New Stories

# Chapter 324

There are few moments in life better than having a sleeping grand baby in your arms. I got to hold our newest granddaughter for some snuggles yesterday and there just are no adequate words to explain what goes on in your heart when you get to do this. Everything else in life can be going terrible and this turns the ship around, this changes the questions and the answers, all that you see and feel, what you know and don’t know about life. It refocuses your attention on the cycle of living and so places a perspective on you and your place in the cycle and tiny baby’s place in the cycle and how few days you have to influence this child and mark her life for good before you are gone and forgotten.

Holding this tiny baby makes today matter, she makes this moment stand large and important, she brings your attention to razor sharpness and at the same time she just lets you feel. Big feelings and powerful feelings that take nothing away from the intensity of your attention. These are the moments that we should be living for and seeking and sharing and embracing and repeating to bring joy and contentment to the world. Instead of our stories of hardship and difficulty and sadness and our general unhappiness with our lots in life, we can hold and hug and cuddle and snuggle and give blessings and love and nurture and care. Its time to make a whole book of new stories. Write these moments down, and repeat them in words and actions as often as possible.

It’s always about your attention

# Chapter 323

Where is your attention? It is something to be mindful of at all times because it is defining your life moment by moment - what you are paying attention to is your focus your joy your pain your delight your disaster your engagement of the now and now is all any of us ever have. This is your life. You can’t control many of the things that happen to you in the course of life, but what you choose to give your precious attention to is one of those things you can control and direction and choose. And guess what? You are choosing. Even when it doesn’t feel like you are are choosing you are choosing.

Where is your attention? And once you are monitoring your attention you can start doing it at more than one level at a time. Like I have my big overview attention and my high detailed in this moment all here attention. I need the big overview attention to understand and know to what I should be giving my high detailed in this moment all here attention. When I complete or finish this high detailed attention, I refer back to the big overview to see what I should intensely focus on next. This is discipline, not rocket science. You likely are already doing something similar or you have your own system of getting the MIT done. But each of these choices is like water pushing against the banks of the river, and eventually it will shape the river’s path through the pasture and determine its contours. Your attention is like that constant force of water, shaping and defining your life. Pay attention to what you are paying attention.

Stretching

# Chapter 322

Doing things that others like, because they like them, is one of the best ways to give of yourself to others. Yeah I get it, its not your gig and you have a million other things to do, but man it ain’t about you all the time. And if you think I am wrong about this, you live in a twisted reality that won’t last long, and is extremely unsatisfying. If you only live for yourself then you are doomed to be alone. Perhaps you think that a lovely idea, but I don’t believe you. I am a solid introvert and not even I could engage the level of aloneness that I am referring to here. Nah lets not even go there, there is not enough room in this small chapter to unpack that.

Doing things that others like is a powerful way to enter into the lives of people in a way that makes you grow and stretch. And growing and stretching are things that we all need in our lives. Just quit being so cotton-picking self-absorbed and you will find yourself doing all kinds of things that are outside your comfort zone. I know I know you don’t want to do any of these things but it is a necessary and helpful part of being alive and engaged to do these things. Otherwise you are living a life too small, less than you could and should, depressingly self-centered and all about you. Break this cycle of self-absorption and start to live on the edge a bit. You may discover yourself there instead of hating it. You make accidentally change the world for a bit of good there instead of spending all your treasures on you. You may find a path that is way more satisfying than the one you think you love right now.

Don’t be less

# Chapter 321

Attention is the life I am choosing to lead, if I still have this choice. There are at least two times when I don’t: when I give into the distractions of social media, doomscrolling or YouTubing, and when I have Alzheimer’s. And I am making no joke. Alzheimers robs you of your ability to pay attention and to focus. My mom had “early onset” Alzheimers and we went through almost 20 years of decline before that monster took her life. And even though its been only five years since she died, she left us mentally 15 years ago! It was all but impossible to have a conversation with her those last 9-10 years of her life, because she had no ability to focus, pay attention or execute any type of consecutive sequencing of thought or conversation. It has been a long time since I had a solid conversation with my mother and miss that more than words can express.

