What’s the problem?

Chapter 257

“As we move through time, we’re often presented with opportunities that are carefully disguised as problems” - Seth

Most of us act and live as if the opposite were true. That we are often presented problems carefully disguised as opportunities. It seems that the posture is - life is problems. Everything and anything is seen through the lens of problems. All life events are seen as problems. Every interaction is seen as a problem. Every person that enters your life is a problem. Every conversation is about problems. Every thought is about problems. You get the problem idea because you are one of these kinds of people, or you have surely met one or are married to one.

Seth’s attitude is just the opposite. There are few actual problems, mostly just opportunities. Even the way that sentence comes off my mind and fingertips is powerfully different than the previous paragraph! This is not merely a posture difference, it is a universe of difference! It is perhaps a different universe entirely! Even as I sit here writing this, I am experimenting with framing all the conversations of the day with, “so what is the opportunity that is presenting itself?” instead of “what is the problem?” In fact, what could happen if we never ever said again for the remainder of our lives, “what’s the problem?” I think that this would revolutionize most people’s lives.

It would change your default answer from no to yes. It would change your view of each situation. It would change your narrative about your life. It would change how you feel each morning as you get out of bed. It would change everything.

Its an opportunity!

Nrg

Chapter 256

It takes energy to hide things, and I would rather my energy be spent helping people. - Rath

Energy misspent. There is a great deal of that going around in the world. Deception is considered a fine art by many, and a natural and frequent part of their lives . . . and your life and my life, as our lives intersect with these people. 

Deception, lies, misdirection, and misrepresentations take a lot of energy to maintain. That means they are costly. And yes of course they are wrong but you already knew that and it didn’t keep you from going forward with your deception regardless. I am trying to help you see the other costs involved.

As you get older, managing your energy becomes the top priority of triage in your daily calculations. You stop trying to manage time and productivity directly and begin to focus on managing your energy, because that more and more becomes the fulcrum of how your daily life tips one way or the other. I am experiencing this myself, and I see it more intensely in my dad. He and I are working on a number of projects, and that work has to fall within a very narrow limited band of hours during the day, when he has the energy to actually do these projects without getting hurt. Yes we talk about the projects for hours, long after we have actually stopped working on them directly.

Therefore I am suggesting that you completely abstain from all forms of hiding things. Transparency has no residual ongoing energy requirements. Instead use all that energy you have to help others. You may find that this process actually s creates more energy than you had before!

Communication?

Chapter 254

Your every correspondence from the top is an opportunity to nurture a relationship.

I really need to remember this, because I communicate a lot by written means, including old fashioned hand-written thank you notes and snail mail. For the last 25 years that email has existed, far too high a percentage of all those emails have been communicating facts. Or answering someone’s questions. Or outlining a decision. Or sending instructions. Or reprimanding someone’s actions. And its no longer just emails, but also mass communications, twitter, texting, responding to blogs, and more. You probably communicate much more than you realize.

Whether you are at the top or at the bottom of whatever relational, corporate or organization structure, I think you can be nurturing rather than only instructive, or outlining, or answering, etc. But I am equally certain that it requires a big shift in thinking and approach in order to do it. The subtle change in writing it out, may be the easiest part of the process.

But don’t let your position on the ladder determine your commitment to nurture your relationships. Think of all your writing, digital and analog, as another opportunity to build relationships. Honestly I think for many people, texting, twitter, and email are the only relational touch points that they have. Why would you not leverage those, in new, and potentially very rewarding, perspectives of writing? I think that there are several ways you could do this.

1.  Be at least equally concerned about the person than the content of the correspondence.

2.  Share something that you are going through personally, this is a two-way street.

3.  Ask for help. People love to help generally.

4.  Ask about their extended family or loved ones, very specifically, and follow up in the next communication.

It won’t be long, until you see a change in how people respond to you.

Tame the cyclone, get a life!

Chapter 253

"Ultimately, the only way to truly be in control of your life is to be in control of your thoughts." Clear

But is anyone? All the time? I think not, though there is certainly a possibility that I may be wrong, but mostly it is apparent that most are not in control all the time. That is not to say that most aren’t in control some of the time, but few of us, if any are in control all the time.

