Wrong again!

Chapter 214

sometimes saying ‘I’m wrong’ is the only time you’re right

It can be difficult to admit you are wrong. It can be more difficult to admit how wrong you are sometimes. It can be most difficult to admit how often you are wrong. This wrongness level is pretty much true for everyone. Those you will come to admire most are those most willing to cop to it. The breadth and scope of knowledge is all but boundless, and no one can know more than a tiny sliver of all that knowledge. That means in the short story I am telling here, that we are wrong, very wrong, often.

In the Deep South where I grew up, this has multiple pain points, because one’s competence in all things southern, determines one standing in the social community. And if that doesn’t matter to you, then you ain’t southern to begin with, so move on to the next blog.

But I have noticed in recent years, that the internet is changing much of the posture of southern knowitallism. Now people speak with more care, and leave themselves a metaphorical back door in case they are wrong. Because dang it, everyone can google you now. It only takes a few swipes on my phone to throw doubt on your proposal of certainty.

Face it folks, we need to fact check the hell out of everything we are spouting these days, and trust me, someone will be fact checking you along the way. It smooths out nice long conversations a great deal though, if you just admit that this is what you think, but you may be wrong. I often am.

Uninterrupted

Chapter 213

our current culture is diminishing uninterrupted thinking - Newport

Thinking in general is in danger, but uninterrupted thinking is all but non-existent. Thinking has fallen to the wayside. Not valued very highly by much of anyone. This is super awful. All the big breakthroughs happen because of thinking. So yes some are doing it, but imagine what could happen if we all were thinking instead of the 1%!?! The problems we could solve and the changes we could make!?! Think about it !  Well . . .  if you can remember how.

Thinking is a lost skill and its rarely taught anywhere. It is something I learned later in life and I am still completely a novice at it. Good thinkers are people I do everything possible to hang out with and spend time with. There are still too few of them in my life! I am always looking for more!

But thinking without interruption is a special category. It is thinking long enough to get to much better conclusions and results, than just mere thinking. If I get a 10 minute window of uninterrupted thinking here or there throughout the course of a day, that is astonishing. But I am certain that Newport is talking about hours of uninterrupted thinking. The kind of uninterrupted time that can now only happen by careful design.

I have only experienced this when I travel to Asia and I plan a couple of weeks of downtime, and there is no one with me on the trip. I am alone and free to fully imbibe all the thinking time I can handle - which isn’t hours and hours. Because I have been trained by the rest of my life to only think in 10 minute segments. Folks its like a muscle you have to build up and then maintain.

Start designing for it.

Start working out.

Surfing on the farm

Chapter 212

Feelings are much like waves. We can’t stop them from coming but we can choose which one to surf.” —Jonatan Mårtensson

I am not sure I have met someone who had control over their feelings, in the sense that they well up from our soul in some fashion and just are. I have met people who are constantly overwhelmed by their feelings, and I have met people who don’t feel much of anything. Everyone has them and there is no mean average, they are what they are, as I said.

But no one wants to abdicate control to the feeling level - too volatile and too undependable to build a future on. I am usually pretty disturbed by the results and processes that start to happen when my feelings get the upper hand. I get competitive, I have to win, and that is almost never positive when that happens at 58 years of age. When feelings get the upper hand logic disappears and thinking is crippled. I can’t be the leadership guru that everyone depends on me to be, when feelings get control. I frequently lash out, and invariably someone I care about gets hurt when that happens.

So can we choose which feelings we surf? Well I don’t know. I seem to have all the emotional/feelings control of a crocodile, so I am not sure I am surfer boy material, now or in the future. Those of you with more fine controls than I have, surf on!! I am truthfully cheering for you and in awe of you.

So I have settled more on blunt force, dampening the waves if you please, like a sea wall protecting a harbor. Reminding myself of a number of facts that help. “You don’t have to enter into every fight you are invited to.” Uncle Joe Callaway’s super helpful advice. And about 95% of the time my wifeclientcoworker is venting, not asking for advice - so keep your mouth shut. These two little mental levers helps me keep the feelings right where they should be.

You can have anything, but . . .

Chapter 211

“I’m pretty sure I can have anything just not everything.” - Score

Put your mind to it and you can have pretty much anything your heart desires. If the want is keen enough and the drive is present and your consistency or grit is stable enough, it will eventually happen. There are few exceptions to this in the Western world. We live in an unprecedented time of history, with god-like technology making almost everything possible. You can have anything you want, if the want is strong enough to carry you through. 

