I did not get back to it. I did the the bare minimum of every action, and the maximum I could manage of each relationship. It worked out good. You need to give yourself that margin after an ocean crossing at 60 years of age. It certainly is not as easy as it once seemed. The physical demands and the mental demands seem to be more. I am not sure I believe that is true, I believe the answer is more likely along the lines of I have less to give and my shallow well is more depleted from such things than before. While I am an experiential expert in long distance travel, I am not a scientist studying such matters in the lab. I have a well experienced habit and nothing more.

But it never ceases to astonish me how much a good night sleep will put many things back to right. Sleep gives the bounty of energy and clear thought and possibility and emotional equilibrium and tolerance for stress, and that the sleep-deprived or the jet-lagged person simply cannot accomplish. Rest resets all these necessary pieces inside of you. I got almost 10 hours last night and would gladly choose to do so night after night if I could stay asleep that long. Each one of those “extra hours” of sleep are worth gold the following day, in terms of possibilities and potential and productivity. I have made larger changes in my day to day life for the sake of sleep, than I have for any other endeavor. It is that important.

Dig in and live it!

# Chapter 306

Back up to full speed in the West after traveling forever on the longest day of the year. Not a moment to stop and ease into anything. It’s rather jarring and difficult, but it’s what we call life and you have to just dig in and live it. Otherwise you just as well turn around and go back to where you just flew in from and be by yourself if you don’t want to fully engage your peeps here. Hey guys, this is a feature, not a bug! You GET to do this! So live it up, and engage this! In fact the timing of writing this is getting in the way of me doing just that, so I am going to take a break and I might get back to this or not.

Spillover

# Chapter 305

Life is full of transitions and this can be good and this can be challenging. Good because it gives you nice solid markers between events and cycles in your life. I have one life in Macedonia. I have another life in Georgia with my dad. I have the hub and majority of my life in Pennsylvania with the kids and grandkids. If I play this correctly, this is also good because I can focus on what needs my deepest attention, as long as I am in the right place when that occurs. As much as possible you should encourage that design. Warn people when you are in one place or another, and raise or lower their expectations accordingly. Even though I do this, I still find that you get a good deal of spillover from other places. For instance, my dad expects to talk an hour a day no matter where I am in the world, This can get complicated quick with different time zones and such, but it can be blessing too, as you can give perspective on the rest of the world. You think gas prices are high in American? Nah, they are always 50% higher in Europe.

Challenging because you are always struggling to live in the present and not the next event or cycle. When you never never ever unpack your toiletry kit you know you are in danger of becoming this person. Challenging because you will be hard pressed to dig the deepest roots in one place and one set of people. While this may make you to appear very cosmopolitan, it will also limit the depth and quality of your relationships and networks. Keep working on that balance!

Precision?

# Chapter 304

The primary difference in the Western worlds and the Eastern ones, is precision. The West expects a much higher degree of precision and perfection. The West expects things to work the first time and not need additional adjustments. This is not how things work, at least not in the Slavic worlds I have worked in over the last 28 years. You could call it the tale of two teeth.

I recently had five antique crowns replaced, and the cavities around them removed. They made four classic studio molds of my teeth and sent them in to make the crowns. Exactly a week later, after not being able to eat because of no teeth, they came in thank goodness, and I went back to the dentist. She had to modify, drilling, reshape and work on each of them to get a good fit, even though they had a perfect model to work from. But in the end, she finally got them in, and now I am back to eating.

When we decided to make the USA our primary home one year and nine months ago, I was in need of a root canal and filling. Our former dentist in the states had retired and so I asked him for a recommendation. Made an appointment. Went in and had the entire procedure done in one visit! Unbelievable. All digital pictures, sent to a machine in the other room, which formed a perfect ceramic filling that perfectly fit the slot. Except it didn’t . . . precisely, since it has come out of that slot four times in the year and a half since I had the work done.

The USA ceramic filling cost more than all the dental work I had done in Eastern Europe, and it comes out when flossing about once every five months! The question I am constantly asking myself is, is the price of that precision which isn’t so precise, worth it? No was my conclusion and that is why I ended up coming back here to get the crowns done. In the USA, they only wanted $11, 600.00 to get those “precisely” done.

Every day

# Chapter 303

Every day is a communication day. I only talked to people in four countries yesterday and honestly it felt like a day off; Rwanda, Germany, Macedonia and the USA. But there are no days off when it comes to communicating, unless you live some kind of dramatic hermit style life, and if you did you wouldn’t be reading this. No one lives that kind of life any longer, though the wise make room for deep silence in their lives and they protect that space ferociously, still I have capitulated and just accepted that every day is a communication day. And everything rises and falls on how well or poorly I do this communication.

Pretty much everything we think and feel about any person in the world is centered around how they communicate first of all, what they communicate second, and third is when/frequency they communicate. The really really uncomfortable truth here is that this means we can always do better, that we control or at the very least highly influence what people can choose to believe about us, that we can be people of hope or people of despair, that we can be people of joy or people of fear, that we can be people who give inspiration or people who tear down, that we can be people of purpose or people of inertia. Honestly, the implications of this are huge and we better not ignore or punt this opportunity to be better. Or yes we can continue to blame our “personalities” for how people respond to us, rather than take appropriate ownership in our communication. I wish someone had explained this to me, in this manner, decades ago. I could have made a whole series of different decisions about how I communicate, and perhaps lived a very different life. But that ship has sailed and now I can only own today and tomorrow.

