a few people named two of this year's commencement addresses as the best, or most inspirational at least. the first, by cartoonist mike peters, happened where i work, the second, by author neil gaiman, took place at an art school in Philadelphia. as someone who dabbles in presentations (and is a commencement speech junkie) i was struck by how stupendously different the two approaches were. peters started out in such a meandering fashion you wondered if he prepared anything. gaiman's talk was so dense the first thing i did after watching it was find a transcript and re-read it marking it up with my symbols and notes like it were an academic text.
while i enjoyed both, gaiman's was rich with insight. in example:
People keep working, in a freelance world, and more and more of today's world is freelance, because their work is good, and because they are easy to get along with, and because they deliver the work on time. And you don't even need all three. Two out of three is fine. People will tolerate how unpleasant you are if your work is good and you deliver it on time. They'll forgive the lateness of the work if it's good, and if they like you. And you don't have to be as good as the others if you're on time and it's always a pleasure to hear from you.
that has to be one of the most cogent insights into the professional world ever made. and i know the guy writes for a living but the compact, precise articulation of his concept is breathtaking in a literary and observational sense. if i ever met that guy, the question i would ask him is how he came upon that insight. did it bleed out over months or did it appear in a flash while showering or exercising. furthermore, gaiman demonstrates how life experience blows the doors off most other forms of learning and how the art of introspection is the prism that allows you to understand what unfolds around us. spectacular.
circumstance recently led me to j.k. rowlings 2008 commencement address at harvard. for me, her twenty minute speech surpassed the combined value of all her potter books. mostly because she's pro-failure, something i'm quite ravenous about as of late. my favorite line, of many:
some failure in life is inevitable. it is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all, in which case you fail by default.
next, we just need to figure out how to move this message down from post-college to pre-kindergarten.
also, as i had to remind bella as she shoulder-hacked me crafting this post, the real meat of failure is not in failing itself, but in the building of tools needed to climb out of life's many divots, holes, ditches, cliffs and canyons. so maybe perseverance is the better term. less ambiguous is the fact that the landscape is treacherous and circumstance requires us to travel large swaths of it in the dark.
Neither the woman on the plane nor my friend Elizabeth was in denial about her feelings. Neither of them was pleased with what was going on, but neither of them had a choice about it. The only choice they had was the style they selected for passing the time. Having the ability to choose a style seems to me to be a great liberation. Perhaps it is the ultimate meaning of "freedom of choice."
Right Aspiration is what develops in the mind once we understand that freedom of choice is possible. Life is going to unfold however it does: pleasant or unpleasant, disappointing or thrilling, expected or unexpected, all of the above! What a relief it would be to know that whatever wave comes along, we can ride it out with grace. If we got really good at it, we could be like surfers, delighting especially in the most complicated waves.
What Right Aspiration translates to in terms of daily action is the resolve to behave in a way that stretches the limits of conditioned response. If i want to build big biceps, I need to use every opportunity to practice lifting weights. If I want to live in a way that is loving and generous and fearless, then I need to practice overcoming any tendency to be angry or greedy or confused. Life is a terrific gym. Every situation is an opportunity to practice.
Excerpt from It's Easier Than You Think by Sylvia Boorstein
there's more than one reason they call them scratchers
at my last job once a week the database guy at my shop walked the aisles of cubes collecting money for lottery tickets. everyone would hand him a wrinkled buck or two, he'd make a scratch on a small piece of paper, and move to the next. then at lunch or on the way home, he'd buy a block of lottery tickets with the money. routinely i was the only one who did not participate. routinely he was the one who would shake his head and tsk-tsk my decision, saying i'd be really sorry if they ever won because i'd be the only one left in the office to hold all of these systems afloat. to this i said if they all won, in a year's time i'd be the happiest one of everyone involved. that comment bought me many a debate on the merits and ills of an average person coming into an un-average flood of money.
my belief on the lottery system spread through the office and my lottery-playing co-workers would appear at my cube in twos, threes, and fours to confirm what they heard and question the source. i would confess to the row of bemused expressions that i did believe they would all be miserable if they won the lottery. when pressed on how that could possibly be i would explain. i would single out one of the gawkers asking about their family. parents still living? how many siblings? aunts? uncles? friends? after getting a sense for the inventory of friends and relations i'd ask what their plan for all of them was. they always had a plan which i imagined got drawn up in their forty plus minute commutes home. their presence would gain a beat as they excitedly stepped through the awards each tier of the family would get thinking they were the first to stagger the amounts with such acumen. i'd then move us along saying ...