But that point is not the main point here. Gaining control of your thoughts is the best possible path to gaining control of your life - which is a multifaceted wide ranging event. Reining in your thoughts also requires multiple strategies. For instance, I have not watched “the news” since 2007. You would provide more truth and fodder for deep thought by reading Dr Seuss than by watching “the news”. Far more actually. So for me, taking control of my thoughts began in 2007 when I begin to limit which nonsense I would allow myself to consume.

From refusing to give the big networks my attention, it was easy to make the jumps to no TV no films or movies, little music, no clutter, little noise and suddenly, almost instantaneously I had room to THINK! I had enough quiet to order my thoughts and think. It seems a very rare event for most folks to ever get still enough and quiet enough - to think. If you don’t think, then you cannot gain control of your thoughts. They will rampage through your mind like a cyclone and you can do nothing effectively to tame a cyclone.

Give yourself the possibly of thinking.

Get a life in return.

Narrowing the scope of responsibility

Chapter 252

“In every class, students angled for a way to do less work and have less engagement. One skill they had mastered was relentlessly narrowing the scope of their responsibility.

Compare this to the courses I taught at Mercy College, a local community college where most of the students had day jobs or small businesses. In every single session, they demanded more from me. More insight, more learning and yes, more homework. They made me stay late after every class. The difference was stunning—they were there to learn something.” - Seth Godin

This is why I no longer teach at the universities in the Balkan Republics, my classes were filled to overflowing by skilled masters of “relentlessly narrowing the scope of their responsibility.” It was so bad in our major seminary that if a student did not receive a passing grade on an exam, the professor was required to prepare a second (and sometimes a third!) for the student to take again until they received their passing grade!! This always felt like punishing the professor for making the exam too hard, rather than having any real expectations of the student.

The deeper sadness here is that you end up having engineers who can’t engineer and doctors who can’t diagnosis or prescribe and teachers who can’t teach, and mechanics who can’t mechanic, and in my case at the seminar, pastors who can’t pastor. Its a travesty in every sense of the word, and  far too easy to place this blame burden on the teachers and professors.

But I am pretty sure that if I had joined Seth at Mercy college and had some of THOSE students, then my perspective would be quite different. I love being in the classroom with people who are sucking out everything I have to give in the pursuit of learning, rather than people who argue endless about every tiny minutia on the syllabi’s.

The piece that we all control

Chapter 251

To be credible, you have to be proud of what you do. - Rath

Credibility is plenty difficult to come by and if you aren’t proud of what you do, its going to much more difficult to be credible. Credibility is a reflection of you as a person and me as a person. It is you doing and thinking what you say you are all about. It is about a form of congruency that raises your trust factor. It is your actions and your words being in sync. It is you and I under-promising and over-delivering, consistently and dependably. 

Authority and authenticity come from credibility. Believability and character are the underpinnings to credibility. Your credibility is how you are going to have your character judged for your whole life. Its important. If you want your credibility to be high and remain so, you need to be proud of what you are about. You think, “Well I am just a common laborer on an assembly line.” or “I am an unimportant cog in my huge factory.” or something along these lines.

While you may be correct about the content of what your job description consists of, that it may not be a change-the-world piece, but HOW you are doing it is where pride of what you do comes from. The quality of our labor is the piece that each one of us controls. Whatever you do, do it well and do it fairly. Instant credibility.

You can be proud of a job well done, even if it does not come with a high paycheck or lots of prestige or tons of visibility or fame. Pride in quality that you produce is totally legit, no matter what the content may be or not.

permanent repeat affliction

Chapter 250

“ . . . a million stories on permanent repeat . . .”

This is my dad and his generation. My father-in-law too. I don’t want to join their ranks of a million stories on permanent repeat. Not 100% sure that its not age-affected, but I think mostly it is a posture of life, an attitude about what is happening to you, the narrative you tell yourself about yourself and your life.

