In honor of Anet Marie

# Chapter 189

Yesterday was another spectacular day, warm and sunny, and lots of great high points and events. This kind of weather in February is very unusual and rarely seen. And we had snow this week already even! So a sunny awesome day on the outside, but still a heavy sad heart on the inside. Still mourning and wrestling with the death of Anet Marie.

And in some ways that made the sun brighter and the day warmer and the experience more intense, because we are determined to celebrate life in the face of death. We celebrate each portion and segment and event not to stave off death, because that is impossible, but to rejoice in the mere act of living. It is an act of thankfulness and rebellion all in one. It is a statement of our determination to live life to the fullest, to experience this moment in all its fullness, to shout to the universe that life goes forward still.

So I filled the day with most life affirming actions I could and enjoyed it to the maximum. Anet would want us all to choose joy instead of darkness and depression. I have even enjoyed watching videos of her singing and playing. What an amazing person.

Needed therapy

# Chapter 188

90 miles or so on the motorcycles today. In February. Unbelievable. And I really needed those miles after getting the news that another close friend had died. Cancer. 47 years old. We had worked together for over 20 years. She fought cancer for a whole year and . . . lost. The world is emptying out of all the great people we know and love it seems some days. Yeah I needed that 90 miles. And could have ridden another 90 easily.

It was easy to go back through a mental picture log of our years together and all the memories we have of her while cruising along on an incredibly warm February day 5000 miles away from where she died and where we worked together for so many years. The motorcycles bring that kind of mood on in a good way. It is its own kind of therapy, the reason I got the bike in the first place. Back then I needed therapy most every day, now just occasionally. Yesterday was one of those days.

We all die, I get that, but why I am never prepared for it when it comes to friends and family?

The brake cadence

# Chapter 187

“Press” . . . pause . . . “let off” . . . pause . . . “press” . . . pause . . . “let off” this cadence, this sequence, that I have been doing with my dad for 50 plus years is a brake bleeding chant. When replacing the brakes and most brake repairs, you have to “bleed” the brakes to make certain that you have removed all air from the brake lines. This involves one person turning the bleed valve on the back of the brake panel, and one person in the driver seat pumping the brakes when instructed. I have always been the little kid, or guy, sitting in the driver seat pumping the brakes. My dad has always been the guy bleeding the brakes and calling out “Press” or “let off”.

When I was eight or nine years old, my dad would often need this kind of assistance late at night, because he worked a regular 40 hour a week job and then came home and worked until late at night doing brakes and engine rebuilds, so that we could eat and have a life. But that is really difficult for little kids to get their brains around, and plus I have been asleep more than once, when he would come and wake me up to help him bleed the brakes. As a kid I was an incredibly deep sleeper, and this was really difficult to do - to wake and be helpful. Plus it was often cold up there in the shop. All these factors put me off mechanicing for most of my life. My dad was just trying to make a living.

Now doing this with my dad when I am nearly 60 years old, is nostalgic fun for me. It’s more difficult for my dad now that he is 80 years old, but he didn’t complain too much. It was a good day and now we have solid brakes on this 55 year old pickup, and we built more memories while doing it.

Making old new

# Chapter 185

Making old stuff new is seriously difficult work and has more challenges to it than you would think. Even taking the old stuff apart is hard because everything is rusted and broke and stuck together in the wrong ways. But in comparison to rebuilding, taking it apart is quick work. We were disassembling a 55 year old truck bed yesterday and this involved cutting torches, impact wrench and regular tools and plenty of tenacious ingenuity. Oh and of course don’t forget the hammers. This is the easier part of restoration by far, the part that often requires brute force and little finesse and mistakes don’t cost too much.

