FUN FIRST!

Torching the Gasoline for Explosive Success

MONTHS

2009

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MAY, 2008

One of my beloved readers occasionally sends me demotivators from despair.com. They usually are hilarious. Recently, he sent one that said: "Tradition. Just because you've always done it doesn't mean it isn't incredibly stupid." It showed a picture of a guy running with the bulls at Pamplona. I hate to criticize but this doesn't seem very demotivating at all. It's actually quite motivating. It encourages us to look at ourselves and to change the things that are getting us trampled. Either the people at despair.com are slipping or they're up to something other than demotivation. Maybe they decided their tradition of demotivation was "incredibly stupid". Actually, I think they're just sneaky motivators in disguise.
If you made $500,000 per year doing something you love, would you quit and do something you hate for $1,000,000? If you said "yes", why? If you said "no", why not? Your answer will tell you a lot about yourself and what you think money can or cannot do for you. Now for the hard question. If you hate what you are doing now, would you quit and try to do something you love even if you made less money? Why or why not? Chances are you could find a way to do more of what you love and less of what you hate without losing income but for purposes of this exercise assume you have to take a financial hit to do what you love. What did you learn about yourself from this exercise?
I always cry on Derby Day. Today is the 134th running of the Kentucky Derby. It's also my daughter's birthday. Her love for horses and my love for her brought us to the Derby the last time it fell on her birthday. Being there with her, learning about horses and horse racing from her, sharing the joy and excitement, is on the short list of greatest moments in my life. The feelings all come back on Derby Day. That's why, when the bugler blows the call to post and the crowd starts singing "My Old Kentucky Home", I'll be blubbering. Just like I am right now.
I dropped a glass on the floor this morning shattering it and sending fragments flying to the far reaches of the kitchen and beyond. Some pieces were large and easy to pick up. Others were very tiny and escaped the first pass of the broom. Some are probably still lying there unseen waiting to get stuck in an unsuspecting foot. A shattered glass is a nice metaphor for the effects of speaking harshly to others. Some of the effects will be obvious (hurt, fear, anger). Others may not be so easy to see (lack of trust, long-term resentment). Better to control your tongue and avoid the future unexpected cut.
Why wouldn't everyone absolutely love you? If you had a quick answer to this question, you've probably hit on something about you that needs to change. Of course, you can't really control whether someone loves you or not. Love is a choice made by the lover. But, you can act in ways that make it easier for people to make the choice to love you. Some people will love you anyway but you shouldn't make them have to be Mother Teresa to do it.
Grizzlies like hot chocolate. When you go to Denali Park in Alaska (where Mt. McKinley is) you can't drive into the park. They take you in on a bus. After several hours, you hit the turnaround spot. They give you a cup and a packet of hot chocolate mix. You take your cup outside and get hot water from a dispenser on the side of the bus. Then you get back on the bus and put the mix in the water. You can't mix it outside because they discovered that the small amounts of powdered mix that spilled on the ground attracted grizzlies. They'd come and lick it off the ground. If you're a grizzly in Denali Park and you want to go lick up some hot chocolate powder, you don't let something like a crowd of tourists deter you and you're probably quite amused by the sight of them climbing all over each other trying to get back through that tiny bus door as you come strolling up. It's amazing that such a small amount of sugary powder would be enough to draw bears out of the woods. But, dispensing a little sweetness can be pretty attractive. Especially if you're the only source people can see in the wilderness.
The New Yorker Magazine's March 29, 1976, cover featured a drawing called "A View of the World from 9th Avenue." Half of the magazine's cover was consumed by a large scale drawing of the two blocks in Manhattan looking west from 9th Avenue. Next appears the Hudson River, drawn as a wide barrier. Then, there is a narrow strip labeled "Jersey" followed by tiny random dots in the distance for Chicago, L.A., and a few other places. The cover was a spoof on the notion that anything "beyond the Hudson" was meaningless to a New Yorker. We can all get a good laugh at the New Yorkers for this (and we should), but what would a picture of the view of the world from your eyes look like? Would the proportions be any better or would it be consumed by an enormous picture of you with other people being just meaningless little random dots in the distance?
I set aside today to pray and think. ["Does that mean you don't think on other days? Boy, that explains a lot!] It's useful to do this every couple months. It helps me refocus on my priorities and notice things that have slipped my attention. It gives me a chance to think about everything and everyone I'm grateful for. And, most importantly, it's a chance just to goof off in a way that looks productive. Give it a try.