I mean my dad still completely has all his mental faculties intact and functioning well. Hell his memory is better than mine! He, in fact I would argue, knows that he is repeating these one million stories, because he often starts the sentence, “I know I have told you a hundred times before . . . “ He knows. This is why I severely doubt that this permanent repeat affliction is an age-related one. I think it is an identity related thing.

What I mean is this, these constantly repeated stories of this person and that person and this difficulty and that abuse and those school experiences, and those bullies and that boss man and those working conditions and that hardship and those people and that unfairness and this danger and that hurt and so on and so forth, these are in the end, the stories that make up his understanding of himself. It is his culture expressed as an oral litany.

The problem with this million stories on permanent repeat is that makes it incredibly difficult to live any new stories, to have new experiences, to go new places, to become anything else than what you were in the past. If that is what you choose to be ok then, but don’t constantly share it with those who want to become more.

The deciding moment

Chapter 249

The deciding moment.

The deciding moment, when you first get out of bed, and you are sitting on the toilet trying to get your bleary eyes to stay open and your mind begin to function at the most basic level, is your deciding moment. Its when you decide how you are going to approach this day, its when you decide what your attitude is going to be for this day. This is a powerful moment, and it is the most difficult one of the day to grasp because of the state you are in, barely awake and probably resenting it, and wishing for nothing more than to go back to bed. 

But you can’t. You have to move forward, you have to go prepare breakfast, you have to get everyone up and out of the door, the coffee made, the dishes washed, the beds made, and a shower . . . returning to bed is not an option. But you are facing other options and that is why the deciding moment is so critical to the entire day. Because this is when you will decide, unwillingly or willing, what the tone and temper of the day will be like. It could be a powerful deciding moment if you are strong enough or disciplined enough to actively participate in the deciding moment.

The reason I am writing about this is because I can see how important the deciding moment is each day and because I struggle so much to actively participate in that decision each day. I get maybe 15 minutes between opening my eyes and that decision coming into play as I begin to interact with other people in my life and home. Those are my most passive 15 minutes of the entire day in terms of what I am feeling, but they are also perhaps the most important 15 minutes of the day, because of the impact they have on the remaining 23 hours and 45 minutes.

No longer captive

Chapter 248

In a world that has changed forever, and will never return to what it once was, hard work is never wasted. Our efforts still make a difference for everything. Getting what we want when we want it with little effort may be gone forever. And good riddance I say! This was making us weak. Hard work is never wasted.

Even if it has a limited effect on what you are working at, it has a great effect on you. Get moving, start living! Today is the first day of the rest of your life. It will be what you make it, unless you don’t make it into anything. Then it will be whatever takes the least effort to get and not enjoy. You will complain and complain and you have no excuses, no valid excuses at all. Decide right this very moment that you will be 100% responsible for what happens in you. You will be 100% responsible for your choices. No blaming and no complaining and no whining, these are your choices. Own them!

Then the fact that the world is irrevocably changing forever doesn’t matter overly. What matters is that you are applying consistent effort to upskilling, to learning, to projects that are changing the world, to endeavors to feed the hungry and release trafficked people from their slavery. These are the ones that capture my imagination, you can dream your own efforts and where you want to make a difference.

No longer are you captive to a life of leisure and ease which makes you weak and undisciplined. Now you are strong and powerful and you can change the world, because you found the power to change yourself.

Failures are failures, but . . .

Chapter 247

“I don’t believe in failure. I believe in growth moments” Moawad and Staples

This is a reframing of failure, or more accurately a reframing of less-than-desired-results, into meaningful lessons of some type. In my world or way of thinking a “failure” is a failure - its pretty unredeemable except the deep certainty that you will never ever do that again. When you review your life choices and actions, these are the events that you remember as failures. I still can’t reframe those into anything other than failures, even decades later.

But you and I can reframe less-than-desired-results into lessons that will result in better decision making and improved actions for later in the day, next week, next cycle, whatever. In fact, lets call these actions mistakes, or poor decisions instead of failures. Because that’s what the majority of them really are at the end of the day.