ok. so you give the sister you don't like so much and her husband fifty grand just like you did for your other siblings and in nine month's they're reporting the t-shirt decal business they invested in went under because there are now printers and special paper that can make decals every bit as good as theirs. but now they have a great new idea and it can't loose but they just need another thirty grand to get it off the ground. what do you say to this? (now some people say they will give them the 30k. when that happens, i bring the bad business duo back in another five months asking for more. and again. and again. eventually everyone says they have to at some point say no.) i agree. you do have to say no. but what do you think that eventual line in the sand will do with your relationship with your sister who you previously had no significant angst with? and then how do you react when your other siblings call and express shock that you wouldn't give her more, and they just had a bad break, and you've got so much, more than you can even use, and it's not like you did anything to earn it, how could you tell your own sister no, how could you be so heartless? then your dad calls. and then your mom. and then what does the next family gathering look like? you pulling up in your fancy car while you're sister couldn't come because she and her obnoxious hubby are getting put out of their duplex because they lost their business just because you wouldn't give them another thirty grand which for anyone else under the picnic gazebo would be like dropping a dollar bill in the turned up hat of a sightless beggar. you're fully convinced it was the right choice. maybe it was the right choice. but do your friends and family agree?
while all of my arguments were based on simple conjecture which were based on scenarios i'd drawn up in my head, after more than a decade of my lottery-conviction, i heard my first bit of first-hand evidence through the aunt of a close friend of mine (and a woman i had socialized with as recently as six months back). four years ago this woman's christmas list was 225 addresses long. then her husband died and she was awarded one point five million dollars. guess how many names were on her christmas list last year, or rather, three years after she was handed one point five millions dollars? when i asked bella this question, she guessed 1,000. i had to tell her the real answer was seven. and then less than three months after the seven-name christmas she took her life with a handgun she had from earlier times.
Ritual, Willpower, and the Final Push
When writing his most recent book, Be Excellent at Anything (2010), Schwartz structured his day into three ninety minute writing bursts that allowed him to complete the book working only four and a half hours a day for three months. Our brains, Schwartz discovered, become easily fatigued. They need breaks in order to refuel, to be able to refocus, create, and produce. When we don't give them the needed time to refuel, they more or less start to shut down and ratchet up the mood crank factor until we have to listen. By then we've often spent hours at work, without actually accomplishing a whole lot of work.
But it's not just the lost creativity, cognitive function, and productivity that take a hit when we don't stop to refuel on a regular enough basis. Willpower is annihilated and fear and anxiety run amok when you don't give your brain a chance to refuel.
In his book How We Decide (2009), Jonah Lehrer points to the part of the brain called the prefrontal cortex (PFC) as the seat of self-control or willpower. The problem is, the PFC is easily fatigued.
...
Willpower, it turns out, is a depletable resource. Tasks that involve heavy thinking, working memory, concentration, and creativity tax the PFC in a major way and ... it doesn't take all that much to draw your willpower tank down to near zero.
Why should you care? Two reasons. What we often experience as resistance, desire, distraction, burnout, fatigue, frustration, and anxiety in the process of creating something from nothing may, at least in part, be PFC depletion that reduces our willpower to zero and makes it near impossible to commit to the task at hand—especially if the task wars with our creative orientation. In addition, what so many creators experience as a withering ability to handle the anxiety, doubt, and uncertainty as a project nears completion may actually be self-induced rather than process-induced suffering.
Think about your own process. As you near the launch of a new venture, the completion of a manuscript, or the creation of a collection of artwork for an upcoming show, you tend to put in more hours. You work for longer periods of time without breaks. You sleep less and do so more fitfully. You stop exercising, meditating, listening to music, and creating deliberate space in your day. You eat like hell (or don't eat enough) and push away conversations and activities that take you away from your endeavor because you just don't have the time (or so you think). You abandon your more humane creation routine and rituals in the name of getting it done.
What happens? All those things stack on top of each other to systematically juice your PFC and empty your willpower tank, then keep it empty. You'll very likely experience that loss of willpower and hit to your ability to self-regulate your behavior as the evil, nasty resistance getting stronger as you get closer to completing your endeavor. In reality, a series of subtle shifts in your own behavior are causing much of the distress.
