Uneven ground

# Chapter 35

Meritocracy has become a bad word in many segments of society, and I see it is disparaged in columns that I read on a regular basis. They think that they position themselves to be advocates of the holiness of humanity, which means that they think that every person has value and worth. No one is going to argue this point. What they also position themselves to be are advocates of laziness and unambitious uninspired behaviors in these valuable and worth-filled citizens of earth. Save the stories about how they don’t have opportunities and possibilities, because I agree right up front that everyone has a different set of possibilities - and that is precisely what the anti-meritocracy folks are most unhappy about. There simply are no level playing grounds anywhere in the world. Is that something to be pleased about? Absolutely not! Does it make it any less true? Absolutely not!

Let me be clear here, my parents both worked low paying jobs their entire lives because neither had a high school diploma, and neither had the possibilities of doing other than low-skilled labor positions. Hell my dad worked in a garbage dump for the last 12 years before he retired! Did he have the same opportunities and possibilities as the doctor who delivered me? Of course not. Did my dad have better opportunities than the African-american man eight miles down the road, definitely. The ground is uneven for all.

The point here this morning is this, take the opportunities you have and maximize them. And be glad your doctor had better opportunities and can point you in the right direction when you need healing.

The end of ourselves

# Chapter 34

How do you handle the end of all your capacity and strength? How do you, or what do you, or who do you rely on when you have nothing left? When you run out of ideas and energy and vigor, what are you banking on? What are you counting on as your safety net? I am having trouble even defining the problem because we don’t have words and ideas for this situation. We expect you to resolve it all yourself in your own strength and power and honestly when we get to the end of ourselves, who can do that? Well no one. None of us can do what Roosevelt said, “When you get to the end of your rope, tie a knot and hang on.”

Hang on for what? Hang on for who? Hang on for how long? I think that this is all seriously wrong thinking and yet not one of us would deny that trouble seems to come in bunches and that pushes us to our perceived limits at times. And our perceived limits are all they are usually. That boundary will move when it has to, it always does. Your constantly changing capacity proves it. The challenge is building margin and competence into your life and not ever getting to the end of anything ever again. No more end of the rope experiences. That sounds really good. Except that we all have ends of the rope experiences and I think that we always will. There isn’t enough margin and competence in the world to defeat all your battles. So back to those three questions then: what, who and for how long? What - is your vision or mission or calling. Who - is whomever you most love. How long - is until its over.

Capturing your imagination

# Chapter 33

What do you want so much that you are willing to be “tolling upward in the night” as Longfellow said? What level of expertise and what level of skill and competence are you willing to strive toward, and to continue working hard to hold? What captures your imagination and desires so much, that this extra work feels normal? I can tell you already that medical doctors and lawyers already go through these trials and they don’t stop once they have their degrees in hand. Honestly that is when the real work begins, but don’t tell them that, they will all quit school immediately if you do.

This has to be something that you want more than sleep. And that is a really high bar for me, I don’t know about you. Sleep is my ultimate value far too often. It has been a long time since I would sacrifice sleep for something else. My read on this is that if you are at a stage of life where the planets have aligned and you are entirely content, then this is probably ok. But I am thinking that for the vast majority of us, this is a sign of laziness or settling for less. I generally think of ambition as a positive sign in most people. When I worked in HR at a factory it was the number one thing I was looking for in folks applying for work, because it meant that they would be intrinsically motivated to work hard and improve their skills and competences. So I think I will sit here for a while and think about this and rediscover what I am willing to toil the night for.

Aspirations

# Chapter 32

What do you aspire to? Where do you want to take this? Where are we going? How good do you want to be? These are all future focused questions and you need those in your life, otherwise you just settle. There are many things that you need to just settle for, but not your future. The future you, needs more and better and if you settle here and now for what skills you have, what possibilities you have, what paths you can choose, who you take with you on these journeys, the doors of opportunity are closed by settling for less or settling for today.