But I digress from the point that what you pay attention to is shaping your life. This is true of everyone. And you can lose that ability through sickness like dementia and Alzheimer’s or you can freely give up your choice to choose by playing on the internet with your phone or tablet or whatever keeps you out of the real world. And yes this is as much a diatribe against YouTube and social media as it is a advocation for paying attention to what you are paying attention to. Youtube and social media has robbed me of some of my best friends. They are so much less than they were before. Don’t be less.

floating in the temporal void

# Chapter 320

Our mental lives are regulated by the instrument of attention. And a finely tuned instrument it is! When you are using it properly it is a highly discriminate, very robust filter on the all the nonsense in the world. It will shape your life and your personality because it will be the definer of what you are allowed to see and focus upon, if used properly, which few do or choose to do. Most are floating in a temporal void of social media and straightforward entertainment to keep their attention from focusing on anything, much less something important or world-changing. In fact I would argue that most people expend far more effort in not thinking about anything, and not paying attention to anything important, than they expend in making this world a better place for everyone. All their energy goes into not using this instrument at all.

My shifting attention span needs all the energy I can muster everyday all day in order to use this world-shaping instrument in the manner it needs to be implemented. I face all the same distractions and pulls that all of you face each day in the fight to remain significant and impactful. And sometimes the more important the work you are doing and the lives you are impacting grow, the higher the pressure to vegetate - which is another way of saying, turn your brain off. Yes yes I have read all the articles about how you need to practice doing nothing in order to get those creative juices flowing, and again I would argue that if you don’t stay heavily involved in where your attention flows, then your creativity won’t matter because what you are doing won’t matter.

Attention is shaping you

# Chapter 319

Attention is shaping our lives. It excludes most things, and zero’s in on a few key things for most people and that exclusion and focus becomes the lines and substance of this thing we call life. What are you paying attention to?? Pay attention to what you are paying attention to, because that is who you are becoming, that is who you are, that is who you will be. Just sit back and think about it for a few minutes and you will see the truth of it. So here is the deal, you get to choose what you pay attention to. Here in the wealthy West, you have housing and food taken care of and that in turn frees you up to make other choices - choices about what you pay attention to with that sharp mind and all those resources you have at your disposal.

This amazing luxury was largely unknown in the historical world, but is actually commonplace today. This is the most interesting time in history to be alive - and it isn’t at the same time, because people aren’t paying attention to what they are paying attention to! They are YouTubing and FaceBooking and watching TV, which are all mindless passive methods to becoming nothing much at all. These are not the actions of change-the-world people. These are not the actions or choices of people who are paying attention to what they are paying attention. Therefore they are being shaped into the form of a consumer, a taker, a purchaser of needless goods, a non-thinking entity, something quite other than they imagine themselves to be.

The beauty of what it is

# Chapter 318

I don’t think discussing these matters we disagree on is helpful at all. All our premises are different as well as our starting points and the conclusions can not coincide when their beginnings are so varied. And not only that, but “this conversation” follows different rules than any other conversation. Special rules apply that grant exceptions to logic, gravity and other forces of the universe, that the person under discussion created in the first place. And this is inevitable when you decide that the book you are reading is no longer a memoir and bio of ancient people and their lives and interactions and understandings of how they invoked, involved and interacted with God and what He chose to do in or chose not to do in all these histories - and decide that this important book of Jewish narratives is now a science text, an instruction manual, and a detailed book of rules and fines for those who don’t follow Alice down the rabbit hole. That is making Rhinold Niehbur’s tome on Ethics a narrative of Goldilocks and the three bears, and it is making Green Eggs and Ham the definitive singular text on nuclear physics.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not disputing Scripture here, quite the opposite, but I am trying to let it be what it is, and allow it to opt out of what it was never intended to be. Set it free to be the amazing narrative and story of people pursuing life and finding God. To unburden it from all the cultural and crap that we place on it here in the West thousands of years later. Let it be what it is - that is beautiful and thrilling.

Tested

# Chapter 317

Testing can open up some new insights for you. I have gone through many sequences of testing over the decades and usually they prove helpful. Especially in the 30’s and 40’s. In fact I took another one last night and it too told me the story of who I am. The labels it gave me will help others understand who I am and help them get a handle on me. I wasn’t surprised by anything the test showed and that is to be expected at nearly 60 years of age, isn’t it?

The test pretty much told me what I already knew, just gave us some cool new words to describe it to others and nuance it a bit. But it is important to others, not only myself that I am getting tested and that I am sharing the results of my testing and I had a great big laugh when Empathetic came in dead last, since Empathy is currently always rated as a top three trait of great leaders. In me, that one came in 34th place out of 34 traits. I will spend some time this week addressing the implications of that in my life, because I have actually been working on that one for a while now. More progress to be made obviously.