If you're someone who creates largely in a vacuum, as you get closer to the end of your endeavor you're also starting to get to the place where you've got to go public or at least reveal your creation to the first line of your potential "judges." Exposure to judgment and risk of loss begin to become far more real to you. That kicks the amygdala's fear and anxiety responses into high gear at a point when your PFC is too wiped out to do much to counter it.
Well-planned, burst-driven creation rituals with recovery periods go a long way toward taming the evil nasties that arise as a project progresses by allowing the PFC to refuel along the way. I experimented with this when writing this book. When I wrote my earlier book, Career Renegade, I spent the final week slumped on the couch in the tattered remains for an extra-heavy Champion sweatshirt from college-writing, sweating, thinking, muttering, spinning, and randomly cursing for the better part of sixteen hours a day. Not fun. I felt a bit like I was waging creative warfare.
This time around, I committed to a ritual that was much closer to Schwartz's. I still donned the ancient sweatshirt. And the week before the manuscript was due, I still had a ton of work to do on it. But i stuck to my bursts, took breaks to meditate, eat, play guitar, walk outside, play with my wife and daughter, and talk to friends. Amazingly enough, the work still got done, the the process became substantially more humane. lesson learned.
a couple times a year i try out a few new magazines. while i enjoy reading the content and studying their pixel perfect layouts, what i enjoy most about magazines is the newsstand experience (good newsstands at least), with its rows and columns of shiny and new. it's clear lots have people have been busy.
initially, i had started writing a gripe about how i find the letter from the editor in most magazines to be boorish and less thoughtful than it seemed like it maybe should be, but i just deleted it. i decided that instead of being critical of most—and who the hell am i to say anyway—i'd compliment the one i enjoy most: David Zinczenko of men's health. he has a style and approach that i find unassuming and real. i imagine him obsessively toiling over his next topic, searching for that one story or experience from his past that will best illuminate the spirit of the pending issue. i imagine these final epiphanies come while he's shiny with exertion from one of his many activities. while i appreciate some might not deem him inspiring, i think we could agree he takes his space seriously and works hard to fill it with relevant reflections from his life. and in the end, that's all any of us can conscientiously ask.
this is a future message to my children (presently 10, 8 and 5 years of age) who i hope, when older, mindfully plan their path and pursue with vigor the life they want.
life is a choice. death is not. this means that what you do between this moment and the moment your heart ceases to throb, which it will, is up to you.
yesterday i talked up a book i recently read. today i'm sharing the best thing i've read on the net in the last four years (the prior favorite read being merlin mann's BETTER essay). below you will find a few excerpts from a speech delivered to a group of first-year west point students by essayist William Deresiewicz.
How do you learn to think? Let's start with how you don't learn to think. A study by a team of researchers at Stanford came out a couple of months ago. The investigators wanted to figure out how today's college students were able to multitask so much more effectively than adults. How do they manage to do it, the researchers asked? The answer, they discovered—and this is by no means what they expected—is that they don't. The enhanced cognitive abilities the investigators expected to find, the mental faculties that enable people to multitask effectively, were simply not there. In other words, people do not multitask effectively. And here's the really surprising finding: the more people multitask, the worse they are, not just at other mental abilities, but at multitasking itself.
One thing that made the study different from others is that the researchers didn't test people's cognitive functions while they were multitasking. They separated the subject group into high multitaskers and low multitaskers and used a different set of tests to measure the kinds of cognitive abilities involved in multitasking. They found that in every case the high multitaskers scored worse. They were worse at distinguishing between relevant and irrelevant information and ignoring the latter. In other words, they were more distractible. They were worse at what you might call "mental filing": keeping information in the right conceptual boxes and being able to retrieve it quickly. In other words, their minds were more disorganized. And they were even worse at the very thing that defines multitasking itself: switching between tasks.
Multitasking, in short, is not only not thinking, it impairs your ability to think. Thinking means concentrating on one thing long enough to develop an idea about it. Not learning other people's ideas, or memorizing a body of information, however much those may sometimes be useful. Developing your own ideas. In short, thinking for yourself. You simply cannot do that in bursts of 20 seconds at a time, constantly interrupted by Facebook messages or Twitter tweets, or fiddling with your iPod, or watching something on YouTube.
