Harmony

# Chapter 55

The process, the climb, the journey and the expedition of life, as I wrote yesterday is the real life that you are living. And you will notice that not everyone is on the same path as you are, not necessarily traveling in the same direction, the same speed, nor the same trajectory. They are living their lives and they are in pursuit of happiness or fulfillment or whatever, though personally I think they should be in the pursuit of good and all else will follow. But simply because they are not on your path, direction or trajectory does it mean that they are lost or wrong or on the wrong journey. It means they are on a different one, and that is quite alright. As diverse as we are in humanity you gotta be able to see that there is no way we are all going to choose the same choices and make the same decisions and go the same ways.

I know far too many people who spend so much energy on trying to convince us all to conform, to be uniform, to think the same, and walk the same paths, believe the same conclusions (about skin color or about guns or a million others). I saw a number of political signs yesterday that said “vote for these three and no others” and that is what is not going to happen. I am advocating that you “vote carefully after much thought and research” no matter which candidate that leads you to.

Apologies that this is not as tight and compact as I would like. The bottom line is enjoy the different notes people play, that is where we find harmony.

Alligators

# Chapter 54

Wrestling with banks and financial institutions is a lot like wrestling with alligators. Or at least what I imagine wrestling with alligators would be like, since I have never wrestled an alligator, but I have watched others do it. The alligator has all the advantages in the fight. All the teeth, all the strength, all the claws, all the terrain, all the power.

I have been wrestling with banks for the last two months to get a loan to buy a house. We are nearing the end of the contract limits, and just this morning, they are once again asking me the most minuscule questions about the most unimportant financial nuances on the most minor parts of my entire financial picture . . . one would think that they did not want to loan me the money! But the bank, like the alligator, has all the advantages, all the teeth, all the strength, all the claws, all the terrain, all the power. They can just keep asking for paperwork right up until the contract expires, and then force me to go through the whole damn process again!

The only power I have here, or in an alligator wrestling match, is the choice about whether I want to wrestle or not. When you find yourself in an unequal power situation, you may want to guard this choice ferociously.

The hourglass

# Chapter 53

My coffee mug is like a hourglass on my morning schedule. And worse yet my wife and I sat here for the last 10 minutes trying to remember the word for hourglass! Let me tell you something you don’t know, that object is very hard to form the question correctly for google or duckduckgo! Hourglass!! And in leadership and in research and in life, asking the right question is the always the most difficult part and the most important part. But you would have gotten a good laugh at all the ways my wife and I tried to frame the question in order to arrive at “hourglass”.

Back to the coffee mug. It is the hourglass mechanism that I use to force myself to write this daily piece. And it has about a 20 minute limit. Things have to start moving fast when the coffee is getting cold or close to the bottom of the mug. This is a perfect example of boundaries or constraints that are helpful. You are essentially giving yourself a time limit. You are forcing the start by defining the ending. This is what I was facing this morning staring at the blank screen without a cogent thought in my head. The coffee steadily draining away in my mug, the peanut butter and Nutella disappearing too, and still a blank screen. So “the coffee in my mug” is the demanding desperation of a start up, to begin, to embark on something, to initiate and get moving somewhere, to get rid of that blasted blank screen! And then the second sentence stopped me for 10 minutes cold. And then here I am at the end . . . sort of all of the sudden.

Try it.

Mental imagery

# Chapter 52

The reward dilemma.

The reward dilemma. For the last 50 years I have rewarded every perceived success in my world with food. And in adulthood, I also frequently rewarded myself with a relaxing beer, or six. The dilemma is obvious. When food and beer become the problem.

When food and beer become the problem, rewarding yourself with either or both, become doubly complicated. Clearly, I need to find a new reward system. That is easier said than done. Far easier said than done. Because this dynamic duo of food and beer, have been a damaging duet for decades and decades.