You want to be careful here that you don’t confuse this with living for the future, because that is only a possibility and the present is all that you have so live it well. But turn some mental energy tuned toward the aspirations that you have, and generally aim life toward those aspirations. No matter how good you are today at whatever, how much better do you want to be next year? That is the real question. You have to give some small steady consistent attention to improvement and change and growth, in order to move in the direction that you need to go. Who will you become? What skills will you sharpen or develop? What expertise will you bring to the world? What will be made better because you did? What change will occur in the world and in the lives of people because of your aspirations?

Mental bungee jumping

# Chapter 31

You are turning a corner and what is awaiting you is undefined and unclear. In other words, you don’t know what is coming. You are hoping for something profound and wonderful but there are no certainties here. Of course there never are in the future, even if you feel like there is a level of predictability in your life and future because of the trajectory you have been on for a while, I get that. But hear me well, there are no certainties ever. Only probabilities. Yes it is “likely” that your place of business will still be there in the morning and you will have a job - maybe.

Corners are what happen when you choose to veer sharply away from the course of probabilities and you throw yourself (and your life?) out into the universe and you don’t really have a sense of knowing how this will all turn out, but you just as likely know that you HAD to make this corner, because the status quo wasn’t cutting it any longer. I have turned a number of corners in the past, on very high probability jobs, that I was super good at, and that I could have worked for decades more. But I was coasting and I needed a challenge and change more than I needed high probabilities.

This particular corner is one I haven’t faced in many many years, this corner is about resources and financing the future. The previous corners weren’t significantly different financially, than the place I had turned from. This time, wow, it feels weightier and scarier and more fraught with danger and with larger stakes than before. Previous corners were about making a difference. This corner is about making a life without sacrificing all the differences we have been making in the world. You still have to turn this corner and live with the consequences. This is like mental bungee jumping.

Moldy people or something else?

# Chapter 30

The mold is not the problem, the environment is the problem. A friend of mine was planning to purchase a house and when they got in under the house they found mold. Called a company to address the problem. The technician told them that he could remove the mold, but it would just grow right back. If they really wanted to get rid of the mold, they had to get some fresh air and sunlight into that space, change the environment, in order to change the mold problem. They agreed on a price and the guy started to leave. “Aren’t you going to remove this mold first?” they asked. And he replied, “change the environment and the mold will just go away, and you can wipe up the residue with a paper towel.” And that is exactly what happened.

Like I have said before in this space, environment and ambience highly impact what you experience. If you are finding yourself in a moldy or less than desirable situation or space, then it is time to change the environment to give the situation what it needs to get rid of the mold. Your mold may be people, noise, smells, intrusions, distractions, the chair you are sitting in, your lack of exercise, your emotions, or something else, but you have to change your environment in order to get the mold out and for it to stay out. If you are unwilling to put the effort into changing the environment, then you will have to live with the mold. Hopefully you are immune to mold’s effects and can still be productive and vital in all you attempt to accomplish.

The cadence of the rain

# Chapter 29

Environments and ambiance are two critical factors to producing great work. On this dark wet rainy morning I am sitting on the enclosed porch with a fine mug of coffee and a sweet piece of tech listening to the rain fall around me, alone and with my thoughts, writing and shaping ideas on digital paper. On an ideal morning, a rainy day would be great for sleeping extra, but that did not happen today. So the second great thing that rainy days for good for, are thinking, sitting, writing. There is a certain ambience to a rainy day that no other day can quite replicate. A rainy day is a day for gathering thoughts and reframing them and forming them into something new and special and useful. The gift of that steady dripping on the roof over my head provides a cadence for processing ideas and solving problems and finding solutions.

If my lovely wife weren’t the amazing person that she is, we would have never realized what a wonderful ambience that can be experienced on the porch. There would be no chairs out here in which to relax. There would be no portable table on which to work. There would be no ceiling fan to cool the porch when needed. There would be no inspiring place to sit when I can’t sleep and experience the rain on the roof and the cocooned feeling that this space gives. Environments and ambience are critical factors in having the right space in which to think and produce. What different choices and decisions can you or should you make about your working space? It really makes a huge difference.