Putting things back together, now that is real skill and work. This is no lego set style putting together mind you, but a careful returning to original condition. Putting the pieces back together is a small part of the restoration, returning the pieces to original or better condition, that is the bulk of the effort, and the highest level of skill. This takes decades long of development and learning and practice to master practically any of these skills. I am learning them later in life and so my expertise levels won’t climb very high, there just isn’t enough time remaining for me to garner many of these skills, but learning in and of itself is a pleasurable and beneficial, and so I will keep pressing forward. But you apply the 10,000 hour rule to 200 different skills and then you see the challenge. You have to choose and pick your skills to learn when you are almost 60 years young.

What gets done

# Chapter 184

Yesterday was only a half day of travel so I was still able to squeeze in a 26 miler outside before hunkering down and getting to work on the farm. We moved the final third of the truck we are rebuilding, into the shop for initial disassembling and assessment. And of course moving that big thing required that we get the tractor involved and then the 20 foot trailer. Then jacks and sawhorses and 2x10’s were employed. This is one of the beautiful things about being here, we have the right tools and equipment to do the work.

This is life on the farm and in the auto rebuilding shop in the coronavirus world. You stay at home with long-term projects that keep you focused and engaged, and you order whatever parts you need and have them delivered. Every spot on the planet seems to be a hotspot for the virus right now and this is definitely not a good time to get the 80 year old parental out into public.

But the reason for telling this story about the bed of the truck that we are rebuilding is that it has been 11 months since we started! In a normal part-time rebuilding project we would still be a year from getting to this part of the truck. Yet this project got a lot more attention than it normally would have in the course of life in 2020 and so we are much farther along.

Whatever gets our attention, gets done.

Owning it

# Chapter 183

A travel day in a truck with a friend. Great day to catch up on life and talk about the trajectory that we are each creating in our lives, and about whether or not we actually have some influence over our trajectories or not. But of course we do. Our weight is a result of what we eat. Our spirits are a result of which scriptures we intake and what generosity we share with others. Our mental rooms reflect what we put in there as well, what we fill them with over and over. Our intellect is as sharp as we are willing to challenge it. Our relationships are generally a reflection of our investment and commitments that we have made to them. Our loves generally reflect the effort and work that we give them. Feeling powerless to impact our trajectories is often just mental laziness and abdication of our responsibilities for our lives. Own it!

While this day was important and good in the life of our friendship, I mourn the loss of all my other systems and habits that drive my life, my own trajectory. I did not exercise physically nor mentally yesterday. I sat in a truck for 13 plus hours. I did not write this section either. I did not post a new one in my second 275 book. I did not listen to any book nor read any pages. No new ideas were allow to reach my brain and start something grand.

There are always trade offs and this one was a good one. After today I will get back on track with my habits and routines that produce a great trajectory. Your habits are producing yours. Own it!

Your cables

# Chapter 182

Recently I was wenching a steel cable through a drain system, 70 feet out to the sewer main, and then another 20 feet to the manhole cover where I had my wench set up. 90 feet of steel cable and we were putting tremendous pressure on it. It stopped, stuck after about 7 feet! Zac my partner told me to pull harder, and I did. Soon Zac joined me at the manhole wench and pulled with me, until there was incredible force on the steel cable.

But it did not break. This is because of the multiple thin strands of wire that are bundled together forming this steel cable. This is what habits become when you practice them for a long time - a steel cable of intention and action pulling your through most difficult moments in life and giving you something to hold on to. You can think of each day that you practice your habits as another thin tiny wire added to the bundle of your steel cable. Your cable of character. Your cable of excellence. Your cable of development. Your cable of Protecting the Asset. Your cable of good health and strength development. Your cable of fiery intentions to change the world. Your cable of certainty that you can chip away at these problems and solve them. Your cable of spiritual disciplines and wisdom. There is so much more. Imagine!