Trying to break their holds on me, and my internal support system, has literally taken the better part of the last eight years. And that is for the food part only! The beer part, I have been addressing for the last three years, at varying levels of success, and only recently have taken a four month abstinence from all forms of alcohol (and still counting).

So right at the moment, I am at the mental imagery point of a new reward system. Mental imagery of what kind of person I want to be, how I want to look, what I think about myself, etc. etc. No actual physical tangible "reward." And it is mostly working I think, at least I have more successful days than I do fail days.

As James Clear says though, this mostly comes down to simply environmental planning. “Environment wins over will power practically every time.” So control the food that is regularly in your environment and you control what you eat. Of course, the fact that I have to eat out 100 days a year (business meetings) complicates that a great deal, but I am getting better and better at it.

Elder care

# Chapter 51

Sometimes you have to bear your responsibilities alone. I know I know, you want to have someone come along and share them with you and help you carry the load, we all have those feeling along the road of life when things are difficult. Having someone else help you is better than icing on cake. But there comes many more times in life when you have to adult-up and take care of your stuff all by yourself. Even when it sucks, and maybe especially when it sucks.

I am at one of those places now. Elder care doesn’t go away. No matter how hard you work at it, it doesn’t finish, it never concludes, it is never done, until it is permanently, and that is a different chapter for a different day. So you have to ride this responsibility out, stand tall, do what is necessary, and get it done not matter how negative it feels some days, no matter how alone you find yourself. This is life and you have to walk this, you can’t get around it and live with yourself. My dad did this on his own with my mom for a decade and my brother and I were little help at all.

Now brother and mom are gone and I am taking care of dad. There is no one to help, and that is just the way it is. Adult-up and stop your whining. All too soon someone will be taking care of you, you hope.

Chaos

# Chapter 50

Chaos is what happens when you have a new context and you are suddenly trying to fit three people in a two person kitchen, or four pieces of bacon in the microwave instead of two pieces, four eggs instead of two, three chairs around the small table rather than two, the timing of everything is thrown off and nothing works like it did before. If everyone is chilled, then you can survive these things with small adjustments. If everyone is normal and easily upset, then these matters can throw a huge wrench into everyone’s equilibrium.

Chaos happens to everyone at some point, and ours flows up and down all the time. Trying to hold to a structure or design for your life in the middle of chaos is very challenging. Hanging on to your well designed habits in the middle of chaos is really really iffy. In fact, hahahaha, this blog has taken two days instead of one! And this is a small thing, but it requires focus and thinking and that seems impossible when the chaos is swirling and hurling and generally making a nuisance of itself and distracting you to hell and back. And at the rate I am going, it may actually take three days to finish this because of chaos - unorganized energy with no structure or defined purpose. This of course is my random definition, which seems to fit the moment.

I think we will let this blog finally end, even though there is undoubtably much more that could and probably should be written about this subject, because the chaos is rolling in waves here and I can’t overcome them any longer.

Pain

# Chapter 49

Working through pain. Its been a fairly shitty summer, which is generally my favorite time of the year. I like summer best for two reasons, its warm and occasionally hot which I like just fine, and its when I can exercise and be outside the most. This summer, not so much. A blown knee put me in a chair for over six weeks and has left me with a long rehab. Just when I was making some good progress with that rehab, my back goes out and I am once again confined to little movement. All these beautiful warm days passing me by and winter is coming!

But the pain is the more minute by minute distressor and disruptor. It is what will keep you from producing your best work and accomplishing all your required tasks. Pain is way more insistent than are noisy distractions, that I wrote about yesterday. Pain intrudes. You can’t just mentally box it up and ignore it, like I am currently doing to the tv blaring across the room. This is inside you and constant and stabbing and poking and generally unignorable. Finding a way to snatch moments of clarity and focus are the challenge here. This all with the understanding that pain is a sliding scale and that there is manageable pain and unbearable pain. Of course we are discussing manageable pain - unbearable pain requires morphine and a good last will and testament.

