To be completely honest, I’m too far gone (tired, distracted, buzzed, relaxed) to write an insightful piece today. It’s Friday, it’s the Summer, it’s my vacation weekend. I encourage you to take one as soon as you can – it’s good for you. How’s that for daily wisdom? Love you. Be back soon.
Monthly Archives: July 2012
Mind Off Grid
Digitally going off grid to vacation has little value if you cannot mentally leave work behind. Turning off your phone is not enough. You need to shut your mind down, forget that work exists. Only when you rest your mind can you truly rest.
The Human Race Is the Three Year Old Infant Child of the Universe
I can only imagine what extraterrestrials think of us:
Hey, you’re going to break it – give it back.
Share – for the love of god.
Clean your plate – or you won’t get dessert.
No, that toy is not yours – I paid for it.
I know the wrapping paper is cool, but it’s what’s inside that counts.
“I don’t know” does not explain why you are whining at me.
That pound of sugar is not good for you.
It was funny the first time. But not the tenth or the eleventh.
Stop trying to run. You keep falling on your face.
Put things away when you’re not using them.
For the record, that’s what a humanitarian allegory looks like on white wine and vacation.
People First, Work Second
Your job will not take care of you when you get sick. Work will not bail you out of jail. Friends and family will. Put them first in your life. When embarking on your career, building companies or engaging in a hobby, make people a priority as a general rule. Culture and the success of your work stem entirely from the health, attitude and relationships of people surrounding the job. Treat them very well, take care of them – and perhaps they will do the same for you. The risk of taking care of others without the guarantee of a returned favor far outshines the risk of working eighty hour weeks alone.
Setting Your Own Expectations
The industrial era taught us as employees to wait around for someone to tell us what to do. Hell, the contemporary education model taught us that. We spent the better part of our lives under the pressure of other people’s deadlines, rubrics and expectations. As we get older and “treated like adults,” people tell us what to do less and less. In life, at home and in the workplace, very few people will babysit you or outline a clear path for your success. It’s up to you to do both of those things.
If no one is setting expectations for you, outline your own and hold yourself accountable. If you’re unemployed and single, you have no choice but to do this (until of course the feds knock at your door). If you’re employed and getting no love from your supervisor, take a chance on that lack of structure to build your own world. If you’re not yet buried in a bureaucratic mess of paperwork and process, build your own. Strategize your own roadmap for success.
How do you think people build huge businesses from scratch? They unlearned to wait for other people to set expectations for them and did their own thing when and how they wanted to. They found a way to give a damn on their own terms.
Writing As A Form Of Clarity
While writing will always be open to interpretation, it’s far less open to interpretation than body language, reactions, passing comments, whispers on the wind, moral values, historical precedent or anything else equally abstract under the communication umbrella. Laws are not common unspoken understandings between citizens and the courts; laws live on paper in writing. Life at home, operations at your organization or cooperation in your community often improve when words grace the page.
If you hope to bring clarity to a situation, put it on paper. Outline it on paper. Announce it on paper. Rules, feedback, expectations, values and goals all work better when written and preserved. They become real. Sure, words can be misunderstood or interpreted in many ways. The best writers learn to use this to their advantage. When it comes to clarity in writing, less is more – with fewer words (specifically adjectives), there’s less room for wandering interpretations. Memos are good. Assumptions are bad. Dialogue without recording serves no concrete or lasting purpose. It disappears and distorts. The written word by itself does not distort.
The Feedback Boomarang
People criticize or applaud others regularly and seem to forget that human beings are defensive creatures. They will criticize or applaud you back. If they cannot return the favor directly, they’ll find another way – often behind backs. It’s only human.
If you feel entitled to give feedback, you should be willing to receive it. Take that notion a step further: dish out feedback expecting to get some back. Managers do themselves a disservice by sitting high and mighty over direct reports that have no forum to return the feedback favor. I mean to call it a “favor” because employees have great insight into their boss’s management style that could seriously help the manager grow and improve. When feedback is a one way street that only cascades downhill, the genuine reciprocation of ideas and flow of information that helps a machine accelerate forward collapses. Honesty, inspiration and purpose all suffer when the feedback loop breaks (or never existed in the first place).
One Note Relationships
Most of the people you know only relate to you in one environment. Work, dinner, parties, video games, home, yoga – one environment. A few more may follow you to a second environment. Very few – perhaps only a small handful – cross all boundaries. These people are your true friends – the relationships that cross time and space. We feel comfortable keeping people in little compartments of our lives, but it is important to let people out of those boxes and into other parts of your life. If anything, as an experiment. Who knows? You may connect with them on a different level. How can that be a bad thing? If you want to take a relationship to the next level or layer the connection more intricately, invite single note relationships to other places that play key roles in your life.
It’s Communication’s Fault!
Human conflict, drama and gossip are all very funny things. Call me idealistic, but I do not believe that deep down people genuinely dislike other people. Bad relationships form out of misinformation or no information at all. We’ve all been gifted with perspective and egos, but they often do us the disservice of helping listeners misinterpret a speaker and inspiring speech to skew with bias. It is very, very easy – even more so for the most mindful, brilliant, sociable or well-spoken people – to misunderstand each other. Dialogue, body language and writing are all very delicate things. If you find yourself in a sticky situation with another human being, give him or her the benefit of the doubt and blame poor communication first. Try to get the other person to do the same. Get on the same page about miscommunication and you are one step closer to working it out. It’s not the other person’s fault – do not blame him or her. It’s communication’s fault.
What Do Black Beans, Honda Civics And The Black Keys All Have In Common?
They remind me of my brother. Today’s your birthday, Kyle. Happy birthday. You badass.
And while I’m at it, another 23 things that remind me of you (get it – because you’re 23 years old?):
- Jedi Outcast
- Hard Days at Preschool
- Tuvok
- Guitars
- Goodwill
- Richard Cheese
- Klondike
- Auburn Lane
- Galactic Battlegrounds
- Pretentious Artwork
- Scrambled Eggs
- Xeriscape
- The Onion
- Pokémon Red
- Ghana
- 7-11
- Cinnamon Applesauce
- Canadians
- Vietnam
- Weird Al
- Vinyl
- Calvin and Hobbes
- Hippies
Craig Ormiston 