Sincerely Cliff

May 9, 2019May 8, 2019

Street Sweeping

9am the 2nd Wednesday of the month. And you know what that means!

Everyone up and down Mira Vista Ave has to move their cars to the other side of the street to make way for the street sweeper.

It’d be entertaining to watch a time-elapsed video of all the people, in robes, with coffee, moving from the right side of the street to the left, almost always a little bit pissed off.

If there were such a video, you’d see me at 8:59 yesterday morning running out the door, angry at myself for forgetting because now I had to park in the boonies and walk 20 minutes back to my house. Ah yes, city living.

But sometimes being late is an advantage. In the startup world, they call it “the last mover advantage”, which is apropos for the street sweeping scenario as well, as I’m discovering.

Just as I get into my car, a man across the street gets into his, and pulls away, leaving behind the gift of a rockstar parking space right in front of my house, a welcome anomaly amidst the bumper to bumper parallel-parked cars wedged into each other across the past couple of hours.

By 9:01am I’m bounding up my steps, delighted with my good fortune, eager to put the extra 20 minutes to good use, and laughing at how upset I was just 2 minutes ago.

A damn parking space, man. Is that really the difference between a good morning and a bad one?

We’re so fragile.

May 8, 2019May 1, 2019

Neither Here Nor There

We all seek to be WANTED, to be sought-after for the things we have to offer.

This can become an obsession, especially for us entrepreneurs, inventors, artists, entry-level whatevers, managerial-whatevers-looking-to-be-directorial whatevers, directorial whatevers-looking-to-be-VP whatevers, attorneys wanting to be partners, athletes, coaches, speed skaters and speed daters, jaded haters, all of us, the broken-hearted…

It’s never enough. We’re always striving, aren’t we?

A growth mindset is healthy, indeed essential, to happiness, but the so-called wanted people out there with the red carpets and the golden signatures don’t seem any more satisfied than the so-called unwanted people, the rest of us.

We all have problems. We all have stress.

Neither emptiness nor fullness equates to contentment. Still, it’s so hard to sit in one place and not wish to be in another.

Here’s my advice: Look down at your feet, look up at the sky, look down at your feet, look up at the sky. Now, try not to miss anything in the middle.

May 7, 2019April 27, 2019

A Gift From Someone Who Loves You

It seems obvious but I’ll say it anyway:

If you want to ensure you have a good day, it’s really up to you.

I mean this in a very logistical way. A surefire practice you can start doing to give yourself a smile is to be the first one to reach out. You will rarely be disappointed.

Call a friend early in the day, email one of your favorite clients out of the blue, say hello to the woman with the dog at the crosswalk, tell someone in your home that you love them, compliment a child.

The very act itself will give you a lift, but there’s something else that happens too. You’re planting a seed in the world that will bloom for you and you alone. It may happen immediately or it may show up later in the day, a gift for you, from you, through someone else.

Be the first to reach out to create joy in your day and get the smile you deserve.

May 6, 2019May 1, 2019

Garbage Man Philosophy

I wrote a short story a while back about a garbage man giving life lessons to a Lit major. Okay, it was semi-autobiographical. I was in school at the time doing a summer job painting dumpsters…

The story veered deeper into fiction toward the end as I was trying to figure out something profound for the garbage man to say. The main character (me) was always quoting novelists and talking in other people’s voices and the garbage man got sick of it. He turned to “me” and said:

“Ya know, Cliff, you need to put the book down every once in a while.”

That was the profound part.

At the time I really didn’t know what I was trying to say but it seemed important.

Now, I think I finally get what was percolating in ‘College Cliff’s’ head.

You have to stop taking in information to leave room for your own thoughts. There is so much to read and so many conversations to have, anthologies to study, podcasts to ingest, soundtracks on your walk, video clips to play in the background while you eat your toast,

But, as a great garbage man once said, you have to put the book down.

There’s no reason to believe that your thoughts are any less profound than the experts you plug into your ears.

Listen to yourself. You can learn a lot.

May 5, 2019May 1, 2019

Your Hidden Bonus

That thing you have in your work history that doesn’t fit?

It’s an asset.

Think about it. Everyone’s applying to the same jobs with the same proposal of qualifications, trying to match their lives to the ambitious bullet points in the job requirements as perfectly as possible.

But perfect is hard to remember. You need something more.

You need something to make you stand out. That weird bit of work, that foray into general contracting, your startup that failed, that hilarious food truck pipe dream, that time you took off to Texas to try something new… that’s the stuff that makes you memorable.

It’s those couple of lines on the resume that can show off an ancillary skill set or underscore that great stuff you do elsewhere. It’s that “Additional Experience” section just before your education that gets read and gives you nickname.

Use it.