Manageable pain still sucks all the air out a room and takes away all your focus and concentration. And how you get that back is the point here. You do it one word at a time, one idea at a time, slowly building what may have happened much more quickly in a painfree world, but you can still do this. I know you can.

Steady work

Chapter 48

Six months of steady consistent work came together yesterday and I got to drive my 1965 ford pickup truck about a half mile down the road and back. This is the truck that we plucked up out of a cow pasture where it had been sitting for the last 24 years, almost exactly 6 months ago. 35-36 years ago this 1965 pickup truck was the one I was driving when I was courting my wife of 35 years. Back then it was an old truck! Now it is a really really old truck. Interestingly it still had the same engine in it that my dad and I put in 36 years ago. Now that old engine is laying in the shop waiting for a rebuild project.

One year ago this month, my dad I started rebuilding a 1967 289 Ford Small block V8, and when we finished 5 months later, we realized that we had nothing to put it in! So we found the truck in the pasture and started working toward combining the two. That was six months ago. It is more than a little astonishing to experience all the work that goes into a rails-up restoration. I certainly had no idea really, how detailed and involved a complete restoration is honestly. Now I know. And its expensive!

But I am learning so much, it levels the cost factor. Few people ever get the opportunity to first hand experience this level restoration project, and probably few people really want to. But they aren’t making old any more, and you can’t capture those old days without getting your hands very dirty. Of course this could have only happened in a Coronavirus world, where we are stuck in the same spot on the planet for 6 months, isolating and social distancing.

Best Covid-19 project ever.

Family

# Chapter 47

Funerals. In one way the saddest emotional event that ever happens in life, and in other ways the most social event that ever happens in life. We buried my uncle John yesterday. I fought like crazy to get there and arrived from California in MooCow Georgia just in the nick of time. I was the last person to arrive. But Aunt Edith and my cousins are special people, and I made a special effort to get there.

I knew some of the people there really really well, and others barely at all. I saw school mates from high school that I hadn’t seen in 40 years. Saw most of my aunts and uncles on that side of the family (my mom had 12 brothers and sisters!) and many of my cousins. The church was packed out and full. And the procession to the cemetery on the other side of town stopped traffic for almost a full mile. And after the graveside, people stood around and were social with people they hadn’t seen in ages.

But emotionally, this stirred up strange and uncomfortable things inside of me. John and Edith and my parents all purchased plots in the same row near each other in the cemetery. So the graveside service happened right next to my mom’s grave at the Memorial Gardens.

I would not classify funerals as a distraction even though it was in fact pretty distracting for the whole day. But what I have been calling distractions for the last 45 days are things I can control to a point or affect or mitigate. A family funeral is a normal life event that I don’t think you can do anything about but just go through it.

Delays

# Chapter 46

Delays. I spend an inordinate amount of time in airports. In fact I am writing this chapter from an airport after a red-eye flight from the West Coast. Of course the connecting flight is delayed. This always creates a cascade effect of problems. Today’s most pressing problem from this delay is that I might very well miss my uncle’s funeral. Its gonna be a close call.

There are few delays that are positive. Almost all of them create more problems than they solve. We delay our investments toward our retirements way way too late. I am guilty of this, and as “retirement” age looms very close on the horizon, I am realizing what each of those decisions to delay are costing me now.

We delay making the hard or difficult decisions. Most of us hope life or the situation will change course all by itself and save us from the horns of whatever dilemma we are facing. Since we regularly use this saying, that “hindsight is 20/20” that clearly points to the fact that we usually wish we had pulled the trigger sooner on . . . well, pretty much everything. I can sure testify to the fact that I wish I had not delayed 23 years to leave my previous employer!!

This can a fairly infinite list of delayed decisions, delayed flights, delayed conclusions, delayed pronouncements, delayed beginnings, delayed thinking and delayed results. What are you delaying today that you can actually control? Those delays that you cannot control, like this flight I am waiting on, you don’t worry or fret about those. Instead focus on what you need to be acting upon and don’t delay any longer.