Fuel

# Chapter 28

What keeps you going? What is the fuel that fires your furnace? What is the excitement that gets you up and going each morning? What is refilling your energy banks? What is cranking you up? What is defining your goals and objectives and plans? Where is this taking you? What partners are you picking up along the way? What is being developed and created in the world? In you? What changes with these actions and these plans?

Whether it is your vision or your mission or your goals and objectives and just an overwhelming need to bring justice to those who have none, you need fuel to keep going day after day, year after year. Structured and regulated fuel works best for most. Passion and outrage are like liquid rocket fuel burned up too quickly. Goals and objectives keep the rest of us mere mortals moving in the right direction for long periods of time. We can structure this and use them like markers in a long journey. They can be milestones of accomplishment and success. As one is completed, another segment in a long process is marked off the list and you are making forward progress. These are milage markers along side of the path you are following or the charge you are leading. You can look back and see how far you have come and you can look ahead and guess what the upcoming path will be like. This vista of completed goals and outcomes keeps me up and energized far longer than does hot passion or outrage. Of course, if you find that you have an unlimited supply of passion or outrage, then please use that freely. Just get up and get it done.

The sweat solution

# Chapter 27

The three P’s of sure success are persistence, patience and perspiration, according to many and various writers. Perspiration gets the least airtime of these three. I am not sure why this is the non-sexy one to talk about or write about. Even I do this. I was going through my archives yesterday and noticed that I recently wrote about patience and persistence as the twin towers of power. Where is the sweat? One of my side hustles is a Real Estate venture and we talk about “sweat equity” a great deal, but outside of that genre of business or development we hear very little about the sweat solution.

The sweat solution actually has more than one side to it. That which provides the right amount of tension inside of you, to the point in which you start to sweat the outcomes, can be a very positive thing. That is a sweat solution to a point. That which gets you all excited and sweaty is definitely a sweat solution. You need to have sustainable anticipation as part of your sweat solution. And then of course the most common meaning, just plain old hard effort and sweat into your project, path, process and you are on your way to some definitive gain. You also will need a shower, but that is just proof that you put solid effort into making some forward progress on this business, whatever it may be. Sweat solutions are also the most tangible and tactile of the three P’s, and some of you may like that, I really do. Most of the time I live in the most abstract of worlds and to do and touch and push and pull and reach and stretch and dig and nail and paint and shovel are all lovely concrete actions that make you sweat.

All your days

# Chapter 26

If you latch on to an idea and make it habit, there is a good chance that you will get it done eventually. Its the story of my life. You can work ferociously at an idea or you can nibble away at it for years, and both approaches can get the job done, but nibble wins the day for me, ferocious takes too much energy and too much away from daily living. But those are my preferences and YMMV. This is really too much in the weeds, the point here is that habits, or at the very least repetitive focus over long periods of time (which in my opinion is a habit) you can get your idea done.

And it can be more than an idea, it can be goal or a plan or something larger. Anything can be accomplished if you keep the energy flowing in the right direction long enough. I am coaching you up here, you are more than just what you are today at this moment. You are all your future days as well! And the cumulative effect of all of you, of all of your days, can be super powerful. This is the long game and the big payoff and where you can separate your results from the general population. This is where you can reach a level of excellence so amazing that you will amaze yourself some days. This is the application of 10,000 intentional hours over a long period of time so that they sink in and produce even more results. Any idea or goal or plan can be accomplished. Any.

Moving you

# Chapter 25

So have you come to understand what gets you up and excited in the mornings, what gets you moving, what you are enthusiastic about? I ask the obvious question for two reasons; you may be one of those people who haven’t yet discovered what you most want to do, or you may be one of the people who have learned that this can (usually is) a moving target and so you need to reset regularly so as to be aiming in the right direction each day. Its not a moving target in that it changes everyday, if that is what you are experiencing then you haven’t yet discovered your calling. It is however a moving target in that us and the world that we live in are constantly growing and developing and changing and that means all these other pieces in our lives do as well.