Golf is hard. The driving range is easy. At the driving range, you don't have to play your bad shots. Life is not the driving range. You have to walk into the woods, find your ball, and figure out how you're going to thread the shot between the trees to get back to the fairway. This can be a mental challenge because the reason you're in there in the first place is because you just hit a lousy shot. Now you have to hit a good shot and recent history is against you. You can't be thinking about what got you there. Relax. Break the process down into little steps. Keep your eye on the ball and give it a whack.
Words are like fire. They can warm your house or burn it down.
Jesus and His mother went to a wedding. At some point she came to Him and said "They ran out of wine." Jesus said to her (and here I paraphrase) "Mom, I know what you're thinking but the time for me to perform miracles hasn't arrived yet." His mother said nothing more to Him. She turned to the head waiter and said "Do whatever my Son tells you." The Bible does not describe the expression on Jesus's face after His mother said this. It just says that He turned water into wine. Apparently, He decided she was right that He needed to fix the "no wine" problem. Moms know these things. Happy Mothers' Day!
One of our cats made an inexpensive necklace into an expensive one. She swallowed it. Getting a necklace out of a cat is not nearly as easy as getting one into a cat. The cat, of course, didn't consider this when she sucked it down. I'm sure it seemed like a good idea at the time. This is a good reminder of the difference between risk-taking and stupidity. Risk-taking assesses the possible consequences and acts knowingly. Stupidity acts without thinking at all. Let's learn from poor kitty's gastric misadventure. Think first.
Tomorrow I get to have a colonoscopy! [I know what you are thinking and, no, they are not trying to find my head.] What fun is there in a colonoscopy? None that I can think of. They do give you amnesia drugs so you don't remember what they did to you. It would be handy to have those available all the time, wouldn't it? To be able to make people forget something hurtful you did to them with just a little injection. No such luck. We have to rely on seeking forgiveness or avoiding delivering the hurt in the first place. Only the doctors get the easy way out. [Depending on how quickly the drugs wear off, there may or may not be an email from me tomorrow. I'm hoping to write something while I'm still under the influence to see if it's any more incoherent than any other day!]
Nothing says "middle age" like a colonoscopy and bifocals. Started yesterday with the colonoscopy and ended the day with some new bifocals. (What, you didn't have time for dentures?) It is amazing the inventions that have come along to prolong our lives and make up for the deterioration of our bodies. [I'm sure the colonoscopy was invented by some doctor watching a horror movie about giant worms invading people's bodies who suddenly thought "Man, what you could see if you attached a camera to one of those suckers!"] While technology can help prolong our lives, it's still up to us to find enjoyment in them. Happiness still comes from having a spirit of generosity and gratitude. You won't find those with a colonoscopy. They'll be evident on the outside. Even without bifocals.
I'm going to be planting a vineyard today. I have no personal interest in vineyards but a friend is planting one. It's a dream he's had for awhile. He bought land, did a lot of study and preparatory work. The plants have arrived and he's recruited a bunch of friends to get them in the ground. Today is a milestone in the process. There's still a long way to go before the plants of today produce the wine of tomorrow but the vineyard will have made the transition from dream to reality today and there will be plenty of sore backs and muscles to attest to it. A lot of people thought it was impossible for him to have a vineyard. He was a guy with no experieince in agriculture and the only real estate he owned was his house in the city. They were wrong. He developed a plan and followed it. Step by step. A dream that begets a plan and the tenacity to follow it is all it takes.
Well, the vineyard got planted. [I mentioned yesterday I was helping a friend plant a vineyard.] It was a beautiful day. Sunny.Warm. Refreshing breeze. Many people drifted in and out throughout the day adding their labor to transform an empty field into a vineyard. It's five years till the vineyard produces a crop that can become wine. No instant gratification here. But, that's not quite true. The instant gratification came from a shared day laboring together to bring one man's dream to fruition. (Sorry, couldn't resist the pun). A day spent with friends for a friend is a foretaste of heaven (except for the back spasms!).