Use it like a lucky lapel pin that people can’t help but ask about. Make it a bonus by figuring out how it fits into your story.

And, don’t worry. It always fits.

May 4, 2019May 1, 2019

Shame on the Shamers

Shaming doesn’t get us anywhere.

That’s what we tell children, yet as adults we don’t play by the same rules.

Worse still, we shame through our fingertips – not our voices – tapping out one letter at a time in private, safely tucked away from the impact of our shaming.

Where do we learn these lessons? From our “leaders” of course.

Half the clips on the web are one head shaming another or a roundtable of shamers shaming other shamers, entire shows dedicated to pointing out where the other is wrong, instead of figuring out one’s own damn story.

Our leaders don’t deserve our applause. They have forgotten the rules of the playground and they’ve all become bullies. All of them (not only the ones you hate). Just because they have microphones and suits and bellowing voices doesn’t make them worth following. One can be charismatic and still be lost.

Let’s look somewhere else. Let’s look to each other, down below the shouting voices coming in from both sides. Let’s set a better example. Let’s love louder than a fist pounding a podium. Let’s stand taller than the hammers coming down.

It’s fine to disagree, it’s important to point out mistakes, and it’s okay to be wrong. Being wrong leads to questions, which illuminate the best way to move forward with the most amount of people.

Maybe more people would be willing to be wrong if fewer people pointed their arrows at them when they spoke. And instead held out a hand.

May 3, 2019May 1, 2019

Cold Showers

If you want to see real change in yourself, start taking cold showers.

When you take a cold shower (or turn the water ice cold at the end as I do), you’re operating from your future self.

Your future self knows how invigorated you will feel after a cold shower. Your future self knows you’ll come alive with new ideas that will shoot into your head like an electric current. Your future self knows how capable you’ll become.

It’s your current self, so warm and cozy and comfortable, that doesn’t want to go through the temperature switch. It’s your current self that has all the logical reasons to choose comfort over a call to action, to prevent change and wave away inspiration.

Just watch. Take some cold showers. You’ll scream your head off and run in place like I do. You’ll curse me out for giving you the idea. But ultimately you’ll be awake, and you’ll take solace in the fact that you proved you want to be alive more than you want to be comfortable.

Small act. Big consequences.

If you start listening to your future self more than your current self, you’ll get more done with your days, you’ll have new ideas, and you’ll be inspired. And, paradoxically, if you let your future self talk you into these ridiculous sorts of acts, you’ll become more present than you thought possible.

May 2, 2019April 30, 2019

What to do with Bad Feelings

I learned long ago that the bad feelings don’t go anywhere, especially if you try to pretend they’re not there. You can’t compress them into nothing, even with years of weight.

No, the only option, really, in order to get them out, is to let them live inside of you, to welcome what they have to offer.

It’s almost like a possession, because those bad things don’t feel like you at all and when you allow them space, it seems as though they’re going to take over.

But they are a part of you. Already. And they get more evil when they’re ignored. They’ll come out like tentacles when you don’t want them to and they’ll slash through what you love, or what you’re trying to love.

Believe me, I know. I earned this smile.

I feel like I cracked the code with this one. When I start turning black, I immediately tend to the darkness. This usually involves telling someone it’s happening (though I REALLY don’t want to do this, and it usually comes out inelegant, to say the least). This person is my lookout, in case I can’t find my way back up.

After the initial leap down into the hole, it’s a very passive act. This is what makes it difficult: to be willing to fight lying down, to let the possession happen and watch the demons swirl.

And you know what’s more difficult? Knowing when it’s over.

It’s both hard and obvious, like knowing when you’ve finished drawing a picture or when you’ve come awake in the morning.

From down below, I can see the bad things cower and, at some point, they’re whispering, which makes it easier to understand what the visit was all about, and what I have left to do.

April 30, 2019April 29, 2019

Faith

Life becomes unbearably hard as we get older. Piercing despair is already programmed in, particularly if we’ve led a life full of love, giving, connecting, and sharing.

Sometimes the pain gets so great, it’s hard to see or feel anything else. You immediately forget what it felt like to be YOU, the YOU from before, the YOU that feels like it’s slipping away.

These moments ask us more than any others to call upon FAITH, to cling to the notion that, although we can’t see any possible path back to comfort, we must continue to believe that the path is there somewhere.

When everything else falls away and not even the shadows of things disrupt the emptiness...

When reaching out and up seems like a complete waste of time…

When you don’t have the words and you feel like you never will…

When you fear that you will fade away irreversibly and become part of the emptiness…

That’s when you need FAITH the most, to prevent you from giving in to the emptiness, to carry you up and over until you can finally place your feet back where they’re supposed to be.

And you can be you again, but a new you, with more understanding of it all, and more capacity to love, to give, to connect, and to share.