I find for myself that my first thought is never my best thought. My first thought is always someone else's; it's always what I've already heard about the subject, always the conventional wisdom. It's only by concentrating, sticking to the question, being patient, letting all the parts of my mind come into play, that I arrive at an original idea. By giving my brain a chance to make associations, draw connections, take me by surprise. And often even that idea doesn't turn out to be very good. I need time to think about it, too, to make mistakes and recognize them, to make false starts and correct them, to outlast my impulses, to defeat my desire to declare the job done and move on to the next thing.
... You do your best thinking by slowing down and concentrating.
Now that's the third time I've used that word, concentrating. Concentrating, focusing. You can just as easily consider this lecture to be about concentration as about solitude. Think about what the word means. It means gathering yourself together into a single point rather than letting yourself be dispersed everywhere into a cloud of electronic and social input. It seems to me that Facebook and Twitter and YouTube—and just so you don't think this is a generational thing, TV and radio and magazines and even newspapers, too—are all ultimately just an elaborate excuse to run away from yourself. To avoid the difficult and troubling questions that being human throws in your way. Am I doing the right thing with my life? Do I believe the things I was taught as a child? What do the words I live by—words like duty, honor, and country—really mean? Am I happy?
...
So it's perfectly natural to have doubts, or questions, or even just difficulties. The question is, what do you do with them? Do you suppress them, do you distract yourself from them, do you pretend they don't exist? Or do you confront them directly, honestly, courageously? If you decide to do so, you will find that the answers to these dilemmas are not to be found on Twitter or Comedy Central or even in The New York Times. They can only be found within—without distractions, without peer pressure, in solitude.
...
These are truly formidable dilemmas, more so than most other people will ever have to face in their lives, let alone when they're 23. The time to start preparing yourself for them is now. And the way to do it is by thinking through these issues for yourself—morality, mortality, honor—so you will have the strength to deal with them when they arise. Waiting until you have to confront them in practice would be like waiting for your first firefight to learn how to shoot your weapon. Once the situation is upon you, it's too late. You have to be prepared in advance. You need to know, already, who you are and what you believe: not what the Army believes, not what your peers believe (that may be exactly the problem), but what you believe.
i know i'm in a scrubby, small camp, but i wish more folks were preaching the gospel of thought.
i'm really shocked i never heard of this guy before now. and i stumbled upon him, surpisingly, while listening to a rather blue comedy stream in itunes.
after forty plus years, i've decided to start being smart about what i eat. being far denser about the matter than you can imagine, i did the following:
read up on what is recommended.
created a system to guide and track my eating.
filled out daily (or near daily) how well i'm doing (in an excel spreadsheet i made).
if you're wondering what it looks like, in typical tradition, i'm more than happy to share. as for what i've learned thus far, it's way more difficult to eat a proper diet than i ever imagined it could be. regarding the system, wherever you see a grey box, it means i missed something i was supposed to have had. the colored boxes on the left, denote how i did for the day. i only get a green for a perfect day. a yellow means it was ok, and a red implies i missed by a fair amount. if i didn't consciously work towards a green day, every one of my days would be in the red. it can therefore be said that every day of my life before i began this exercise last summer was a red day. every last one of them. suck!
Old age can be both miserable and joyous. It all depends on the facets we choose to examine. But one thing we do know is that positive aging must reflect vital reaction to change, to disease, and to conflict. Thus, perhaps there is a third way for us to view old age - one that does not try to paint old age as either black or white. A 55-year old Study poet underscored the dignity even in dying. He rhetorically asked, "What's the difference between a guy who at his final conscious moments before death has a nostalgic grin on his face, as if to say, 'Boy, I sure squeezed that lemon' and another man who fights for every last breath in an effort to turn time back to some nagging unfinished business? Damed if I know, but I sure think it's worth thinking about."
here's the latest installment of the troy regiment. a few thoughts about this rendition before the reveal. something i just recently observed about my regiments over the years is that it began as a very simple model and as i had success with it, i added more routines thinking that my system could shoulder whatever i threw at it. what i found though was that i made it too difficult to sustain and instead of bringing order and calm it caused stress and fervor. as such, i've returned to a more simplistic model. only weeks in, i'm already thrilled with the shift. it's been awhile since i've routinely given myself more time to do something than i needed. i've already experienced boredom more times in the last ten days than i have in the last year and for someone who seldom experiences boredom, the sensation can be quite scintillating.
and next, to answer a few questions i routinely get to save you (and me) the email:
(1) the chart is made using excel.
(2) yes, there is flexibility in this. there has to be. it is a schedule, a goal, a guide, it is not a mandate. for something like this to work, you have to be malleable to life (just like with our menu). that said, i often have days that line up well. i've never had a perfect week. close, but never perfect.