Mind you there are clearly similarities between mistakes and failures, but the implications of the scale is really the deciding factor. Mistakes are less-than-desired-results kinds of moments, whereas failures are career changing, life-altering kinds of events. The author’s may be correct and all of these mistakes cum failures can be growth moments, but eternal regret is not a growth process in my mind.

I made a mistake yesterday painting the 1966 chassis that we are working on. I got better as I learned from those mistakes. That is a far cry from a failure. I failed . . . hmmmm, exactly. Failures are epic and no one wants to share them. Oh I can regularly share near failures with my clients and show them how they can lead to something better. But my failures, I don’t share those with anyone. 

Balance and possibilities

Chapter 246

Balancing work and elder care

This can be complexified a great deal if you generally live far away from your elder. I live about 5000 miles away on another continent. So if you find yourself on the wrong side of the ocean in a crisis, getting there quickly is impossible. International travel is usually at least a two day process for us.

On the other hand, with technology, we can talk every single day as long as we want, pretty much effortlessly. In the three and a half years this elder care has been my responsibility, we have talked about 70 minutes on the phone every single day I am not physically here. This would have been unthinkable when we were living in Russia 25 years ago. And actually impossible from where we lived. And even if it had been possible, it would have been astronomically expensive (the monthly call from our neighbor’s house, to our kids at the boarding school ran about $300 an hour).

Yesterday was a perfect example of how effortless this is in the modern world. I am with the elder I am caring for at the moment, and my wife called from Eastern Europe (where she is working) and we were video chatting over lunch together when a client called from Berlin and so we got off our daily video chat and I rang the client back in Berlin. All from rural Georgia, where we are surrounded by far more cows than people, all while doing my elder care.

There is no balance, but there are possibilities.

What you can control

Chapter 245 

 . . . what matters most to most introverts. It’s not quiet or space. It’s control. We just wish to be able to engage people on our own terms - Damon Young

Not 100% sure I agree with this, because I am an introvert, and quiet or silence even, is pretty high up on my list of what matters most. But Young has a point that the isolation required these days by the Coronavirus pandemic is wearing on some introverts as well. Personally I haven’t noticed it at all, and I am enjoying the effects of quarantine. It feels normal to me. Best possible day to day for me.

But others are feeling this really intensely, and every introvert definitely wants to have the control to engage when they want to engage, even though that may not be very much. Not only does the quarantine take away when we can engage, but also The Who we engage. And of course any quarantine will take away the Where we can engage. This loss of control is distressing to everyone, even introverts.

And my estimation is that here in the USA it will get quite a bit more strict before these restrictions end. But I think that focusing on your lack of control is just making things worse. If you are fully engaged on another front, you don’t even notice the control thing because, well you are engaged on another front. You only have so much bandwidth, so burn it all on what you can control or do or accomplish, and don’t waste any on what you can’t control.

Inspire! Lead!

Chapter 244

"If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader." ~ John Quincy Adams

I am a leader. I want all my actions to inspire others to dream and learn and do and become.  It is essentially the TIME leadership model, which postulates that all leadership activities involve Thinking Inspiration Mobilizing and Empowering. The TIME process is what I am all about. 

This is about to become even more important to all of us, in the post Coronavirus world. Nothing is ever gonna be the same as it was. Especially the way we work and live. The world has changed more quickly and more completely in the last 12 weeks than at any point in history. Cities of millions, with empty streets and empty stores and businesses as people stay home in hope of not getting nor giving the virus. Unfortunately this is the only frame that people are currently focusing on, how the isolation keeps them at home.

But the larger story is how we are going to work and live and move forward in this highly connected world that has shown us new vulnerabilities, new possibilities, and new challenges. We need thinking inspiration mobilizing and empowering more than ever. We need leaders who aren’t stuck in the psychic prison of the isolation cycle of this new reality. Leaders who inspire dreams and learn and do and become and bring others along with them. 