Average razors

# Chapter 179

/The successful man is the average man, focused." ~ Anonymous/

Focus is the key to so much in life. Or you can think of it as attention. The entire western world is monetizing around your attention and they will do anything to capture it and hold it. They have discovered that your attention or focus is the entrance into your wallet. So there are thousands of engineers out there working to keep you on FaceBook, Twitter, Instagram, etc etc as much as possible, not so that you can stay in touch with friends and relatives far away, but so that you and I will buy their products, and we evidently do. I would highly recommend boxing those activities in to small segments of the day and never letting them out of there. Put them on a timer and keep the leash tight, otherwise you will frivolously spend all your focus on the most unimportant things and get very few change-the-world actions completed.

I am not looking for star talent in my business and friends, I am looking for average people with a high focus discipline. In fact the more normal “average” they are, the sharper their focus discipline will be generally, because us average folks have to compensate. I have lots of tenacity but I have to work for focus. More and more I am heading to the basement to work when I need my highest focus, because that removes even the visual stimulus of looking out the window next to my desk. This is where success lies, in deep work done with razor sharp focus.

What are you focused on?

Risk

# Chapter 178

Risk is relative. People have a broad spectrum of risk, from those who have no tolerance for risk at all, to those who can risk everything over and over. The vast majority of us are huddle in the end of the spectrum where there is little risk - and little reward - and we call ourselves wise. Few there are at the other end of the spectrum where risk is great and so are the potential rewards - and we generally call them fools. We consider them to be strange foolish outliers who defy common sense and who take unnatural risks like daily walks in the park. But the reality is that the real difference is that vast distance in our positions on risk that separate us. Those on the no risk end of the spectrum can’t get their minds around the real risk takers at the other end, and in fact they seem to be strange deranged individuals who don’t consider the realities of life in the same way that the rest of us do.

Yet there they are, and darn it most of them win more than they lose. All of them are wealthier than me and growing their wealth at far fast rates than I am. Even though they lose some, their capacity for loss is far higher than mine. They seem to view losses and gains in a completely different fashion than I do. Their capacity to recover from a loss seems staggering to me. I sit here fretting about the 107,986 shares I have in a worthless company gone bankrupt, while they are out building their next company and network and infrastructure. Losses incapacitate most of us, but energize these rare people on the other end. Gains are hoarded and counted over and over by most of us, while those rare individuals on the other end, just get up and build another company and network and infrastructure. Their losses and gains are just another day.

Seems like some mental shifts are in order.

What about me? (Hint, its the wrong question)

# Chapter 177

Another classmate had died. He was a quiet one. So quiet that after 12 years of school together, I still did not know him very well. I don’t like what that says about me, but it is accurate and true. Still the same self-absorbed person I was 50 years ago most days. Living in my own world inside my head. Wishing that it were easier to think of others, care for others, reach out to others, if not for Brenda I would be a hermit on an island, mentally in another universe.

Not sure why it still surprises me that another classmate has died, we are all pushing 60 years of age now - an unbelievably old age to us just a few short decades ago. And here after his life has ended I find out that Gregg was a veteran, that he served on aircraft carriers in the Navy, that he lived not all that far away from where we grew up, and yet I haven’t seen him once in the 40 years since we graduated from school. Ok ok maybe me living in five different countries in that time span had something to do with that, but I suspect on good evidence that if I had never left I hometown, I still would not have seen him a single time, because I am all into me.

This selfishness has a cure, and yet we seem incapable of focusing on others with deep regularity and intentionality. There is always that underlying primary concern of how does this affect me, what about me, what about my goals and objectives. Shesh this is disgusting.

Not a destination

# Chapter 176

Folks are looking for the happy place in life, thinking it is a destination they arrive at through some cosmic combination of forces or good fortune that comes together randomly or as a result of our efforts at pushing the cosmic happy world in our direction. Burton Hills said that happiness isn’t a destination, and I immediately think, “he has never been to Chiang Mai Thailand when there is snow on the ground in Pennsylvania!” And I mean that literally. Life may not be happy there, but it is as close to a happy place as anyone can find in the middle of winter. Warm day and night, beautiful mountains, spicy food, and pleasant people.