Life is like baseball. Sometimes you foul a ball off your foot. This usually hurts a lot. But, in the baseball realm, it's not that bad because you're not "out". It's just a dead ball and maybe a strike. As long as you can still stand, you get to take another swing. You still have the chance to succeed. Try to see your setbacks as fouls not outs. They may cause you some intense pain but at least you're still alive with the prospect of success just a pitch away.
Is there really such a thing as delayed gratification? We think of it as putting off a pleasure now (ice cream) in favor of some other good down the road (losing weight). It's the whole work before pleasure thing. But are we actually delaying gratification? Aren't we just gratifying a different desire? The desire to be thin, or tough, or virtuous, or thought virtuous by the people seeing us not eat the ice cream? It's not a question of gratifying or not gratifying so much as a question about our desires. What do we want? I think we are always gratifying our current desire, whether it's ice cream, building a friendship, or avoiding some kind of pain. If you develop an understanding of your purpose, have a passion for it, and set goals for living it, your momentary desires will tend to be consistent with it as well. If you don't do these things, your momentary desires may have you watching a lot of Gilligan's Island reruns.
The Chicago Bulls won the number 1 pick in the NBA player draft. This means, in theory, they get to pick the best basketball player who has made himself available to play in the NBA starting next year. It is a great opportunity to improve the team (which sadly was pretty bad last year) but who do they pick? They need to decide which skills they need to improve the team the most and then pick the guy they think has those skills and will display them when he plays for the Bulls. This can be difficult and picking someone who doesn't deliver will lead to endless criticism from the media and the fans. They just have to be bold. Study the possibilities. Look honestly at the needs they have to fill and make a choice. That's life. Making the best choice you can with the information you've got. Fortunately for us, most of our choices that don't work out can be corrected with new choices. There won't be anybody on the radio talking about how stupid we were in making the first choice and how we never do anything right. Except, of course, if we tune to that channel on the radio in our heads.
Modest Mussorgsky never quite got his musical composition "Night on Bald Mountain" to the point where it could be performed. His friend Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov re-orchestrated it and it became a huge perfomance success. (It's even featured inWalt Disney's movie Fantasia). Genius often involves taking the work of someone else and building on it. Sometimes the talents needed to finish something differ from those needed to get it started. Mussorgsky had trouble finishing but what he started provided a foundation for Rimsky-Korsakov. Together they created a beautiful piece of music. When you think about it, most important successes are collaborative efforts in some way or another. Don't be afraid to ask for help.
I was going to write today about George Halas, the founder of the Chicago Bears football team and cornerstone of the National Football League. I was going to report that Halas had been the rightfielder for the New York Yankees baseball team until he was replaced by Babe Ruth and that this appaerntly bad turn for Halas turned out to be a wonderful opportunity for him to find his true calling and both he and Ruth became the very best at their particular callings. Unfortunately, despite having heard this story more than once, when I went to check the facts it appears not to be true. Ruth apparently did not replace Halas in rightfield. What is true is that Halas played some for the Yankees (my father-in-law, who played for Halas and the Bears, had a picture of Halas in a Yankee uniform) but left to take a job as a sports director for the Staley Company and soon formed a professional football team, which he moved to Chicago and named the Bears. It's still a great story. Halas bounced from being mediocre in the Major Leagues to being a master of the NFL. Lack of success at something is often the spark to success at something else. Even if it wasn't Babe Ruth who sent you packing.
Babe Ruth was probably the most dominating hitter in baseball in the 20th century. While hitting a baseball well might seem like something you do strictly on your own, in fact, during the best years of his career the Babe had a lot of help in being the best. If you look at photos of Ruth crossing home plate after hitting a home run, you'll probably see the guy who provided all the help. He's the guy wearing number 4 on his Yankee uniform. Lou Gehrig. Lou's in the picture because he's the next guy coming to bat after the Babe. If it weren't for Lou, pitchers would have walked Babe on purpose a lot rather than giving him a chance to hit a homer. Better to put him on first base and take your chances with somebody else. But, Lou made that impossible. He also was one of the best hitters ever. If you walked the Babe, Lou would make you pay. He could easily hit a homer himself scoring Ruth as well. Two runs instead of one. So, Babe got to swing away and now everybody knows the name of Babe Ruth. But without Lou would Babe have done as well? Not likely. Nobody achieves greatness without someone else contributing to the conditions that allow them to excel. We all need other gifted people hitting behind us.