Lead! Instead of being self-absorbed and whining about why your favorite restaurant is closed, or why you can’t go to church, or your after-work club is no longer an option, but as I sit here at this table and listen to my 80 year old dad tell of the working world in the 1960’s and 70’s, the contrast is startling. That world is long gone and won’t be returning. And the one you remember from the 20/teens won’t either. 

Lead!

What you might have been

Chapter 243

You can still become what you might have been.

One of the greatest dangers in life as you get older and older, is that you start thinking that you are too old to change. This is not true, but it feels like it is true, and even more so when you reach a certain age, a certain psychological tripping point or a particular stage in your career, but its not true. My learning curve has never been higher in any decade than it has been in my 50’s. I have learned far far more in this decade (and I still have two years remaining!) than I did in my 20’s and 30’s as I went through college and grad school.

I have a terminal degree, I have gone as far in the educational world as a person can go. I lead an International non-profit, I live abroad. I am still learning on that side of things. But in the last two weeks I have removed two engines from their chassis’s, and I have disassembled an entire truck. I have repaired a fence, I have learned how to count the teeth on a flywheel in order to discover what kind of clutch, throwout bearing and pressure plate is needed to be used with that particular transmission, etc, etc. I would quickly bore Bernie with the minutia about this stuff. But the bottom line is that I continue to learn. You can too.

In fact, you no longer can say “I wish I had become such and such” or “I wish I had learn this and that” because you can. You can re-aim your ambitions higher than ever before. You can still become what you might have been, regardless of your age.

I don’t want to be like this!

Chapter 242

“I could have all the tickets but one, and that other fellow would win.” - Earl

This statement had me howling with laughter and I couldn’t stop. My dad can say the funniest things you can’t imagine. Yes I said that right. But while these Southern ways of saying things can be very humorous, they hide a terrible underbelly, a mindset that makes or is made by the environment down here.

Its extremely negative. Negativity disguised as humor often enough, but nevertheless powerful negativity. When you start looking for it, you can see how in permeates all of the culture and all of the messages that parents and grandparents send their kids and grandkids. Of course the kids don’t know what they are getting, they are just getting what they are getting. Kids don’t get a choice.

Not until they are older. Sometimes much older. It takes a while to recognize the messages that you were fed as a child. Then it takes a while longer to assess those messages and decide if they are valid for you or not. Those are the two easy and objective steps in the process. The much messier and longer process is disempowering those messages internally.

I find that my internal dialogue can be just as powerfully negative as Earl’s statement above. While I have lots of practice hiding those thoughts and feelings, they are actually still in force somewhere in my mind or psyche. Overcoming that, now that is the real battle! I have to remind myself over and over and over again, that I don’t want to be like this, that I reject the possibility that I am destined to lose, that I refuse to believe that I don’t have a hope and a future.

Is this the life you want?

Chapter 241

What are your nonnegotiables, and what are your guardrails?

These are different and equally important. Your nonnegotiables are your values that you live by come hell or high water. They are the foundation of your moral house that you live and die in. They are the measurement of your life. They are the cornerpins of your stability, however much or little that may be.

The guardrails are the systems that you have in place to stay true to your nonnegotiables. These are your protection pieces. These are your safety lines to protect you. These are your over-the-cliff protection frames to keep you on the road. They may hurt when you bump into them or crash into them, but that pain is less than if you ruin your nonnegotiables. Trust me.

So here, list your nonnegotiables:

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

Here list your guardrails:

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

Is this the life you want?

The development of me

Chapter 240

What matters the most on a daily basis?

Whatever those things are, you need a systemic way to make sure they get done first or when your energy is highest in the course of the day. For me that would be my mornings. For some of you, perhaps it is your afternoon or evening, though I can’t get my brain around that, but knock yourself out.

So what matters most on a daily basis? Perhaps you will need to do some careful analysis or perhaps it will be obvious to you, but what matters most on a daily basis are the actions that get you the fartherest down the road, toward your goals, where you are going. Not necessarily the noisiest loudest most urgent thing, but that which advances your agenda the most consistently. This may be counter intuitive for you, for instance I thought email was what matter most on a daily basis for years, until I realized it wasn’t.  But I am in the communication business (most people are) and thinking that email was at the top of the list was understandable. But wrong.