My strengths of course say that I am builder of people, high initiator, reader in the extreme, get it done sort of person and everyone who knows me knew that already. Not a single surprise there. Nor should there be when you are my age and at this stage of your working career and life. Testing is good though, and it keeps you on your toes while giving you a great deal of helpful information at early stages of your life and work.

The shaping tool

# Chapter 316

Our attention shapes our entire experience in the world. What we choose to view, see, read, research, believe, adhere to, love, and spend our time doing, is the full result of what we will experience as we live our lives. Even the events that are forced upon us, how and to what extent we give them attention will largely determine our experience of and with those imposed events that we did not seek out. The quality and consistency of our attention is a shaping tool, it frames and molds and designs our experience, especially the intensity of our experience.

This is how we love, care, develop, engage, learn, find insights, explore, investigate and decide. Attention is the central, albeit underlying, driving factor to all these pieces of our experience in the world. Undivided attention is perhaps one of the rarest gifts in the modern age. When was the last time you were having a conversation with someone without an iPhone between you? That constant instigator of endless interruptions and breaker of all focus. Or have you ever been to someone’s home for a visit and they don’t turn the TV off?? Shesh! But these are just big major examples. One of the most common sentence structures I hear every day in my life is, “did you see that YouTube video where . . . ?” I don’t watch YouTube videos not because I don’t like them (how would I know I like them or not) but because I don’t have TIME to watch them because my ATTENTION is elsewhere. Yours should be too.

Changing your averageness

# Chapter 315

Focus is a superpower, I don’t care who you are or how average you think yourself to be. Focus changes everything including your averageness. It can elevate the typical to the exceptional, the mundane to the magnificent, the boring to the exciting, the dismal to the dynamic, the uninteresting to the fascinating, and the unimaginative to the intriguing. Yes like I said it is a superpower. You have it within yourself to take this superpower and put it to work.

Mostly it is just a discipline that generally doesn’t compete well against the legions of distractions that you have surrounded yourself with and allowed into your life. Those distractions will win practically every time if you permit them into your mental space and grant them access. Focus won’t even get a chance to show you what it can do, because it never gets out of the gate, distractions keep it firmly pinned in and unable to function. Many folks don’t even know what their focus can do because they have never let it run rampant in their day and time like they let the distractions run wild. Unless you reign in this zoo of distractions you will never encounter the superpower of focus nor the gift of deep work.

Once encountered, everything can change. You can dive deeply into complexity and complicated challenges that you never could have wrestled with before. You could change lives, neighborhoods, communities, counties, states and countries! Most will never get this opportunity because YouTube and Facebook will doom them to obscurity by robbing them of every possible chance to make a difference. Instead of changing the world, they will watch all the awkward ways people make videos of themselves and they will see pics of what their friends and relatives are eating. Wow.

Keeping it moving

# Chapter 314

Keep moving and never give up. Yes there are times for doing absolutely nothing and just vegging out, but few of us seem to have a problem with getting in our veg time. The problem more of us face is a focused keep moving in the right direction and not giving up when things prove to be very difficult. Between Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat (and my wife would have to add Viber and messenger) we have lots of things aimed at derailing our attention away from our focused keep moving intentions. And everyone else makes everything looks so easy! That feeds my “I want to just give up” feelings when things inevitably prove difficult. And yes they are difficult because you are changing the world without enough resources, help, people, and energy = very difficult.

This should encourage you rather than make you want to give up. I already told you that this was going to be a challenging path to follow. If it proves to require little of you, your heart and soul, then you likely are on the wrong path. That does not mean every single piece is like an olympic event, some parts will be easier than others. When you get into this groove and you are smoking hot with your progress the whole affair may fly by in a moment because you are in the zone. But don’t give up if you don’t reach this plateau. Keep moving and never give up. Its the difference between those who succeed and those who spend their time watching YouTube.

Limit the non-negotiables

# Chapter 313

The 12 hours weren’t enough. Not enough thinking time and not enough percolating time. More than enough sitting time though, my body does not like those 700 mile road trips, even though my mind does. But as I was saying, not enough time. Too many variables to calculate, on too many possibilities and this is starting to feel a little bit like ordering food in an American restaurant. What I mean by that is that there are too many choices at play here.

American restaurants always cause me and my wife a good deal of stress because we are accustomed to living in Eastern Europe where the options are far less. In Russia if you were lucky enough to find a place to eat at all while on the road, there was no menu for they only had one dish per day that they were serving. Perfection! While that may not sound appetizing to you, it lowers your choice/decision fatigue to zero. The options are just far less in many places around the world where we have lived and we like that.