But Hills’ is right, happiness isn’t a destination, neither physical nor mental, its a way of living, its how we approach all of life, and it happens inside of us. We can be happy in northern Canada in the middle of a snow storm or we can be happy in SE Asia in January on a warm beach. While I think every rational person in the world would prefer the beach, that is just not actually so. My best bud Kimmy would always choose the snow storm over the beach. On the other hand I think snow storm people are not as happy as beach people, but that is not an empirical study or proof, just my bias toward warm temperatures.

Many decades ago I thought that being married to the perfect person would make me happy. And I married her. And while she is perfect, I was still just as unhappy as before. Lesson here, happiness is not a destination (or marriage), it is a way of living, it is inside me or not at all. While warm temps can encourage me in many ways, there are unhappy people in Asia too. Like you and me, they have to find a way to live happy.

Our willingness to fall (fail)

# Chapter 175

“Fall seven times, stand up eight.” - Japanese proverb

Bootstrapping is underrated in the modern world, people want so much more help than folks expected (or wanted) in the past. We need to recover that can-do-ism of the past, that doggedly determined commitment to getting back up no matter how many times we fall. Now we are so failure-adverse that we rarely fall. Thus we end up timid and afraid and ultimately far behind the frequently falling crowd.

This is a place for the perfect metaphor - roller skating. Or you could use snow boarding too, they both depend upon your willingness to fall (fail) in order to master them. There is a direct correlation between your falling rate and your learning rate in both of these sports. I have been taking my three oldest grandkids skating at the local roller-rink now for a few months. At first none of them to could skate, The two most willing to fall have nearly mastered skating. They are fast and as smooth as silk. The third grandchild is still pulling herself along the hand rail, because she is completely unwilling to fall. Even though they have been skating roughly the same number of times, the skill of two has far outstripped the third, simply because of their willing to fall.

Even I still fall occasionally, even though I have been skating for over 50 years. And yes I am the oldest person out there on skates by quite a bit . . . but the point is that falling is not fun, but it is where all the progress is made.

The demands of living

# Chapter 174

There is death for all of us. Last night my son-in-law’s dad passed away. There is no escape from death for any of us. It will come to each of us. Most ignore this truth and believe it will never happen to them. But that gets more and more difficult to believe as you get older and older and more of your friends and enemies cross over to the other side of eternity. The minutes are ticking and our time is limited. Best to get things in order, for this comes to you and me for certain.

My dad is a big believer in this. We have already chosen his casket, funeral, grave site, head stone, etc etc. My son-in-law is having to make all those kinds of decisions today because his dad refused to prepare for this certainty. It’s a really shitty way to leave things for those you say you love. There is no rushing it, but there is also no stopping it, our days are numbered. Don’t be an idiot and cause even more pain to those left behind by refusing to take care of the details of your passing.

But there is another side of dying that is much more difficult to address and one that my dad doesn’t do nearly as well - living. The certainty of death should make living all the more precious and important and high priority. But unlike the details of dying, the details of living are messy and difficult and often vague. There is no checklist of things to take care of and buy and decide. Living requires much more of us. Living requires an engagement in the present and future that becomes increasingly more challenging if you are sick or infirmed in some fashion and most of us will be. Living demands much more of us than dying - share the love you have to give, and all the love you can receive, thoughtfulness, depth, kindness, joy, happiness, and peace you can give and take.

Death is certain, life far less so. Make appropriate plans.

Reign in your dopamine drives

# Chapter 173

An astonishing day yesterday. I basically locked myself in the basement for four hours so that I could focus focus focus, and I even added noise-canceling earbuds to limit all visual and auditory inputs. The results were awesome. So turn off your phones, close your Slack channels, halt your notifications, stop all interruptions and soar. Experience the thrill of progress and success and deep work, the flow of ideas, the depth of what you are capable of producing. It will never happen under other circumstances. There is not enough room in your brain to manage all the channels of input seeking your attention. No one can handle all those attention seekers in a productive manner. Honestly, if you can’t turn off all those distractions, then that is a decision to hop from email to tweet to facebook to web browser to text message and to not get anything important done.