I live near a small private college campus. A drum and bugle corps practices on one of the campus fields. As I sit on the patio composing this email, I can hear their music in the background. It's cool. They're providing a musical soundtrack to my life just like in the movies. Adding richness and beauty to the scene. Good music does that. What do you hear in the soundtrack to your life? We all have one playing in our heads. Themes of thought that recur regularly. Does your soundtrack add richness and beauty to your life? As I sit here, I have to accept whatever the drum and bugle corps chooses to play. But, for your life's soundtrack, you get to be both the composer and the director. You can write the score as you see fit and you can also send what you hear to the cutting room floor if you don't like it. They give Oscars for great soundtracks. The ones that most enhance the film. If yours isn't Academy Award material, you should get to work on the re-write.
"Just" or "unjust", wars create a lot of dead people. Today we remember them. Maybe. As I write this the TV is on in the background and children are saying what "Memorial Day" means to them. No mention of remembering anyone killed in war. While unfortunate in one sense, in another sense it is a good thing. Many places in the world people long for the day their children will have no concept of the death war makes commonplace in their lives. We should be grateful that day is here for us. But, we are not children. Let's take a moment today to remember those war took too soon.
"'My boy can eat 50 eggs.' 'How long?' 'Hour.'" And so, Dragline commits Luke to eat 50 hardboiled eggs in an hour to win a bet in the movie Cool Hand Luke. Luke was a more or less willing participant in this ordeal but I'm not sure his share of the winnings was enough to compensate him for his agony. After eating the 9th or 10th egg, he probably wished he had said "no" at the outset. We've all had the experience of asking ourselves in the midst of something unpleasant "why did I think this was a good idea?" We often don't have an answer to this question because we didn't think but merely followed an impulse to get ourselves into it. Impulses aren't bad but you ought to filter them through your mind first before springing into action. Whether you can eat 50 eggs isn't nearly as important as whether you want to and you'll regret not making this distinction in advance.
"This morning will be mostly cloudy. Clearing later in the day." So, said the guy on the radio. If he'd looked out the window, he would have seen totally clear and sunny skies. He didn't let reality interfere with reporting the prediction the meteorologist made some time last night. He just followed the script they handed him. Failing to adjust to changing circumstances is a common problem. You wouldn't have a picnic in a thunderstorm just because the forecast said it was supposed to be sunny. But, you might stay on a career path you hate because someone told you (or you told yourself) years ago it would be good for you. So, are you picnicking in any thundrstorms? Maybe its time to head for a more inviting environment.
Do you ever feel like the Leaning Tower of Pisa? That you're still standing but you're not sure why? Kind of teetering on the brink of toppling over into a pile of rubble? I guess some engineers have fortified the Tower so it can keep leaning without falling. While this makes some sense for a landmark famous for its lean, chances are you'll be better off if you start moving toward vertical. You're not going to get cranked up straight all at once. Just make a decision to change one small thing that'll get you moving toward upright. An inch at a time will get you there without too much trauma to your structure.
When the town of Leipzig hired Johann Sebastian Bach to be the cantor for St. Thomas, they were apparently concerned about whether he could adequately fulfill his additional duties as a Latin teacher in the school. This is like the Chicago Bulls hiring Michael Jordan and then telling him he has to sing the National Anthem before every game and that his job depends on how well he sings. With a genius like Bach, wouldn't you want him devoting his time to composing and playing music? Couldn't they find another Latin teacher? Maybe money was tight and what they really wanted was a Latin teacher who could also play the organ at church on Sunday. The money must have been good enough to entice Bach to take the job. Apparently, he became frustrated with the job. Understandable. If you have a gift like Bach, you need to use it to the full. No amount of money will compensate you for neglecting the gift for other pursuits.
I'd have a hard time selling houses. I've got no vision for houses. ["Hey, this place is great! It's got a roof, it's got walls, it's got heat, it's got a toilet! Wow! This place is perfect for you!] I could look at a house forever and nothing about it would ever be "cute". When people are buying a house, they're looking to fulfill a desire. They want to imagine themselves living there and being better off and happier than they are now. That's true about buying anything to some degree. We're looking for it to improve our lives in some way. We run into trouble when we look for it to improve our lives in every way. If you're not happy, getting a new house isn't going to fix it. You'll just have a nicer place to be miserable. Your happiness is much more likely to increase if you do something for somebody else than it is from getting something new for yourself.