So when pursuing resolution to thorny problems, one of the ways to contain and constrain the size of the problem is to well define the non-negotiables. And by well define I mean limit the non-negotiables. If you are successful at doing that, then you likely will find yourself with a much more manageable resolvable problem. And since 12 hours were not enough, you guessed it, too many “non-negotiables” in this one. All those competing trade-offs will never be happy.

Consistent progress is called . . .

# Chapter 312

Staying on task is what brings about the most consistent progress. I am calling it “staying on task” this morning because I want to give it more flavor and nuance than just focus or attention may lend. Staying on task means that you get up every day and you plug away at whatever mountain you are moving to whatever conclusion. The mountain is unimportant, what kind or how tall or where its going to be moved is unimportant. The staying on task is the important piece. It is the part that is providing energy and forward motion to mountain-moving. My dad is much better at staying on task than I am, even though I am pretty good compared to most. My dad is almost compulsively obsessed with the task. It is the last thing he talks about before going to bed and almost the first word of his mouth in the morning.

Staying on task is just a constant problem solver, no rock too large or awkward to move eventually, stopping is not an option. Slowing down and figuring out how to resolve the rock-moving dilemma is acceptable and wise, but not for too long, then it becomes inertia or procrastination or distraction. And distraction is a mild word for a very powerful force. I got a work call right in the middle of our staying on task project yesterday and was deflected for an entire hour of talking and working, and then another hour of thinking as I got back to staying on task with our project. Soon we were grooving again and the hours flew.

The visibility of progress

# Chapter 311

Progress looks different depending on what you are measuring and looking at as progress. Yesterday looked like massive progress on our project because we were laying down long wide boards and over a four hour period it looks like we made unbelievable progress. But yesterday would not have been possible without the two previous days of tedious careful meticulous work and planning. There was very little showing and visible from these two previous days of work, even though we have lots of hours and effort involved. The look of progress on each of these three days looks very different. What is visible progress is very very different each day.

So the guy I am working with thinks we wasted our time in the careful setup of the highly visible progress that we made yesterday. But I am here to tell you that without those two days in careful painfully slow work, there would have never been a big showing yesterday. The reason that I am belaboring this rather obvious point is that we make this mistake all the time in other areas, especially knowledge workers.

I work in the idea world. There are almost never big showing days where we are laying down long wide planks marking huge visible progress on a project. If I am lucky and successful there may be two days like that in a YEAR! Most of the progress is incremental and non-visible to almost everyone. So the metrics you are using to decide if you made progress or not, are super critical and often super nuanced. Pay attention to your work, measure carefully, keep it moving forward, ignore the big visible pieces and don’t give them more value than they actually have.

Thriving - the 25%

# Chapter 310

Only 25% of the world’s population is thriving according to Gallup, the bulk of the population is struggling (59%) and there are way too many people having the worst possible life (17%). The guys I got these stats from go on to say that a full third of Americans have/are showing signs of clinical anxiety and/or depression. One Third!! Holy smokes! Of course depending on how they are calculating these matters you could have a wealthy person who has no physical needs unmet, having the worst possible life because their child was just tragically killed in a car wreck. Or a homeless person who has no physical needs being appropriately met, feeling like they won the lottery because of what is going on inside their head, or a middle class person who has just found out that their spouse has cancer, or a middle class person who just lost everything in bankruptcy. All our stories can go either way.

The 25% that say they are thriving may come from all walks of life, all economic classes, all social classes, and all ethnic groups and every other demographic. There is no one single factor that means “thriving” and no one single factor that means “worst possible life.” These are subjective categories that mean different things to different people. What thriving means to me is very very different than what thriving means to my 14 year old grandson. And what thriving means to you will be vastly different than it is to others. The point here is that these categories are moving targets and we all go through stages in life that lend themselves to one side or the other. Most of us get stuck in the middle as these stats show.

Be a person who helps others and yourself move in the direction of thriving, it’s a win for us all when you do.

Who we might have been

# Chapter 309

Who we might have been? I felt that question more often and more deeply when I was 40 than I do now when I am almost 60. But it is just as critical a question now as it was then, because we are still changing when we reach 60 or at least I am, your mileage may differ. But this is also a useless maudlin question unless you modernize it and make it work in the present. Otherwise you just sit around and fantasize about what could have been what might have been, what would have been different than the life you chose.

