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The Feeling The Follows

(45 sec read)

I thought acupuncture was hokey… until I tried it. I was at Burning Man back when celebrities weren’t flying in on their helicopters yet. It was a friend who did it in a tent on a blanket and the effects were immediate. What he said would happen, happened. The feeling that came across me right afterward was near-ecstasy and undeniable. I was an immediate believer, despite my inner East Coast critic.

Now I evangelize acupuncture (and get it where I can). I certainly don’t feel anywhere near as good coming out of the doctor’s office!

There’s truth in this experience because the goal was never acupuncture. Same with yoga, same with meditation, same with eating less bread, cherishing gratitude, walking 3 hills a day with no headphones, and taking guidance by things I can’t see. I guess you could say I have been a reluctant believer, and I suppose that’s the best kind – the skeptic turned faithful disciple, and not by fear or desperation or safety or persuasion – by nothing internal – but by the act itself, and what follows.

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Social Media Fights

Social media fights, they all look the same and lead to the same place.

I admit it, I get drawn in myself. I comment less these days but I often read the entire thread and imagine what I’d say. It’s hard not to play.

One common bit that happens is the request for real facts, which is sort of funny because facts are no longer capable of changing minds. There are just too many of them out there.

If we’re to be honest with each other, we’d admit we don’t actually want facts and we don’t want to change our minds. We want to be right and we want the other person to lose the argument. We want our friends to swoop in and tell us how smart we are and how right we are and we want the other person to go away thinking that we’re a mighty impenetrable wall of knowledge.

We want to look good and we want solidarity but only with the people we came with.

The fact is, if we were standing in a room alone with this person and sharing spinach dip or guacamole, things would be different. If we grew up living next to them, things would be different. If we knew their life in its sweetness and sorrow, it’d be different. If we watched them walk through one day from start to finish, I swear to you, it’d be different.

Doesn’t that count for something?

Why wait for the shared guacamole moment? Why not start sooner?

We can start sooner.

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The Fine Line Between Preparation & Procrastination

(90 sec read)

A clean room makes for a clean mind.

From this perspective, it’s a great idea to straighten up your office/studio/workspace to give yourself the greatest opportunity for success. Cleanliness and order denote pride and commitment. It’s good to see (and feel) pride and commitment when you walk into your space. And the very act of cleaning and preparing your space is cathartic, good for the lungs and the heart. You should do it.

Now, lurking beyond that great productive act, just minutes away is Preparation’s evil twin who we all know very well: Procrastination.

Be careful. Procrastination not only wants the room clean but wants the pencils aligned and all facing North. Procrastination asks for the closet to be cleaned, the contents of the boxes to be sorted into smaller boxes. Procrastination, wants you to call Goodwill to ask about donation pickup. Procrastination thinks the wheels of your chair need changing and a quick web search is the best way to find a replacement.

Here are some quick tips to help you enjoy Preparation without fear of a takeover from Procrastination:

  1. Work while standing. Never sit down. Sitting allows you to go deep. You don’t want to go deep. Not now.
  2. Don’t think outside the room. No need to call anyone, no need to bring something from the workspace to another room.
  3. Never “do a little research.” Ever.
  4. Stop cleaning after 30 minutes. Period. There is always tomorrow.
  5. Hide your phone. 🙂

If any “great ideas” pop into your head or if you find yourself wanting to go deep, make a note, put it on the wall and move on. You deserve a nice space. It will make a difference, but your work – both the sustenance stuff and the growth stuff – are always more important than the space you do them in.

Be proud but stay productive.

You got this.

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What the Waves Teach Us

(45 sec read)

As I go through my day, certain things – the same things – go through my head and they usually have to do with the stuff I’m not doing.

No matter how much I accomplish, there’s always more. It’s a feeling I can’t shake and so, on my best days – days where I can quiet my mind in the morning and cut myself a break – I’ve found a way to make peace with it.