Group all those attention seekers into one single hour long space in your morning and perhaps one more in your afternoon, and then box them out, turn them off, silence them, refuse to bow down to their alerts and notifications, beeps and pings and vibrations. Have enough adult in you to restraint your dopamine desires, to get to the important stuff, the world changing stuff, the value producing stuff, the stuff that can really make a difference in the world, rather than the loud the urgent and the noisy.

Have an astonishing day!

Boundaries

# Chapter 170

All upside down world this week. All systems are off kilter, and I am sitting here trying to keep this piece in its normal morning slot, but that too is impossible. Clearly I need coffee! Ah that’s much better! Now that I reread that, I realize that many of you will think I am talking about the World, but I am really just talking about my world - trying to get my systems back on track after a three month bender is proving to be nearly impossible.

For decades my mornings have been sacrosanct and protected from outside schedules and wrecks. But not for the last three months and not today. Any time you have people in the mix, things are going to go awry and you can’t plan for that, you can only roll with that. Flex and live this moment. It is all you can do. Getting upset or frustrated is pointless. If this is stressing you to the breaking point, well then good! You will now build better boundary’s so that this time is protected and productive. If that is your only take-away this morning, it is a solid one. You won’t go wrong there.

Until you and I value what we produce enough to protect these highly productive times in our days, no one else will value what we produce enough to pay us and engage us in these endeavors. Of course you can always just go exchange time and energy for money, the way that most folks do, and that is fine too. You have to decide if you want control of your time so that you can leverage your life, or not. Decide!

Changed forever

# Chapter 169

Obstacles are a normal part of an eventful and exciting life as I have said before. And in defeating them and overcoming them we are changed forever. Neither my brother nor I were very good a learning new languages. Though we did it, there was nothing fun or enjoyable about it. The energy and focus demands were excruciating. But my brother said something after I had learned Russian and he had learned German, “after doing this, I can do anything.” The overcoming of that challenge, defeating it, climbing that mountain, change us.

These days I don’t have linguistic challenges, I have financial and vocational ones. You have your challenges and they are likely different than mine. We can be transformed by the process of overcoming them. It helps a great deal to envision what changes about you as we climb our mountains and reach our peaks. In the striving we are shaped and formed into more. The constant effort and demands makes us hardier and stronger and resilient and capable and focused. Welcome the obstacles!

What am I not seeing?

# Chapter 168

Choosing your specialization and making a living at it. This is far more difficult to do than it is to write on this digital paper. While I have been doing my specialized kind of work for decades, and full time for the last eight years, it has never had to pay me or support me before. I had another stream of revenue to do that. But now I am to the place where I need to join the ranks of those who live off what their passion and creativity and specialization can produce for them. I am not reading many thrilling stories about what this is going to look like. Seems like there are lots of starving artists out there.

Clearly we need to move in this direction with wide open eyes and clear vision. Not only does this require a prudent person to have excellent vision and foresight, but also the willingness to consider every possible variant. For example, my specialization is with non-profits and International Workers, people who have very little money to start with and jealousy guard what they do have so that it does the greatest good. While they may desperately need what I am offering, it will never trump the hungry people knocking at their doors for food and resources. This is why I have depended upon the outside stream of revenue to pay the bills for years, because the people in my specialization are poor and on the edge to begin with, paying me will be the last thing on their list of to-do’s, no matter how valuable I make myself.

So I can continue the second stream of revenue once it has been shored up - is that even possible in the Coronavirusworld? Or I can work an outside job - which I just tried valiantly for the last three months and it failed beyond words. Or I can change my mix of clients to reflect a more balanced portfolio of business and mission clients - looks good on paper but execution has proved to be elusive so far. I have tried at various levels of intensity to do all three of these approaches with very limited success. What am I not seeing?

