Month: November 2017

Sunday morning has special memories for me. I remember my Dad dragging me out of bed every Sunday morning to go to church – I didn’t want to go – but I was always happy I went when it was over. My Dad was a deacon in the church and I remember how proud I was to sit next to him on the front row, between him and my grandfather.  Sunday meant lunch at my grandparents. Sunday meant biscuits, fried chicken and playing in the yard after church with my cousin and the neighbors kids. Sunday meant spending time with family. Sunday evening meant evening church services and then coming home and watching the wonderful world of Disney with my brother and Mom.

Those were wonderful years. Wonderful times.  Cherish the time you have with your family – live in the moment.  I see too many people with their eyes on the horizon, always wishing for whatever is over the next hill. I was guilty of that. What I wouldn’t give for one more Sunday that started on a pew between my Dad and Grandfather and ended with a Disney movie. Plan for the future but live in the moment.

Today is my wife’s birthday (Happy Birthday!). Birthdays are gifts. I know others have said birthdays are gifts because we were given the life we have and many people associate birthdays with giving gifts. But I think all of us start our lives born as gifts. I firmly believe most people are positive, loving joyful people who make others better just by being around. In the case of today’s birthday girl, she has had that impact on me, our daughters, many friends and family members, coworkers and even complete strangers. She is always looking for opportunities to help others. Because of her presence in all these lives, over decades for most of us, we have become who we are in great part because of her influence. Birthdays give each of us to each other. Happy Birthday bunches!

I was arrested today…okay, I was detained by the Border Police while trying to travel from a Paris to London. Tehcnically, I was arrested. Turns out I didn’t take the right passport with me so I wasn’t supposed to be allowed back into England. Based on some incomplete advice I received, I wasn’t equipped for the journey.

Luckoly for me, the U.K. Border Police are a common sense organization. After less than ten minutes, an officer asked for my story and then said he understood what happened so I could continue traveling.

I’m very confident that wouldn’t have been the outcome in many places includIng our own country. There are processes and policies that must be followed. This is even more stringent under the travel restrictions since TSA stood up. There’s a good reason for those processes and policies. They keep us safe. There’s also room for common sense, but in my experience most people defer to the stringent written guidelines with no room for interpretation.

I’m grateful for common sense and the British proclivity for not making mountains out of molehills. Not sure I wanted to spend more quality time in Paris.

I have had the good fortune to travel fairly widely, but, on the down side have spent an inordinately significant period of my life in airports. Yes, I am the guy that insists on getting there early because I always assume it will take longer than it does. This means I have plenty of time and opportunity to observe, analyze and reflect. Technology has made our world smaller, and air travel has made the expansive geography accessible. While it would have been a pipe dream to go to Europe in the 1700s, today we have multiple flights per day. 

You see quite a wide spectrum of emotions, reactions and decisions at the airport. You inevitably run into someone having a bad day, someone overly excited and a broad group of people trying to figure out how to just get through the experience. Within moments you can see the happy-go-lucky family leader become Hitlerian in his or her actions just to get on the flight faster. 

I have seen people try to cram luggage the size of a refrigerator with a handle into overhead space, try to “charm/threaten” flight attendants and try to find the optimal way of navigating the idiosyncrasies of airport existence.   Frankly, I enjoy it. People are fun to watch and airports have all the drama necessary to keep me entertained. 

Given this, I have developed a few rules that should be followed as you travel. 

First, give yourself lots of time. Everybody is stressed as they navigate the ticket counter, security, and the gate. Save yourself the heart problems and give yourself more than enough time. Second, check bags. There is nothing worse than having to fight for overhead space and the airlines are great at making sure your bags arrive with you. Third, treat it like an amusement park. The lines are longer than you want, the concessions are more expensive, and time loses all meaning. Fourth, remember that you are in public. Don’t, I repeat, don’t, wear sweatpants/pajama pants and Crocs for the trip. That is never a good look and you should have a little more respect for yourself than that. I know it is comfortable. Just don’t. 

Finally, roll with the punches. The airlines don’t want to delay you, because it costs them money. The pilots and flight attendants have less authority than you think, and, as with normal everyday life, a ready smile and polite response goes much further than you think.  More than all of this, though, don’t shy away from it because it is unknown. Air travel is still pretty easy and straightforward despite all of the additional security, etc.  Plus, you get to see humanity at its most basic form. 

Have a great weekend!

I hesitated in my naming of this post, but I think it fits.  I have recently rediscovered several things that I enjoy doing.  I am not surprised that I enjoy them, but was surprised as to how long it had been since I had done them and how much I truly enjoyed rediscovering them.  In many ways it was like putting on a pair of pants and finding $5 in the pocket.  It was unexpected, but neat.

The first was tinkering with several project devices I have around the house.   I thoroughly enjoy digging into them and seeing what all I can do with them, but it had been awhile since I dug into them.  I was cleaning out my office and found one project in particular that I had left in a state of disarray and started to take care of some of the simple things that needed done first to get it into a workable state.  Before I knew it, I had made significant progress and realized that the time had just flown by.  The sense of accomplishment and the ideas of what to do next were both enjoyable and energizing.