So the core question here is, what moves you? What will move you to get up and get going with excitement each morning? What will move your heart to give all that you have to bring to a problem so that it will shift and proceed in a better direction for all? What moves your mind, so that you are fully mentally engaged and in the flow of this situation or event or process? What moves your wallet to sacrifice and to generosity? What is so important that all the pieces of you are impacted and affected to the point where you have to take action? That is what we are talking about. Without this critical motivation in place, you aren’t fully alive yet (or anymore depending on where you fall).

The finish line

# Chapter 24

It is always so hard to sustain energy or enthusiasm or intensity. There are too many events people and actions sapping it away. There seems to consistently to be more takers than givers. There are constantly more ways to spend it than generate it. You and I have to change this, because important actions and change the world courses will require a great deal of energy and enthusiasm. If you aspire to do something big, at scale, too make this world a better place to live, then you are gonna need a lot of energy and enthusiasm.

Enthusiasm is probably an old word, maybe zeal or vivacity or eagerness or passion would be the more common usage words here, but Emerson used the word enthusiasm and so I followed suit. No matter which word you choose to use or idea you want to hold on to here, get the main point - you need some sustainable power and drive to get to the finish line. The more of this that comes from you the more control you have over its direction and application. The more of this that comes from an outside source the less directional control you have in your hands.

Now you understand the thinking and systems for why us leadership consultants are always asking you, “what are you so passionate about that it gets you up and running every morning?” Because you are going to need that to get to the next place you are heading. Because if you don’t have this enthusiasm, then the goal isn’t likely all that important after all.

Regret avoidance

# Chapter 23

Price or pain? The pain is the deep disappointment of regret. Regret that you did not make different choices. Regret that you did not did decide to go that direction or this path. Regret that you chose deep patterns of unhealthy eating and inactivity and the result has made you more unhappy. The pain of regret when you did not spend time with loved ones before they passed on. The regret for having focused only on you and yours rather than change the world. Regret for the legacy you are leaving (or failed to leave) behind for your kids and grandkids and great grands. And there are far more genres of regrets than I could ever list here this morning.

The only way I have read and understand and have learned to escape regret’s grasp is the price of ferocious discipline. At least all my regrets eventually come from a fail on discipline. I did not discipline my mouth, or my mind, or my body or schedule or wants or desires and /viola/ I have regrets popping up like mushrooms on my lawn after too much rain. And I get it, you can already feel your willpower waining at the mere mention of discipline and in so many areas! All areas actually.

Back in my marathoning and ultra-marathoning days, I would often hear runners say that they ran so that they could eat French fries, or some other nonsense like that. So you are disciplined to work out viciously and training hard so that you don’t bear the regret of gaining weight by eating without discipline? Yeah that pretty much sums it up. I didn’t say humans are logical, I said each failure of discipline can foster a regret. Choose your price that you are willing to pay, or the pain you are willing to suffer.

What are your three?

# Chapter 22

You can live in frustration and disappointment all the time because you are not gaining any traction in your forward momentum or you can choose some goals and develop an action plan to get you there and finally know which direction you are going after all. I have a friend who is frustrated all the time because, according to him - he is surrounded by idiots, and according to me - because we can’t read his damn mind! He has no idea what direction he is going or which direction his business is going. Oh he knows the bottom line and that provides him with some measure of satisfaction that they are in the black, but he is frustrated and disappointed all the time because he doesn’t know where he is headed, and if you don’t know where you are headed then you don’t know what it means or the why.

So lets stop the frustration and disappointment and choose those goals - say three to begin with, sorta a Maslov’s hierarchy, goal one is to pay the bills, goal two is to build some margin, and goal three is to change the world. If you don’t like these three then choose your own dang it, but choose! Got goals now and so we need an action plan that will move the markers. So your action plan for goal one can be multilayered as can all the rest , you can both make money to pay those bills but also work to lower those bills so there are less to pay. That is a two-fold approach to move the marker. Goal two, once you have gotten lower-the-bills/pay-the-bills under control, then pay yourself first. This means the first 10-20% of however much money you are making, goes into a margin account, a savings account, a safety account that you can’t touch until you are 85 years old. Goal three, set that safety account up so that it gives a portion of the interest to whatever change the world charity that you prefer.