(3) for those who look at the chart and think marty is getting ripped off attention-wise, you're daft. if anything, marty wishes i'd sit around less looking at her to say something to me. my take, if you're going to error in marriage, it is the side to error on.
(4) and yes, i still get my books knocked out of my hands in the hallway and pushed down in the sandbox at recess. but not as frequently as i used to.
or view the four year evolution...
also note the summer of 2010 was when i finally became a morning person
in re-reading last week's deepak breakdown, i fear i may have not been entirely fair in my review. while it is true that he did not spoon-feed me answers to the questions he initially posed, his book still contained its share of pulpy goodness. my favorite mouthful (and i'm paraphrasing):
if you're in the business of trying to change others or waiting for others to change to your way of thinking/living, consider something difficult you have tried to change in yourself and how challenging it was, even when you had all of the control. then consider making a dramatic change in another when you have no control over their thinking or actions.
i've bumped into that very problem a great many times over the years. and here's one i didn't get from deepak but i've leaned on plenty over the last ten years:
you will never be able to change your past, but you can have all sorts of opinions about your future.
i don't know who to credit for that one as i've read it, or some semblance of it, in many different places. i've even had marty remind me of the point a time or two as well.
friday is movie night in our house. first the family watches a kid-friendly show ** . after our family movie and putting the kids down, i watch a troy movie. if marty doesn't fall asleep with the kids she'll usually stop by to see what i'm watching, contemplate it for a moment, and then either join me or move on. last week she joined me. the pick was called The Last Picture Show. i'm not sure who referred it to me. it just showed up the netflix sleeve (i'm a tragically horrible netflix queue manager ****). the movie was odd and not too long in you got to see a young cybil sheppard topless. quite certain that would be the movie's crowning achievement for me, i went to sleep with my head in marty's lap. marty stuck it out. when it was done she was intrigued by the male lead and looked him up on imdb. his portfolio led her to watch an episode of 21 jump street and melrose place. this translated to her being awake well into the 2am hour.
the next day, around 4pm marty cautioned the kids that she was tired and not in a good mood. bella asked what was wrong. marty said she stayed up too late the night before. bella asked why she stayed up. marty confessed that she was watching shows. bella ruminated on this for a moment and marty actually saw the realization settle into the girl that there is no one to tell moms and dads when enough is enough and it's time to go to bed (like it or not!). bella then turned to her brothers and said, "alex! anthony! do you hear that? when you grow up it's important that you make good choices because no one will be there to tell you what to do. nothing is for free!"
i would pay a whole lot of money to know where that "nothing is for free" closing stems from. it's strong. i've already used it four times in just the last week. when you get the inflection just right, it gives everyone pause. in fact, it's almost as effective as swearing to people you believe johnny depp's best work happened in 21 jump street.
** right now we're doing a special movie night project where we're going through the alphabet. this means the week's letter defines both the movie and our meal. last week, E, was E.T. (which anthony keeps calling E.T.A. for some reason) and we ate enchiladas.
**** i read or hear about a movie and then add it to my netflix queue. the movie can show up more than a year later and i have no idea what drew me to it. sometimes you get a pleasant surprise in this lackadaisical approach to life, but most times you just get stuck with kooky movies you're not in the mood for. this proclivity is also why i don't play fantasy football. i once had a week where two of my rostered players were on a bye week. i lost in that case too.
p.s. apologies for all the errors and typos in yesterdays gallery posting. i took ill that evening and was working through the haze of a robitussen induced coma. i don't really have a good excuse for the rest of the days.
i think he could safely expand who he claims could benefit from such advice
he's been a consummate professional and team player and good things usually happen for those kinds of people. i think that's a lesson a lot of young people in our locker room can learn.
steelers coach mike tomlin addressing the performance of his 4th string qb, charlie batch
a student of mine from last year forwarded me a link today. he said that after seeing this interview he felt it might be of interest to me and of possible use in future classes. i opened the link. this was the first thing i heard.
technology is like a mirror, if an idiot looks in you can't expect an apostle to look out.
after that line i paused the video, now fifteen seconds into a thirty one minute interview, readied a reply to my student and wrote, "that is possibly the single greatest line i've heard in regard to technology since i've begun working in technology."
i've never heard of stephen fry but after listening to thirty minutes of him free-styling here, i can assure you that three months from now i will be very familiar with his thoughts on technology and life's chase.