We are not dealing with what you should want, but simply is it possible? The morals or wisdom of your wants is the subject of an entirely different kind of writing and post. But every desire has costs and tradeoffs. If you want your doctorate, it takes years of effort, that will cost you other wants you may want. So few people get their doctorate and travel the globe while writing for a fashion magazine, even though they may want both of those things. The two wants have clashing needs and competing demands and requirements. You can have anything, just not everything.

Many of the young men I grew up with want the excitement of the chase in a fresh and new relationship. They also want to have the luxury, contentment and stability of a lifelong partner in marriage. You can’t have both at the same time, even though one might lead to the other eventually. You can have anything, just not everything.

You can purchase a new car, or invest in real estate or your 401k, but these two wants, have competing purposes and requirements. You can have anything, just not everything.

So choose.

100 daily decisions and the mirror

Chapter 210

Health isn’t just one big decision. It’s hundreds of smaller ones that add up to a way of living. - Score

The information online about health is so confusing and overwhelming in pure volume. I think it is the most written about topic in the entire world. Outside of the virtual world of digital information, is the flabbergasting number of people who tell me not to eat that carb and who tell me to add that protein and . . . are you serious? You think of food as carbs and protein. Shesh.

And then do that exercise over those exercises, and use that gadget over these gadgets, and did you get your steps in today? And did you try that gym, or that bicycle, or those shoes, or that outfit to workout in? We are all, always looking for steps process, shortcuts and the fountain of youth, while eating out the Nutella jar with a long spoon.

The standard line I hear while traveling the world is, “I need to lose weight” and they do, but it will never happen while they are living the way that they are living. They and us want health to be just one big decision - I need to lose weight - but it doesn’t work that way. You have 100 decisions to make every day, and after a few weeks, most give up and go back to couch-potato see-food-diet mode.

All that information on the web and all the exercise tools, gyms and equipment in the world will not get you out of the 100 decisions a day. These 100 are about moving your body, the air you breath, the position you work in, the fuels you choose to feed your body and so on and so forth.

Its a life, either way. The mirror shows the results of the last 100 decisions you made each day over the last five years. If you want to see a different result, you have to make different decisions, every day.

This is your chosen way of life.

The shadows on our sunshine

Chapter 209

"Most of the shadows of this life are caused by standing in one's own sunshine." ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

We get in our own way. All the time. It is the worst correctable offense that most of us regularly are guilty of it seems. I see it especially in my children and grandchildren, and therefore it is very true of me without a doubt. Those apples haven’t fallen far from the tree.

Stop getting in your own way. There at least 1000 ways in which people do this and you have probably invented several more along the way in your own lifetime. The most obvious manner that we get in our way and throw a shadow on our own lives is by failing to see the blessings in our lives. We see them as curses, difficulties, irritations, bothers, problems, challenges and worst parts of our lives. After a few years and some perspective, we often realize that those were gifts, blessings, helpful, a bonus, a benefit, luck, good fortune, and an opportunity.

How can such a reversal of thought happen you ask? Well you were just standing in your sunshine, making shadows. When you stopped, and starting thinking and got out of your own way, then you could see what happened for what it was truly. And we get in our way by sabotaging our own success all the time. We get in our own way by our unwillingness to change - what got you here won’t take you there. We get in our own way by our resistance to accepting the help offered by others.

Don’t throw shadows on your own awesomeness. Reach for the stars and don’t give up.

Our real limits

Chapter 208

“I recognized the connection between my communication effectiveness and my success as a leader, I learned to slow down, focus and deliberately strive to succeed at every communication encounter.” Art Petty 

I grew up being taught that workers were workers, people who sweated from the intensity of their labors. Everything that was truly “work” resulted in back-breaking labor and sweat. What I was taught was accurate to one small segment of the 1960’s populations of the uneducated Deep South. I have done plenty of that kind of “work”. It is actually very satisfying if not very much intellectual stimulation.

But there are far more difficult types of work than the back-breaking sweating variety, even if my uneducated family and peers refuse to think of these other types of work, as any kind of work at all. Two of them are particularly challenging: thinking and communicating. Regardless of the vocation you have, you are most certainly confined and constrained by your abilities and capabilities with these two jobs.

