Pulling the Trigger

Decision making is hard. Climbing the whole mountain is impossible.

Decision making becomes much harder when we only make monumental decisions that we have to marry for the rest of our lives. As some call it, pulling the trigger.

The issue is that most of the time we should be making tiny decisions that we can undo just as fast as we did them. We make a hundred tiny decisions and they all add up to create a mass and momentum that are what we were truly trying to achieve all along. We never pull the trigger.

Pulling the trigger fires the gun, you can never unfire a gun. Pulling the trigger can kill something. Pulling the trigger is terrifying, so why do we continuously put ourselves in the position to have to?

Want to get in shape, lace up some shoes you already own and go for a walk, don't pull the trigger on a $500 gym membership. Want to change careers, go volunteer for a day doing something you might be passionate about, don't pull the trigger on your job.

So go out there today and don't make a big decision, just dip your toe, it's a lot easier than jumping in.

Running to the noise

In a world completely thrashed with noise I find it interesting that we so often run towards more noise. When we go shopping we head to the mall. When we go on vacation we head to Vegas. When we want to eat out we find crowded, popular restaurants downtown. When we wish for entertainment we run towards television which spikes twenty minutes of commercials into our face for every hour of couch time.

If you watch 1 hour of television a day (stop lying, 5 maybe) then you watch 560 minutes of commercials a month. If you bought Netflix for $9 a month and streamed those shows you would save over nine hours. Next time you get on a plane and they ask, "would you like to upgrade to our flight that takes one hour less for $1", smile, shake your head no, and then stare at the back of that seat for an hour watching your life filch away.

Stop running towards the noise. Start searching, spending, working to get towards the quiet.

100% of this post was stolen from my fantastic wife Kelsey, come on Kelsey, lets escape the noise and get out of here soon.

Frankenbusiness

Today we are going to play a little game where we hook up the neck bolts of our company to a lighting rod and bring the ugly thing to life. The game consists of two questions and it if you follow me to the end, or cheat and jump to the end right now... welcome back cheaters, this post will relate to everyone. I played this game with Dance Core:

1)What would your business look like if it where a real person?

2) What do you want your business to look like as a real person?

Interesting question here and it could be answered a couple of different ways. Maybe you imagine taking your business to a holiday party and look at it through the eyes of the guests. Is your business sexy? Did your business get drunk and make out with a stranger? (mine sadly did but we are getting over that, at least there aren't many pictures) Does your business talk softly telling stories or loudly yell jokes? Is your business a man or a woman? Does your business brag, are they well kept or could they use a haircut and deodorant? Is your business confident about itself or does it cower behind you?

We may not have control over our business all the time but much of that we can decide. More accurately in tune with parenting we can lead correctly and hope for the best instead of just sitting back while your business lives in your basement smoking pot.

So how does this apply to everybody? Well, replace the word business with career, house, hobby. You would not go to a party with a guy wearing a piano tie, so why are you letting your resume out dressed up like that?

Seth Godin and Steroids

If you click on the title or here you can read Seth Godin's post from this morning. The interesting thing for me is to take his idea a step further and say that trying harder is a race to the bottom. Take the baseball pitchers. Throw the ball really fast and you succeed. So everyone starts working really hard at throwing a ball faster. Then they start changing training techniques. Then they start changing their diets. Then they start taking steroids.

Roger Clemens (steroids) was 6'4" and 240 lbs, at 47! He hit the wall of work harder, and then realized there was still another step. Where Seth leaves off is sometimes working harder is actually not the end, but the end is even worse.

There is another pitcher in baseball aptly nicknamed "The Freak" who is 5'11" and 170 lbs. Seventy pounds less then Roger. Five inches shorter than Roger. I promise you, that if Tim Lincecum had tried to beat Roger by working harder, changing nutrition and shooting steroids, he still would not have won. And yet he did, best pitcher two years in a row. Sometimes you need to stop working harder not because there is nowhere else you can go, but because there is no where else you should go.

Before you lose a leg and have a wheel leg like the maid from the jetsons

I once read a book called "Good Calories Bad Calories" back in 2008, great read, a thousand pages of technical insight on the long road of how we got to where we are when it comes to our view on calories if my memory serves me. Here's a note I jotted down after reading it.

Enter Ben 2008 -

Just putting in junk hours is like eating carbs, it makes you think that more will help and in reality you are just getting fat and closer to death. But meat, meat satisfies and solves, meat is tightly held in one package that includes everything, meat is neither sweet or bitter or sour, but rather, it is meat.

Something had to die for you to eat meat, does that register?

What dies when you put in meat hours?

1200 cal of junk carb's make you lose little weight and feel like your starving, 1200 cal of meat makes you full and healthy (check out the Inuit's). A cool thousand bucks can buy you a big tv and leave you feeling starved: Forty hours in a week can make you believe that you need to put in another forty just to break even. Or you can spend one hour a day tutoring a child so they can graduate high school: Spend a thousand bucks on giving a needy family a furnace. We spend all week at work snacking on hours, and then we take the money we earn there and spend it on more empty calories. Now we wonder why we have emotional and financial diabetes?

Re-enter Ben 2010 - I think relating this thought to time = money is important because both sides of the equation can vary so greatly. Not all time/money is created equally, dump the empty calories/time/money from your life and start consuming smaller amounts of quality. Did you know that our bodies can get most of the nutrients we need from meat even though they are in tiny quantities compared to fruits and vegetables. This is because carb's force our body to work overtime (and create to much insulin) and we don't absorb the tiny but sufficient nutrients such as vitamin D.

Money CAN buy happiness

There was a great article here about money and happiness. An aggressively interesting part is when they discussed the concept of what we are buying.

"Part of the problem is that happiness isn’t necessarily what’s motivating us when we reach for our wallets."

This is interesting because most of us work eight to twelve hours a day for money and then think long and hard about how we are going to spend our money. We then bemoan that money can't buy us happiness when in fact that is not what we were trying to buy in the first place. What if somebody close to you spent a year saving money, took twenty thousand dollars in cash and went and bought a beautiful car with it. Three months later they come to you and complain that the car was not giving them the the benefit of retirement security that they had hoped for. It is not that money can't buy you retirement security, that's just not what you bought.

So read the article and then go out today and buy yourself some happiness or stop complaining that your money is broken.