The second was listening to an old playlist on my older iPod classic.  I normally exercise to one of a few channels on Spotify, but had a comms problem that prevented me from being able to stream Spotify, so I dug out my iPod, which amazingly enough, still had plenty of battery life, and selected my old exercise playlist.  I had forgotten how much I enjoyed several of those songs and that led me to spending quite a while scrolling through and listening to songs I hadn’t listened to in ages.  As with the project above, I reluctantly stopped listening to get other things done, but I had thoroughly enjoyed the time and resolved to do it again soon.

The third, and final one that I will cite here, was picking up The Lord of the Rings again and starting to re-read it.  I love the story, the writing and the characters. From the first words of “Concerning Hobbits”, I was drawn back in and I quickly found myself as entranced as the first time I read it.  Like a comfortable pair of jeans, or a bowl of soup in front of a fire on a chilly fall day, the story wrapped around me and I rediscovered the joy I had reading it the first time.

I am quite sure that there are similar “joys” in our lives that we have misplaced or spent too much time away from.  The challenge is to both rediscover them and then do them.  I hope that you all rediscover at least one thing during this beginning of the holiday rush that enables you to experience some level of unexpected joy.

Baby gates are the exact equivalent to, “This area is locked until you’ve gained more experience.”

This year has probably given Cards Against Humanity enough material for a stand alone 2017 special edition..

Procrastinating is hoping that future you isn’t as lazy as current you.

The first actor who said “curses” while playing a villain may have just been reading the stage directions.

An assassin is just a serial killer who takes requests.

A child is the most expensive thing you can get for free.

Candy corn is just corn turned into corn syrup then back into corn.

There was a moment in time that your mom or dad picked you up, put you down and never did it again.

When you smile you are showing as much of your skeleton as possible without injuring yourself.

You’ve never seen your real face — only pictures and reflections.

If you’re over 30, you were alive before every dog in the world.

Humans cut down bird’s houses to make bird’s houses.

Finally, if you are reading this -out of the millions of ways you can die – you’ve avoided all of the them. Congratulations!

The other day I had a very nice conversation with an extremely extroverted Pakistani driver on the way home from the airport. He was excited to share his philosophy, primarily substantiated by his Islamic faith, about how to live a good life. Fundamental to his argument was his tenet that people need to understand, acknowledge and face facts. Too often, in his opinion, people rationalize, avoid or cover up facts because they don’t allow them to live life the way they want to live it.

One of his facts that he believes people rationalize is that there are only 24 hours in each day. Many people spread themselves thin trying to accomplish more than 24 hours worth of goals in the physical limit of one rotation of the earth. There are books and courses about how to try to do this, but they all fail to acknowledge the fact.

My drivers sage advice was to accept the limit of time and find your center. Find the thing (relationship, career, mission) that drives you more than anything else and make that your center. Here’s another fact; there can only be one center. That one is tough to deal with but it’s a fact. Have you ever seen a circle with more than one center? Finding our center doesn’t mean ignoring everything else, but it helps us focus and come back to the one thing we hold above everything else. This is difficult because it means putting everything else in second place…at best. But that’s another fact, there’s only one first place, top priority, most important….  Spreading our attention to thin doesn’t work. Not for us or for others. I know. I’ve done it. Time to find my center.

”God will not look you over for medals, degrees or diplomas, but for scars.”

The quote above come from a good given to me by an underrated, yet deceptively brilliant colleague with whom I spent the past year fighting against self-serving nepotistic hypocrites who rose to leadership ranks on the backs of others. He believed in the simple, realistic advice given in this book and he has the scars to prove it—as a United States Marine and as a federal civil servant. Over the course of the past year, he put his own reputation and the futur of his career at significant rock in order to protect others who needed his help and maintain integrity as a core individual and organizational value. In the end he won and the right thing decisions were made. He paid a price, but he did it willingly and he is stronger now.

In thinking about Veteran’s Day, I wondered if there is one inherent character trait that causes men and women to willingly risk life and limb for others…often others they don’t know. When I think of my own reasons for joining the military, I have to admit it wasn’t about service. Yet over time and through shared experiences, like my coauthors, I came to understand what it meant to serve others (Service) willingly. I don’t think this character trait is learned. As written above, it is inherent, but for some of us it needs to be drawn out.

Different circumstances provide different methods for drawing service out of us. Often, it’s a common, seemingly intransigent enemy or threat to mankind. Sometimes, it’s a fleeting moment—pulling someone from a dangerous situation, helping a stranger, giving up your free time for your kids, spouse or friend, etc. A sense of service abides in all of us. Service requires us to do work, put our own needs aside and often get hurt, or worse, in the process. I’ve written before that I believe humility is the greatest strength of any leader. Service requires humility. Our culture preaches the opposite, yet men and women continue to serve. That has to be the result of human nature which will always win against darker forces… just like it did for my colleague.