Thinking is damn hard work, but mostly can be confined to what is going on between your ears, often can happen in solitary bliss, individually, privately, etc. etc. Communication never happens like that. Communication happens between more than one person or it is not communication, it is something else. It is public, and will be graded and assessed by all who come in contact with it. It has almost infinite nuance and grades and levels and sub-levels and approaches. It is the non-creative’s nightmare. It is the creative’s playground. 

How far we go in life will be determined largely by how well we communicate.

The impact we have on people is measured by our communication.

All our real limits are right here in communication ability or lack.

The way we think

Chapter 207

‘How you think is how you feel, how you feel is how you act, and how you act is what defines you.” Porter Moser

The chicken or egg? Which came first? It seems like the quote above could be one of those nonsensical hypothesis like the chicken or the egg, but it is not. Like many times in life when you need or want to analyze something, start with the end and work yourself backwards. I do this with clients a lot, we will decide some goal or target 5 to 10 years in the future and work our way back to the present step by step. Moser gave us the steps this time.

How you act is what defines you? True. In the end, 99% of the time, our actions are what define us to everyone in the world, and likely, to God as well. No one really cares what you feel or what you think or what your intentions were, they only care, and only judge, and only assess, your actions. Same was true with your parents judging you as you were growing up, and the same is true now that you are a grandparent and are as old as dirt. Everyone is standing in judgement of your actions. And you are standing in judgement of theirs. And frankly, that is perfectly ok most of the time, its a very accurate barometer of that is going on inside of you as well.

Because we all mostly act how we feel. True. If we are feeling pissy then we act pissy. If we are feeling angry, then we act angry. If we are feeling peaceful then we act peaceful. If we are feeling generous then we act generous. Tell me it ain’t so? It takes 1000 times more effort to act in a manner that conflicts with our feelings. Oh it can be done and we all have done so in heroic moments, but for the most part, we are just emotional rollercoaster and emotional action figures.

Because how we feel is how we are thinking. True. And here is the critical piece for us all today. 

Change the way you think.

Intellectual dishonesty

Chapter 206

convenient and predictable and safe

This is what most people want life to be. Its what want themselves to be. And well, maybe they dream about living a different life here and there in some private moment, but the choices they make every day prove that they want convenient and predictable and safe, more than they want something exciting, dangerous or difficult. This is most unfortunate. My wife is sitting here arguing with me that most people wanna change the world, that they want their lives to matter. Nope. Nada. Zero on that one. Don’t see it. She is just projecting her own desires on the rest of everybody.

Of course everyone says they want to change the world, correct the injustices that are rife throughout the world, or that they want to make a difference in peoples lives, or that they want to help others - basically they all say they want to be like me and Brenda. But it ain’t so and all the talking in the world won’t make it so.

Instead they live in their 3000 + sq. foot homes, and their three car garages, with their RV’s and boats parked outside because the garage is too full to pull the RVs and boats in, and sit at their dining room table with me drinking tea or coffee, telling me how much they are struggling financially and that is why they can’t assist financially in changing the world. This has happened so many times that it is completely and typically the norm. 

I actually have nothing against convenient predictable and safe, I like them too. What I am against is intellectual dishonesty. You can’t make a big impact in the world, and have convenient predictable and safe - they don’t go together - oil and water. You choose everyday which is most important to you.

If you want it bad enough

Chapter 205

“Willpower is defined as the ability to resist short-term temptations in order to meet long-term goals. It’s the self-control to manage our thoughts, emotions and behavior in ways that set us up for success. It’s like mental toughness  it boils down to who’s calling the shots. If you want something bad enough, you’ll find the willpower to make things happen.” - LaRae Quy

Quy is very insightful here. That last sentence is the killer one, if you want it bad enough, you will find a way to make it happen. And the converse is true obviously, if you aren’t making it happen, you don’t want it badly enough. You can make excuses all day, week and year, but the bottom line is that if you live in the Western World and are not a trafficked slave, you can do it if you want it enough. “It” being whatever that thing is that you just have got to accomplish, have or experience.

I think that most people who consistently do and experience what others don’t, would agree with me. These are the people who have vividly experienced “the self-control to manage our thoughts, emotions and behaviors” that the author is referring to above. No one finishes their doctorate without a degree of mental toughness, no one learns a foreign language without it, no one grows their business without it, nor changes the world without it.