Oversized impact

# Chapter 302

Yesterday I was talking to the guy who is in charge of Europe for one of the parent orgs I work with, and he was laying out for me the things about the job that he did not expect and that he was not equipped for, and I listened. The reason he feels so comfortable unloading and unpacking all of that with me, is because I had the job before him. I was the one who mentored him and brought him into that position. When you have walked in someone’s shoes, all the paths that they are navigating, it gives each of you confidence to share burdens without judgement. You don’t have to fix anything, just listen and observe. Contribute if asked. Give perspective if invited. These are the experiences of mature leadership in the flow of life.

The mature leader is more comfortable than ever leading from the back of the room, out of sight, not in the limelight, not upfront, not on the marquee. The mature leader needs no fanfare, is not looking for credit and accolades, is rarely in charge, orchestrates and coordinates far more than instructs, connects and encourages far more than she comes up with some brilliant whatever. I have only had the privilege of working with and along side of a few mature leaders. They had an oversized impact on me. It’s time for me to be that for others.

Making adjustments on the fly

# Chapter 301

There are adjustments always between expectations and experiences. You never get precisely what you were hoping for, what you were expecting. The most important question at the end of the day is, can you make the adjustment a good thing? Can you accept and embrace the tradeoffs that you will have to make? This is just life, and your memories and expectations never can fully live up to what you were hoping for, so you have to flex and accept what is rather than what you thought would happen.

I am sitting here writing this, using my front eight teeth to slowly nibble my peanut chunks into smaller and smaller pieces instead of grinding them to fine dust as a normal person would on their molars. I dare you to try this, and bet you $1000 that you will last less than one minute before you start shifting the crunchy peanut butter back to your rear teeth, beware your tongue! I have bitten my tongue more in the last six days than in my entire life. But if you took my little bet and lost, then you have come to realize that this exercise is far more difficult than it sounds. BTW, Nutella is much easier, it just melts in your mouth. Yet the overall point here is that my expectations about getting some major tooth repair done while abroad, never included six days and counting, of not being able to functionally chew. All this lovely cuisine, not that I am getting to enjoy any of it! Adjustment alert, adjustment alert! No one gets precisely what they are expecting and we all have to make adjustments while not feeling deprived. How you do’in with that reality?

Just Be

# Chapter 300

It is so rich to catch up with old friends. Friends you haven’t seen in a long while and with who you have long histories. Things are easy between you and there are few secrets and fewer surprises, and this is a very good thing, as it has a richness about it that can’t be compared to most other experiences. All your filters fall, all your inhibitions are let go and you can just be you yourself in all your glory. Doesn’t happen to us often enough I think. We need that freedom to be us, and those that allow us and encourage us to be so without fear of reprisals are just gold. We need to always be cultivating people who can be like this for us and us for them. It is powerfully reciprocal.

Our hearts need these times, when our defenses are unneeded and our spirits can be free to explore without fear or hesitation. It is moments like these when we can soar and think outside the boundaries of normal every day lives. Consider what might be, could be, if you had more of this in your life, the very experience itself opens up possibilities in your thinking and in your expectations of where who and what you may accomplish next. But the very best part of people like this isn’t about the possibilities and the expansion they create in your heart and mind. No, its just that they let you BE. We could use a lot more of hours, days and weeks of just being the essence of ourselves. Here is to old friends.

Distance isn’t any more

# Chapter 299

Distance is almost irrelevant in the modern world. I flew East over 5000 miles last week. Away from elder care, away from the cares and worries of south central Pennsylvania and how are we gonna keep living there, away from the worries about my kids and my grandkids, away from the worries about our old car and how much longer will it hold up, away from the noise in my house and my dad’s house, away from the worries of my responsibilities there, away from the constant demands and needs of those around me, away from the political insanity in America and the gun violence, away from all of that and more.

But almost nothing changed. Yes I am currently living and working in a far different country and language and situation than I was five days ago, but my dad still demands his hour on the phone, I still hear about everything going on with all the kids and grands and the challenges of that, I still read about what is going on in America, still am appalled that people want their guns more than they want their children to be safe, still aware of all that was going on in that life there in America and being asked to stay involved and responsible from 5000 miles away. Its the beautiful disaster of an interconnected world. There is literally no place you can go and get away unless you are willing and able to turn off every electronic device you own and do the hermit gig.

Far from being a place of peace and quiet, I have just added the relationships and responsibilities of this place to the one I left. Distance is all but irrelevant.

The difficult things

# Chapter 298

There are always hard decisions. Make them. If you don’t, the regrets are far worse. Dig in deep and find that place inside of you that allows you to be more. I know you don’t really want to do this, but you should and you will. Is it that simple? No. But you can do it, one step at a time, this one morning, because tomorrow might not come for you or me, so today is all we have.

Perhaps the better question you could be asking yourself is, precisely why is this designated as a hard decision in your head? That made me stop and think. What are the factors or environments or people or timings or costs or conflicts or expectations or distances or irritants or trade offs, that make this a difficult decision? Something or somethings are making this difficult for you to make a choices and follow through with it in this situation. Have you ever stopped and analyzed it? Now is an excellent time to do so, and you may find yourself surprised by the outcome of your thinking and mental perusal of the anatomy of this difficult decision.

Perhaps you will discover that this is actually a difficult decision of the past, but no longer needs to remain in that category in the present or future, because stuff changes and life moves on and you can be a different person. Perhaps you discover that your reasons for thinking this is a really difficult decision are no longer valid, that the context as well as you have changed. Perhaps you will come to realize that your dread is rooted in some matter that now, is no longer all that important to you and you can let it go, make this decision and dread it no longer. Perhaps you will discover you were just wrong. Perhaps you will discover you were just incredibly correct and that you still don’t want to do this difficult thing. But at least this morning, you have looked at it well and good and now you know why this is a difficult thing. Proceed accordingly.