Our minds are as vast and mysterious as the ocean. Most of the time we paddle on a little piece of the blue trying to stay afloat. And as we splish and splash, great waves roll underneath us. These thunderous waves are our thoughts about those things we’re not doing – the unfinished business, the grand ideas, the risky things. They cycle up and under us, making their presence known by lifting us up and then dropping us back down, a bold, rhythmic reminder they’re there.

You can find joy in this up and down movement. The thoughts themselves, like waves in their generous and endless repetition, are not dropping you in the same place. They are teaching you.

Every time you go up, you see a little bit farther across the ocean and you learn a little bit more about the wave.

And every time you come down, you’re a little less afraid, comforted by the remembrance of what you saw and the truth that you’ll go up again.

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Wrong Number

(45 sec read)

Am I the only one who loves to dial wrong numbers?

It’s a surefire way to catch someone off guard, in the midst of their normal goings-on. You’re instantly a fly on the wall.

Both parties may suspect something is up right away but there’s still that awkward conversation that has to happen.

And people handle it in such different ways…

Incredulous: Alex? Nah, no Alex here, man.
Apologetic: Oh I’m sorry, I think you have the wrong number?
Indifferent: Wrong number.
Efficient: (Click)

I admit, I usually try to draw the call out a bit just to see if I can catch another fragment of their life, like looking through the cracks in a wooden fence to see if I can see what’s going on back there.

“Oh, sorry about that. I was just trying to call a client.”

No one’s asked what I do yet but the subtleties in their retorts tell me tons.

It’s refreshing to catch a sliver of life that’s far outside my circles, to hear a voice that sounds nothing like my people, to experience a reaction that’s as authentic as it gets – not staged like a blog comment and not as risky as real life.

Just two people crashing into each other for a moment, exposed wires making contact and then falling past each other, unable to resist the curl of their cords.

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Inventors & Investors

There is a push and pull between inventors and investors – sometimes a dance, sometimes a fist fight. This plays out with entrepreneurs and VCs, startup founders and startup funders, artists and agents, designers and financiers…

The goal of inventors is to protect the invention, to stand over it like an angel and shade it from the harsh sunlight. The goal of investors is to push it out into the sun and ask it to increase its output.

Inventors are just happy seeing their thing work in the world. Investors want it to work better and faster than anything else that’s out there, to shine brightest, to speak loudest.

At best, these two forces work together to both protect and expose their beautiful thing so that more people will see and understand its value. But often, one pushes or pulls harder than the other, steps on toes, and ruins the dance.

Inventors may hold too tightly to the original vision. They can love their creations so much they stifle them, watch them wither and die in the workshop, happy and sad at the same time, like the last person to be holding a hand that’s going lifeless.

Conversely, investors can lose sight of the original vision. They may mistake themselves for inventors and try to reprogram the motherboard, furiously fiddling with wires while the inventor reveres the tools on the wall.

Each one resents and respects the other for their contributions, for their required reliance on someone who can do something they can’t. It is a tenuous relationship, where trust is a transient, distracted moderator who may get up at any moment and walk out of the room.

And from this alliance, as delicate as a coin on its edge, so many of us seek to change the world.

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Talent & Skill

(2 min read)

Talent is what you’re born with.

Skill is something you develop on your own.

And when you combine Talent with Skill, meaning when you take what you’re already good at naturally and make it better through hard work, practice, and perseverance, well then you achieve mastery, like a Japanese Samurai, like Steph Curry.

In other words, Talent + Skill = Mastery

Skill in one person can overtake Talent in another, but only if that Talent is not tended to, not properly used as a foundation for growth.

But this relationship is really only valuable if we’re talking about winning the NBA Finals or slicing your opponent in half.

You don’t have to use Talent as a stepping stone. You can put talent aside and look for other things. The talent will always be there; it will always be perfect for you, like a diamond. Leave it in the cabin and go out into the woods, open and excited about finding other jewels. Gather them, try them on and see which ones make you sparkle.