you can all thank luke, the most stylish student i've ever had the pleasure of working with for this juicy and marbled slab of greatness. and, send good thoughts and karma his way as he looks for a curious endeavor with a non-profit in the atlanta region.
if you haven't read PART 1 or PART 2, you should do so before reading this.
there is a reason i thought to share my personal values at this time. two fridays ago bella and i were to spend the day together. this father-daughter event was to celebrate her successful completion of another year of school. in the past, this ritual took place on the last day of classes but now that she and alex attend the same school i couldn't take them both out individually. bella was kind enough to give the day to alex as it was his first full school year.
before i knew it there were just a few weeks left of summer and bella and i hadn't gone out for her day. marty and i scrambled to find a date. we squeaked it out on the last weekday of summer. bella requested to go to six flags (again) followed by a steak dinner. knowing it was going to be a long day, i went to bed early the night before. when i awoke, i checked the day's weather. 96 degrees. and i was to be out in it all day. add to this i was to spend the day with bella who for the prior week hadn't exactly been a model citizen. marty chalked her vinegar up to the fast approaching school year. i pointed at the late-summer weeks of going to bed after 10pm. whatever the source, times with the girl had been unpredictable and tumultuous, and i was about to navigate those erratic waters on my own, all day long, and in an inhumane heat.
after groaning at weather dot com i pulled up my values document and began my daily review. personal growth - check. value my time - check. care for myself - on it. care for my marriage - check. enjoy my children - uhhh, yeah, sure. equip my children for life - trying as always. professional excellence - got a pass today. be grateful - uhhhm, yes, gratitude, could use more effort here.
i then drifted down to the images, glancing at them in order. i take in the visual. depending on my troubles and/or the day ahead the various images wash over me differently. as i move through them, the first one to give me pause is the bride and her father. this picture always emotes something from me but especially when bella is on my mind and as noted, bella was on my mind today. every time i take this picture in i project to a day in the future when i will be in this man's position. and i'm sure it will seem like just yesterday when i was doing things like dreading taking my nine year old daughter to six flags. and i know whether i show it outwardly or not, i know, i know already, that this is how i will feel on the inside the day bella dedicates her life to someone else, someone else our family doesn't even know at the moment.
i then moved forward. my eyes next paused on the image of randy pausch. if you don't recall, randy pausch was the last lecture guy. the forty-something year old who went to his doctor with flu-like symptoms and was told he had six months to live. and he had three children all under the age of six. he died last year as his doctors predicted. so this is the image i find myself studying in the pre-dawn hours while thinking i don't want to go out for a dedicated day with my daughter because of the heat and because she hasn't been as pleasant as she's capable of in her last week of summer break. i stared at this image, this simple, low-res image of a smiling father holding his three children ... this father holding his three children shortly before he passed away with a cruelly inadequate warning. as i took this image in, i wondered what randy pausch would do to spend another day, a single day, with his daughter. i then wondered what randy pausch's daughter would do to spend one more day with her father.
bella and i went on to have an amazing, friction-free day that included hand-holding and smiling and stories and laughing and closeness and very little worry about the heat.
and this is why i chose, at this time, to share my private ritual with you.
PART 2 : yesterday i left my socks on. today i'm going full monty
if you haven't read PART 1 yet, i'd consider doing so before continuing as this will seem incomplete without it.
yesterday i shared my personal values. something i didn't share was that in addition to the written definition of my values, i also have a set of images that go with them. i'm a visual guy and somewhere along the way i learned that these images had a power to reach me in a different way and added a depth my written words alone lacked which is how the addition of photos to my simple written values came to be.
again, before the share, a few things about the pictures:
i use one image per value.
like the words, these sometimes change. but i've been pretty happy with the current set for awhile.
how it works is these images reside just under the written portion, so every morning i first read through the text posted yesterday and then i take a moment to glance at these photos, reflecting on each as i move through them.
aside from two of the images, the actual people in the photos are not the significant part of the story. it is the emotion the image elicits that makes them powerful for me.
i don't know who sgt joe hall is. it just seemed like a quintessential photo all family scrapbooks might have. oddly, it is the name in its elderly scrawl across the top that makes this picture not so pedestrian for me, or perhaps it is that it makes it perfectly pedestrian.
i reckon some folks might like an explanation for my selection for the professional value. i'm not going to explain. it's not important. it's the picture i have chosen and i have my reasons. were you to do something similar, you'd pick a picture that speaks to you.