But like I said, the barriers are few if you live in the West. The greatest (maybe only) barrier to you getting all that you want, is you. Barriers I said. That is not the same as difficulties. Difficulties are where the real challenges lie. This is not easy. It is very very challenging. It would not require such gigantic levels of willpower - mental toughness - were it easy.

Lots of difficulties.

Few barriers.

No excuses.

Gatekeeping

Chapter 204

The word “attention” in psychology is a catchall referring to any process that influences what information from the world breaks through and affects your thinking. - Art Markman

The world is desperately trying to break in and affect your thinking. All of marketing and advertising and sales and social media and most social conversations are aimed and intentioned at affecting your thinking and your actions. This corralling and refocusing of your thoughts and actions toward someone else’s agenda and purpose, is the bulk of the vast energy and resources and creativity generated in the world on any given day.

Buy my dress, use my makeup, this car is the one successful people drive, we are certainly the most cutthroat law firm, this diet is the one where you can eat all you want and lose weight, this medicine is perfect for you (except for all these side effects), there is a pill somewhere that can fix everything, every winner drinks this particular beer, the fountain of youth is right here in this bottle, your sex drive will never wane with this med, this gas burns faster better cheaper than that gas, this additive will make your car run like new, all of the cleverest folks use this smartphone, and this grocery store is far better than the one next door, etc. etc.

The truth or falsity of any of these advertisements is irrelevant, you have missed the point if that is your focus. The point is your attention. I am pretty sure that 90% of you knew what product I was talking about in each point above. Stop!

Be the gatekeeper of your own attention.

A credit card with a parking spot

Chapter 203

Maya Angelou wrote: “I am convinced that most people do not grow up. We find parking spaces and honor our credit cards. We marry and dare to have children and call that growing up. I think what we do is mostly grow old. We carry accumulation of years in our bodies and on our faces, but generally our real selves, the children inside, are still innocent and shy as magnolias.”

What we do is mostly grow old. That needs to stop, and regardless of our biological years floating around the sun, our spirits and outlooks need to stay young and energetic. Don’t just accumulate years on your face and in your mind, stay vibrantly hopeful and youth fully  optimistic inside. While you may not be able to control how the one happens to you, you can certainly give the second one freedom to romp inside your heart and mind.

We do not want our lives to be defined as people who find parking places and use credit cards. But that has such a ring of truth to it, that it is unignorable. The sum of our days is far too often that mundane and uninspiring, that small. Don’t get offended, get moving. Change direction. Make a difference. Choose more. Be more!

You have been able to produce offspring since you were 14 years or so, and that is a purely biological function, and is no claim to maturity and adulthood. You can legally marry in many places by the time you are 16 years old and so neither is that a claim to maturity and adulthood. Look at the divorces and separations and children abandoned into foster care - proving that many of such decisions are made in poor judgement, and without the character and maturity to follow through and make good on them.

Be more!

Adulting?

Chapter 202

True adulthood,” Toni Morrison told an orchard of human saplings in her  2004 Wellesley College commencement address , “is a difficult beauty, an intensely hard won glory, which commercial forces and cultural vapidity should not be permitted to deprive you of.” 

Notice the commercial forces and cultural vapidity, Those are the forces that work against adulthood. Going out and buying something when you hit a tough spot in life is being an American, not being an adult. Purchasing more stuff to keep up with the Jones, to be seen as stylish and vogue and accomplished is being a Consumer not being an adult. Purchasing what you need and no more, spending less than you make, saving and investing, those would be the habits and decisions of an adult not the commercial consumerist forces that drive our economies. Those forces would want you to spend more than you make, be an impulse buyer, make financial decisions based on style fashion or image more than needs or practicalities.

And most if not all of that style fashion and image stuff is directly tied to vapidity of the standard culture, offering you no real challenge at all. There is no challenge in using your credit card to purchase more than you need for appearances sake, or because something is broken inside of you. There is no challenge in being like everyone else in your school or on your street. The challenge is in being yourself, being comfortable in your own skin with your own thoughts. The challenge is being a person who is changing the world, while the culture around you thinking only about themselves.