Lets go!

The most important DO everyday

# Chapter 21

There are those who would urge you to not think, just do, and I would agree that action trumps inaction every time. But don’t throw thinking under the bus, that is the biggest DO of all time! Thinking is also the hardest work you may ever do in your entire life, unless you are like a Navy Seal or something otherworldly like that. The most average of you immediately reacted to my statement that thinking is some of the hardest work you will ever do, because of several reasons, the foremost being that you have not done it. Worrying over a sick kid, or figuring out your job, or navigating life in the modern world is not thinking. This is why you believe it to be easy, you believe that you are already thinking about all your stuff and that that constitutes thinking. It does not.

The other reason you may scoff at my point is that you grew up in the Deep South and nothing other than pain-inflicting sweat-producing physical labor is considered “work”. But you are wrong again. “Figurin’” out math problems and puzzling out words is not thinking. Telling lies fast enough to keep you out of trouble is not thinking.

Thinking is the deep contemplation of thorniest of problems, it can take decades! Thinking is what chess grandmasters do for hours and hours, barely moving at all, but burning thousands of calories from the effort! Thinking is mental welding together of disparate parts of information or making connections between things that others can’t see unless you do. Thinking is the deep reasoning that few take the time to do any longer. Thinking will make you sweat and will completely wear you out. Try it. Its the most important DO of every day.

Seeds

# Chapter 20

I believe the vast majority of us don’t sow nearly enough seeds for the harvest we expect from our efforts. This is because we are harvest-focused not seed-focused and I for one have got to change this up completely, for I have learned that real success is casting seeds, the harvest will happen sorta automatically if I focus on seeds being planted. Or to say the metaphor a different way, your investment should be focused on the investment not the pay out at the end. Your success is in how many possibilities you produce not how many widgets you make. The success is in how many coffee’s you share with potentials not how many clients you have at the moment. A company I work with even has a name for this concept - 100 cups of coffee. Clearly I need to get out and have many many more 1-10 cups of coffee because it has been an entire year since I had coffee with someone in an actual coffee shop! Now I have made lots of cups of coffee for people in our home, but that is not generally planting any new seeds, that is more enjoying the outcome of seeds planted in the past if they are in my home enjoying a meal and a cup of java with us.

Many things require multiple seedings. When we lived in Eastern Europe for 22 years and I would try to get new idea off the ground I would have to “seed” that idea over and over and over until someone else thought it was their idea and then, and only then would it fly and take over and eventually become a harvest. In the business ventures I have been working on for years, I have to look at 100-200 houses (seeding) before I have a real possibility to make an offer on and pursue the purchase.

Stop focusing on the harvest to the exclusion of planting more seeds, over and over and over!

The long game

# Chapter 19

It takes courage to take risks, to pursue dreams that may or may not turn out the way that you hope and wish. Designing a life that has meaningful impact on the world you live in, is dastardly difficult, and its risky because if for no other reason it is almost always outside the realm of what is considered normal or typical and that is risky. Courage is necessary to follow a dream rather than a career path. Courage is demanded if your dreams have a long far reach. To get there will take decades perhaps and that kind of courage and bravery is in very short supply. The long game is the rarest form of action that I see in the worlds of dreamers and doers. Everyone seems to have extremely short time frames these days. The instantaneousness of our world, has spilled over into our dream expectations and that can be deadly.

So you and I are gonna need the courage for the long haul, and that might be a higher price than you are mentally calculating right now in your head, because I have been doing the long game for decades and there are few peers remaining. It takes a particular type of certitude to keep your hand steady to the task for year after year after year. Tell me you can do this on a raining dark difficult morning, not when the sun is shining and all things are going perfectly. Convince me that you can face weeks or months of challenging circumstances and continue to plod and progress forward? Ok now convince yourself. Done? Good, lets do this!