Just modernize it and ask, “who might we be today?” What kind of person do I want to be today? What kind of impact do I want to make today? Who do I want to help today? What do I care deeply about today? And on it goes or can go. Its never too late to become who we might have been. All it takes is the same commitment and the same action that it would have required back whenever in your past. Yes that’s right, it costs just as much as it did before and you very well may decide once again that the the price is too high as you obviously decided before. And so 10 years from now you will still be thinking about what you might have been, instead of being being that person. Or maybe you are wiser and braver today than you were in the past.

Nothing is static

# Chapter 308

Great way to start the day yesterday, meeting with a longterm client who is finding their way in life and at a very different stage than they expected to be at this point. His resilience is always an inspiration to me and fires me up and helps me believe I can. Of course I rarely do morning meetings because it wrecks my structure and pattern for the rest of the day and throws me far off kilter, but I survived and even got other great things done which proves that an occasional morning meeting is not the end of the world no matter how it feels at the moment.

And out of that meeting came some possibilities to help this client once again reach some of their life goals and dreams. That excites me much more than the thought of me actually doing those possibilities myself, even though that is how I came to have that juggling around inside my head at that moment of conversation. As I first thought, this might be my niche within this niche. But we will see and we will keep exploring. Nothing is static and those who stop exploring are dead, or have never been alive.

Integration and alignment are the more difficult pieces, to get all these possibilities to line and up and work in your favor instead of against you. But patience helps a great deal as you wait for these things to line up or at least move around and change the possibility landscape.

Difficult Mondays

# Chapter 307

Having a difficult start this morning or having so many thoughts running through my head that it is the net equivalent of a non-starter. All the possibilities and directions that this amazing life has taken and could now take are just overwhelming and stunning. Instead of talking about the weather or worse yet, which TV channels are coming in or not, I want to have some major time to think about changing the world, securing our reach and future, impacting our grandkids, helping our kids, serving our church, helping our neighbors and generally living a life that is full and complete.

I am booked up this morning as well, and having a tough start with that too, because the TV is playing in the room, and dad is talking from another room and so now I have to try and think while engulfed in the noise of all that is going on in the lives of the other people in this house and all the other agendas that are at play here and that is just life right? This is always true to varying degrees, but the level of noise and distraction here is generally beyond my ability to block and continue forward successfully. The practice of constant partial attention, never deep focus nor in the flow of deep work, that is the best that I will ever get here and that is just gonna have to be ok because the alternative is far worse. Ok off to the first meeting of the day.

Decisions about decisions

# Chapter 306

A day of relative quiet. Rare in life and most valued. Didn’t resolve anything, other than I am going to pull the God switch on Growability and see what God sends our way. Everything else just sat on the back burner and simmered all the way through the day. And that is ok for most things in my life require a long simmer these days. Don’t really know if this is a new phenomena in my life, or if I am just noticing it finally, or if I have transitioned to a different stage of life. I simply don’t know, but it has become the new normal that I can think and percolate on things for a very long time now.

What I need to assess is whether or not this is helping me execute or preventing me from executing or taking action. Sometimes thinking about something can be a form of procrastination and delay rather than being a tool of careful thoughtful due diligence. How to decide which one this situation is developing into? This is more difficult than you would think, to set some metrics and make some decisions about your decisions. Making decisions about your decisions, now that is something you can think about.

Embracing the road trip

# Chapter 305

This is one of the reasons, the main reason in fact, I dislike flying - the schedule changes or gets delayed and throws all your plans into the air and makes everyone have to flex whether they can or not. So Jake is not getting here when he (and everyone else) planned. All those scheduled events got shifted and new plans had to be made and everyone is making the best of it as we are inclined to do and lets face it, we have had far more experience doing this than the typical family has. But that does not mean I like it any more, just because I am skilled at all the segues that this requires of us all. Therefore I drive when possible. Now I just need to figure out a way to work while driving down the road without it being distracted and dangerous.

If I could resolve that piece I would only fly when it was international. Domestic flights are only attractive if you are going more than half way across the country. If you aren’t changing two time zones, then drive it. Or if you can’t work then think. If you can’t think then listen to an audio book. Of course the one big advantage to flying is that my hands are free to type and create solutions and put them down where others can receive them and see them, answers that others can read and respond to, etc etc. But I know that if the inside of the car is quiet enough, you can dictate all that you need to write with Siri. You got this. The hell with flying. Embrace the road trip.