Hurting for help

Chapter 201

“This is what I believe we should all aim for: to make contributions to others’ lives that will grow infinitely in our absence.” - Rath

There are two critical pieces here to unpack; making contributions to other people’s lives and sustainability. Helping other people, and by contributions I don’t mean money, investing your time and energy into their needs situations and lives, appears to not even register on most people’s minds. Or if it does, it only takes up a fraction of 1% of their time talent and treasure. A fraction! Like 0.00123 fractions. I meet thousands of people each year as I travel and if I meet one or two world changers out of those thousands it is good. I so wish I was stretching the truth here, but everyone is pretty much 100% focused on themselves and their stuff and their issues, not helping someone else.

So as I travel I try to turn this fraction into a much larger number, making people aware of the scale and number of world challenges facing us as humans, and as stewards of the planet. I keep thinking that if 10% of us would sacrifice to make other people’s lives better, that would be a huge world changing number of helpers. But I am not gaining much traction. I mean it seems like I am, when I have the platform and am speaking and people are asking questions, but when the meeting is finished its allotted hour, all the conversations go back to their small miserable mundane trivial boundaries of work weather politics and TV.

That is the 99.99987 of the population. However there is that fractional group though, and they are the opposite. They live to help. In fact they are helping so much it hurts the people they say they have come to help. I so admire their energy and passion and generosity and selflessness! But they help in ways that hurt often and there is little to no thought of sustainability. 

Both sides could benefit from reading “When Helping Hurts” and then applying those points to their lives. 

We want to help. And the help to continue long after we do.

Throw another rock!

Chapter 200

"I alone cannot change the world, but I can cast a stone across the waters to create many ripples." ~ Mother Teresa

Ripples. That is what we are aiming for even though we use other words and language to explain and complain and describe it. All the giant massive problems and challenges facing the world are too complex and multilayered for one person or organization to change them. Don’t let that stop you from aiming for them though, when enough of us send ripples through them, the tsunami will absolutely topple them.

Mother Teresa was born here in Skopje, where we have lived the last 20 plus years. She would be rather upset to know that a large three story shopping center has been built upon her old homestead where she was born, but she had nothing to do with that, instead she chose to live among the poorest of the outcasts in India. She gave her life to that work, and even though she has been gone many years now, her ripples continue to change the world, circling ever wider.

While you and I may never receive the Nobel Peace prize for our ripples, as Mother Teresa did in the late 1970’s, that doesn’t make our ripples less important. In fact, you should make as many ripples as you can and as often as you can. Shake up the challenges and problems of the world, interfere and attack the systems that make these problems happen and provide the structure for them to continue. 

Our ripples will put cracks in these structures that allow abuse and permit people from taking advantage of one another. 

Throw another rock with the efforts of your life!

3 plus years later . . .

Chapter 199

After three and half years, I finally found the fortitude to put strings back on one of my beautiful guitars. There hasn’t been any stringing of the guitars since my brother died three years and nine months ago. There was just no music in me anymore. Don’t know how to explain it better than that, simply lost all interested in something I had been doing everyday for decades. Gone.

But a conflagration and synergy of events, brought me back together with two of my band mates, and they asked me to play this week . . . and I said yes. Still not sure why, but I have to admit, its been rich. The sweetness of the chords rolling off a beautifully crafted instrument, a lovely riff here and there, the magical voice of Barry singing and making it all work together. I haven’t had this much music rolling through my head in years! Ok ok I haven’t had any music rolling through my head in years so that is not saying much.

But why does grief lead us to withhold such joys in our lives? The antidote to grief is living wild full free and joyfully, right? I don’t know. While I am certainly enjoying this week of having music back in my life, most every other grief induced symptomprocesshabit I had going on pre-guitar-stringing, is still going on. 

While none of this honors my brother in any kind of meaningful way, it accurately reflects how I feel now that I am an only child - angry musicless negative and a bit morbid. I guess you have to work your way out of each one of those over time.

The wrong shoes

Chapter 198

The wrong shoes.

What a terrible story and a great metaphor. This past week I was getting my physiotherapy done at Energi Studio where I have been using their services for the last 12 years. When we finished, I got dressed and jumped in my car and headed across town for a client meeting. I called my dad up on the phone like I often do and headed out.