So, when you come across Talent, you have a choice: you can go deep or you can go diagonal.

In going deep, you drill down into the bedrock of your Talent to understand it and get the most out of it. You become the best. You make your diamond shine as bright as possible.

In going diagonal, you reveal new interests and make new connections, perhaps connections no one’s ever thought of before.

So, here’s a second equation for you:

Talent x Skill = Innovation

In other words, when you go diagonal and you look through the lens of your Talent at a completely different Skill, you will find unexpected things. You invent. You discover. You reveal, which, like mastery, is another way to grow.

So which way are you going — or should I say, growing — right now? Deep into your Talent or Diagonal into a new Skill?

Deep or Diagonal?

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The Return Key

(1 min read)

We humans are adaptable creatures.

I have an ancient keyboard that I keep around because I love the clickety-click springiness of the keys. That said, it’s old, so the return key sticks. And when I say sticks, I mean at least 4-5 times per day when I hit the return key it stays down and creates a bazillion returns in the document I’m working in. And I’m a resume writer so I work in documents a lot.

This has been going on for several years.

I’ve become expert at hitting the return key at just the right angle with my pinky to keep it from sticking, and when it does stick, I can unjam it so fast the computer doesn’t even register the initial keystroke.

It’s become a daily practice – unsticking the return key. I didn’t even realize my gift until my brother sat down to use the computer to write something and started freaking out when he hit the return key and it stuttered out a dozen returns.

“Oh yeah,” I said, leaning over his shoulder. “It does that.” I popped the return key back into place.

He looked at me half concerned, half puzzled. “Seriously?”

Seriously.

Workarounds, quick fixes, jimmying, Macgyvering… We’re creative beings and that creativity can protect our laziness quite well, especially if the workaround works good enough.

We can get used to anything. We’ll put up with the jankiest of software, the clunkiest of contraptions, and the most duct-taped doo-dads imaginable, well beyond the limits of practicality, as long as we’re getting from point A to point B and nobody of importance is watching.

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Rule Makers

(1 min read)

Beware of the people who make the rules, for every organism has embedded in its center the drive for self-preservation.

It goes against nature to create a rule that will harm itself. Like a child picking a branch with which to be beaten, the rule maker will likely choose the instrument that will hurt them the least, even if it means others will find themselves in harm’s way.

To be skeptical of rule-makers, of erect authority no matter how big the shadow, is a sign of self-worth, of one’s own justified drive toward self-preservation.

For any heterogeneous group looking to expand its collective value, pushing back on rules should be a required activity. Frustrating for some and energizing for others, it should be a near-literal pushing and pulling, a deep commitment by all to show up every day in order to loosen the flag once staked in the ground.

And the pushers and the pullers, they shall get along fine, remaining aligned in their optimism that there could be a better place, a new place, an unthought-of place, where they can put the flag next.

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The Naive Meth User

(1 min read)

I talked to a recovered meth addict, 8 years clean, who said he went cold turkey after 3 months of non-stop use. I had to ask how he did it when so many others struggle to quit, step into the abyss with their eyes wide open.

His answer surprised me. He said: “I didn’t know that Meth was addictive.”

In other words, he didn’t have it in his head that if you start doing meth, you can’t stop, that it is a highly addictive substance, up there with heroin and nicotine. He’d moved from a tiny, sheltered, detached town in the South to a big city. He didn’t know the facts. No one told him. And his naivety saved him.

That’s crazy.

In a sense, his head overrode his body. His preconceived ideas, though contrary to piles of research, won out over the chemicals swishing through his brain, perhaps they even changed the chemicals and changed his brain.

The power of thought. What we believe – the mantras, the tenets, the gospel – regardless of its accuracy, can and will nullify cold hard facts and common knowledge. It can change our physiology and therefore our emotions, our friendships, our core beliefs, our very outlook on life.

We, the normal and boring humans, have a superpower.

This is both the good news and the bad.