Who are you gonna delight?

# Chapter 167

It’s travel day again. Weird to be saying that in Coronavirusworld but yet I am saying that. The 4:00 am alarm says it loud and clear. The stress and tension of moving from A to B to C to D today says it. So much can go wrong and might - it has in the past and will in the future. It’s the nature of traveling long distances quickly. But more than anything is the emotional feel of a traveling day. It is the feeling of transitions.

I am leaving this responsibility and exchanging this one for responsibilities elsewhere - all just an inside-world transition while the landscape flies pass at 500 miles per hour transitioning the outside world. Finishing this responsibility well and retaining enthusiasm for the next responsibility is another transition inside. Doing this transition is particularly difficult, because I am sure to leave something important here as I am packing my bags, and putting things away. And putting things away is another whole transition - after almost four years of positioning us to move here to be close to this responsibility - I have cars and bikes and “stuff” everywhere. Now everything has to be gassed up and stored until I come back in three weeks. Try doing that on both ends of a transition 6-8 times a year . . . its a bigger job than you think. And there are mental transitions to go along with the emotional and physical ones - like navigating a city of 12 million versus MooCow GA - just thinking about the contrasts makes my brain hurt.

Its definitely a travel day again. As Seth said this morning, “All forward motion disappoints someone.

If you serve one audience, you’ve let another down. One focus means that something else got ignored. If you create something scarce, someone won’t get their hands on it.

The very act of creation means that it won’t be the ideal solution for everyone.

On the other hand, with certainty, we know that doing nothing disappoints an even larger group of people.

The opportunity is to find someone to delight and to embrace the fact that someone is not everyone.”

How often you get back up

# Chapter 166

Everyone gets knocked down. Some get knocked down regularly. There are emotional knockdowns, physical, spiritual and relational knockdowns, and pretty much any way you can imagine, someone can receive a knockdown. These set backs are an everyday part of life, unless you are completely charmed and never get hit by misfortune. I don’t know anyone like that. Perhaps you do. Perhaps those with charmed lives only live in books and fairytales? The point here is that me you and everyone I know, gets taken down in some fashion regularly. The question is not if, but when and how often.

What matters in this experience is not the type or number of knockdowns you receive, but how often you get back up. Resilience is king in this one. Everyone gets knocked down, not everyone gets up. And many who do, seemed to be injured in such a manner that they don’t have their former energy and power and purpose. This of course makes them more susceptible to more injuries from future knockdowns. This is the beginning of a bad circle. You want to do an intervention if at all possible. Break this cycle before it digs its claws in too deeply.

Know that knockdowns are coming. Be prepared. Bounce back stronger than before. Focus on full recovery. Prepare for more success.

Your results might be . . . less

# Chapter 165

Obstacles are the normal experience for everyone, but this is especially true when you are striving to achieve. And the more you strive to achieve something for the good of others, the obstacles seem to exponentially increase. You have to find a way around or through these obstacles, otherwise you are gonna be very disappointed in your results and success. The point here is not to get upset or frustrated by obstacles. They are the normal course of an eventful and exciting life. Notice too that I did not say anything about removing them, which is the typical language involved with obstacles. Because I don’t think you can, nor should if you actually can, remove them - they are an equal part of the landscape.

In other words, the process of overcoming the obstacles shapes the results of what you are achieving. If you removed them, rather than defeating them, your results might be . . . less. The important point here is that you see obstacles as a ubiquitous part of the whole. Yes they still have to be dealt with and worked around, but obstacles are a structural part of what you are trying to resolve, what you are aiming to achieve.

It is inevitable when explaining how trafficked girls and women are restored to their communities of origin, that Westerners are outraged that we don’t remove them from these communities permanently. These communities are the very places that allowed them to be trafficked in the first place, yet they are also the place they need to return to. The obstacles are key parts of the solution. Stop trying to remove the obstacles, unfailingly find the way to overcome them.