It’s just an obstacle

# Chapter 18

We are all facing obstacles. Of some type and some variety but we all have them and they take up a surprising amount of our focus and mental bandwidth each day. I discovered this as my knee repair and surgery loomed and it was more and more robbing all my focus away from other tasks that needed to be completed and accomplished. But this is just an obstacle. It is not a task to be completed nor is it producing anything awesome or beautiful or creative, its just there like an elephant in the room, in the way, bothersome, intrusive, something to be suffered through, something to be managed, something to be survived, a pain, or an injury, or a chronic problem, the kids, heck even your husband! An obstacle! Not a goal, not a target, not even a challenge, just an obstacle!

These obstacles are the deep space voids of emotional pitfalls, the black holes where focus goes to never return, what will keep you awake at night because its an obstacle dang it! It is in your way, it is in your path, it will hinder you delay you block you prevent you and impede you from getting to where you need to be to accomplish what you need to complete. And that makes it evil in the productivity realm of reality, it has to be overcome and removed, contained, boxed up, put away and leashed, at least temporarily so that you can be what you need to be for your customers and your family and yourself. Its just an obstacle, and you can overcome it. In fact you will find it darn satisfying to do so.

Disruptions

# Chapter 17

Upside-down days and backward processes and disruptions can be good to help you assess and revalue your existing systems properly. If you never have a disruption how can you know if what you are doing is producing what you need most? By missing a day, by not producing, by viscerally experiencing how those systems affect you and what you do/make/be each day. Its the lack of what happens when I miss those morning (and all day!!) routines that make the beautiful ideas and communication and thinking that I do each day get off to a lovely start, that glaringly shows me what is missed and missing. So you too need to have rare occasional days that are upside-down, like a travel day that prevents your morning routine from happening. Perhaps like our 4:30 am flights out to Vienna that we used for decades? Those were definitely routine breakers! Or perhaps you need a backward process day, where your morning routines are forced into the afternoon or evening, like series of morning meetings with out-of-towners that take all your morning hours and lets you see the value of the mornings for what you typically do?

Or perhaps just a full day disruption where you don’t accomplish any of your usual work or systems, like the surgery I had yesterday. That made the day a complete wash out in terms of productivity and work. When I wasn’t lying the hospital bed with a gown on and my butt hanging out for everyone to enjoy, I was under the influence of high grade meds that while keeping me pain free, were messing with my brain in ways that would have prevented any serious work from being done.

This morning things are back to “normal” and that is sweeter than ever because of the massive disruptions yesterday. The point here is that train wrecks of a day can teach you much about what you are doing right and what needs adjustment.

Harmonious opportunities

# Chapter 16

Opportunities and harmony. These are two things the leader always seeks. And never more than now in the COVID ravaged world where discord and frustration and a year and a half of staying home is the normal that everyone has been experiencing. Harmony is a delightful mixture of belonging and community, neither of which are easily found when isolation has become the new normal because of the pandemic. Yes the pandemic will end and this will all just be a memory but as we are living it, it feels interminable. So the urgency and need for harmony grows in such times as these. Even for introverts as myself, who need far less human interaction to have a full heart than do my extroverted friends, harmony is the sweetest nectar and in short supply. A leader who fosters and creates a place of harmony around them, will find people are flocking in their direction.

Opportunities are just as plentiful even though the world is a disaster and everything has changed and yet little has truly changed, except how we go about doing what we did before. We still eat and order stuff and pay our bills and work and take care of our loved ones, right? Only the steps and methods have altered, our overarching lives have not because we still have the same needs as before and we will strive to resolve them as we always have. So opportunities are there, we just have to seek them in different places and in different manners than we did in the near past. For example if you are looking for a work opportunity, then you will be completely overwhelmed if you go looking in the same way and places as you did in 2019 because there are 100 times more jobs now it seems. Instead you need to search out curated methods to find the /right/job opportunity. Likewise every other process and system and website you used in the past needs to be reassessed. The leader who brings his followers opportunities never fails.