The whole trip across town (35 minutes) Energi Studio kept ringing my phone and I kept declining their call because I was talking to my dad. When I arrived at my client’s office building and rang off with my dad, I called Energi studio to find out why they had been blowing up my phone. When Nena answered the phone she asked me to look at my shoes! Huh?? Yes I have shoes on. “Those are Adidas that you have on, but yours are Puma’s.” It finally dawned on me that I had one someone else’s shoes on! Yes they were very very similar in color and obviously practically the same size, but still!

Lots of people I know are wearing the wrong shoes relationally or vocationally or spiritually. They are someone else’s shoes, not their own. Not the vocational shoes that they should be wearing. Not the relationship shoes they should be wearing, nor the spiritual shoes they should be wearing.

Most just fall into these wrong shoes just like I grabbed the first pair of gray sneakers off the rack at Energi studio. We don’t examine these shoes very closely, we just put them on and if the fit isn’t too terribly wrong, then we wear them.

This is a mistake that you keep paying the price for, if you don’t back up and get it right.

More and more about less and less

Chapter 197

In the story of a group of blind men, they describe the elephant based on their limited experience of touching various parts, and their descriptions of the elephant are different from each other. They suspect that the other persons are dishonest, and they come to blows. The moral of the parable is that humans have a tendency to claim absolute truth based on their limited, subjective experience as they ignore other people’s limited, subjective experience.

Said another way, we are all blind and have limited understanding of even those things we can touch and feel, what we think about these matters, goes through a filter of ignorance and incomplete understanding of the whole of what we are trying to describe or defend or prove, or whatever. You get the picture, or more accurately a part of the picture. Because that is all we can ever get. 

Life is just like my doctoral program where you learn more and more about less and less. You and your experiences become more specialized as you grow older, and that specialization is the less and less, even though you know more and more about that less and less. And a wise person learns humility from this truth. No one can know everything about anything. Its ok to not know everything, and it is more than ok to admit it. Frequently. I admit that I may be wrong about pretty much everything, far far more often and seriously than I did 30 years ago.

Boast in the fact that you are willing to be wrong and to learn, rather than you insisting that you are correct about some unimportant (or important) matter. Your fellow blind seekers are far more important than you being right.

The cost of a thing

Chapter 196

“The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.” - Henry David Thoreau

I meet very few people who calculate life this way. We should though. Like the meeting I have in about an hour from now, that I have dodged, ducked, avoided and shrank from over and over again, because there is about a 99% certainty that it will cost me at least an hour of my short life, and give me nothing in return. That is a cost that is unacceptable. It is one that I avoid ferociously (and successfully most of the time) though I got trapped into this one today with no more delays being socially acceptable, even though not even that can stop me most of the time.

There is no more sure way to end our relationship than for you to waste my time, show up late for an agreed upon meeting, or fail to deliver what you promised. Its nothing personal, the cost is just too high. I only have so many hours to give, and if you are frivolous about one of my hours, then I am going to be very upset and never give you an opportunity to ever do so again. Socially acceptable or not. This is one of the benefits of being almost 60 years old, that I can get away with being eccentric and unwieldy and socially misfiring. People will just write it off to age and Alzheimer’s, and forgive you.

If you think to change the world and do something important with your life, then by all means possible stop giving away yourself to meaningless meetings that bear no reciprocity of value for the time given.

You matter

Chapter 195

"What you do makes a difference, and you have to decide what kind of difference you want to make." ~ Jane Goodall

First of all you have to understand that you matter. That what you do makes a difference, changes things in the world. That your life counts, and if you grasp how much it does, it will make it count so very much more, because you will be intentional. If you don’t get this, then all else is lost. None of this conversation will matter, if you don’t believe that you matter. Get it?

Goodall is very correct in her statement that what you do makes a difference. And granted that does not preclude a negative difference. I would not have a hangman’s scar around my neck if Sidney Eirchberger did not throw a rope at me just as I was starting down a steep slide in 4th grade and the rope burned me good as I sped down the slide. His actions made a difference. But not a good one. 

Not only do our actions make a difference good or bad, but I would also postulate that all our actions make a difference, not just some of them. Now they certainly don’t all make an equal difference in the world, but there are always effects from our actions, from what we do, even if that is choosing not to do anything at all in a situation. That not choosing is a choice, and it has consequences.

Now that we got that settled, then the meaty part is, what difference do you want to make?? Once you baldly decide what you want to change, then you can massively structure all your actions into alignment and make a massive impact on the world