Soul alignment

# Chapter 45

Brainstorming with your team can be the most delicious mental event and exercise. This is assuming of course that your team is like my team of peeps, who are all in relationally for one another and focused and pursuing the same goals and outcomes as you are, the synergy and interesting conversations are astonishing. They are food for the soul. They are life-giving and very fulfilling. I am so fortunate to have people like this in my life and that I get to hang out with them occasionally. These are some of my favorite times in life. These are the pieces that make life really interesting! It seems that too few people have experiences this positive and that makes me sad. It doesn’t have to be this way. You can build this kind of life, and you can built these kinds of teams and relationships. It is hard work like most things are, but it is very doable.

In the pandemic the biggest challenge is meeting people period, but meeting people that you resonate with and want to hang out with and want to work with, is extra tricky. I don’t really have any ideas to help you with that, because I am meeting people even less than you are - on purpose. But you can groom your connections and networks and church and your friends friends and your enemies enemies, and you will be sure to find one or five possible people that you have soul-alignment with. You don’t have to agree on politics or eschatology, you just have to be moving in a similar direction and want to support and be supported along the journey. Don’t miss this!

Spinning MY plates

# Chapter 44

Spinning plates. The distraction of 1000 competing agendas. You and I have boundaries to our energy and our attention. We may be able to grow these capacities over the decades of our lives, but they are still limited, when they are done they are done. So this limited supply of energy and attention can only be stretched so far. The only real control here is, where you choose to expend these capacities. And thus what most of us do is spin as many plates as we can. We actively try to learn to spin ever more plates.

Or ... we allow others to give us plates to spin. This is normal to a point, because we all have to navigate our human relationships with other people and that most often includes expectations (one kind of plate to spin) and demands (another kind of plate) and social/family/cultural) obligations (another). There is no way around facing this. People *will* give us plates to spin. The plates given to me so far today, would be: 1. A funeral 2. Travel 3. A $1000 loss 4. Fixing a problem in another country 5. The coming week of activities, etc etc.

Now I can spin all those plates and perhaps make these people in my life somewhat happy that they see me trying to spin their plates for them. All the while my plates fall to the ground and break. Or I can watch them all wobble and see how long I can keep too many up there, while not spinning any of them properly and safely. This has to stop. And I have a life statement to address this spinning plate dilemma - “under promise over deliver.” If you spend any time with me at all, you have heard me say this phrase. Probably many times.

I aim low when I sense your desire for me to spin a plate for you. I keep your expectations low to non-existent, and I keep my pressure to perform or conform in the low to non-existent range. So whatever I deliver in the end, can be enjoyed as great because I generally never promise to deliver very much at all, and moreover I am committed to spinning my plates, not everyone else’s.

IS what you do important? Then stop spinning other’s plates and only spin those important few.

A brutal awakening

# Chapter 43

Too much information about too many things and none of them are interesting to me even when I am awake. But within the first hour I get up, very very few things interest me, food being about the only thing. It takes me a while to get going in the mornings. I really don’t want to talk to anyone or have any conversations until after 10 even though I get up at 6. It just takes me a while to get myself going. Your mileage may differ. I know my dad does. If his eyes are open his mouth is moving. I just can’t.

There is a correlation here between investment and returns here. The more you have invested the more you can engage, because you are expecting a return. You are invested in a return. I am not invested in returns for early morning stuff period. Early mornings should be peaceful and quiet and restful and gentle. Not jarring and intense and chatty, and especially not requiring a response or thought or thinking from me. Get used to disappointment if you are going down that route. I will not be coming along willingly.

After I have been awake for an hour and have some coffee in me, then we can do all those things you want to do, talk about all those things you want to talk about, focus on all those inane things you want to focus on. I can’t multitask on a good hour or day, much less in the first hour of the day. Leave me the first hour to come into the world gently and fully, not with blaring questions and inquiries and required responses. It brutalizes my soul.