the equip my children for life one could also possibly use some explanation too. that is one i might one day speak to but i'm not going to today.
for the last few years, i've been posting my daily and weekly regiment. this is the schedule i created to help me meet my personal goals. to be truthful, there have only been a handful of times where i've come close to a perfect week. but to be truthful again, hitting my marks or not, my weeks prove far more fruitful trying to adhere to this plan than if i entered life's fray without it.
it occurred to me very recently that i have never shared the counterpart to that schedule. this would be a list of the things that i, in long periods of contemplation, have come to know are important to me. some folks would call them my values. without this list also in hand, the schedule would be rather pointless and the same would be true the other way around.
before i share, a few things about my list:
i've been working on this document for about thirteen years. that would be three years longer than i've spent producing all of the content for this website.
there is no other block of text that i have ever spent anything near this amount of time and effort on.
the list does see edits but changes at this late point are usually fairly minor and have more of a nuanced effect rather than massive shifts in thought.
without this list, it is very possible my life would be in a complete shambles.
i read this document just about every morning.
i sometimes read this document twice in a day.
the most i've ever looked at this document in one day is five times. and it wasn't the day that was trying, it was me trying not to wreck something i'd later regret.
the red text is what i read if i only have a minute or two for my morning review.
i would liken this text to a daily chiropractic adjustment for my mind and soul.
unbuttons shirt ... the list:
personal growth employ the collegiate spirit of continued growth, expansion, and improvement. live introspectively but do not compare myself to others. only compare myself to how i was last week, last month, last year. recognize and eliminate the bad. recognize and nurture the positive.
value my time
there are limited minutes in our lives. the clock is ticking. use each day to achieve things that matter. ritualize the things deemed vital. leave a mark. avoid the typical and unnecessary regrets.
care for myself
do not deprive myself of life experiences through poor, selfish and gluttonous behaviors. stay healthy. stay fit. stay away from doctors and hospitals through wise living. do not go down behind something i can control.
care for my marriage
always remember my luck in finding marty. she is the one. cherish her. make her feel special. work to make her dreams come true.
this relationship is the only up-close, intimate partnership my children will see first-hand so marty and i are teaching them, the primary ones teaching them, how to be part of a loving, respectful and healthy relationship built from friendship, adoration, and love.
marty is who i will be eating breakfast with and sharing porch-time with long after the children have moved on. it is vital i never stop nurturing and caring for the relationship thus keeping the friendship not only in tact but vibrant.
enjoy my children
this experience is tragically temporary. they will be gone soon. too soon. do not take my time with my children for granted. when i spend time with my children, actively BE WITH my children. do not squander these moments, i can never get them back and will forever regret not doing more with the relationships.
create an environment my children want to be part of so they cherish the memories of their father, family, home, and childhood.
equip my children for life
treat my children as i would treat another adult i respect. be even-tempered. be consistent. be patient. be just. don't spoil them to the point of ill-preparing them for the world they will one day enter. remember, you're raising adults, not children.
professional excellence
make my professional contributions be thoughtful and of consequence. never let my role be questioned or compromised. control my experience. remember my fortune in being employed and show my employers and clients this respect and gratitude daily. be consistent. be timely. be reliable. be conscientious.
be grateful be grateful for the quiet fortunes in my life that i did nothing to create, earn or attain but benefit from daily (e.g. birth, health, family, locale).
bella and i snuck in our father-daughter day on the last weekday of summer. now that she and alex are going to the same school, and it was alex's first year at the school, bella let him have his day out on the last day of school and said she'd take hers later. later almost didn't happen.
we again went to six flags and then longhorn steakhouse at day's end. my favorite ride was the tidal wave. hers was the tony hawk roller coaster. the best food of the day was the porterhouse, easily, given how famished we were after a day in the ninety degree heat and our sack lunches. the best piece of advice dispensed during the day: always be friendly with bullies but never be their friend. the only problem with the advice was it was bella who dished it to me. we were soaking wet and excitedly walking up to get back on the tidal wave ride. i'm not even sure why the topic came up but she just said it with me trotting behind her and lapping it up like some adolescent fan-boy.
BELLA
always be friendly with bullies but never be their friend.
TROY
always be friendly with bullies but never be their friend? i like that. that's good. where'd you learn that?
BELLA
horse camp.