After years of looking at this and tweaking this and evaluating this, it became abundantly irrefutably clear that developing me, was what matter most on a daily basis. Your mileage may vary, but this is it for me. Each morning starts with working out my mind, my soul and my body. This has actually become my whole morning many days. Everything else in my life runs from this core ongoing development of me.

Nothing else gets touched until my morning development time happens. This is what matters most on a daily basis for me.

The answer has always been no

Chapter 239

Is everything going to be the way it was and the way I expected it to be?” then the answer is no. The answer to that question is always no, it always has been. - Seth

The past is past and it is never going to be that way again. This has always been true. Things are not the way that they were when you where in first grade, or fifth grade or high school. They never will be again. The past is past and it can be no other. The real issue here, is our nostalgia about the past, and our desire for things to be simpler and less complex and less stressful and more predictable and more of what I expect. But this too will never be again. We must change our posture and expectations.

Especially as the whole world is about to shut down. And COVID-19 is only the beginning, as COVID-20 and the then COVID-21 will challenge our status quo once again in the future. No things will never be the same as they were, and it has been ever true. Time goes only forward, never backwards. 

I am currently living with an 80 year old man, who spends about 90% of his thinking and talking in the past. All he talks about is the past. He is talking about a ghost that only exists in his mind. 

What he and I both need to be talking is the present and near future. We need to let the past stay where it is.  The present and future are changing faster and fast. What is our position going to be on this?

The grumpy old man floor

Chapter 238

We all need to stay out of the emotional basement. Our mood elevator goes up and down constantly. But its all too easy, especially in these COVID-19 days, to spend all our time in the emotional basement. I feel like I spend more time in the basement that I do on the top floors. I want to move into the top floors permanently - experiencing life with a sense of humor, patience, hope, and gratitude. 

And I do experience these top floor feelings most days, but in fleeting moments here and there. I don’t experience them in a stead sustained sort of way that I want, and the world needs. Most people have constant feelings, and so if you and I aren’t having top floor feelings of humor, patience, hope and gratitude, then you and I are visiting another floor and other feelings are at play. If you make it to the basement then you are feeling depressed, stressed, anxious, and. judgmental.

Honestly I spend more time on the grumpy old man floor more than either of these highs and lows. While there is something to be said for the whole grumpy old man persona, its not a very pleasant place to stay. But my elevator stays here in these middle grumpy old man floors 80% of the time, and I touch the top and bottom floors about 10% of the day on a typical day. 

So I am writing about this emotional elevator in hopes that visualizing this metaphor will help me remember that I can choose which floors I am staying on and moving toward.

Remember and reach for the top floors throughout the day.

Visible for everyone to see

Chapter 237

The things we say and the projects we do are our clips. Judge us.  - Seth

We generally only want to be judged for our intentions. Even though clearly  no one can even know those most of the time unless we explicitly state them out loud to everyone, and even then we have to take your word for it, because intentions are not verifiable. Intentions are not visible. Intentions can’t be compared against something else.

That is why what we say and what we produce are much easier metrics to assess. But they are also visible and comparable and open to interpretation. That’s why we like to be judged by our intentions far more intensely than what we say and what we produce - we are the only ones who can frame our intentions. No one can misconstrue nor interpret our intentions. No one can even argue about them, they are what we say they are - and that is why no one judges them - its impossible.

But the words that come out of your mouth, oh baby, that is an open stream, and clear invitation to assess, judge, convict, affirm and sentence you. Is this unfair? Sometimes. I recall a conversation a group of us were having in a barber shop 35 years ago. Making fun, joking around, saying less than stellar things to impress our compatriots. My comments showed up in the Orlando Sentinel the next morning! Just my comments. Out of context of the whole conversation! I have never spoken to or in front of a reporter willingly ever since. 

And your clips - well they too are visible for everyone to see. Its what you produce or not. It is what it is, regardless of your perfect intentions.

Understand that your words and your clips are going to be judged.

Embrace it.