Goalposts

# Chapter 42

You have to set goals or you can’t see where you are aiming. Goals are like the sights on a gun, they let you know what you are lined up on, where you are pointing, what you are likely to hit. Goals are like those huge metal posts at the end of the sports field in rugby or American football, and yes they are called goalposts, but that is the direction you are moving toward, it is the point you are striving for, it is where you are trying to move your team, it is where your focus stays, it is where your intensity is pointed and you celebrate when you get there, you dance and jump around and generally act a fool because of your happiness.

Without these markers, without these ideas of where you are going, you can’t create a visible (to you) path to see by and know that you are moving in the direction that you really want to go. Without goals, then you are directionless and maybe even motionless. But even if you are moving, you may just be moving in circles and not actually going anywhere, or sitting on a stationary bike pedaling hard but not going anywhere. Even if you have an audiobook to mentally transport you somewhere else, you still aren’t really going anywhere. That is what it is like to be goalless.

Goals will make the invisible visible, as Tony Robbins said. Goals will light up the path you are walking. Goals will illuminate your aspirations. Goals will make you confident as a GPS does when you are on a trip. Goals will tell you whether or not you are making progress, or sitting stationary.

Write those goals down, they are gold.

Practice time

# Chapter 41

There are so many great things that you can spend your time practicing and learning. Even really hard and difficult things. But you will never be able to do that if you are mainlining the news on TV. All they talk about is Covid-19 and politics, who knew what when, and generally who is worse than someone else. The attention economy is more intense than ever before. Everyone wants your attention and will do all that they can to get it, include making you angry or fearful. So there are probably several good ways to mitigate the pull of the attention economy on your life, but the only one that works great for me is limits. No TV, little social media, no doomscrolling and stay off the TV! Oh I already mentioned that.

Then you will have time and space to practice hard things, to improve your skills, to attempt to do something important and world changing and life-changing. I don’t think it is possible to overstate how much time and attention are taken up by TV and social media and doomscrolling, nor how much energy, space and possibility is freed up by removing these things from your life. You cannot change the world or change your life while doing these attention-sucking activities, which are so powerful even though they are also passive.

Take charge of your life and make a huge difference. It’s closer and more possible than you think. You are capable of far more than you think. You have far more potential than you have shown so far. You can do this. You got this.

How far you can go

# Chapter 40

The most major problem with quitting or giving up is that you don’t know how far you could have gone. It stops the forward progress and makes all things come to a halt and the stretch ends. I know I know I can hear the argument in your head, that you are at the end of yourself and that you have nothing left, and so you need to stop. I get it, I truly do. Yesterday I did something only the young and foolish should do. I rode a motorcycle for 13 hours and 700 miles with detours and road constructions and hours of sitting on the interstate like it was a parking lot at Target. And yes I am still sore the next day. On the other hand, even though I could have quit and given up and grabbed a hotel room and chilled for the night and finished the trip this morning. But I did not. Because when I got here finally, the happiness of my dad in finally seeing me made that extra push worth all the pain and time and effort.

He had the garage door up and ready for me to drive right in and that says more than you can know. We never leave the garage door open. Period. So this little story tells us that the extra effort, the do-not-give-up-and-quit decision, that the sticking to it until it is finished, the see-how-far-we-can go thinking, can bring amazing results and most of the time you will be happy that you did not quit. You will never know how far you can go in life, if quitting or giving up become your standard practice.

Leaks

# Chapter 39

Every time my roofing guy comes over to repair my roof, the net result so far is that the leak just keeps moving. This is telling is that we are treating the symptom not the cause. The water won’t stop coming until we find and eliminate the root cause. There are so many areas of our lives were we treat the symptom rather than the root cause. And perhaps like my roofer, you just can’t find the actual problem and so some drastic wider action is gonna have to take place in order to dig out the root problem and finally eradicate this particular leak once and for all.