TROY (contemplatively)
hmm. can you explain why this is true?
BELLA
well you don't want to be their friend because then they will expect you to do bully things with them. and you don't want to be their enemy because then they will bully you. so you just act friendly and all (smiley face) 'hey there' and then they'll leave you alone.
you would think on a nine hour father-daughter day outing, the more mature, more experienced, more educated father might be the one delivering sage counsel to the child but i can't honestly be expected to compete with tutelage as insightful as that, can i?
i'm the better for the day. i only hope bella benefitted and enjoyed her time a fraction as much.
the piece of advice i've given more than any other in the last six months is this:
if there is one thing my daughter isabella has taught me, it is to never, ever act or make decisions when you're angry. nothing good ever comes of it.
in fact, i dispensed that very bit of advice three times, to three very different people, for three very distinct scenarios just last week. there was even one moment where i could have better used the advice myself.
people never knew the fountain of youth was actually just a pond, and in their own back yard
saturday bella ambled down for breakfast around 10:20 in the morning. she took her spot at the breakfast bar and professed to me, "i like sleeping late, reading for an hour and then eating breakfast five minutes before its lunchtime."
after she finished her proclamation, i stopped what i was doing to look at her. she could have passed for a preacher, prophet, philosopher, and truck driver, or all of them wrapped up into one which obviously looked peculiar coming from a well-rested, and mid-summer sated nine year old girl wearing pink pajamas with prancing horses on them.
yesterday i talked about the what i found most surprising about my trip, today i wanted to share what i found most enlightening. the moment came in the last hour of the 208 hour vacation experience. we were almost home. the kids were playing in the back as they had the whole way there and the whole way back. marty, in the seat to me, had her head back on the seat rest, her eyes closed, feet on the dashboard and a pillow wrapped up in her arms as if it were a stack of books and she were walking to class. after glancing at her for a moment i broke the silence by saying that when i was younger i was always hyper excited for vacations and uber depressed to return from them. but now, while i still love and anticipate vacations, i no longer experience the extreme elation and even more extreme letdown i used to. i view this in a very positive way as a mark of my daily life and routines and i'm immensely appreciative to have reached a place as satisfying as this.
without opening her eyes, marty responded that the thing she disliked most about returning from vacation these days was the solitude of her life. confused, i commented that it seemed she got out a lot, through arranged, weekly events with other stay at home moms and friends and such. she elaborated saying she didn't mean solitude as in simply being alone but rather solitude as in not getting enough adult interaction and that spending the lion-share of your time with someone whose conversational repertoire predominately consists of the question 'why?' takes a dramatic toll on an educated and previously mentally challenged individual. she went on to say how she totally understood how not all moms (or dads) could manage staying at home with kids because the reality and rigors of just you and a child or two at home are serious. the occasional bouts of disbelief at the state of your life, rational or not, could be defeating. i thought of a new neighbor, fresh from philadelphia and at home all day with a thirteen month old while her husband is at work and her with no local network yet. then i thought of our friend e-love who teaches school full-time and then changes gears, dramatically, to care for their children full-time in the summer months. even though e-love has the advantage of nine months of diversity, i imagine his scenario has to be an even harder lifestyle than a straight full-time parent who has at least the consistency-crutch to lean upon. after marty expressed her sentiment she slid into her quiet reverie again. i let her be and drove on wordlessly.
for some time now, i've been doing an exercise on monday mornings. it is from the happier book i read last year. in the exercise you are to imagine you are at the end of your life and mere moments from death. you have the sudden ability to travel, via a time machine, to your present day self. you are asked to contemplate and answer the question, 'what is the one piece of advice your expiring self would give your present-day self?'. last monday, my first day back from vacation and the day after i had the above conversation with marty, my answer to that question was, "be more empathetic about how challenging my wife's job of raising our children is — and how extraordinary she is at this job."
i then drifted down to the images, glancing at them in order. i take in the visual. depending on my troubles and/or the day ahead the various images wash over me differently. as i move through them, the first one to give me pause is the bride and her father. this picture always emotes something from me but especially when bella is on my mind and as noted, bella was on my mind today. every time i take this picture in i project to a day in the future when i will be in this man's position. and i'm sure it will seem like just yesterday when i was doing things like dreading taking my nine year old daughter to six flags. and i know whether i show it outwardly or not, i know, i know already, that this is how i will feel on the inside the day bella dedicates her life to someone else, someone else our family doesn't even know at the moment.