The book is called A Mesage to Garcia. Find it and read it.  And thank you for your service.

For those of you that don’t appreciate reading my long-winded writing, here is the tl;dr version.  We all have the responsibility to be an informed citizen.  We need to understand the principles behind the founding of our nation and we need to stay involved if we truly want to change it.   The rest is basic pandering to various interest groups and the odd funny aside.  For those of you wondering, tl;dr is shorthand for “too long; didn’t read”.

For those of you still with me, this is long, but, hopefully, worth it.  Leading up to Veteran’s Day, an event my coauthors and I celebrate and one which I am sure will be addressed appropriately, I wanted to engage in a little intellectual discourse about history, responsibility, and their relation to current events.  In an effort to keep things brief (at least briefer than it would be if I poured through all of my readings), I narrowed my historical look to the Russian Revolution, which occurred in October of 1917 and the election of 2016.  I am not implying an equivalence, but hopefully my points will ring through.

There is a widespread misunderstanding that the Russian Revolution was the lower class rebelling against the upper class.  While there are many, many nuances, and many reasons and actions taken, one key point, and one shared by most, if not all revolutions, is that is was of the middle class versus a permanent, impenetrable upper class.  During this revolution, much like the events leading to the fall of the Roman Empire, the fall of monarchies across Europe, and, indeed, the US revolution, there was a permanent upper class that was fixed in its position.  If a commoner was successful, they may have means, but not the access and respect accorded to the nobles.  This led to unrest and discontent among the middle class (those with some means, but no access), which ultimately eroded the pillars of the upper class and forced a sociological change.

One year ago, the United States, for better or worse, elected the first President who is truly an outsider in every sense of the word.  He has no foreign policy, government, nor military experience.  He is crude, thinks differently, and doesn’t respect the established norms of what our government has become.  This doesn’t mean he doesn’t respect the intent of the constitution to have the three branches separate, but equal, which is evident in his putting pressure on the Congress to actually legislate, but it is safe to say that he, at the very least is a wild card, and at worst, a ticking time bomb threatening to blow up the status quo.  (Disclaimer to the NSA and Secret Service, this is a metaphor/simile.  The words I used are not indicative of a threat, rather an attempt to provide a mental picture to my readers, however few they may be.)

While by no means the same, both the Russian Revolution and the 2016 election indicated an extreme dissatisfaction with the status quo.  Whether valid or not, many, many middle class personnel expressed their desire that the “nobles”, whether Tsars or legislators, change their behavior or be thrown out (okay, in the Russian Revolution is was not so benign).   Frankly, my (and only my) read on the election was that most of America finally got sick of both parties and wanted somebody to start to fix things.)

Now, most people working in government are good, honest, hardworking people, no different from you and me.  The business they work for is the government, but they have the same goals, desires, and ambitions of us all.  There is no us vs. them, and they should not be demonized for their service.   As with any company, there are the slugs that everyone points to as bad, but that is just not true for the bulk of the workforce, and thought difficult, the slugs can be gotten rid of.

One of the great aspects of our history is that our founding fathers understood that small groups in control of everything was a bad idea, so they actively sought to put in place a system resilient to those weaknesses…not a perfect system, but a hedge against abuse.  Our founders understood that power consolidated in a few hands leads to tyranny.  Their intent was that our government leaders would serve rather than rule, which is a point that has been minimized and lost as we have moved from unpaid leaders to career politicians.  Our founders never considered that future leaders would use the power of governmental authority to become part of a permanent ruling class, which could be every bit as divisive as a monarchy.  Yet, today we see Legislature, the Presidency, and, in some cases, the Judiciary, become family businesses, similar to monarchies or oligarchies around the world.  These were all shaken by the election of 2016, and are still shaken today.

So, why did I call this “An Informed Citizenry”?  Frankly, it is because there is a very critical need for the citizenry of the US to not just absorb content generated online and through other media, but to UNDERSTAND.   We need to understand the reasons for the decline of cultures of the past.  We need to understand the concepts, ideas and motivations of both the left and the right.  Most of all, we need to understand why the United States is different from the historical super-powers.

I will finish this post tomorrow, but I want to challenge those of you still with me.  READ the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, the Federalist Papers, and the works of John Locke and Francis Bacon.  Too many people cite them without ever knowing what is in them.  Don’t be “that guy”.   Second, despite your own biases (yes, we are all biased), read both left and right news sources in an effort to discern the truth, which generally resides in the middle.  In short, do the real work.  Ask the hard questions.  Challenge your own beliefs.  Truth will ALWAYS be revealed and is always better than believing or following a lie.  There is a desperate need for an “informed citizenry” today.  People who are not making decisions based on the Kardashians, the Twitterverse, or Facebook friends.  Their is a critical need for people to evaluate (not just encounter) opposing thoughts and to have the strength to stand up for what is true an right.  We have plenty of examples of good people doing nothing.  We were founded by good men doing the right thing.

To be continued tomorrow…plan your time accordingly.