This happens to us at work and in our relationships and in our lives all the time. Of course we want to take the least intrusive and destructive action possible to resolve the problem. But as we are discovering with our leaky roof, water is an insidious intruder. Pain and difficulties are the same. They will find any possible path to your house or your heart. And the only way to truly stop these elements of destruction in your life and home is the root cause, where its entering into your life. That point of entry has to be eliminated and completely dealt with. You cannot leave that possibility open, or the ceilings will begin falling down (they already have water circles all over them) and the rafters start to rot. Soon you will have much much larger problems, if you don’t get a handle on this one.

Low bars

# Chapter 38

Too many of us seem to be keeping the bar low and only aiming at that which we already know that we can accomplish. I get it you really don’t want to put it out there to be criticized or that you have to step up and make it happen at a whole new level and that this is threatening and difficult. But keeping the bar low so that you don’t ever have to or need to stretch is beneath you and actually harms you in many ways. You were made for more than this. You are capable of more than this. You are punishing yourself by keeping yourself from being all that you were designed and created to become. Stop.

Don’t get me wrong, I am no more fearless than you are, and I don’t like these uncomfortable matters anymore than you do. But they have to happen, and 99/100 we are really glad that we went ahead and bit the bullet and paid the price and received these results. You need to continue your development and your growth into the best version of you. That can only happen if you are a learning machine and if you take these risks. Let me say the hard thing here, you are weak if you don’t. Weak in the sense that you chose to be less. Yes you were made for more, but your choice in life is less. Not good.

Is there a time for less, well of course there is such a time - especially when talking about retirement or contentment in your heart. But when we are talking about your power and ability and skills and reach and impact, no way! So stop reaching for what you already can do. Go for more.

Mental Will

# Chapter 37

Training and learning and failing and trying again we agreed, is just SSP for most of us, and that this is simply the path to success. Here is where we engage our mental will and put our mental wills into play. It is when we are in the long haul of developing ourselves that we have to impose our will on our worlds and continue to train, learn, fail and repeat for once again, that is the most typical path to success for most of us. But you need your mental will to keep your momentum moving forward, you need your mental will to not falter and cave in from the pressures of looking foolish, or becoming a beginner AGAIN. Oh I get it. I have done this so many times.

You go instantly from being a rock star at something, and top of the pack, the alpha - to less than a child (or a dog!) the moment you enter into a new field of learning or new context where your old skills can’t help you, or when you are dropped into a new country where you don’t speak the language and they don’t speak English. I have had this done to me more than once. It is the worst and best experience you can possibly have in your life. But you have to SSP through the being an idiot period, before you can return to your rock start status. Mental will. It is what shapes this day up into the learning marathon that it will be. If you do not exercise your mental will, then this day will be relegated to a waste of your life day.

SSP candidates

# Chapter 36

Training and learning and failing and trying again are the standard suffering package of those who are succeeding. We could call this SSP instead of SOP (standard operating procedures). No one becomes great at anything without the SSP. I am in a particularly difficult SSP at the moment. I judge the intensity of an SSP by how threatening it feels, you can use a different metric if it suites your purposes, but this one works pretty well for me and I find it to be quite accurate. If you desire to do something great or simply to be great at any one thing, then SSP is the route that 99.9% of us go through to get there. The other 0.1% just get by with their talent and opportunity and their lives appear effortless, but I would not know for certain since I am clearly in the 99.9%.

But this bears mentioning because the books I read and the articles I curate and the bulk of the information out there is usually about the 0.1%. I have noticed in the last decade that even in generic novels MC’s are often these highly talented lucky individuals who happened upon the perfect work opportunity and are effortlessly supporting themselves and many even become wealthy. They are also highly muscled without ever working out, and thin in spite of eating and drinking copious amounts, not to mention good looking and did I mention highly talented?

The point being here, that the 0.1% belong only in fictional novels, and that the 99.9% of us are SSP candidates if we want to do something important, change the world, or become exceptional in an area of expertise. Don’t confuse your life with a fictional novel. You only get this one ride, no edits permitted.